Overthinking? Maybe this will help

Susan Brumbaugh
4 min readMay 28, 2021

A guided mindfulness meditation to work with thoughts.

Photo by Alonso Reyes on Unsplash

Have you ever tried to focus on something, but your thoughts keep carrying you away? It can happen with work, meditation, conversations, food — you name it. A practice of mindfulness meditation can help improve focus because we practice paying attention to some experience in the present moment. When we do this, of course our attention wanders to thoughts, or sounds, or memories, or plans (anything other than what we’re trying to focus on), and this gives us an opportunity to practice noticing where the mind went and bring our focus back to the present moment. We don’t have to make thoughts go away in order to meditate or focus on something that’s important to us. We just need to practice shifting thoughts to the background.

I’m a licensed mental health counselor who enjoys sharing mindful meditations and information about mindfulness. Below is a transcript of a meditation I led on this topic, and at the end of the article, you’ll find a link to the meditation video. Give it a try and see what happens.

Meditation Transcript

We can begin by moving a little bit, stretching, doing whatever the body would appreciate doing as we work our way into a meditation posture. We tend to sit in this group and so it can be helpful to have both feet on the…

--

--

Susan Brumbaugh
Susan Brumbaugh

Written by Susan Brumbaugh

Susan Brumbaugh is a criminal justice researcher who telecommutes, a licensed counselor, a mindfulness meditation practitioner, and a perpetual learner.