How a Buddhist monk breaks the addiction to your thoughts

Thubten dismantles the common misconception that success in meditation means having no thoughts. Real practice is a three‑step loop: focusing on the breath, noticing the mind has wandered, and gently returning. The ‘return’ is the workout; each return is you reclaiming your attention from mental addiction and training the ability to choose your focus instead of being hijacked by thoughts.

He explains how consumer culture trains us to believe happiness is always in the next achievement or purchase. Dopamine peaks in pursuit and drops just before attainment, so chasing becomes a habit that fuels more lack. The pleasure after getting something is actually the brief absence of wanting. Meditation balances this by cultivating inner freedom so career, wealth, and goals can matter, but aren’t your only source of satisfaction.

In his four‑year retreat, Thubten was overwhelmed by depression, panic, and old trauma until he hit rock bottom and literally tried to run away. The shift came when he stopped analyzing the past and instead meditated directly on the raw sensation of pain (e.g., a ‘knife in the heart’), feeling it in the body without story, and sending compassion into it. This ‘moving towards’ pain with love gradually dissolved the sharpness, turning suffering into strength.

He uses the image of holding a terrified rabbit or a bird with a broken wing: instead of hating or rejecting the wounded part of you, you learn to cradle it with tenderness. Practically, you locate the physical feeling of distress, rest your attention there, and intentionally relate to it kindly. Over time, this replaces a lifelong ‘devil voice’ of self‑disgust with a fundamentally friendlier inner stance.

Beyond formal 10‑minute sits, he recommends tiny practices in queues, traffic, or airports: feel your feet on the ground, notice your shoulders dropping, attend to your breathing for a few seconds. Doing this repeatedly in ‘stuck’ situations retrains your nervous system: instead of automatically reacting with impatience and anxiety, you build the habit of responding with presence and calm, making you more resilient and less fear‑driven.