Episode
When Obstacles Become the Path
- Published
- Nov 22, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 2559
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://amykisei.substack.com/p/when-obstacles-become-the-path
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Summary
One stanza from the Trust in Heart poem says: Cut off all useless thoughts and words and there’s nowhere you cannot go. Returning to the root itself, you’ll find the meaning of all things. If you pursue appearances you overlook the primal source. Awakening is to go beyond both emptiness as well as form. I appreciate the clarity of these instructions. Here we find an invitation to practice with our thinking minds. I find that this instruction to “cut off” is more of an invitation to see through or into the thinking mind and recognize what thoughts really are. Especially thoughts that appear as hindrances. The repetitive inner critical thoughts, endless doubts, obsessive thinking about the future. What are thoughts made of? How long do they last? We are told in Buddhism to regard thought as another sense. What is this like? To notice the textural, auditorial, image-emotional experience of thinking. What happens when during a meditation period or in your daily life you turn attention to the thinking mind, to attend to the thought stream? When we see thoughts for what they are, they have less power over us. We don’t have to believe or even identify with everything we think—we also don’t need to get a in struggle with our thoughts. This teaching and practice empowers us to be more discerning. We use our thinking minds throughout the day—planning, reflecting, reasoning, contemplating, conversing. And it is possible to use the mind, without being used by the mind. This poem is inviting us to recognize the root of the thinking mind. The root of the thinking mind, is the root of all things. When we know experientially the true nature of the thinking mind which includes: doubt, inner critic, worry, anxiety, judgement, planning, other people’s thoughts, views, perspectives—then t…