Sky Behind the Thoughts — Breath, Awareness, and Compassionate Attention

What if your thoughts are thinking themselves? In this third episode of Standing Nowhere, host Jacob Buehler guides you through a simple, anywhere practice—on a cushion, a chair, or even while commuting—to watch the breath, notice thoughts arising on their own, and taste the quiet, sky-like awareness behind them.

You’ll hear how presence (awareness) and love are two sides of the same coin; why “suffering = pain × resistance”; and how prayer—understood as presenting what is—meets meditation in everyday life. Jacob weaves insights and stories (including a raw 3 a.m. moment of financial fear and grace), along with reflections from Kalu Rinpoche, Meister Eckhart, Jesus, the Buddha, and Alan Watts to invite a grounded, compassionate wakefulness you can live right now.

In this episode:

• A 5–10 minute experiment to notice breath, body, and thoughts—without controlling any of it.
• Seeing that thoughts “think themselves” (disidentification ≠ dissociation).
• Presence as love: why full attention is the most generous act.
• “Suffering = pain × resistance,” dukkha, and learning to surf the waves.
• Prayer as offering what is—meeting mindfulness in daily life.

Try this today: Sit upright (upright, not uptight), feel the breath, notice thoughts come and go, and gently return—sky behind the clouds.

If this brought you a little peace or a new angle, follow the show and share it with one friend who might need it—it really helps others find Standing Nowhere.

Chapters

• 0:26 A Different Kind of Episode
• 1:43 Watching the Breath
• 6:45 You Are Not Your Thoughts
• 19:08 Wake Up and Stay Awake
• 22:42 Love and Awareness
• 28:26 Pain, Resistance, and Prayer
• 32:21 Compassion and Closing Blessing

Transcript

Jacob: 0:01

Go ahead and say to yourself, I won't think a single thought for the next ten minutes. And let me know how far you get. Hello and welcome to the third episode of the Standing Nowhere Podcast. I am your host, Jacob Bueller. I wanted to try something different with you today. Instead of me giving you a word salad about reality or yourself, I wanted to invite you to experience it for yourself. Experience yourself for yourself. But in order to do this, you've got to go along with me, at least for a little while. I want you to try an experiment. This experiment will show you something about yourself that you've always known, but you really haven't known, or you haven't experienced yet. So let's pretend that you're and we can just pretend. Let's pretend that you're interested in what I'm about to say, what I'm about to ask you to do. At some point in your day, I want you to sit down. It doesn't matter if it's on a cushion on the floor, with your legs crossed or on a chair, but I want your body to be in a sitting position with your back upright. A dignified position. Not slouching. I like to say upright, but not uptight. So that you don't fall asleep. Now while you are sitting, I want you to bring your attention to your breath and your body. It can be primarily with your breath, but if you feel other sensations in the body as well, just simply be aware of them. Don't try to influence your breath in any way. Don't try to slow it down and don't try to speed it up. In fact, if you feel any resistance or weirdness about your breath, as in you're struggling with not controlling it, let that be as well. And just notice that. Maybe your breath feels relaxed. Maybe it feels a little strained. I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm asking you to do nothing but watch. Just watch. Now during this process, when you watch your breath, you will notice that thoughts will appear. I don't want you to judge the thought. The many thoughts. I want you to do nothing about them at all, but simply be aware of them. See if you can notice before the thought arises. When you're completely with your breath or your immediate surroundings, the feelings in your body. When you're with your breath, see if you can notice the thought just before it arises. Is there a feeling like I'm about to think something? Of course, it doesn't come out in words like that, but you know the feeling, and we can't really put words to it. Or did you catch the thought in the middle of it? Or perhaps you caught it afterwards. Whatever the case, it doesn't matter. I'm just asking you to notice when you notice. Notice what it's like when you're carried away by a thought, or in the middle of it and consumed by it. And notice when you come out of it and you remember to come back to the breath. Now you may be driving, and that's okay. If you're driving, watch your body as it drives. Just notice it. Notice how your body knows what to do. Just like if you're sitting, it knows how to keep the muscles erect to keep you in a sitting position from collapsing to the floor. You may notice little quirks about your body. This part hurts. Oh, this part was moving, and I didn't notice it. But now I do. Just notice. If a thought arises and carries you away, don't judge that, don't judge yourself. Just come back to the breath. If you're carried away in a thought, and then another thought arises, darn, I got carried away by that thought. Just notice that thought as well. Notice that judgment. What you'll notice over time, and this is something that you must experience, because what I'm about to tell you will make sense, but you have to experience it. You will notice over time that your thoughts are simply thinking themselves. In other words, you are not doing your thoughts. Your thoughts are doing themselves. And I don't I don't just mean some thoughts. I mean all thoughts are doing themselves. All of them. The good, the bad, the neutral. Your thoughts will be very seductive. They won't quite say literally this thought is you, but you'll feel without words that your thought is you. That you're the one doing your thoughts. If that happens, just notice that as well. Some of you may worry that this is some form of disassociation or disidentifying. And in a way, it is. But not in a way of avoidance. No, no, no. This is the deepest form of grounding that you can get. Because you're simply watching, and in the process of watching, you come to realize that your thoughts are not yourself. You'll start to notice that if your thoughts are not yourself or me, you almost have a weightless feeling that you're the sky and the thoughts are clouds that pass by. Whereas before, you took your thoughts very seriously. You identified with your thoughts. They made you feel a certain way. They moved you throughout your day. Thoughts are not a bad thing. Thoughts are not the enemy. Identifying with your thoughts, that's where problems can arise. I want to read something to you. It's a quote by Kalu Rimpache. He says, We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality, we are that reality. When you understand this, you'll see that you are nothing. And being nothing or no thing, you are everything. That is all. Now why do I bring that up? The reason I bring that up is because some of you before hearing this assumed that you were your thoughts and whatever you were thinking. But after you do this experiment where you sit and you watch and you watch, you start to realize that you, the real you, your real self, is not the content of the thought itself. But you are that which is watching the thought arise. The more you practice this, the more you accumulate what I like to call and what many call self-realization. Because you are doing nothing more than realizing what yourself actually is. And your self, as you will realize, is not a thing. It is not a thought, it is not a body. Then let's put that to the test. Go ahead and say to yourself, I won't think a single thought for the next ten minutes. And let me know how far you get. This is a liberating truth. Perhaps you've heard that word liberation before. They call it sudden awakening with gradual realization. For some people, this makes them laugh hysterically for a while. It did for me for a little bit, not in a crazy manner. But when you really just slow down enough in this crazy busy world and just breathe with your breath, and just watch and rest into that watchfulness, you start to realize that you are not your thoughts. And that is incredible, that feeling. They still come, but they come and go like clouds. The only difference is you don't identify with the clouds anymore. You realize that you are the sky? There's an interesting quote from the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, who said The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me. Does being aware of my thoughts and my words change things? There was something interesting spoken by Jesus Christ. Well, many things he said were interesting, but one thing in particular I found that was very interesting and very curious, he said the words that I'm saying to you right now are not from myself, but from him who sent me. And of course the source or origin of all life they personified as a father figure. Some people don't like that, and that's okay. But the point is he said the words that I'm saying are not from myself. That's interesting. I quote Jesus sometimes because I grew up in the Christian tradition. And I rather like a lot of the things he said. I try not to go over them too quickly, but really stop and sink into them. Now, some people listening might find that upsetting. Let's say you were like me and you were raised a Christian, or you fell out of the faith, and you prefer atheism or nihilism. Whatever your beliefs are, there's no judgment, but going back to our experiment, observing thoughts and realizing they think themselves, is your view something that you decided? If you decided to believe what you believe, when did you decide to decide to believe that? Can we look at them as just beliefs without you attached to them? Jesus said something else that was interesting in this context. He said to deny thyself and take up the cross. Those who would follow me. Deny thyself. Deny yourself. Hmm. How do you deny yourself? I would imagine the first step is to notice what you're doing, what you're thinking, what you're feeling. On this concept of self, going back to that Buddhist quote that I gave you, we live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality, we are that reality. When you understand this, you will see that you are nothing, and being no thing you are everything. That is all. To the Western ear, being nothing sounds a little scary. Nobody. What does it mean to be nobody? That's a curious word, nobody. Hmm. Perhaps you are that which is watching this body. Another curious thing that Jesus said he said he who believes in me, Jesus does not believe in me, Jesus, but in him who sent me. Let's look at that again. He who believes in me does not believe in me, but in him who sent me. You see, there are people in this world that we refer to as realized beings. And some of you listening may be familiar with that term, and some of you it may sound totally foreign. What is a realized being or a fully realized being? This language points to those who have walked this earth in a state of inner stillness, inner silence, and through that were able to realize their true nature. And these figures have come from all different walks of life, through all different eras. As I mentioned, Siddhartha Gautama, the original Buddha, he came from the Hindu tradition. There is suffering in life. There it is. Look at it. To those unfamiliar with Eastern tradition or the Buddhist tradition, it may sound very foreign, very other. You may have intense fears about what you believe, or perhaps you've thrown the baby out with the bathwater, as I mentioned in the last episode, and all spiritual traditions just seem not worth the effort. But in Buddhism, the word Buddha means one who is awake. The root in Pali or Sanskrit word meaning awake, I believe is Bodhi, and I may be wrong on that. But the idea is wakefulness to be awake. To be aware. To be aware that you are aware. Most people they go through life thinking that they're awake. You wake up in the morning, I'm awake. But are you really awake? Are you watching yourself? Are you really aware of what you're doing? Notice going back to our experiment earlier, when we watch our breath, it makes it easier to see when thoughts arise because we sort of make a declarative statement to ourselves when we sit down in a dignified posture. I will watch my breath. And it's not a grunting struggle where we're clenching our jaws I'm gonna focus on my breath not at all. I describe it as a relaxed alertness. We're focusing on what is, and with watching what is, the background becomes more apparent because the foreground is also more apparent. We're taking a stance of watching. We're sitting down, we're being still, and we're watching. We're not doing, we're just watching. Notice another curious thing that Jesus Christ said in the Gospel of Mark. When he was praying the night before he was to be executed, and he knew it was coming, his disciples kept falling asleep, and he said, This I say to you, I say to all stay awake. Stay alert. And you will notice in all spiritual traditions, the core emphasis is always to stay awake, to stay alert, whether it's on the nose with the title Buddhism, which is another way of saying wakeful ism or staying awake, watching, or in Christianity, in the tradition of Jesus Christ, where he says to stay awake, but also to love thy neighbor as thyself. Now why do I bring up love when the emphasis is on wakefulness? Well, well, well, you will discover that love, elusive as that word is, and compassion, you know in the deepest fabric of your being is nothing more than the same exact thing that being awake is. What do I mean by that? Let's take children, for example. Do children enjoy when you are attentive to them? When you are awake to them, giving them your full attention? Yes. Human beings in general, not just children. We crave to be seen, to be in the awareness of another person. How about it's a curious phrase, isn't it, when we say My mother, she cooks with love. What does that mean? Well, obviously it means that you are cooking with attention, with clarity. What about when someone gardens with love? You do you see where I'm getting at? So love and awareness are two sides of the same coin. You might say awareness clears out the stuff to allow the love to flow both in and out. Wherever there is awareness, there is love, there is gentleness, there is calmness. Notice how when you are calm, you are also more aware, you are more in a state of flow. There is a s there is a saying slow is smooth, smooth is fast. There's a wonderful example given by Alan Watts in this idea of clarity and awareness, and that is the idea of what we mean by clear. And this is a wonderful metaphor. When I say the word clear, what comes to mind? Well the first thing is total transparency. Like a lens wiped clean, no blemishes, no smudges, nothing whatsoever to obstruct the vision of the lens. Now the next thing you'll think of is of clear is perfect form, focus. Everything is clear, sharp, articulated in a very precise way. Is the image clear? You see? Two sides of the same coin. When you are clear, when you are nobody, in other words, when your mind is uncluttered, unfettered by various thoughts that weigh you down. What remains? Where do you go? Well, you're fully there, completely in focus. When you are listening to your four year old tell you about Minecraft or his monster trucks or playing games with him fully there, fully clear, then you are completely in focus for your child or your spouse or your mother. You're there. You're there. And they feel it. When you are listening to your friend with complete attention, not at all thinking about the next thing that you're going to say in response to the person, no matter who it is, they can feel that connection. They can feel that love, that compassion, and that is where you want to dwell in that clear state. They have that analogy with the word mindfulness. Is your mind full of things? Or are you mindful, as in taking in your surroundings? The person in front of you. If you are fully with and aware of exactly what you're doing, you'll always be okay. Always. Because the first noble truth, as I mentioned from the Buddha, is that there is suffering in life. However, there's a phrase that I really like that really encapsulates what the Buddha meant by dukkha or suffering, as we translate dukkha, which is the Pali word, which means suffering, amongst other meanings. There is forgot what I just said. So oh yes, the the reality is that there is suffering in the world, but there's a phrase that I love, and that is that there that suffering is pain times resistance. Pain times resistance. How do you resist pain? How do you resist things that you don't like? You avoid them. That's the only way to resist them. You run from them. You run to a bottle and you drink. Or you run to your pipe and you let your mind get high. You run. Run, run, run. We all run. I run. But that's resistance. Fighting it. Suffering arises when we are out of sync with. Whatever is arising in our life. We hear the phrase like get with it, man. Get out of your mind and come to your senses. Isn't that interesting? Our language always points us to the truths that we know deep down. Or when your spouse may say, It feels like you never listened to me. You see? So perhaps what we perceive as pain or the down moments in our life are not really suffering, but a cry for us to pay attention to it, to be with it. And this is not to say that we do nothing, become passivists, as many people misunderstand spiritual traditions to be. Passivity. It's quite the opposite, is a full embracing of what is what is. It's interesting. Prayer and meditation are often mentioned together, but what is prayer? We've mentioned meditation and mindfulness, and how that is really the other side of the same coin of love. But the word prayer in Aramaic is salotha, and that means not asking for this or that, but presenting whatever is giving you difficulty or challenge or struggle in life, and saying here it is and opening up. I'll give you a vulnerable example of this. And of course, there's many examples in the Bible if you read the story of Jesus Christ. He went off by himself to pray quite often. In fact, he spent forty days by himself in absolute stillness, prayer and meditation. Here I am. Here I am. This is what I have to do. Here I am. I had been struggling to pay my rent for years, still am. More than you know. So I had been struggling to pay my rent for a long time. And it got to the point where I moved into an apartment that was charging me almost $2,400 a month in rent. In my job, I was losing a lot of income at my place of employment or my my gig work doing deliveries. Business was going down. Long story short, they were cutting pay. And I'm I've been adjusting to pay cuts over the last few years. But it had reached a culmination point where I couldn't even sleep. My mind was so full of worry and dread about where this money was going to come from for this particular month. And I woke up at two or three in the morning, sweating, thoughts racing. And this is a good year, year and a half into my spiritual practices that I had picked up, you know, being with my thoughts, meditating in the morning, trying to be actively aware of all the activities and thoughts I did throughout my day, what the Hindu tradition might call karma yoga, releasing the fruits of my actions to God, or whatever word you have for God, and just focusing on my action, what I can do. So here I was, 3 a.m. A mind riddled with pain and sadness and worry and fear. How am I going to pay the rent for my wife and my three kids and myself, this supporting this family? And I got up out of bed and I went to go pray, as they say, as the Aramaic meaning of the word pray from Jesus' time, Salotha. Presenting what is to God or higher power or just being with what I was experiencing. So I put a meditation cushion on the floor in the living room. Everyone's still sleeping, the whole world is still asleep. And I sat on that cushion, and I focused on the feeling of my financial shitstorm. Not with words, just being with that feeling in your chest. And anyone listening that knows the struggle of financial worry knows that feeling and exactly what I'm talking about. And even if you've never struggled financially, I'm sure that you've had some struggle in your life. And if you reduce or eliminate the words that go with that struggle and just focus on the feeling in your chest, that's what I did. I sat on that cushion and I sat with my breath and I held that feeling, that incredible, str incredibly stressful feeling. I held it with open arms. I said, Here I am, and I gave my stress a hug, and I just held it, and I cried, and tears streamed down my face as I was sitting there on that cushion, and I just sat with it because I didn't know what else to do. I didn't know where the money was going to come from. You see, that is prayer on the deepest level, where you're not crafting a a a well-worded petition to God, fix this. You're sitting there with your feelings, without words, and you're just experiencing it. And later that day, you know, I felt a little better after the session was over. I sat for probably a good forty minutes with it, you know, and I didn't push the feeling away. I didn't drink it away, I didn't smoke it away, and no judgment to anyone listening if if you struggle with addiction of any kind, because the problems in life are very real. But it's like Dante's Inferno, the only way out of hell is straight through the middle of it, without trying to fix it, without knowing how you're gonna fix it. That's what prayer is, that's what meditation is. The two are really very similar. They just hail from different traditional backgrounds. So later that day, when when everyone woke up, I texted my family and I said, I don't know what I'm gonna do. This is my situation, and I just want to share it with you because I'm lost. I want other people just to share my pain with me. And you'll notice the word compassion, that's what that word means. Suffering together. That is the definition of compassion. Literally, that is the definition of compassion. Suffering together. I think passion means suffering, compassion, suffering together. But compassion that's where you open up yourself to the pain and suffering of others, and you experience it with them. And perhaps you know a way of fixing it, and you help them fix it, or you don't, and you just are with them completely. And I shared the way I felt with my family, and my sister, God bless her, she took immediate action. I mean, all of my family was there for me, and they always have been. My sister in particular, she took immediate action, and she reached out to a church that we go to, and they gave me a thousand dollars to help me pay my rent, and it was like within that day or two. You might call it a miracle or lucky, whatever. And there's plenty of people who will go through something like that, and there won't be a thousand dollars at the end of it. And that's okay too. What else can we do but be with what is? Moving towards the finish line here. But I wanted to point out to you guys in a still compassionate way what it means to be alive, to be human. There is suffering. And in Buddhism, that word is dukkha, and it it also means sort of a misaligned wagon wheel uh axle. Like you're you're sitting, you're going through life and it's a bumpy ride because you're out of sync with life, you're not with what is. There's a wonderful saying that I've heard you can't stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf. And that, my friends, is what meditation is. That is what prayer is. You can call it prayer, you can call it meditation. That is what love is. When you stop and you really get with yourself, you are loving yourself. When you're really with the person that's in front of you, you're loving that person. When you're cooking and you're really with what you're cooking, you're cooking with love. Love, love, love. Love is all you need. So whether it's Jesus emphasizing loving everyone and everything, as he says, love thy neighbor as thyself is the greatest commandment that fulfills all the others, and of course the second, love the Lord your God. What does Lord mean? Lord means I am, to be, to exist. Love your existence with all your heart, mind, and soul. Love your neighbor. The Buddha. He says less and emphasizes stillness and watching. Is that any different? Hinduism, releasing the fruits of your actions, you know, with karma yoga. They have many traditions. You know, I'm I'm not trying to simplify or reduce all the traditions, but if we distill them down, they all tell you to stay awake and to have compassion for everyone and everything that you come across. Jesus says if someone strikes you on your cheek, turn and offer him the other one. If he steals your cloak, offer him your shirt. Love people. Don't be selfish. Well, I hope that this found whoever it needed to find. And my parting message is to slow down. Look at your life. Watch it. This is your life. Be there for it. Don't be in your head about tomorrow. Be here now. It's okay to plan for tomorrow, but do it mindfully in the now. If something pops up in your head, because thinking will always happen, it just happens. This is not some clinical bad case of disassociation, it's simply a realization of the truth. You are that which watches. But just before I do, if this episode brought a little peace in your life or a new angle, please follow the show in your favorite app and share it with one friend who might need it. It helps others find the show, and I'd appreciate it. And now from Lao Tzu. Can you coax your mind from its wandering and keep to the original oneness? Can you let your body become supple as a newborn child's? Can you cleanse your inner vision until you see nothing but the light? Loving yet not possessing, working yet not taking credit, guiding yet not controlling. This is the supreme virtue. Blessings