The ‘Monkey Mind’: How ‘Observing’ Thoughts Can Be Detrimental

Thanks to J. Guillermo Robayo Gómez for this wonderful photo.

For many years on the spiritual path, I’ve heard the phrase “the monkey mind” used again and again - the restless, distracted mind that jumps from branch to branch, never still, never satisfied. The implication is: the monkey mind is something to be tamed, transcended, or left behind, and the quieter, more spacious, more thought-free we become, the more spiritually mature we are supposed to be.

In some ways, this framing helped me, and in other ways, I now see that it subtly led me into a long relationship with control, vigilance, and a quiet mistrust of my own mind.

For a long time, I thought that being “on the path” meant learning how to be the witness, standing back from thought, observing it, not being identified with it. I was trained in practices like antar mouna in the Satyananda tradition, where stage two is about observing spontaneous thoughts, and yet, strangely, I could never really do it.

Whenever I tried to observe my thoughts, one of two things would happen. Either my mind would go blank, as if everything froze, or I would feel a kind of subtle effort, a watcher watching, a sense of holding something in place. What I see now is that this “observing” was not neutral, it was doing something to the mind, it was a form of management.

Even today, I can still notice the habit. When I try to be “aware of thoughts,” I often feel a subtle tension in my belly, a slight holding, a faint suppression, as if some part of me is saying, “Let’s keep this tidy, let’s not let things get too messy.” That’s not freedom, that’s supervision!

This supervision of the mind was a recurrent pattern especially at night. I used to wake up almost every night around two or three in the morning, and instead of simply letting myself drift back to sleep, I felt that I should “be the witness of the mind,” that this was the yogic thing to do. So I would lie there, watching thoughts, subtly managing them, subtly staying alert, subtly holding myself in a kind of inner posture of practice. In hindsight, I can see that this created just enough tension in my nervous system to make real rest impossible, and over time it led to quite a lot of sleep deprivation.

The shift came when I realised something very simple: I didn’t need to watch my mind at all. I could just let it think. And the moment I stopped trying to be the witness, stopped trying to do something right, my body could relax, and sleep would come back naturally. It was a small change, but it was life-changing, because it showed me directly how much effort I had been carrying in the name of awareness.

Somewhere along the way, I had absorbed the idea that a good spiritual life looks like fewer thoughts, more space, more silence, less mental activity, less “me.” And yes, teachers like Eckhart Tolle have said that one hallmark of spiritual maturity is fewer thoughts. There is truth in that, and there is also a very subtle trap there, especially for sincere practitioners, because the ego can easily turn “having fewer thoughts” into a project, a way of measuring progress, a way of feeling more evolved, a way of being slightly superior to one’s own humanity.

In my case, the idea of the “monkey mind” slowly turned into a kind of distrust of the mind itself. If the mind is a monkey, then it can’t be trusted, it must be watched, supervised, calmed, kept in check. And so, without realising it, I began to live with a background posture of inner vigilance, trying to be the witness, to stay spacious, to not get lost in thought, and all of that trying brought tension.

Yet all this is a whole world apart from my pre-awakened days, when I felt that I WAS my thoughts, and I would be pushed or pulled, crushed or redeemed, by any thought I believed was me, by any story that appeared. 

That identification has thankfully softened profoundly. Now I can rest in a hypnagogic state — the natural threshold between wakefulness and sleep — where thoughts flow freely without any supervision at all. In that space, the body is relaxed, the managerial part of the mind is quiet, and thinking becomes fluid, associative, almost dreamlike. There is no watcher trying to hold anything in place. And in that state, I can let thoughts arise and dissolve with absolutely zero tension in my system.

What I have not yet fully embodied is that same effortless allowing in bright, daytime awareness. When I try to “observe” thoughts while fully awake, there can still be a subtle doing — a faint sense of managing awareness itself. 

So my aspiration now is not to eliminate thought, not to perfect witnessing, but to discover whether the ease of hypnagogia can coexist with the clarity of wakefulness. To be fully here, fully conscious, yet without that background contraction.

If that integration deepens in this new year of the Fire Horse, it will not be through greater effort, but through trust — the same trust that already allows the mind to flow freely when I stop trying to oversee it.