After some time, Rinpoche added another refinement to the instruction. He began to ask us to label our thoughts “thinking.” We’d be sitting there with the out-breath, and before we knew what had happened, we were gone—planning, worrying, fantasizing—completely in another world, a world totally made of thoughts. At the point when we realized we’d gone off, we were instructed to say to ourselves “thinking” and, without making it a big deal, to simply return again to the out-breath.
