Thoughts are gripping. Like a good movie in which you lose all awareness of your surroundings and yourself, thoughts do the same thing to you – only the consequences are much more powerful. Like a good movie takes you on an emotional roller coaster, thoughts do the same thing, but you take them as more real, and so the emotions are even more piercing. Thoughts stimulate emotion, which can be very taxing physically because of the physical sensations associated with fear, stress, anger, and other painful emotions. These types of emotions not only make your experience physically uncomfortable, they can cause you to react poorly, make harmful decisions, and harm relationships.
Additionally thoughts can keep you from experiencing reality as it is. They can keep you from fully experiencing the presence of your awareness and the beauty and fullness of experience itself.
This is not to say that thoughts shouldn’t exist. They are very useful for many things, but when they negatively impact emotion they become useless and possibly harmful. There is a good chance that a lot, if not most, of your thoughts are in this latter category.
Given this, it would be nice to minimize the painful and harmful thoughts, or at least minimize their impact. To do this it can help to explore the nature of thought itself.