From 'Meditation: Now or Never' by Steve Hagen:
Distracting Thoughts
All kinds of thoughts will bubble up in meditation. Some will be
mundane, some surprising, some delightful, some disturbing. Let
them all arise and fall.
Whatever thoughts come up, don't resist them. Resistance will
only intensify thinking. Just let the thoughts crop up as they
will, and they will die down or drift away on their own.
Learn just to watch your thoughts without comment. Put
your bare attention on the thoughts without adding anything.
The unruly mind doesn't like to be watched. But if we just
watch our mind without commenting, even to ourselves, our mind
will begin to straighten up and settle down on its own.....
...People often think meditation is about driving thoughts out
of your mind. But this isn't meditation at all, as Foyan correctly
points out. You don't need to annihilate thoughts. Thoughts
annihilate themselves, if you'll let them. They simply fall apart.
Everything does.
Yet we think we have to make an effort to drive them out. We don't
realize that, in doing so, we only solidify them, and thus deepen
our confusion and entanglement.
In Zen we don't teach people to annihilate their thoughts. Instead
we sit quietly and learn to pay attention to what's actually
happening. Thoughts will naturally drop away if you don't hang on
to them, don't build them into something....
.....In meditation, we give full attention to direct experience
- that is, what we feel, see, think, hear, smell, or taste right
now. That's all. In other words, we don't comment on it. We don't
ignore it or squelch it or analyze it or dwell on it or control it.
Thus it all washes through.
In learning to come into this moment, we realize feelings
directly, and we see the thoughts that often come attached to them.
But we don't judge them or talk about them. We don't make anything
of them at all. They come and go, and we taste them fully and
directly, with no aftertaste. We don't consume them, and they don't
consume us.
We only need to watch. Negative emotions under wordless
observation cannot last for long. As long as we don't say anything
to ourselves about them, they will naturally weaken and die away.
But if we feed and amplify those feelings, they will just as
naturally remain and grow.
Our emotions and thoughts are like the weather. They are
sometimes pleasant, sometimes unpleasant, always changing. We can
do little to control them directly, and are wise not to try. Yet
they needn't control us, either. What we can do is to be alert.
Just observe and let them be what they are. And after the
occasional, inevitable storm has passed, we only need to quietly
watch as the clouds dissipate on their own without any help from
us.