Mindfulness teachers will often use phrases in meditation guidance such as “find your anchor” or “dropping anchor” or ‘anchoring attention on the breath”. What does that mean?
In the Happiness Trap, it is described as follows. To prevent a boat from being swept away by the tides or by a storm, an anchor keeps it from drifting too far. With an emotional storm, thoughts and feelings can flood through us, and sweep us away. Dropping anchor involves noticing thoughts and feelings and then connecting with the body.
In a mindfulness meditation, the guidance often invites us to anchor ourselves to some aspect of the body. Breath meditation repeatedly invites us to return to the sensation of natural breathing. The intention is not to quell thoughts, feelings and body sensations. Rather, it is to stop us being swept away by them. Each time we catch ourselves drifting into thoughts and emotions, we remind ourselves to reconnect with our anchor (e.g. the breath).
So the intention of mindfulness meditation is not to stop thinking, but to find ways of dealing with thoughts, feelings and body sensation in a way that prevents us getting swept away by them.
Jon Kabat-Zinn has a maxim “you can’t stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf”. You can’t stop your thoughts and feelings, but you can, with patience and persistence, stop them carrying you away. Dropping anchor is a way of interrupting the natural flow of thoughts and feelings and bringing us into the present moment. In time maybe you won’t feel overwhelmed by emotional storms and be able to “surf them”, to see them for what they are.
We practice meditation regularly to improve our ability to drop anchor when storms arise. A meditation does not usually involve dealing with strong emotional storms (though it may sometimes), but it does usually involve the natural flow of thoughts and emotions, and as we learn to drop anchor and reconnect with the present moment we build skills that are useful for when storms do arise.
This way we learn to decentre from our thoughts and feelings and see them not as ourselves, but as part of ourselves. This is an important psychological skill that helps with emotional resilience.
