Learning 'Not to think about it'

What do you do when you have something on your mind that you just can't stop thinking about? Even if you don't want to and you say to yourself - 'right - I'm not going to think about it anymore!' - it just seems to come back to you and stay there - like a song that you get stuck in your head which you can't seem to get rid of.

I read an answer to this challenge yesterday. It's a rather annoyingly simple and yet challenging answer:

"We have to learn the paradox that to want not to think about something is in fact to be thinking about that something: and that as long as we think that it is an effort to discard undesirable thought or habits we make it an effort". (The Dhammapada, pg 31)

Wow! Annoyingly true. Here is what I understand this to mean: when we want or don't want something this implies that we have thought about it (in order to judge it as good and therefore something we want, or something bad and that we don't want). If we are then 'not wanting' then we are thinking. If we 'don't want to think' then we are in fact thinking. When the thought comes into our minds, if we put more thought into it like saying to ourselves 'I don't want to be thinking about this' then we are doing just that - we are thinking about it. So - how do we get out of this loop? Well, the answer to that is to not resist that the thought comes - unfortunately - we don't have that kind of control. Instead, we have to let the thought come but then not give it any attention by thinking about whether we want the thought to be there or not. We just watch it/be aware of it and then it is likely to pass. 

This is a surprisingly obvious thing to do and yet it is so difficult because we are not used to understanding how our thinking works. It takes us on a journey all the time from one thing to the next without us really paying much attention to who or what is in control. By meditating, we learn to watch thoughts come and go and not get sucked into them and be carried off on a train of thought from one thing to the next. Quite cool when you think about it!