Modern mindfulness tends to urge us to stay in the present moment, learn to avoid getting distracted by wandering thoughts. A friend recently raised a thoughtful critique of this approach: aren’t there times when we want, even need, our thoughts to wander?

This is particularly poignant for the writers among us, academic and otherwise: a freely wandering mind is essential for creativity. Our best insights typically don’t arise while we’re immersed in putting a piece of writing together; they come to us while we’re walking or biking or – the cliché – in the shower. And even for those who aren’t writers or engaged in other creative pursuits, we still need the chance to let our minds go in directions they otherwise wouldn’t have. So do we actually want to tame the wandering mind?

For these reasons I return to Buddhologist John Dunne’s valuable distinction between classical and nondual mindfulness. That is, in earlier, classical Indian mindfulness traditions, you are focused on eliminating your bad mental states like anger and despair, even thinking of yourself at war with them; whereas the more recent Tibetan, Chinese and modern traditions that Dunne calls nondual are nonjudgemental: you don’t try to suppress the bad states because that only encourages them, you just notice all your wandering thoughts, whatever they may be, and turn your attention back to an object of focus (like the breath). I have become progressively more sympathetic to the nondual approach over the years because I have found it much more effective. But that’s not quite the end of the story.

I think the nonjudgemental, nondual approach is essential as a meditation practice. You need to learn the skill of noticing all your stray thoughts, all your stray feelings, and turning your attention back to the focus without judging them – because the judgement starts to frustrate you and get you caught up in it. To really build the skill, through repeated practice, you need to notice and let go of even the good and helpful thoughts. St. Teresa is not wrong to distinguish between good thoughts and bad ones, overall – but she is wrong to deal with the bad ones by fighting them.

That said, something different, closer to the classical style, is often important once you open your eyes and leave the meditation for everyday life. There are still situations where the nondual style helps: in situations where you need focus on a challenging mental task – whether editing something you’ve written or doing your taxes – the nonjudgemental practice can still be useful, since you’re trying to reduce the amount of time you spend with your mind wandering and distracted. (Especially in our age of endless electronic distraction.) But if you’re walking or showering, there are plenty of helpful thoughts that you don’t want to notice-and-let-go-of; it’s helpful to run with them, indulge them, follow them where they lead. What you do specifically want to notice and let go of, even in those situations, is the harmful thoughts: your cycle of anger at people who have wronged you or at your political enemies, your catastrophizing anxiety, your feelings of self-pity and despair. That is, you need to judge: you need to distinguish between the bad thoughts and the good ones, and only let go of the former.

The Headspace meditations led by Andy Puddicombe are very much in the nondual style: Puddicombe always insists on the importance of not judging or resisting the emotions you notice, even harmful ones like fear and anger. Yet even his approach does subtly make enough judgements to distinguish between good and bad thoughts/emotions. I’ve found Headspace’s Restlessness series of meditations particularly helpful, one dealing specifically with a mind that wanders too much: during the meditation Puddicombe repeatedly and helpfully insists that you must not judge your mind for its wandering, but simply continue to notice the wandering and return your focus to your breath. Yet he also advises the listener to notice the conditions that produce that mental wandering (too much caffeine, not enough sleep, etc.) and try to adjust lifestyle in a way that reduces those conditions. He never comes out and says that the wandering is a bad thing, but when you are actually making plans and thinking about your lifestyle, he still effectively says that you need to act as if it is. Bad things are bad, including harmful emotional states, and it is good to find ways to reduce them; it’s just that judging them that way in the moment often happens to make you more disturbed by them, and therefore paradoxically makes them worse.

But once you’ve built up the skill of noticing and letting go of your stray thoughts and feelings in general, good and bad, then you can start to apply that skill more generally, in a way that actually does make the distinctions. You can keep noticing the bad thoughts and let go of those – but indulge the good ones and run with them, letting your creativity flower.