Bare attention is silently watching. You want to integrate thoughts as a part of your experience so that over time your thinking habits will change so that thinking is just thinking. In the beginning the thinking apparatus feels like it's trying to control meditation. Seeing your thoughts about meditation and your analysis of meditation and noticing any clinging stress associated with it shows that you should let go of those thinking habits as well.
Most people replace normal self-referencing in general with meditation + self-referencing and evaluating yourself based on the meditation quality. Eventually they let go of that in the end because the stress keeps pointing it out to you and the brain just likes quiescence instead.
The brain is conditioned since childhood to make yourself into an object and then to evaluate whether you like or dislike yourself. This habit needs to go into atrophy. It's pervasive. If you're a perfectionist you'll probably have more negative self-referencing habits and all that extra cortisol does you no good when chasing after long-term goals.
I would also experiment with emptying ALL the thoughts you can throughout the day and get on with life tasks. What will happen is that the necessary thinking will appear because you need it to get on with life and the habitual self-referencing will (out of years of habituation) interrupt you. You can keep emptying your mind and going to bare attention but let the good thinking continue. You can add positive thinking like in the brahmaviharas. You can do concentration practices with your breath. I personally like just imagining the benefits of pursuing some goal and why you're doing it. This can create healthy motivation. New habits you create can replace the old ones.
There's lots you can do but it's important to see all the different kinds of thinking (analysis/evaluation/judgement/strategizing) and paying attention to how they feel inside you. When your mind wanders is there aversion to it wandering? Isn't it true that if you notice it wandering the mind is already back? Why add the extra aversion?
When you feel sorry for yourself you are making yourself into an "object" to like or dislike. When you puff your ego out with intense pride it's a different version of the same thing. When you get angry at yourself, more of the same. Watch the talking in your mind. Even subtle talking has a feeling tone in the head. Notice how all this stuff is happening conditioned on each other so that there's very little gap between consciousness -> vedana -> perception/evaluation -> craving/aversion -> clinging -> Habitual action. Notice how those mental outbursts feel like a self but the knowing part of your mind (knowing is the same as consciousness or awareness) can see impassively all these thoughts. If they are seen then how can they be a permanent self floating in your mind?
The ambient noise around you can be an anchor along with the other senses to create some quiescence in the mind. Taste it. Drink it up. Get refreshed by it. Try and take a shower and do it with as much mental quiet as possible. Over months and years the mind finds it easier to stay there. It's a hard practice because it takes so long to wean yourself off old habits that have been conditioned in you for such a long time. Notice how perceptions can be implanted in you from other people, commercials, beliefs etc. Look at how you can take them on and condition yourself with it and not even notice you're doing that because it's such an automatic behaviour.
Here's good practice advice from Kenneth Folk on Shikantaza:
Practice becoming aware of the body sensations that correspond to a thought. Whenever a thought arises, feel the body. How do you know whether you like the thought or not? It's because the body sensations feel either pleasant or unpleasant. Notice that if you dissociate from this moment, i.e., step into the fantasy and leave the body, you will suffer. Suffering is not ordinary pain; ordinary pain is just unpleasant sensation. Suffering is cause by the dissociation, the stepping out of this moment, out of the body. Stay in the body and ride the waves of body sensation. Watch how the body reacts to the thougts and vice versa. See how the looping between body and mind IS the dissociation. Short-circuit this by returning to the body. Stay with the body as continuously as you can. You are stretching the amount of time you can stay in the body without being blown out of it by an event or a thought. To be in the body is to be free. To be in the body all the time is to be free all the time.
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"While you are practicing just sitting, be clear about everything going on in your mind. Whatever you feel, be aware of it, but never abandon the awareness of your whole body sitting there. Shikantaza is not sitting with nothing to do; it is a very demanding practice, requiring diligence as well as alertness. If your practice goes well, you will experience the 'dropping off' of sensations and thoughts. You need to stay with it and begin to take the whole environment as your body. Whatever enters the door of your senses becomes one totality, extending from your body to the whole environment. This is silent illumination."
-Master Shengyen
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Kenneth: See how the looping between body and mind IS the dissociation.
Mumuwu: Do you mean the moving out of the body to the mind and back?
I mean the creation of a third "thing," this pseudo-entity that is a composite of body sensations and mental phenomena. Living in this third thing is suffering because it takes you out of what is really happening in this moment; it becomes a proxy for experience. You can train yourself to stop living this proxy life of suffering by coming back to the body sensations in this moment. The body cannot lie. Being in the body is being present in this moment. Being present in this moment does not allow the pseudo-self to form. When the pseudo-self does not form, life is simple and free. It will be pleasant at times and unpleasant at times, but it is always free.
There is no conflict between noting and living in your body, by the way, whether you note silently or aloud. You can note or not note, think, act, talk, love, live; there is very little you can't do; you just can't suffer. If you choose to note, understand that there is nothing magical about the noting itself. The noting is simply a feedback loop to remind you to feel your body and observe your mind in this moment.
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You can see what I mean about bare attention and the self-referencing looping habit that can take you as an object to perceive and evaluate and react to.