I am so so well acquainted with this frustration. Starting to meditate, I would regularly beat myself up over how I was "doing it wrong" when I'd sit down to meditate and thoughts would come up. I think part of what meditation has given me, maybe the most important thing, is space around my thoughts. It's made me realize how little I can actually consciously control the majority of them, and made me much more comfortable with the realization that "that thought I just had wasn't helpful". The realization that I'm not my thoughts and that my thoughts aren't who I am sounds a bit academic, but it's been a huge benefit.

Paradoxically, and very anecdotally, I also this this space and allowance for your brain saying things you don't like is the quickest way toward thoughts and feelings you do like. This quote from Bhante Gunaratana really resonated with me:

Try to force things out of the mind and you merely add energy to them.

I get the same thing. I've done some amount of comedy, and something about the space of practice causes comedic ideas to creep in. Unfortunately, the ideas don't generally turn out to be as good as they seemed during practice...

Anyway, that's really funny!

useful posts related to at least one type of DRSI on one of my foavrite blogs, Dog Spelled Forward: This one about a command you can use to redirect your dog on a leash, this one about a harness that helps