Why this is so hard

I was thinking today about the fact that, for the most part, when we want to understand something, we think about it. We use our brains and logic to figure it out, to make some order of it, to conceptualize it, to make it graspable or to make it make sense.
And then I thought about Buddhist practice and it seems that, the first thing to know, is that thoughts, are what cause us additional suffering. It's not that thoughts cause us suffering, it's that the farther away we get from reality, from our actual physical experience, the more discordant or unharmonious we are with our actual existence- and that can bring us suffering. It's the concepts, the labels, the perceptions, the stories... all those things that our mind makes up that creates a separation between ourselves and our reality and that's where we can get bummed out.
So, in theory, what we're supposed to do, is give up on all that thinking and just feel, just be, just exist in this physical realm.
Ha!
Who has experience doing that?
When was the last time you learned to ride a bike by...
oh shoot, that is how you learn to ride a bike. You have to just get on it and ride.
oh shoot, it's the same with swimming, but still....
When was the last time you learned to do something by physically doing it?
I didn't learn to bake by...
Oh shoot, that actually is how I learned to bake. I started out not knowing much and just trying it and then, by doing it, over and over again, in a bunch of different situations, I actually learned about it and kind of made it my own.
Darnit, this isn't working- my theory is not being proven.
What I was trying to suggest is that, in general, we try to learn things by understanding them and that we tend to do this by thinking about them. But in this practice, we're robbed of that one tool- the brain- that we've used all along to understand things. It's like the one thing we have always used to help us learn things is thrown out the window in this practice and we're left, without it, and don't know what to do with ourselves.
And then I was thinking about zazen, and how zazen is just that: it's this place where we practice having no thoughts. Well, not really, zazen has never been about not having thoughts, it's been about noticing thoughts and also about feeling your body. But that's kind of what zazen seems to be: practicing being without using your brain.
And a lot of the practices at the zen center are practice in learning without your brain. Everytime I do something "new" at the zen center, I'm encouraged to just do it, not think about it so much, and just be aware of myself in doing it. They're asking me to practice learning through my body, through awareness, through immersion, through experiencing reality, just as it is, in that very moment, right then- they're inviting me to actually experience reality without  concepts, stories, theories, ideas- just experience it, right then, right here.

And that's actually where I realize that what we've been taught to do, is really quite silly. I was going to give all these examples of how we learn things by thinking about them, but it's not true. I've never learned a life skill by sitting in my room and thinking about it. I may read things and connect things and wonder about things but none of that does anything until I'm actually doing what I was thinking about/ trying to figure it out. We definitely like to believe that the thinking and figuring out is what will help us but it just isn't true. We really can only learn about something by doing it- because it's only in doing it that we experience the thing that we're doing. We definitely don't learn it by sitting around and thinking about it. At least, I don't.

Anyway, I still think I get why this can be so hard for us: we're used to using our brain to understand things and when we're told that the thoughts are what are causing us the suffering, we're stuck without that one tool and don't really know what to do instead.
But I think that by removing this tool, Buddhist practice points us toward a more realistic and useful way of learning- that in asking us to experience things, to learn by doing them, it's bringing us to do what we've done all along: learning by doing, experiencing our lives by living them, instead of sitting in a room and thinking about them or believing we can change them by practicing them inside our heads.