Don’t believe every shit thought you have

Thoughts seem to have such incredible power over us. We seem to believe what we think without question or any further investigation into if it’s true or not. The mind has this insanely powerful momentum that can sweep us away in an instant, and we don’t even notice it until we’re completely gone and missing everything around us.

I even think sometimes we prefer to be gone, lost in a fantasy world instead of being right here on the spot in life, as our mind made creations become a strange substitute for being here now. So we kind of just miss everything that’s happening, while we cheat ourselves out of the present moment constantly. And for what? Ridiculous dramas, stupid storylines about not being good enough, and revisiting old events while worrying about the future which has not yet arisen. Our thought patterns almost seem like a form of madness. At least mine do anyway.

But there’s an upside to all this, and that is that thoughts are just thoughts, nothing else. They arise, they fall away and they’re gone… if we let them. The problem for a lot of us is that we hold on to them as if they were real, completely believing the information being presented. Don’t get me wrong, some thoughts are great, we like them, we say yes to them, thumbs up, hurray, great thought. It’s the ‘bad’ thoughts we struggle with, cling to and completely engineer our mental distress with. But the great thing is that ‘bad’ thoughts are just thoughts too, nothing else. This is brilliant news, cos it means that we can relax with anything that arises in our minds. Our seemingly negative thought patterns are just a conditioned response to the situations we find ourselves in. We’ve responded like this before, so naturally our mind uses what it already thinks is an appropriate solution, even if it’s not. These are just mental habits, and all habits can be changed with sustained attention and effort.

More good news is that if we can recognise a thought as just a thought, quite often it will lose its power over us. We don’t get dragged down the river with it. It drops away. We’re free and open, until another thought comes, then we recognise it again and let it go if we can. Even more great news is that if we keep doing this, then we’re creating the really good habit of letting go and learning to un-knot the basic elements that keep us stuck in our suffering and neurotic tendencies. For professional overthinkers like myself, this “it’s just a thought” realisation has been really important.

So, no matter what it is, it’s still just a thought. No more, no less. It will come, it will go. Who cares? Thoughts are not reality. In fact, overly identifying with our thoughts is what keeps us from seeing reality as it is. Living in a mind-made fiction only keeps us from touching life as it is right now, which is always enough. The problem for most of us is that we don’t know that yet, or we glimpse it and then come back around to our usual way of functioning, which always has to do with our over-identification with our thought processes.

The world is just waiting for us to snap out of our conditioned mind and wake up to the incredible situation we have found ourselves in. Look at the sky, it’s amazing. What’s up there is even more amazing. Look at the trees and the plants. This is all happening without our interference. We’re just a part of an astonishingly beautiful organism that’s flying through space, but we’re getting upset if our wi-fi isn’t fast enough or the milk on our flat white isn’t perfect.

Life is a gift. Our minds are gifts and our thoughts can be really shit gifts if we believe everything they tell us. From now on, let’s promise to laugh at our negative thoughts and say “yeah, yeah I hear you, but I’m not really listening.”