My work, as well as my own entryway into the world of my work, started by helping myself and others change their thoughts and emotions into what they want them to be.
That’s great. It’s helpful. It’s benefitted a lot of people. But there is something it subtly perpetuates: resistance.
Because when something doesn’t fit the mold of what we want to think or feel, we tend to resist it. This internal resistance was the cause of inner conflict for me for years.
Resistance to reality is the cause of suffering. And a fundamental part of our reality is our thoughts and emotions. We can observe them just as we can observe anything else. We experience them just as we experience anything else.
And this observation, or awareness, helps create some space between subject (us/awareness) and object (thought/emotion).
And this space leads to another profound realization: we are not our thoughts and we are not our emotions.
They are things we are aware of, content of our experience.
Anyway, that all leads me to the point of this passage.
Our relationship to our thoughts and emotions is significantly more important to our wellbeing than our thoughts and emotions.
One more time.
Our relationship to our thoughts and emotions is significantly more important to our wellbeing than our thoughts and emotions.
People are so bothered by what they think and feel. But that’s only because they are attached or fused with their thoughts and emotions.
In many ways, they identify with their thoughts and emotions. They consider their thoughts to be “them” and they literally speak their identification with their emotional state (e.g. I’m angry).
But when you identify as awareness, consciousness itself, then you recognize that thoughts and feelings are just phenomena appearing within awareness. They are no more “you” than the clouds in the sky.
What are thoughts? Seriously, what are thoughts?
When I inquire within here’s what I find: Thoughts are bits of language, often accompanied by mental motion pictures.
Tell me what you find.
There is a skill called cognitive defusion that I learned in grad school (or, rather, in perusing spiritually aligned modalities while I was in my grad school internship). This skill is about stepping back from your thoughts so you see them as passing words rather than absolute facts or commands.
Who steps back from your thoughts? You.
Yet another proof point that you are not your thoughts.
And how many thoughts have you had that end up being untrue?
A ton.
Why still treat them as gospel?
There is so much freedom available to you when you stop treating thoughts as though they are facts.
Most thoughts are the mental relics of past experience… shaped by or direct replicas of things you’ve been told or shown throughout your life.
Told and shown by who? By other people who have been told or shown those things.
Mental conditioning. Entrenched cognitive patterns. That’s all.
And we can do the same thing with our emotions.
What are emotions?
Felt sensations.
Again, they can be observed. We can practice emotional defusion by observing them the same way as our thoughts.
Just observing. Nothing else.
No resistance. No suffering.
The essence of who you are, consciousness itself, does not suffer.
Only the ego suffers when it identifies with the content of the brain and body.
This realization, when lived, also frees us up from reactivity.
Because most reactivity is not us reacting to events or circumstances, but our thoughts and emotions about those events or circumstances.
…
I’m so unbothered by my thoughts and emotions these days.
It’s not because my mind never comes up with bothersome stuff. It’s not because I never feel fear, sadness, or anger.
It’s because I’ve changed by relationship to that stuff.
I think a lot, and I’m unbothered by my thoughts.
I feel deeply, and I’m unbothered by my feelings.
Why? Because I allow it all to be what it is. Because I recognize myself as the awareness beneath and beyond the content of my awareness.
I’ve become defused.
Untethered.
And that’s what I invite the people who work with me to step into.
And, funny enough, from that place it becomes easier to cultivate new thoughts and emotions than ever before.
Because inner freedom liberates us from past conditioning and fosters pure possibility, which allows for new potentials to exist.
The old adage: what we resist persists.
Well, we can also say: what we allow passes.
What’s left? That’s for you to find out.
If you’re into this sort of thing, I made a course to help you experience inner freedom. You can get it here.