How to manage thoughts!
Welcome to the first in this F*ck Thoughts Series, where we will be looking at thoughts in a new way to free ourselves from their limitations and the suffering they can cause.
So what are thoughts and how do they behave? We can spend a large portion of our life without even asking such a question. To build an understanding of thoughts in Mindfulness we use the analogy of ‘standing on a train station platform’ like the picture below.
When a thought comes into the mind it's much like when a train enters the station. Whilst it may not seem like it, we have a choice of whether to board that train or stand back and watch it pass. More often than not we board the train without noticing and are carried away for miles until we become aware. The moment of noticing that we have been carried away is a moment of awareness and can be understood as the felt sense of shifting from, ‘contraction’ to ‘expansion’. We have then returned to the train station platform and back to the position of observer.
We can't choose what type of train comes into the station. Some destinations we might like and be happy to board. Others we may not. By praticising becoming aware when we have been carried away and returning to the ‘station platform’, our minds strengthen their ability to sit back and observe thoughts (trains) as they come and go.
Eventually this gives us the feeling of more freedom and choice as we do away with the shackles of thoughts and break out of our automatic, unconscious and learnt habits.
Eventually this gives us the feeling of more freedom and choice as we do away with the shackles of thoughts and break out of our automatic, unconscious and learnt habits.
Another analogy often used is ‘The Sky’. Imagine your awareness like the giant encompassing blue sky (expansive awareness). Clouds (thoughts) may come in, they may be light, airy and quite pleasant but they will not stay and they will pass. Dark clouds may come in, they may be distressing and stormy but they too will pass. Unbiased in its position regardless of good or bad weather, the sky is merely the encompassing container and not the interpreter of the weather.
Looking ‘at’ versus ‘from’ our thoughts
Ultimately this knowledge and practice gives us the direct experience of the difference between...
...looking ‘at’ thoughts vs looking ‘from’ thoughts
The difference being in the heat of the moment distressing thoughts have the ability to drag us into the middle of them, carry us away and we see the world from this thought. For example:
Event: On a sunny day a friend fails to acknowledge your wave from across the road and walks by.
Thought: “Shit! They ignored me”
Feeling: Hurt
Thought: “They must not like me anymore?”, “What have I done?”
Feeling: Sadness
Thought: “I feel like shit, so it must be true”, “Whats wrong with me?”
Behaviour: Avoid them in the future, criticise them to other friends, develop the learnt behaviour of distrust and avoidance.
In this example, we are caught by our reaction to an event and have stepped ‘into’ our thoughts about the experience.
The result is that we then see the world ‘from’ those thoughts and feelings rather than recognise the direct factual experience itself i.e. You waved, they didn't and there are an innumerable amount of reasons as why that may have happened e.g. the sun was in their eyes, they just didn't see you, they were having a difficult time and didn't want to feel a burden on you.
The train in this scenario carried us away as we personalised the event and saw only one outcome, interpreting it through the lens of insecurity and as a result, decide to feel and act from this interpretation of the event.
Not being aware of judgments about a situation, our own mental filtering process and our emotional reaction to it prevents us from stepping back, observing our experience in a larger awareness and having the capacity to choose any number of possibilities to the event and as a result, suffer a lot less.
Beyond finding a justifiable reason is a place where it doesn't matter what reason you could come up with, it need not be justification for your thoughts to be determining how you feel. This can be accessed and experienced by yourself.
Can you relate to this example and how the mind can negatively skew events almost immediately? This happens all the time, like when you have a job to do and predict it’s going to be much larger than what it turns out to be, or when you judge a person only to find out they are much more than what your thoughts had you believe.
We will look into the difference between reacting and responding to experiences and the negative filter in the next article in this Fuck Thoughts series as a way of working with our inbuilt tendency to filter experiences through a negative lense.