Peace of Mind is a Thought Away: Mastering Your Thoughts, Part IV
This is Part IV of an eight part blog which began on April 14.
Actually, you can literally be hijacked or held-hostage by your own thoughts. Some thoughts are so powerful that they create huge amounts fear or anger in you. And if you were to really feel what is going on in your body when you are having these thoughts, you would realize how insidious and damaging some thoughts are to you physiologically.
They create enormous amounts of tension which is the starting point of all illness. A bamboo stick hitting your fanny causes you a lot less damage physiologically than what you put your body through when you are caught in a negative cycle of thoughts.
So, the point of all this is to be your own loving roshi and to step back and dis-identify from your negative thought patterns. You can eventually learn not to identify with these thoughts. You can learn to see your thoughts as just something happening outside of you, so to speak, and not to you or inside you.
You don’t have to take your thoughts personally or seriously. You are not your thoughts. Thoughts have a very short shelf life, if you ignore them. And by learning to do this, you can truly live in the present and be so much more relaxed and a master of your thoughts.
If you were to look at your thoughts honestly and objectively, you would begin to realize that they are mostly just a rehash, an old tape, of all kinds of old junk. And if you don’t take them personally, you don’t have to get involved or enmeshed in them over and over again.
So, if you all of a sudden find yourself having an angry thought, or a fearful thought, you can become angry or afraid; and say and feel “I am angry” or “I am afraid.”
Or, instead you can step back and say, “I am having an angry thought.” “I am having a fearful thought.” And then let the thought start to dissipate by dis-identifying from it, by not feeding it any focus or energy. This is what it means to not take your thoughts personally or seriously.
You don’t have to get caught up in the drama of your thoughts. There is a huge difference between these two responses. You get to choose how you respond and thus what you experience.
This is Part IV of an eight part blog.