You Are Not Your Thoughts
You Are Not Your Thoughts - Setting The Scene
It’s 3 am and you have woken up and can’t get back to sleep. You lie in
bed tossing and turning and as your brain wakes up a little voice in
your head starts nagging you with doubts and fears about money… and your
business failing… about being unemployed (again)… about being
unemployable… you try and ignore it but you can’t…
Later that day
you are outside in the countryside, enjoying a walk in a forest, and
feeling relaxed. You feel your phone vibrate in your pocket. You try and
ignore it, but it keeps on vibrating, and in a milli-second your mind
is flooded with thoughts:
“What if there’s been an accident…
Oh no it’s probably from work to tell me a client project has got
delayed, and you need this project because you are self-employed…Oh dear
god, I hope my (elderly) mother hasn’t had another fall and hurt
herself again…”
On the drive back there is a news item on the
radio rattling out statistics about the Covid-19 related number of
business failures in your region… suddenly you are overwhelmed with
feelings of anxiety and fear…and your brain is flooded with thoughts of
financial disaster.
Thoughts… thoughts… thoughts..!
3 Core Beliefs
How do we deal with our negative thoughts: thoughts of anger, accusation and despair?
I
am not a counsellor or therapist nor in way trained to offer any form
of professional advice in dealing with these issues. What I am going to
share with you here are my own personal experiences of addressing these
issues and suggestions as to what has worked for me.
I must declare three core beliefs that I have and that underpin my take on you are not your thoughts:
(1)
I am interested in what works, for me! I am interested in approaches,
tools and techniques that I can apply and put into practice. I only want
to be informed about something to the extent that it helps me apply a potential solution that may be resourceful and beneficial to me.
(2) I see the universe and our lived experience within it as energy based, thus we live in an energetic universe . This perspective is science based and proven.
(3) More significantly, I see that in addition to living in an energetic universe, we live in a participatory universe. This perspective is supported by science but not yet fully proven by science.
We are going to cover a lot of ground here and in the follow-up article
to you are not your thoughts and I am including many links to third party resources and other
articles that I have written that will provide a more holistic
understanding. I encourage you to follow up and read this material.
In
dealing with our thoughts, I have found that there are four stages:
awareness of our thoughts; understanding our thoughts; accepting our
thoughts; and, living with our thoughts.
You Are Not Your Thoughts: (1) AWARENESS
Awareness of Your Thoughts
The best way of becoming aware of your thoughts is mindfulness practice. Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh defines mindfulness as “…the energy of being aware and awake to the present moment…”
It is helpful to understand that:
* Your mind is the repository of all of your pre-programmed reactions and response patterns.
* Your body is the vehicle through which your emotional reactions arise and are expressed.
* Emotion is your body's reaction to your mind.
So,
if you are new to mindfulness practise and you are struggling to bring
your unconscious mental activity into conscious awareness as thoughts,
pay very close attention to your emotions.
Your (unconscious) thoughts are always reflected in your body as emotions. So ask yourself: "What am I feeling?"
Mindfulness
practise will enable you to watch and observe your emotions and
emotional states as they arise, and will empower you to not become
totally immersed and identified with them.
How to practice mindfulness?
To make a start with this practice here are 6 basic exercises.
Also, follow these simple instructions for understanding the basics.
Understanding the basics of mindfulness meditation technique is fundamentally very simple – the hardest part is to just do it!
After
some practice of mindfulness and with a developing awareness of
previously unconscious thoughts as they arise, three things become
apparent:
1. The repetitive nature of these thoughts - they are rather like a tape loop.
2. The triggers that give rise to these thoughts - such as: tiredness, stress, emotional vulnerability, other people, the media, circumstances and temperament.
3. The energetic states associated with these repetitive negative thoughts create repetitive negative results.
You Are Not Your Thoughts: (2) UNDERSTAND
Understanding Your Thoughts
Put simplistically, we can understand the origin of these thoughts from two perspectives:
1. The hardware - the physiology that creates these thoughts.
This
is centred on the amygdala, a major emotional centre in the limbic
system. This is responsible for our flight / fight response. The Chimp Model explains this and how it generates many of our unconscious and automatically arising thoughts.
These
thoughts are non-rational and largely driven by survival instincts and
pleasure instincts - sometimes referred to as our "animal nature".
Many of our negative thoughts stem from this region of the brain.
2. The software - the conditioning from our primary caregivers and dominant adult figures in our childhood that creates these thoughts.
This is a vast subject and there are many psychological models and interventions used to address and "repair" this conditioning.
For simplicity, if we use Buddhist terminology there are three concepts to frame this:
Samskaras
- impressions created in our minds and thoughts by our actions or, more
damagingly, the actions of others upon us. If these actions are
repeated regularly, they become a habit and are performed largely
unconsciously. The stronger these habits become - as with all habits -
they exercise increasing power.
Anusaya
- latent tendencies which are these deeply ingrained samskara, or
habits of response and thought, and which are largely unconscious.
Samsara
- the cycle of being caught up in perpetual suffering, death and
rebirth. This is often thought of in relation to reincarnation but in
fact describes the hell on earth - in this life - that we create and
endlessly put ourselves through with our samskara and anusaya - or our
"shadow side".
Think of this as a ferris wheel of suffering.
You Are Not Your Thoughts: (3) ACCEPT
Accepting Your Thoughts
The mindfulness practices outlined
above will go a long way to helping you develop considerable self
awareness and insight into the causes and nature of your negative
thoughts and the realisation that you are not your thoughts.
There is a vast industry of professional psychologists,
therapists and counsellors offering a wide variety of interventions,
coping strategies and potential solutions. For many people this level of
professional assistance is necessary and beneficial.
However
there are probably an even greater number of us who either just struggle
on and do our best, or who seek to apply the insights gained from these
practices to help ourselves work to a position of deep understanding that you are not your thoughts. I suggest 3 keys:
1. The key to dealing with these thoughts is acceptance.
2. The key to acceptance is realising that we are not one self but a composite of multiple selves.
3. The root cause
of our suffering is that when we deny (suppress or repress) any one
part of us we deny the whole; in other words, united we stand, divided I
fall.
You Are Not Your Thoughts: (4) LIVING
Living With Your Thoughts
This article continues here: Living With Your Thoughts
What Matters Is Not The Content Of Your Thoughts But Your Relationship With Your Thoughts
Further Reading:
5 Buddhist Teachings on Working With Habitual Patterns of Thought
"Feeling Great" by David D. Burns - "Negative feelings always say something good about you"
Return to: Techniques For Stress Management
Return to: Renewing Your Mind
