Freedom From Thoughts

Hey! Welcome back to your Daily Mindfulness. How did it go yesterday? Did you get to practice creating a little more space for the experience of stress? It doesn't always make the stress completely go away. But it does help us prevent ourselves from compounding, doubling, tripling, quadrupling. In today's session, we're going to build on that, but specifically work with our thoughts and gaining a little bit of freedom from the tyranny of our thoughts. I'm sure you're already well aware of this, but one of the big things that create stress for ourselves is the thinking mind.

The mind that gets caught up in story or narratives of why me? I have so much to do. Not good enough. What if this doesn't go well? What if, if, what if? And it can be tough when we're caught in that loop. And I think we're all familiar with those thoughts and immediately creating an emotional response and a sense of tension in the body. One of the first things that we can do to work with those thoughts, is again giving those thoughts specifically space.

But it'll be a little different than yesterday. And that we're going to be taking the perspective of being an observer to our thoughts. So much of the time when it comes to the thinking mind, we are just right there in it, the thought comes up and we're thinking those thoughts. And we start ruminating about those thoughts, fueling those thoughts, and they just go on and on and on. But there's a different perspective we can take.

One where we're watching them rather than being caught in them. I like to think of it as being in relationship to watching a river. So if you imagine, a river going down a mountain. A lot of times, if that's how our life, we're caught up in the river, smashing into the wide water, banging into the rocks, wherever the river goes, we go. And that's kind of like what it's like to be caught in our thoughts.

But there's a different way we can be in relationship to the river. We could be sitting on the bank. And in that way, same you, same river, different relationship, different experience entirely. So as you sit here, maybe just start to notice what thoughts are moving through your mind. You can have the eyes open.

If you want to close your eyes, you're welcome to as well. And what's it like to start to watch that inner narrative? To watch the stream of thoughts moving through your mind. As if you were watching a river or watching clouds pass through the sky. As soon as we take that perspective that we're observing our thoughts, immediately presupposes that who we are is different from our thoughts. And I would argue who we are as much bigger than our thoughts.

We have this dimension of ourselves that can simply be aware. And what we're doing in this practice is connecting more to awareness itself rather than being so consumed by the thoughts. Now, this is an ongoing practice. It's something you could practice throughout the day. But it's something we're going to dive in more deeply in the meditation.

So be sure you stick around for that meditation, cause that's really where we get to put this into practice in a deeper way. But again, thank you for continuing on this journey. You're on day two, which means we're, we're making some headway and you're learning some new tips and strategies. Each day is building on the other. And we'll take what we learned here and build on it tomorrow.

As always, thank you for your practice. I'll talk to you soon and take care.