If you’ve ever wished you could take your brain out and give it a good scrubbing, you aren’t alone. Our brains seem to enjoy tormenting us with perceived problems so that we can spend the time to “fix” them. From criticizing your diet and sociability, to commenting on your lack of passion. Our thoughts seem insistent on making us miserable! Get outside more, just be in the moment, be more authentic, change the lighting in this room, your relationship could be better, why are you so X? On and on, day after day, hour after hour, our thoughts come. And usually, they are mighty critical. They aren’t great at offering solutions, but they are fantastic at pointing out apparent problems.

But the reality is, most things aren’t a problem.

So we begin the adventure of ignoring our thoughts. It sounds super counter-intuitive, but take a moment to appreciate that your thoughts are unbidden. You do not summon them. You don’t choose to think about the relationship with your mother when you are eating chicken noodle soup. It just comes up. You don’t choose to contemplate the meaning of life when looking at the stars, but you can’t help but do so. This is why meditating is so damn hard. Because we are trying to stop a steady stream of thoughts, often sometimes wrongly trying to prevent thoughts, which is impossible. Different forms of meditation have popped up encouraging us to let go of the thought when it arises, as opposed to preventing them completely. If you’ve ever tried this, you know how insanely difficult it is.

Yet it’s not about stopping our thoughts, or even not getting carried away with them. Today, I simply want to remind you that you AREN’T your thoughts.

Thoughts Come Unbidden

We often think that we are our thoughts. If we think negatively, we are negative. If we think about work to do, we love to work. If we think about how to care for others, we must be caring individuals. WRONG. These thoughts are coming up from the depths of your subconscious. For various reasons, but survival is a huge one. If we are in a position where we feel unsafe, we’re going to point out the negative, in order to convince ourselves to leave. If we used to be praised for helping people, then when a moment arises to help someone, the thought will come up that we should do so, because in your experience, helping people has gotten you love (ie helped you survive).

Survival. This is why we think the thoughts we do. This is why they come unbidden and seem so difficult to control. Our thoughts are a never-ending string of information being processed. We interpret the outside environment, determine a problem or threat, and this transforms to information that should help us with the problem/threat.

This is all well and good if we were still cave people who only needed to focus on survival. But nowadays, most of us are lucky enough to live in the modern world, where survival is pretty easy. As a result, our brains have dug deeper into what survival means for us now. What survival now means for us is being loved, having our own space, creatively expressing ourselves, having work that we care about, etc. These are much more complex problems than finding food or not being eaten by something.

Yet we don’t need to listen to all of these thoughts. They are simply bits of information triggered by the environment. They are not necessarily true, and they definitely don’t define you. After all, haven’t you ever had a thought so crazy, so horrible, so random pop into your head that you ask yourself, “Where did that come from?” That’s what I mean. All of our thoughts are unbidden. Which means we need to stop beating ourselves up for A) not having all the “solutions” and B) having so many thoughts that bog us down.

You are not your thoughts. You are not your thoughts. You are NOT your thoughts!

Where do thoughts come from?

Try to remind yourself when thoughts come that get you down. You can even think of these thoughts as coming from a specific aspect of yourself. Is this a thought from the inner child? From my inner protector? From my shadow side? Or is it really just a random thought triggered by the environment and my unique experience? Regardless, the thought is not YOU. You may have a negative thought, you are not negative. You may have self-defeating thoughts, but you aren’t actually what you think you are. Your thoughts aren’t true, they are just thoughts. I could think “Giraffes eat meat,” but that doesn’t make it so.

The more we lean to separate ourselves from our thoughts, I think the happier we’ll be. It may sound impossible, but just as in meditation we aren’t preventing the thoughts, we are simply watching them pass with curiosity, this is the goal: to let the thoughts come without getting attached to them. It’s not easy, and it’s not quick, it’s something we’ll have to work on for the rest of our lives. But if we can, I believe true freedom awaits us. If we are not a servant to our minds, then we are entirely sovereign. We choose what we believe, and what is simply “a thought”.

To get the most out of these messages, I invite you to join the next live circle, happening every Sunday! Come reclaim your thoughts after religion, along with so much more.