Don’t believe your thoughts – Take charge of your mind!

Most people are so identified with thinking and completely unaware of it, and when we believe our thoughts rigidly we live a very anxious life, full of worry and fear and life becomes very serious.

The ego is easily offended and challenged because it’s full of opinions and conclusions.

When we’re not living our lives in and from the mind we can handle what comes up much better, for the simple reason that we are more established in the present moment and not caught up in thinking patterns that has to do with past and future; we’re Here and Now, where Life really is.

Just watch your mind, see how it works, watch how it always moves away from the Now, how it always drags you back to time (past and future), and how every little challenge pulls you into a reactive mode, a flight or fight state of mind. (We only need the flight or fight response for physical threats).

To become aware of how it works and operates can be a huge enlightening experience!

We can even observe others as well; I’m sure you have encountered someone who’s complaining a lot at some point.

See how their mind refuses to get off topic no matter how you try to lead the conversation into a more constructive direction, the mind revels in self-pity and victim-hood. It can be very interesting to observe this. 

All the while we can chose to follow every thought or not – we don’t have to believe everything the mind throws at us!

We don’t have to follow every thought that pretends to be important, but when we do we quickly find ourselves in a full-blown soap-opera that’s going on in our minds and not anywhere else! It’s hilarious when we start to see this. Very enlightening.

One thought leads to another thought, but only if we chose to believe the first one!

When we learn to not take thoughts seriously we are liberated from the minds grip on us.

That’s how habitual thinking patters are formed, we keep on taking the thoughts as truths, we believe them and make them real.

But we can stay neutral, we can let the situation be without making any conclusions about it. We can stay in the moment and not get hooked by all kinds of thoughts that arises from the reactive and conditioned mind.

We can learn to not go with the mind whenever it wants our attention. 

It’s by observing it and keeping quiet for only a brief moment before the usual reaction – just enough to see, very clearly, how the mind immediately comes in to make conclusions and comments about ‘what is’ – that way we’ll learn to see the dysfunctionality of the thinking mind.

Drop the urge to judge the situation and see how that feels.

The most normal state for people overall is to be in that level of consciousness where they believe their thoughts but it doesn’t have to continue being that way.

It all begins to change with awareness. Just by the act of looking and observing.

Ask yourself:

“What happens if I just stay present? What if I don’t follow my thoughts? What if I don’t have an opinions about this? What if I decide to just be with what is, without judging it as being wrong?”

It’s the judging that creates fear and suffering, not the situation, it’s our opinions about it that creates the drama and takes us away from the present moment.

We can chose to stay in the now.

Old patterns may come up (most definitely!) again and often even stronger than before, but when your reaction to them ceases, eventually the thoughts ceases too.

When we don’t get entangled in the habitual pulling of the mind it will loose its power.

And how that happens is by becoming attentive to how the mind moves and how it tries to get you hooked into old thought patterns and when that happens you can say “no, actually I don’t have to think about this at the moment because there are no problems here and now and if a challenge would arise I would be informed in that precise moment what to do about it”.

Realizing that all else is mind-made drama and not real, so there’s no need to get lost in illusion, only question our thoughts and beliefs and then throw them away when we see they are not even real; just mental noise. 

Here are some other articles that you might like:

Don’t Make The Mind Into An Enemy

Letting Go Of Your Story

Before Thought Enters The Present Moment

How To Respond To Negativity In The World From The Perspective of Spirit

How Do I Avoid Being Swept Away By The Excitement Of The Mind?

When The Ego Collapses

PS:

A message to my mailing list and members of mariaerving.com:

To be sure you’re receiving all my emails could you have a look in your spam/junk folder and see if there are any emails from me there and if there are mark them as not-spam/junk?

Just to make sure you’re receiving them all:)