Your thoughts are like sticks floating in a river.
Ok, so a thought pops up in your mind right. Understand that generally you didn’t choose the thought, the thought happened to you.
However, what most people do, is they suddenly notice the thought, then they latch onto it, they watch it, they study it, they believe it, they get invested in the thought, they get emotional about the content of the thought, and they identify with the thought.
Which just means that they see identify with their thought.
As in…
“yep, that’s true, that’s who I am, that is the way that things are”
So really, without knowing it, they have focused their attention on that thought. Then what happens is, your mind ends up having an energetic hold over you – That’s why your suffering.
Its just like your standing on the edge of a river, just looking at the water, peaceful and happy. When suddenly an interesting looking stick floats past and grabs your attention. You want to keep looking at the stick, so you start to run along the riverbank keeping up with it. You get scratched by blackberries and end up falling into the river and swept over a waterfall. Because whatever happens, you will not let the stick go.
At the same time, you are looking back up the river frantically to try and see the next stick, plus you are straining to look back down the river to see what stick has passed you by. So the whole time, you are in chaos. Now you are wet, cold, and injured.
In reality your thoughts are your own prison, and if you can't SEE your thoughts - then you ARE your thoughts. By that I mean, if you are not aware of your thoughts, or you are not aware you are believing and identifying with each thought - then you are the thought itself.
If you’re not aware that your watching the stick, then you are the stick.
So what do you do about it
What you do is you learn that most of the time you didn’t actually ‘have’ any thoughts at all. The thoughts happened to you. Just like you didn’t beat your own heart. Your heart beating is happening to you.
Plus you learn how to choose where you put your conscious attention. You grow in awareness. You understand that you have the power to choose where to direct your thoughts and attention. The biggest thing is to understand that you are not your thoughts. You are the observer of your thoughts. Because remember, if you don’t watch your thoughts, than you are your thoughts.
Thoughts come and go like sticks floating past in a river. If in awareness your able to understand that all that happened is that a thought entered your conscious awareness. However, you didn’t select that thought. Then suddenly its like a space opens up where you separate yourself from your thoughts. And in that place, you're not that thought anymore and it loses its energy over you and doesn't affect you so much.
Your able to watch your thought, understand consciously “oh yep, I’m thinking about x” and let the thought float away, out of your conscious awareness. Its only because we are automatically, madly scrambling to look at, hang onto and believe our thoughts that they constantly bother us.
I have counselled many suicidal clients who have been tortured by their constant mind activity for many years. One of the key things I work on, that they have reported made a useful, practical difference to their lives. Is helping them disidentify from their thought stream, create separation between the thoughts and themselves and learn how to be the observer of their thoughts.
In this way the repetitive thoughts themselves go from deeply traumatic and upsetting, where one thought inevitably leads to another and a person’s mental and emotional health cycle down into despair. To a person being able to stop the cycle and say to themselves…” oh yep, there’s that thought again”. They have created separation and the thought looses its energetic hold over them, and most slip straight out of your consciousness again.
All it takes to start the journey is to have a tiny bit of awareness that you just had a thought.