Your thoughts either help or hurt you.

When a negative thought goes unnoticed and unchallenged, your mind believes it and your body reacts to it.

If you can’t observe or watch the thought, then there is no separation between Mind and Self, so in effect, you are the thought, you have become the thought. Taking back control of your life starts with learning how to observe your thoughts.

An enormous amount of suffering is created by not realizing that a large percentage of your problems consist of repetitive, negative self-talk in your own head. Your mind has an energetic hold over you, that’s why you suffer.

Many people live with a mind that has taken possession of them and is pretending to be them. And they are stuck in it without even knowing it. If they knew it, that would be the beginning of freedom.

They don’t know it, and if you tell them they often get angry at you. That’s their mind reacting because it’s threatened by your awareness. It’s your mind unconsciously defending or protecting your fictitious sense of self, in reality your defending an illusion.

Your true power comes when you wake up out of the pattern of your unconscious mind. Your real power comes when your able to interrupt the unconscious process of your mind with conscious thought and become the witness or observer of your own mind.

A simple way to achieve this is to take a break by visiting your senses. Your senses are 100% guaranteed to be in the now. Sense awareness takes your focus from internally to externally. From being lost in your own minds dialogue, narrative, story or whispers. To the world outside of your Being.

For example, if you came to me in a state of great anxiety, stress or worry. And I took you outside and asked you to look around and tell me what 5 blue things you can see. I then asked you to shut your eyes and tell me 4 things you could hear. Now look around your environment and touch 3 soft things and 2 hard things. Plus, I asked you to shut your eyes again and breathe slowly and deeply 6 times and tell me what is something you could smell. You would have to agree with me that your conscious attention would have to be engaged to some degree, to gather that kind of information.

A less involved, yet equally powerful exercise that would bring some level of relief from an anxious state, would be to simply hand you a happy, friendly, playful puppy and ask you to feed it and look after it for the duration of our session. 

Your focus would have to go from internal and automatic, to outside of yourself and focused to complete this task. You cant be standing in your house and out in the driveway at the same timecan you? And equally, you cant be in the past and in the present moment at the same time.

I have witnessed first-hand, these exercises drawing people out of their conditioned anxious state and changing their state of being.

How?

Well, sense perception takes you out of thought.

I know you don’t always have a boisterous puppy on hand, however the point of the exercise is to illustrate what I mean.

In this way you can learn how to choose where you put your conscious attention and you grow in awareness. It’s about understood that you have the power to choose where to direct your thoughts and attention.

Plus, by doing this, your actually entering the present moment. Your body will learn to find, settle into and trust the present moment and it will help you be more present consciously.

In fact, ultimatly, you will become a conscious presence that perceives the world around you.