The Truth

For example.

Thoughts become actions, become your life.

VS.

You are not your thoughts. You are your actions.

Taking control of your mind is quite different from watching it frolic and play, fall down and hurt itself, get back up, play again, etc... and not interact with it. If I am watching my thoughts come from my mind, and I do not believe or entertain them, who am I? Am I my spirit?

So if I am my spirit, and I can choose differently than my thoughts, does that not mean that my brain is like a separate mechanism, a tool, something I can choose to use or not to use? Like my arm. I can choose to use my arm to reach over and grab my coffee cup, or I can choose not to.

I can choose to entertain those happy or depressing thoughts, or I can choose to just note my surroundings and BE. I can choose to remain focused on a different task, such as writing, speaking with a friend, etc. We do this all of the time, and we don’t even realize it. Talking to a friend, something they say triggers our mind to go off on a rant of its own. We can start listening to the rant, stop focusing on our friend, and miss huge meaningful parts of the conversation.

My brain just started telling me how I haven’t seen my friend, who lives nearby, in a while. I started thinking that maybe I should see her today, since it’s my day off. This took my focus off of writing this blog post, and I realized it. I have been waiting for weeks, months, years even, to make it a practice to give myself half a day to a whole day to write. My soul cries out for this. I focused back in on my writing, because my brain was trying to distract me from my soul work.

I think I like describing myself as a soul, rather than a spirit. "Spirit" seems wispier, transient, while "soul" seems grounded, safe, and full of love. I long to live in that safety of the soul, to practice life from a safe place.

Having established that we are not our thoughts, let’s address the sometimes truth that says that your thoughts create your life. Say you are having coffee with a friend, and someone you know, whom you don’t think particularly likes you, comes in, orders coffee, and sits facing the opposite way. They didn’t see you, as they entered the shop door. They start talking on the phone, and you think you might possibly have heard your name. You put your hand up, asking your friend to hold on a second, mid-sentence. Your thoughts start telling you negative things about yourself.

He’s probably talking about how I messed up on that project the other day. I know what I did didn’t make sense, I was distracted, but it made me look stupid. I do things a lot that make me look stupid. I hate that. People think I’m stupid. I do make a lot of mistakes some people wouldn’t. I miss things that should be obvious... and on and on and on. If you allow yourself to believe these things, you may cut your time with your friend short, saying you aren’t feeling very well, remembering how you did that one stupid thing when you were with our friend last, and how they were probably only having coffee with you again because they felt sorry for you… Oops, you listened to it again. You leave the coffee shop, thinking, I hope I didn’t make my friend mad by leaving, but that’s what I would deserve anyway. It was rude to ask him out for coffee and then cut the time short. And you have a predictably gloomy day, looking forward to when you can just black out on the pillow, because you’ve listened to this mean self-talk all day...

In that instance, or another where you listened to the opposite type of self-talk, your thoughts do become how your day goes, and presumably how you act.

I think that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I think that our thoughts CAN become our actions, but that we don’t have to let them do so. We, the soul, the spirit, whatever you want to call it, can choose to identify with those thoughts, or we can tell them that we are not our thoughts. That we are the sky, and we can watch those cloud thoughts drift by and away, regardless of whether we deem these thoughts good or bad.