It's Not JUST Thought

I’m resting on the other side of a really raucous thoughtstorm. If I had been standing in a snow globe, I would have been buried alive.

I won’t go into details. The specifics are actually irrelevant. It’s amazing that I see it this way now because just a few days ago, the details and drama of my internal story were very important to me. There’s no way I would have called them irrelevant while they were spinning their scary tales.

I lost sleep due to a busy mind. Then I acted with haste, a bit too impulsively, in fact. I would have liked to do a rewind and have a do over. But such is the nature of life. Emails and texts and conversations can’t be deleted after being sent or spoken.

If you’ve been reading my blogs or have read my book, Space of Love, you have a glimmer of the truth of the human experience. It is created via the energy of thought. Thought is a formless and very powerful energy that is responsible for a constant hum within us. We hear bits and pieces in the form of mind chatter or personal thinking but much of it is deep below the surface of our awareness. Like gravity or the air we breathe, it’s invisible yet powerful and important to life.

Thought is the paint that creates our experience whether it be happy or sad, stressed or relaxed. It colors the lens through which we view life and literally paints our separate realities. We can’t have a feeling without thought because feelings are made of/caused by thought. They are two sides of the same coin.

The thing is, when we are knee deep in an experience, it is like being in a good movie. It might be thought created, but our consciousness is so amazing and efficient at bringing thought to life, we experience it as full reality through all our senses.

Those feelings and experiences create sensations in the body. Sensation can feel heavy. Like the heaviest of weight is upon us. Similar to when our heart pounds during a suspenseful movie. However during a movie, we have the subtle awareness of being in a theatre or watching our TV.

When caught up in a life movie, where thought is moving 100 mph and repeating itself over an over, it’s easy not to see or know it’s a movie. It’s easy to believe our experience is coming from another person or situation. It’s easy to believe our thoughts may actually mean something about us. Or, going one step further, that they actually ARE us. Such is the incredible design of humans.

It’s often not until later that we are able to pull back the curtain and step into the space between us and thought. It is from this space that we may get a glimpse of the nature of our stories and that we are the observer rather than the creator.

My recent experience…..

I had a very busy mind for a few days. It kept churning and churning replaying scary thoughts and trying to figure out what to do. Lots of questions in an endless repetitive thought loop. Do more research on the topic? What’s the solution? What’s the right thing to do? Share or don’t share. Lay low, do nothing? Could I live with myself if I said nothing? And blah blah blah. The brain loves to repeat itself.

Where was wisdom when I needed it? I can see now that it was obscured by a busy mind. At the time, I kept hoping to hear a bit of wisdom rather than the same old stale repetitive fear based thinking that was tormenting me. When I was deep in the middle of it, I didn’t have a sense of the nature of my tormentor. It felt serious, heavy, and urgent.

It still boggles my mind how thought energy can feel heavy then light. Solid then fluid. Stuck then in flow.

Feeling desperate to settle down and hear a solution, I told myself “It’s JUST thought.” I didn’t believe it. Thought continued to say, “It’s not me.”

In fact, if you were my friend or my coach and told me “It’s JUST thought,” I might have kicked you.

Until I wake up, and that often happens later on, I will still be buried in uncomfortable experience or confusion. And I may feel very lost, as if my head is in the clouds of not knowing what to do.

Here’s the thing. It feels really big to me.

It’s not JUST thought. It’s THOUGHT!

What an amazing and powerful gift. It shouldn’t be and really can’t be minimized. It has so much power! It is the clay of the human experience. Although we may curse it at times, and desperately wish we could change it at will, it is one of our superpowers.

When new thought rolls in, we are able to have a shift in perspective or experience on a dime.

We are able to have a new experience of a situation in the outside world even when the facts or details of that world remain the same.

Without even consciously trying, our brains string thoughts together to create beliefs and stories. They become our truths. Until they change.

We are able to feel stuck in the past when the past no longer exists.

We are able to travel to an unknown future when we are not even there yet.

We are able to wake up from stuckness or leave the future and immerse ourselves in the moment. Thought has the ability to fall away, soften, and quiet deep below the surface.

And best of all, we are able to have brand new fresh thoughts. Insights. We are able to see, hear, and know something new that a moment before, did not exist.

It’s not JUST thought. It’s THOUGHT!