My word this year was to simplify everything, I have simplified how I send the weekly calm. It was complicated and I just wanted to write it and send it. I can now do that, if you are reading this it has worked.
UPDATE: The second try. If you do see this, hit a quick reply saying a quick hello or something. Steven x
Imagine you're sitting on a platform at a quiet railway station. Trains are coming and going, but you don't have to board any of them. You're just sitting. Breathing. Watching.
Your mind generates thoughts all day long, like trains pulling into a station. Some are welcome. Some are not. Most of them, you never asked for.
When any thought arrives, our instinct is to react. We engage with it, either follow the story always tussle with it. But your subconscious mind is watching. It mainly cares about two things. Did the thought create an emotion? And did you go with it?
Positive or negative, it does not matter. If the thought gets a reaction, your mind registers it as important and keeps sending it. There's a very good reason for this, survival.
When you stop reacting, something remarkable happens. You see the train pull in and you simply do nothing. You don't board it. You let it pass. Over time, that train stops arriving at your station. Just like a company wouldn't waste money, your subconscious mind is not going to waste valuable time and energy.
In time it will find which thoughts you do get, the ones you do enjoy when you start using and it will give you more of them.
It's a myth that you can change your thought, if a thought arrives it's already there. It's like sitting in a train station and complaining about the colour of the train. You cannot turn a negative thought into a positive one. It is what it is. But you can gently train the subconscious mind which thoughts you want. If nobody got on the green trains, the company would change the colour.
When an unwanted thought arrives, consider doing nothing with it. See the thought as a train pulling in. Notice it. Name it if you like: worry, desire, judgment, story. Then do absolutely nothing with it. No pushing away, no frustration. Just allow it to be, allow it to move on without you. And you do that by doing nothing with it.
Consider how different your life would be if you could choose which thoughts to entertain or not.
This week, I will notice my thoughts without boarding them.
New meditation: Meditation to help Deal with Intrusive Thoughts
A guided practice to help you change your relationship with the thoughts you never asked for.
Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
I want to be honest about why this meditation matters so much to me.
When I broke my neck at eighteen, I spent seven months in a hospital bed in Salisbury. I could not escape my own mind. The thoughts were relentless. I believed I was subhuman. That was the word I used for myself, lying there, day after day.
Years later, when a relationship ended, the intrusive thoughts returned. The images of the person you loved being with someone else, replaying over and over. Your mind thinks it is protecting you, but every replay is like living it again.
Then in my thirties, I lost my business and went bankrupt. The guilt was overwhelming. I dealt with it by drinking, sometimes heavily, trying to silence the noise.
It was not until a wise teacher said something very simple: you are not your thoughts. That landed in a way nothing else ever had. Almost from that moment, I understood I could choose. Not to stop the thoughts, but to stop boarding every train that pulled in.
I still get intrusive thoughts. The desires in particular never disappear for long. But they are more tolerable now. I can move on quicker, laugh with them, and not take them too seriously.
Be gentle with yourself this week. You are not your thoughts. You are the one watching them arrive and depart.
Much love, Steven
Thank you to everyone who supported me with a coffee recently: Kay, Tiffany, Kasia, Annie, Karin, Chantell and Elizabeth. It means more than you know. And there are a few others, there are anonymous and those on Insight Timer.
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