How would your life be different if you didn’t believe your thoughts?
When a thought arises in our experience and we follow it with our attention our focus moves away from the experience of this moment. We become less alert, less present and ultimately we miss the beauty of life because this moment is what is real, not thoughts about the past or the imagined future.
So what if we chose not to follow our thoughts, just to notice whatever thought arises, let it pass through our experience and allow our focus of attention to rest on what’s here right now – the sky, the trees, the gentle movement of our breath.
Try it out and see how your experience changes!
You may notice tension in the body that you weren’t consciously aware of before. Your body may begin to relax. You may notice the birds singing and the pretty formation of clouds in the sky. You may appreciate the colours and shapes of buildings and objects, like you’re seeing life through fresh new eyes. You may even notice something unpleasant about your experience, like a contraction in the stomach or a sense of unease or heaviness. Let those experiences be ok too. They’re also part of life. Let yourself fully experience this moment exactly as it is right now, without wanting any aspect of it to be different.
Over time we develop habits and patterns and the more those habits are repeated, the more crystallised they become in our experience. Most of us learnt to identify with thoughts from a very young age so we’ve been practicing it for many years and have become absolute masters at it! But it’s actually not a habit that is serving us, and once we recognise this we can retrain our system to stop following thoughts and instead focus fully on the beauty that is here, right now in this moment. ~ Louise
