You are your thoughts (I agree)
You are not your thoughts (I agree)
How can both of those statements be true within our lives?
I think the answer is; it depends.
It depends on your mindset.
It depends on how you interact with your thoughts.
It depends on how you allow them to affect your life.
Let’s take a look at both of these statements and see how they can show up in our lives to become “us”.
You are your thoughts.
All things created begin with a thought.
How do you know you like one food and don’t like another?
How do you know what is the most important thing in a certain area of your life? (Values)
How do you know you have a certain fear of or not of doing a certain activity?
All of these things begin with a thought. Those thoughts then can go on to become a belief. Those beliefs then go on to become ingrained in us as “what” and “who” we are.
Looking at the work of Deepak Chopra and the Quantum body; he says “Your body exists as pure creative potential, a multilayered process controlled by intelligence.”
”The skin replaces itself once a month, the stomach lining every five days, the liver every six weeks, and the skeleton every three months. To the naked eye these look the same from moment to moment, but they are always in flux. By the end of one year, 98% of the atoms in your body will have been exchanged for new ones.”
Not to go too far into this work but for the sake of this article, I would ask you one question.
How does your body remember what it is supposed to be if it is always changing? If your skin is renewing itself once a month, how do you still have that same scar or freckle?
There is a thought/memory of what makes up “you”.
Our thoughts at the deepest level truly make up who we are. There is great potential in that and something to be talked about at a deeper level later.
You are not your thoughts.
Here is some research on our thoughts:
“It was found that the average person has about 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. Of those thousands of thoughts, 80% were negative, and 95% were exactly the same repetitive thoughts as the day before.”
“According to the research of Dr. Fred Luskin of Stanford University, a human being has approximately 60,000 thoughts per day—and 90% of these are repetitive! 60,000.”
You can see that negativity bias shows up in these studies and that is more reason for us to take control of our thoughts and not allow all of them to become beliefs and form who we are and how we interact with the world around us.
Our central nervous system (to include our brain) is always on the lookout for signs of safety or threat. This system is millions of years old and it is responding to a world that doesn’t exist anymore. We have to be aware of what makes it tick so we can fully understand where our thoughts come from.
Polyvagal theory is an amazing way to look at how our nervous system works and how those signals show up in our lives in ways that are meant to help us but sometimes the signals can get misinterpreted inside and that can lead to dysregulation and problems interacting in our world.
Meditation practice is one way that we can calm our minds, and have a better relationship with our thoughts.
Our thoughts do not have to have control of our lives. We can work so we can control them. One of the ways that you are taught to do that in meditation is to visualize your thoughts as clouds passing in the sky.
Allow them to float by and realize they do not have to stay with you.
Wayne Dyer used to say that when he had a negative thought come into his mind he would simply say, “next” and move on.
Thoughts are going to show up in our lives. We choose what we do with them. They are guests, sometimes invited and sometimes they just show up unannounced (kind of like some relatives).
As we learn to acknowledge our thoughts for what they are we can learn to recognize them and make judgments about if we allow them to stay or just pass on by. If we allow them to stick around, then we are opening ourselves up to them becoming our beliefs or directing us to go in a direction or do something we would not like to.
Remember, we are driving the bus. We are in control of our thoughts and therefore we are in charge of our outcomes.
So yes, we are our thoughts and we are not our thoughts.
We have the choice.
