Don’t Believe Everything You Think

Do you meditate? If so, you have probably struggled at some point with the judgement of ‘not doing it right’. I’m grateful that my first meditation teacher repeatedly assured me that there is no wrong way to do it, that it is a practice not a perfect. In this process I go within to find that still, inner space of being, knowing and observing. Meanwhile, my brain has other ideas! It continues to do what it is designed to do, which is to have thoughts. The challenge comes in realizing that they are just thoughts, that they are not mine. I remember the first time I had this realization. I was in meditation, paying attention to the stillness between breaths, when a thought came in and I wondered where it came from. In that moment of detachment I could see that this thought was just a random thing that drifted in. It was not mine. As long as I simply acknowledged it without attachment or resistance, without owning it or identifying with it, it was free to pass through me returning to wherever it came from.

I recently took a class in which the teacher expressed this in a way that was new and novel to me. All possible thoughts and ideas already exist in the infinite Universal Mind. Each of us is simply one potential outlet for that thought, an out branching of the universal thought field. We all have free will, the choice to take a thought and use it, or let it go. I remember once as a kid on a canoe trip, we were dealing with hours out on the water in the intense summer sun, alternating with portages through mosquito infested woods. First I put on sunscreen, then bug repellent, then sunscreen, then more bug dope. A thought occurred to me; I could get rich if I could just make an insect repellent with sunscreen in it! But I was just a kid, what did I know? Sure enough, not too many years later, there it was on the store shelf. That thought didn’t find expression through me, so it just returned to the ether until someone took hold of it and acted on it. The same is true of any thought, inspiring or devastating. Just because a thought crosses your mind, it doesn’t mean it originated with you. You don’t have to own unless you choose to. So if a thought says, “You’re just too different, no one understands or even likes you!” or “You are divinely unique, individual as a snowflake, a shimmering expression of Spirit!” what you choose to do with it, if anything, is up to you. Just be certain you are aware that you have the choice. Don’t believe everything you think!