Rule #7: You are not your thoughts

Then who exactly are we then? Good question

Have you ever been angry at yourself for having a thought? Or a feeling? I have many times. A common one for me when I was younger was to be angry at myself for being sad. I used to try and argue my way into a feeling or out of one. And I’d get angry at myself when I failed to do it. It sounds silly to me now and I know feelings about feelings are dangerous things. Why then did I do it? I believed that my feelings and thoughts should be something I could control.

Should is a dangerous word. When people say it, it assumes that something is supposed to be different than it is, but rarely is there much thinking about why. I’ve learned to be very careful about how I use that word and to question myself whenever I’m motivated to use it. I now ask: why do I think it should be this way? What good reason might there be for it not to be this way? And why does my happiness depend on this ‘should’ that clearly I do not control?

I played competitive basketball in high school and college, and something about my desire to control my feelings contributed to my success. I’d get mad about my body not doing what I wanted it to, or for making mistakes during games, and that energy fueled the self-discipline to practice that made me a good player (few competitive people are driven to be that way from a healthy place). I was my own drill-sergeant in my head and if I’m honest with you, he’s still a part of who I am. He speaks up less, and he’s nicer, but he is still there.

Recently I’ve discovered how silly it is to be angry about a thought or a feeling. Why? We’re not in control of them, at least not in the way we are taught. Here is a simple exercise that proves it. Simply ask yourself: what will my next thought be? Take a moment or two to see what happens.

For most people asking this freezes the brain. No thoughts arise. Why? Because we can’t predict the future, not even the future of our own minds. Thoughts and emotions arise from our subconscious, and surface into our conscious, ego-centric minds with energy of their own.

There is much about who we are we do not control. Do you think about raising and lowering your heart rate? When to be afraid or aroused? Your blood pressure? How much of each hormone in your body to release right now? How to digest the food in your intestines? Most of the important systems that keep us alive are outside of our conscious control. But we like to pretend otherwise! Our ego loves to talk to itself about how important it is, while the rest of our mind does much of the real work.

Here’s another way to poke at this question. Do you ever talk to yourself in your mind? Most people do. A conversation means there are two, or more, diverging opinions going back and forth. If you talk to yourself, who are you talking to? Our culture says you are mentally ill if you talk to yourself out loud, but in our own minds we do it all day long. Walt Whitman famously wrote “I contradict myself… I contain multitudes.” We all do. We have thoughts, feelings and ideas that contradict each other often. We just don’t talk about it openly. We pretend we have a singular voice in our minds that is always in agreement with itself. It’s a dangerous and self-limiting belief. It’s a kind of should about what it means to be a person.

I’ve admitted to myself that emotions and thoughts are forces that move through me. They visit and I give them attention. Some are gentle and others are overwhelming, but they all move on. That is, as long as I connect with them and don’t avoid them. But the more I ignore them or try to control them, the more dangerous they become. There is a saying that what we resist, persists. It’s counterintuitive because we are taught to believe in a singular rational ego-centered mind, but that’s really just a made up thing (and we can likely blame Descarte for it).

In meditation it’s commonly taught to think of ourselves as a mountain, and that thoughts and feelings are clouds. They come and go, but we remain. And the more self-aware we are about the different layers that make up our minds, the more comfortable we can be even with difficult thoughts and feelings. It’s resisting them and trying to control them that causes the trouble. It’s not easy to remember this, which is why it’s a rule to live by. And it’s also why meditation is called a practice: it’s something you have to do regularly to remind yourself to be comfortable with the multitudes of who you are.

“You are not your thoughts; you are aware of your thoughts. You are not your emotions; you feel emotions. You are not your body; you look at it in the mirror and experience this world through its eyes and ears. You are the conscious being who is aware that you are aware of all these inner and outer things.”

― Michael A. Singer