During those wonderful times where we feel a strong sense of flow, confidence and often attendant success, we often achieve it without feeling like we’ve been burdened by overthinking regarding our doubts, worries, our confusion or our disappointments. In fact, the lack of debilitating thinking is exactly why we are able to capture that sense of flow.
Despite the fact that the successful person noted above is a real version of ourselves, it is amazing how quickly we will dismiss that person as though they don’t exist within us –and all because of our debilitating thinking. Because if you’re like most people you’re pretty hard on yourself in your thoughts on most days.
You think about how you don’t look the way you want, you think about how you would like to be somewhere different in your life by now, and you think about all the reasons you can’t seem to be the better person you want to be. Hell is a good name for that place of belittling over-thinking. It exists in eternity and eternity is happening now, which basically means that ego-based thinking is hell.
So what can we do about it?
We can avoid visiting there. After all they are our thoughts. So let’s make a simple deal, okay?
It’s Family Day today where I am, so let’s celebrate it by honouring our participation in the family of humanity. 7.5 billion of us are each individuals and we are each fulfilling our roles perfectly. Sometimes we play the hero, sometimes the clown, and yes, sometimes we are the villain. And often times we don’t find out who we were until the final curtain because perspective changes everything. So just forget all of the pre-judgment and let’s just let go and stop all the critical thinking about ourselves, others, and the world.
If we really feel the need to, we can all go back to beating ourselves up tomorrow. But just for this one day, let’s just dismiss those thoughts about how we are lacking, or how our life is lacking, or how others are failing to meet our expectations, and let’s just let those thoughts go instead.
Simply breathe and look around and treat your day like you’re on holiday, or visiting inside your own body. Look at everything familiar as though it is new and needs review. See the logos on products you use, note the names of machines, or look on parts of your computer screen you usually ignore. Talk to the person you normally barely notice, or listen for the differences in timbre between two friend’s voices.
However we do it, we need to get our minds focused on what’s happening in the moment that we are in, even that’s just the sound of our feet on the floor. There is richness in stopping our incessant thinking. So today let us all commit right now to spend less time having critical thoughts about what we are doing and instead we will invest that energy on spending more time being in the space between the thoughts.
peace. s
Following a serious childhood brain injury Scott McPherson unwittingly spent his entire life meditating on the concepts of thought, consciousness, reality and the self. This made him as strange to others as they were to him. Seeing the self-harm people created with their own overthinking, Scott dedicated part of his life to helping others live with greater awareness. He is currently a writer, speaker and mindfulness instructor based in Edmonton, AB, where he finds it strange to write about himself in the third person.
Habits. Your mind is built around recognizing patterns. Done with awareness, it’s a great tool for efficiency. Done blindly, it digs the rut that leads to an early grave. Often we’ll work on our behaviour habits without realizing that without changing the underlying thinking, there is no hope of lasting change; no hope of new awarenesses forming.
NEWSFLASH: It does not matter how strong you are, how smart you are, nor how educated you’ve become, nor how skilled. Those are all great thing, but all of them can quickly become worthless by being easily undone by a simple internal narrative of insecurity. Whether it’s a sport, an art, in business, or with others in our social lives, nothing will do more damage to us than our own egos and their neverending pursuit of whatever our current definition of perfection is.
The voices in our heads are debates by for and with ourselves. It’s a strange thing to do when we get right down to it. It’s natural in that no one tells us not to fall into the trap of too much self-talk after we learn to talk, but by the time anyone’s forty they start to grasp that the unhealthy people overthink and the healthy ones seem inordinately calm.