The Pros & Cons of Thinking

Harnessing Thought to Strengthen Us

Happy Sunday! It's not just any Sunday or any regular day. It's TODAY :-) If you know what I mean. Every day is a new beginning.

After 2 days of training I'm taking needed rest and usually this means I replace gymming with going to the pool and lazing in the sun for 15 minutes, the minimum amount of sun exposure required to activate melanin and stimulate 'tanning'. I just love relaxing under the warm, early sun's rays. I read somewhere that the sun's rays before 10am or 12pm are healthy and beneficial. In any case, I really enjoy the ease, comfort and physical pleasure of just laying there and not doing anything while trying to do something - tan. An amusing oxymoron (when are oxymorons not amusing? :-)).
I love it; it makes me feel so grateful that the building comes equipped with a pool and it's accessible in the morning. What a magnificent blessing! Sometimes I swim a few laps if I can disregard the fact that continued exposure to the chlorinated water will diminish the Keratin treatment I purchased to ensure smooth hair.

In life there's always a give and take...I can enjoy smooth, straight and hassle-free hair at the expense of not frolicking in the ocean. Give and take i.e. Compromise. The "work" is never done. We desire and aspire for a given thing and then once achieved it will give rise to some other desired thing or situation. Constant waves of wanting where our appetite is never fully satiated. This seems like a natural dynamic of life, unless you are monk or nun where you surrender desire and devote your life to clearing your mind, meditation, enlightenment and relinquishing control.

A life of enlightenment sounds beautiful and divine and I feel we can be on the journey of increasing enlightenment even in our current modern urban lives. Living in a monastery is not essential. It comes down to being present, questioning your thoughts and setting the intention to begin your own personal journey of enlightenment. Expressing to yourself and to the Universe that you invite becoming more enlightened through life's experiences.

For us living in modern society exposed to the rhythms of urban life, work pressure, family, social engagements, there is a reliable and predictable flow to desire and fulfillment. Once you have what you wanted it spurs new buds of wanting, new ideas, new expectations. You can view it as new problems, or new opportunities and possibilities. It can also simply be regarded as the Next Step. That which follows from the preceding stage or level. And we can count on it - it must be and it will be, 10 times out of 10 once we have what we wanted there is something new to have. And if it doesn't naturally arise then we create goals. This is the human way.

All of this isn't good or bad. It simply is what is...Everything existing serves a purpose and has some benefit in our lives. It just comes down to how we personally experience a given dynamic.

Sometimes we receive what we thought we wanted and yet when it's tangible it does not live up to our grandiose, picturesque expectations. Somehow our marvelous imagination painted a picture far more extraordinary than reality renders. Less exciting than we imagined. On the other hand, many times it is exactly all we imagined and so much better! Sometimes God/the Universe wants to grant us blessings that are far greater than we could have conceived with our limited human thinking capacity. In both cases feeling gratitude makes us appreciate whatever we receive regardless of our judgment about it.

There's a wondrous beauty and thrill in that too because it means that life experiences once traversed never leave you lacking or bored...there will be a new beginning and a new vision for our future self. This keeps life spicy, intriguing, engaging and mysterious.

This is where the power of thinking and thoughts comes into play.

Is it true? Byron Katie

Since discovering the work of Byron Katie, "The Work" (http://www.thework.com/index.php), two weeks ago it has really revolutionized the way I approach stressful situations. The main tenet is that we experience suffering because of the types of thoughts we are thinking. Asking the 4 simple questions helps to view a situation from a new perspective and realize what is really going on:

Is it True?
Can you absolutely know it is true?
How do you react and feel when you think that thought?
Who would you be without that thought?

Her work is incredibly transformative. She has worksheets available at her page free to download and dozens, if not hundreds, of YouTube videos that walk people through real-life painful situations using the self-inquiry method. I love having discovered it.

Thoughts are powerful tools and every single thing we live in life is a construct of our thinking.
Just take any given stress-inducing scenario and ask yourself: Is it true? Can you be absolutely sure it is true?

If you take a moment to pause and reflect on it, you will find that it's not true. That troubling thought about a situation or person is not factual truth but rather a feeling, emotion and/or assumption.

I've done this self-inquiry process on 3 separate situations and each time I come away with remarkable personal breakthroughs. Each time in the privacy of my home and each one taking 40 minutes to work through. This process helps me suss out my ego and grasp it enough to understand, "Hey, what I thought was real is not real. I just made that up and in fact that is how I feel about myself...etc."

It illuminates my real insecurities, what is really underlying the problem and it hits the core of my self-doubts, criticisms and judgments. For instance, I've uncovered elements of insecurity, grappling with self-love at times, and body image issues. Since beginning this process I've come away with new insights and strengths.

I've been able to realize that I want to support myself fully, that my body is incredibly wise and loving, that I will have myself and that we can never really live up to others expectations. Gaining your sense of worth from others feedback is shaky ground. How can we humanly please everyone? Everyone wants something different; it's impossible.

Lesson: please yourself, live your life, be true to your self, make yourself happy & enjoy life.

So in this sense, we can ultimately use our thoughts and analysis to perform The Work to help lift us higher and out of the doldrums.

Depicting the Doldrums in "The Phantom Tollbooth," one of my favorite children's books.

Chiang Mai, Thailand_August 2014 - Reaching a national park with a striking limestone waterfall, pictured below. Darkness in the past can be overcome with constant self-appreciation, self-awareness, and tapping into nature. You can always overcome, you can be happier still...Even from the darkest of nights, you can rise higher than you ever imagined, and higher still. It's a beautiful miracle.