It's Impossible Not To Think

I tried not to think for a while but those thoughts just kept popping in because we are supposed to think. You cannot stop that. The initial thought turns up but there here are some things that can follow on from that first thought. Thinking about thinking, giving meaning to thoughts and feelings, and the idea that you can have right and wrong thinking. But once you understand thought better, it is easier not to fall into that trap.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Calmcast,

A time to feel calm and think clearly.

I'm Claire Downham,

The Queen of Calm,

A Transformational Life Coach.

I was a burnt out headteacher who finally made the journey to calm after years of trying and I want to prevent you from having to do the same.

The Calmcast is a series of short explorations gently guiding you back to your natural state,

Which is calm and clarity.

Just listen like you would listen to music with an open mind and curiosity.

There's nothing else to do.

Now let's relax into today's episode.

Have you ever tried to stop thinking?

That's my little exploration today.

I don't know if you ever have tried to stop thinking,

But it is actually impossible,

Isn't it?

I tried practices to at least try to slow down my thinking or perhaps I initially thought to try and stop it.

I think when I initially got involved in meditation,

I definitely was on the path of trying to stop myself from thinking because I could see that I got in a little bit of a tizz when I did too much thinking and I got the impression that I could somehow stop that turning up.

I think I probably got to the stage where it slowed down a little through daily practice,

But it probably only really slowed down whilst I was actually doing the meditation.

But it's human to think.

It's human for thoughts to pop into our awareness.

There are thoughts all the time.

Some of them we're not even aware of.

Some of those ones that happen when we do habitual things that we're really familiar with and we know how to do,

We're probably not even aware that there is a thought process going on.

But some thoughts really do almost tap us on the shoulder,

Don't they?

They pop into our awareness and then we think we've got to do something about them.

And if you've started on a journey of understanding that thought has definitely got something to do with how you're feeling and how life's going and all those kinds of things and your experience of life,

Then you might have got into a little bit of a trap of trying to control your thinking.

There are a lot of tools and techniques out there to do that.

And innocently,

I think they're giving us the message that that's a job for us to do,

That controlling thought is a job for us to do.

Now I really don't see that the first thought that appears in my head or yours,

That the first thought that appears in our awareness is really up to us.

And I've had a couple,

Well,

I've had lots of experiences of that.

You know you can be just doing something,

Concentrating on something or in the middle of the part of your life and a random thought about something else pops into your head.

And I'm sure you've had that experience.

And if it's just a fun memory of something that you enjoyed or an item you need to pop on the shopping list or whatever,

You don't probably take much account of it.

But if you started to look towards wanting to have better thinking,

I'm popping that in inverted colours,

But if you've started to look towards having better thinking,

Better quality thinking,

Which is super judgemental,

Isn't it,

Then you might have started to really become quite noticing,

Quite hypervigilant of certain thoughts and been starting to think,

I'm not really supposed to have those kind of thoughts,

They're not really good.

And so then if you really think that those thoughts have got something to do with you,

I think that's maybe one of the first traps that you think that your thinking is you.

It says something about you.

That's a bit of a trap because then if you've got an unpleasant thought inside your head,

Then there's a sense that there's something unpleasant about you.

And I had a really interesting experience of this not so long since,

Because I went to visit a place called Harry Rocks,

Which is on the south coast of the UK near Bournemouth.

And it's a very steep cliff,

You can walk right up the edge of the cliff and it's a very steep cliff with some rocks that kind of stick out into the sea.

And I remember there's no fences or anything,

So you can walk right to the edge of the cliff.

And I remember walking to the edge of the cliff and the thought that popped into my head was,

I wonder if people jump off here,

Not in a particularly pleasant way.

And that,

Like,

I could have thought,

Oh,

That's an awful thing to think.

Is it because I want to jump off here?

Is it,

Why am I thinking such terrible thoughts?

But by that point,

I had really started to see something about the nature of thought.

And it brought some ease to that situation because I kind of mentioned it to my fiance said,

Gosh,

That's really strange thought to have,

Isn't it?

And we chatted about it a bit,

We chatted a bit about the nature of thought.

We didn't really chat about the thought itself.

We chatted about how interesting is it,

How random things pop into your head.

I don't see that that has anything or that says anything about me as a person.

I don't think it means I have bad thoughts.

I don't think it means there's anything wrong with me or that I have a tendency towards throwing myself off cliffs or whatever the meaning you could make about that is,

Is considerable,

Isn't it?

But because I didn't go into that,

I didn't really get caught into thinking about that particular thought.

What I did with my fiance was we had a,

Just a really interesting conversation about the nature of thought.

Isn't that interesting how thought pops in.

And I suppose that's just a different conversation to that's horrible thought.

I shouldn't be having that thought.

What am I going to do about it?

It means something about me.

And so the arrival of a thought in our heads is this really,

Really random thing,

But it is what comes after that.

If we misunderstand what thought is,

If we understand that thought is random,

That it is that you are not the thoughts that don't mean anything about you.

You are the thinker of the thoughts.

When you understand those things,

Then the need to get involved in thinking about your thinking or giving meaning to that thinking,

Or even the feelings that come off the back of it,

Or even the judgmental side of having some kind of thinking that's right and some kind of thinking that's wrong.

Then there's just a lot more ease and the thoughts themselves have no inclination to,

Not that they're actually a thing,

But you know,

They'd have no inclination to hang around.

The hanging around occurs in the analysis.

So if I had hung onto that thought about,

You know,

People throwing themselves off a cliff,

That thought that randomly pops into my head,

And I had continued to think,

Oh,

That's really awful.

Shouldn't be thinking that.

What can I do about thinking that?

That thought would have hung around for the rest of the day and probably on from that.

But it just didn't make sense to me to do that because I have this,

I've developed over time over this,

Having this conversation,

This more detached relationship with what pops into my head.

This more of a dispassionate interest than a,

Oh,

That means something about me.

This is awful.

I shouldn't be thinking that way.

And that brings a lot of ease actually into my life.

And I suspect it could in yours too,

If you keep looking in this direction.

Because when you really understand the nature of thought,

When you really see it for what it is,

When you get curious about it,

It becomes a lot easier for that thinking to fall away because you're just having a really different relationship with it.

And that just makes life a little nicer and a little easier.

Because if you can imagine living in a world where most of your thoughts appear and disappear without you needing to get overly involved,

That is,

It is transformational.

So the encouragement as always at the end of these little sessions is to just get curious,

Start to notice what random interesting stuff pops into your head and realize that there is at that little moment,

There is something of a choice when we understand what thought is,

We can make a little,

It becomes easier and easier to go,

Oh,

That's just interesting.

It doesn't mean anything about me and I don't have to do anything about it.

Thank you so much for listening.

There's nothing to do now,

But bring some awareness to how this is working out in your life.

Listen regularly to experience longer and longer periods of calm.

This has been the Calmcast with Clare Downer,

Queen of Calm.

Take care and keep listening.

Reviews

This was very helpful and nice. Thank you so much teacher 😊