If you were sitting behind your head watching your thoughts,
Sitting behind your heart,
Your gut,
Watching your body,
Your sensations and energy in your body,
We get more of a picture of how we're doing in the moment.
One of the things that makes thoughts so intense is that we often have an energetic response to them.
So let's watch thoughts for a moment.
Just noticing the train of thought.
We'll often have a moment of no thought.
Let's give it a little bit of time to see what comes through.
We can notice the energy of thoughts.
Some thoughts are neutral.
We don't really respond to them.
Some thoughts are more positive and we might have a warm response.
Our heart feels softer,
Maybe our muscles soften.
If we have a scary thought or if we have a memory or something comes up that's disturbing,
We'll often have an energetic response to that.
Our body tightens up,
Maybe we start holding our breath.
Let's look at that for a moment.
What is the energy of your thoughts right now and the content of your thoughts and how is that related?
Neutral,
Positive,
Negative.
You might keep an eye on your breath as you're watching thoughts.
Might soften your forehead.
If you notice that you're engaged in the train of thought,
Then you can bring yourself back.
That's very common.
There's nothing wrong with our mind that we get engaged in trains of thought.
That's how our mind works.
Notice the specifics of thought.
Thoughts are words and images.
Words come in as audible.
We can hear them.
Sometimes we put them into a frame and notice here's the word fear.
We can see the shape of the letters.
Most of the time,
The thoughts in our mind are something that we hear.
Let's hear inner voice.
It's a little bit different than hearing words that someone has spoken.
If there is a thought that seems disturbing,
Sometimes it's very helpful to witness it in a way of putting it onto a frame on the other side of the room,
Noticing the font,
The colors,
The shapes.
Words that are written out are shapes that our mind interprets.
If we experiment with that a little bit,
You can make them bigger or smaller.
You can make them into dancing cartoon characters.
You can imagine that they're written in watercolor and then they're being rained on.
They're gradually just disappearing,
Getting blurry.
We're always working with helping our brain realize that we're looking at a thought.
We're experiencing words that we hear.
Notice what is my body's response to my thoughts?
How do different kinds of thoughts affect me?
We might even look and see what predominates in my mind right now these days.
Is it mostly gloomy?
Is it fear?
Is it happiness?
What is the predominant feel of my thoughts these days?
And take a few breaths.
As we're watching thoughts,
It's helpful to stay really aware of our body.
But the other components of thought are images.
Sometimes that's like a visual picture,
A video clip,
Cartoon character,
Colors,
Shapes.
If you were to bring to mind a happy childhood memory,
One of the things that we often do is we see it through our own eyes.
So take a moment to bring to mind a memory.
Then take a step back so that instead of seeing everything out of your own eyes,
You're seeing yourself in the image as well.
So that helps our brain to realize that we're looking at a memory or at an image that is not a current event.
That's not something we necessarily need to do with a happy memory.
But if we could start to train ourselves to look at thought that way or witness thought that way,
It's very helpful when it comes to troubling memories or traumatic memories.
Let's take another moment just to let whatever images are in our mind come to our attention.
And you might be still on a happy memory or maybe you've gone into an associated thought.
Our brain is highly associative.
So another way that we can help our brain know that we're looking at an image,
We're not actually in a situation.
Put the image on the wall on the other side of the room.
Imagine that it's in a frame,
The image of somebody's face or if it's whatever it happens to be.
Imagine that it's over there and you don't have to get a really clear picture.
Some people see pictures in their mind,
Others it's more of a general sense.
And notice the empty space on the outside of the frame.
Take your eyes around that empty space a few times,
Go one direction and then the other.
And then look back at the image and notice if anything's changed.
One of the things that happens in our brain is that we get really caught up in the images and the memories and the thoughts that we have.
Our brain believes our thoughts,
Which is one reason why it's very helpful to work with happier thoughts and memories.
But our nervous system will bring in the more negative or the scary ones because it's trying to protect us,
Trying to warn us.
So recognizing the type of thoughts and our response to thoughts can be very helpful to help us remember that right now we're not in that situation,
We're thinking about something.
We can always open our eyes,
We can use these methods.
Some people like to tap on their forehead taking the attention away from the thought,
Just into the sound and sensation of your fingers on your forehead.
There's a lot of different ways now that we can witness thoughts.
If you have a whole bunch of images,
You might put them all up like they're in a collage.
As we come back into the witnessing,
We recognize that this is a thought.
It's not something we need to respond to as if it's happening right now.
This is a thought about something,
It might be about the future,
Might be a past memory.
And how much of our day are we really caught up in this?
And then here there's these really powerful tools.
Okay,
Here's my train of thought.
I can see that it's catastrophic thinking,
Or I can see that I'm caught up in a memory of the past that's not present anymore.
And then I come back into my body,
Take a breath,
Move around,
Shake or stretch.
We let ourselves rest in the safety of the present moment.
And in the present moment,
There's no danger in the sense of what there is in the world right now,
And also what might have been in our past.
So we have these vivid memories come up,
And then we work with them.
We come back into our breath.
Maybe we put a hand on our heart and give ourselves a little support.
We have these minds in this nervous system that make it kind of difficult some days.
And then we can come back into presence,
Into awareness.
We can relax and be here.
