One of my meditation teachers always started the class with the question,
How do you stop your mind from spinning around a hamster wheel?
And before anyone could respond,
She'd say,
Just get off the wheel.
I remember the first time I heard it,
I like inserted my perfected eye roll.
Obviously,
Yet this doesn't help when we're not sure of how to get off of that wheel.
When worries arrive,
We can choose to stay focused on them,
Let them take control of our experience,
Or like Bob Proctor put it,
We can choose a better feeling thought.
So that's not like we're ignoring our problems,
We're just shifting our focus.
You can allow yourself time to work through whatever is happening and then just let it go,
Offering kindness and grace and compassion to yourself.
So maybe you'd focus on a few things that you're grateful for in the moment and just keep your mind there.
Another teacher of mine used to say,
Use the words let go and just let it unfold on your breath.
So each time you have a concern,
You could say the word let.
Each time you breathe out,
You could say go.
It's just this practice of let go,
Let go,
Let go.
Obviously,
You're not breathing that quickly.
He would slow it down to match the breath.
You can control what you think about,
And that's the easiest way to get off of the hamster wheel of thought,
Controlling that monkey mind.
We're just reframing our experience,
But I don't think it's that easy necessarily.
I do believe it takes some practice.
For example,
Over the holidays,
We had plans to go to Primitive Designs in Port Hope.
It's a really cool store.
It's in Ontario,
And it's got these really cool large statues made out of used car parts.
They even have a really big transformer there.
I don't know how tall it is,
Probably like 20 feet or something,
But it's amazing.
They've got driftwood horses,
Again,
That stand,
Probably five,
Six feet tall,
A bunch of other wares from around the world.
Definitely worth the drive.
If you're around Port Hope,
You can also stop off at the Big Apple.
It's also a great place to stop by.
We had planned to go to Primitive Designs,
And it turned out that while we were driving there,
I ended up missing the turn.
We ended up turning around,
And when we finally got back there,
When we arrived,
It turns out that we couldn't get into the shop because there was a fire in the back of the building,
One of the buildings,
And fire trucks were blocking the whole path.
There was fire billowing out of the storage area at the back of the property,
And I was so disappointed because my husband has never been there before,
And I really wanted to share the place with him because it was time definitely to reframe.
So afterwards,
We talked about it.
My husband was laughing at me,
Actually,
Because he said,
You know what,
Maybe we should just listen to the universe.
There was a reason why we missed the turn in the first place.
We ended up finding the humor in the whole situation,
Not for the fire,
Of course,
But for our situation,
And decided to make a plan to go for another day,
Which I ended up doing by myself.
My husband still hasn't been there.
But the point of that whole story is just remembering that the next time that you're going through something that isn't working out the way that you want it to,
If you can just reframe our thinking,
It might just do the trick to help you feel better,
Just like we had to reframe and find the humor in the day that did not work out the way that we had wanted it to,
To ride the waves of emotion or the experience,
That whole ebb and flow of life that is definitely going to change for us at some point,
And just give ourself permission to be.
Just be.
Thank you so much for listening.
Take care.
