Category: Thought

In my daughter’s book about moods, there is a bad mood cloud that follows people around. It’s like a lighting storm of thoughts, and when it’s above you, all you can see and think and feel is bad.

The bad mood cloud has been hovering over me all day, with constant thunder and lighting of negative thinking bringing negative feeling.

When I picture a cloud above my head I can feel separate from it for a moment. It’s still hanging about, but I know it will pass eventually and I’ll feel the calm of the clear sky again.

I wish it would move on a little more quickly, but while it’s here I’m appreciating the awesome power of my thoughts, which are just electrical impulses, and which can suck me completely out of the moment and into an intensely negative made up experience. It’s not exactly fun, but it is awesome.

There is a profound difference between being in a crisis situation and being in a crisis state of mind.

A crisis state of mind is very disruptive to the human experience. We lose problem solving skills, our thoughts and feelings seem to be held hostage, we can even exhibit physical symptoms that resemble a heart attack or dying.

Fortunately, we humans have the incredible ability, without exception, to be in a crisis and be in a healthy state of mind.

We can be in crisis but not feel in crisis.

We can also be in a crisis state of mind while not in a crisis situation.

If you’re experiencing a crisis, see if you can become aware of your state of mind. There are the facts of the situation, and then there are your thoughts and feelings about those facts. Is your situation truly a crisis? Are you in a crisis state of mind? It’s completely natural to feel in crisis sometimes, and it’s also completely natural for that state of mind to dissolve.

We can be in crisis but still feel open, resourceful, healthy, calm.

You can be in crisis but not feel in crisis.

Imagine you’re on the highway, driving on the shoulder. You’re riding over potholes and speed bumps, trying maneuver after maneuver to gain traction and speed but you’re progressing like a snail even with increasing effort. You’re working so hard to move a few hundred feet that you don’t even notice that a few lanes to the left, through the bumper to bumper traffic, the fast lane is wide open.

Now, imagine you’re in the fast lane. The road is completely clear ahead and you’re sailing along at a comfortably smooth clip, with a lot less effort and much more ease.

Our thoughts move in a similar way. One mode of thinking is like shoulder driving, with constant work and not much space to enjoy the drive. The other type of thought is like the fast lane, where progress is smooth and easy.

Shoulder driving thought is analyzing all the different reasons you should start a business, weighing the pros and cons, researching everything you can think of for hours or years or a lifetime, reanalyzing and reweighing, strategizing about the logistics, how health insurance would work, what would happen to your 401k, what’s the best way to file taxes, what on earth should the company be named, researching how others approach naming this type of business, researching some more to see if the idea is still viable after all this time. Shoulder driving gets you somewhere, and there are times that it’s best to stay in the shoulder, but it can be exhausting to shoulder drive all the time, and you might not wind up much further than where you started.

Fast lane thought is feeling a magnetic drive to start a business, noticing all the different sparks that ignite, following them to see where they take you, noticing new sparks in the same places or in new ones, driving with ease and speed and joy.

You can always dip back into the shoulder in case of an emergency, but consider spending more time in the fast lane. It will be easier, more effective, and so much more fun.

What kinds of thoughts surround you throughout the day? Do you listen to them as if they were real? Do you know they’re not?

Thought is one of the most powerful forces of human experience. Our thoughts create our reality, if we let them.

A common misconception is that what we think, how we feel, and how we experience life come from and are caused by things outside of us. In fact, our experience is wholly and unequivocally created by our thoughts. Our thoughts are also the source of our feelings.

People, events, and circumstances do not have inherent properties that cause us to have specific experiences.

I was at a funeral recently. One person passed away, and everyone at the funeral had different reactions and feelings. Some people were crying, some people were telling stories about her life and laughing, some people were thankful that her suffering had ended. Her death did not create anyone’s reality – each person’s thoughts about her death created their individual experience.

Of all the thoughts that pass through your awareness every day, which ones do you choose to listen to? Which ones do you allow to create your own reality, your own experience of life?

There was an important moment at the kitchen sink a few weeks ago. Matt was in the hospital, I was home with the kids and doing it all and taking care of it all, and I was angry. Not at anyone or anything in particular, but I was so exhausted and so angry at the relentlessness of everything. The only way to cope was minute by minute, and with each minute my resentment was growing into something very large and heavy and ugly.

I was leaning over the awful corner sink, installed by those awful people who owned the house before us, who thought it would be a good idea to retrofit the kitchen with a sink that requires leaning at an inhuman angle. I was thinking about how angry I was and about how much I hated my life in that moment.

Then, the simplest and most unassuming little thought fluttered into my mind: “What if I don’t really hate my life? What if I just think I do?” Then silence for a moment. Even the kid volume was low momentarily.

Then I laughed, shook my head like a dog shakes out the rain, and went back to washing the dishes. I didn’t really hate my life, and the thoughts that had made me believe I did were gone.