In life there is a lot going on. In your early years you are not really conscious of your mortality.
When you’re a teenager and tweener you think you will live 500 years.
The older you become though, the more you become conscious of your finite life.
We start to ask ourselves: is this all there is to life? Is this it?
Shouldn’t I be somewhere else? Do something else? Have more?
When such thoughts arise, we often dismiss them.
Our minds are fast with inventing counterarguments.
The real problem with this is: we believe those counterarguments.
We are not in control of our minds.
Thoughts come and should go, but often times we invite the (negative) thought and let it stay with us.
This often triggers other negative thoughts that have one goal in common: for you to stay in your comfort zone.
We all have thoughts, we all know that. What you also should know is that thoughts can be witnessed. You don’t need to be your thoughts.
See your mind as an ocean and waves as thoughts. We tend to believe we are the wave, instead of remembering the grandiose ocean that we are.
That’s why mindfulness is vital. It stops you from immersing yourself in disempowering thoughts. It reminds you you are the ocean, and you just let the wave (thought) pass through.
It’s okay to daydream, but when something or someone triggers a specific moment in time that makes you feel a negative emotion, you want to be able to ground yourself to here and now. To be in the present. To realise where you are, that the past and event is over, and that you don’t need to operate from those emotions for the rest of your day.
You’re back in control.
Thoughts trigger emotions, so if you are not careful, negative thoughts will determine how you take on a particular day.
Let’s connect this to phone and social media addiction. The more you can ground yourself to now, the more you understand that using your smartphone in a particular moment is unnecessary.
You will witness your thoughts going to your phone. So instead of riding the thought and taking your phone, you see it for what it is.
You are then in a position to choose if the thought is valid, or if the thought wants you to use your phone because you trained yourself to use your phone at that hour.
What about social media? When any negative feelings arise due to the news feed that triggers a whirlwind of I’m not enough thoughts, you quickly disengage with them and recompose.
There is so much to say and write about being in the moment. The key takeaway from this blog is that the more self aware you become, the more you realise you’re not your thoughts.
If you don’t know how to ground yourself back to the moment, you will find yourself mostly in the past or future. Not much productivity and empowerment can be found in both places, since they don’t exist. Only this moment exists. Even the future will take place in now.
The next stage is to create thoughts on purpose. Empowering thoughts that serve you and your future self. But that’s for a different blog.