in your head

 

By Ruth Lera

 

Whatever thoughts you have in your mind, don’t matter as much as you think they do.

This is what meditation is all about, noticing our thoughts without getting caught up in them, and the point of meditating is to bring this awareness into all of our life.

But if you are anything like me then you probably forget this all the time and often find yourself caught up in believing that whatever you’re thinking about is crucial, incredibly important and so life shattering that you need to hold onto it closely.

That somehow the thoughts are helping to keep you safe. This is so easy to believe.

But what if it is the thoughts themselves that are preventing us from opening up to the myriad of realms of consciousness that are available to us at all times?

I remember reading Cave in the Snow: Tenzin Palmo’s Quest for Enlightenment over a decade ago and learned about Tibetan Monks teleporting and predicting the future and being just incredibly adept at all types of mind experiences most of us consider impossible.

But instead of thinking it was impossible to me, it just made sense.

It just made sense that if we could somehow stop being so busy accessing such a small part of our minds with menial everyday thoughts then who knew what our minds were really capable of doing. It has taken me over a decade of meditation experience, but what I am finding now is that my former hypothesis is true.

I haven’t teleported (yet) but I have experienced many other types of consciousness and so have many other people.

And I believe these consciousness opening experiences are available to most of us because most of us (of course not all of us) don’t need to worry about our children accessing food and we don’t have to worry each night about how we will have a roof over our heads. We don’t need to keep looking over our shoulders to ensure we aren’t going to being attacked by wild beasts (although I do have both grizzly bears and cougars living in my backyard).

Most of us live in a place and a time that we don’t need our thoughts to keep us hyper-vigilant and safe.

This is exciting.

To me this reeks of an opportunity to choose not to always get caught up in our own mundane thoughts and instead start working with our own minds.

And where we start is by simply wondering.

We can wonder about what would happen if we stopped constantly thinking about our VISA bills and who is going to drive the kids to school tomorrow and when we’re going to go on our next date.

We can wonder about what we would be doing if we weren’t constantly worrying, doubting and criticizing.

Because a lot of the time wondering is all we need to do to get the ball rolling on a new journey of the mind. When we start wondering we will quickly find that these types of reflections beyond thought and habitual patterns of the mind can and will take us far.

All it takes is the slightest bit of awareness that the majority of our thoughts don’t really matter.

 

ruthleraRuth Lera is the friend you turn to when your world has gone all topsy-turvy. Not because she tells you it’s all going to be alright but because she reassures you that not being alright is just part of the whole process of being human. And she might even give you some ideas about how to feel better, too. Find her at her website, her Facebook page or Twitter.

 

Photo: masaism/tumblr

Editor: Dana Gornall

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