Category: Thinking

It's Kind To Be Human

6/20/2011

Pair #96 Life, but not as we know it

Recently, I had a glimpse of the profound 'kindness' of our human life-support system.

You know how on a music player you have the LOOP button? After the song finishes it loops back to the beginning? And in the scientific field, you have "closed systems". We also talk about "feedback loops".

Well I spent a day with George Pransky and one of the things he talked about was how thought and feelings truly are a looped. We have only to look to our feelings to know exactly the quality of our thinking at any given moment, and we have only to have a thought in order to have the feeling that goes along with it.

So... if it's true that thought-feeling is a completely closed loop, then it can never be true that things create feelings in us but rather that it is always our own thoughts. Our thoughts are solely responsible.

That means we are living out only our thinking. We are literally, thinking our way through life. And...

that would mean that we have been beautifully constructed.

It struck as me how incredibly smart it is that we each came equipped with an amazing GPS system that would always help us if we ever get lost and forget that.

If we are always feeling the world through our considerations about it (thoughts) and that it is not because the world bumps into us that we feel bad or scared or afraid, then the world around us may have no inherent meaning at all. Period. It would be just a simple blank canvas.

Which opens up the possibility that the world is not just neutral but a terribly kind place to live, and that, while we are here, we've been given a built-in navigational device, a treasured gift to help us find our way.

I used to believe that how I felt was telling me that a bad thing was happening to me, but now I understand that all a bad feeling is telling me is whether the quality of my thinking is dropping or rising.

Which ultimately means that Shakespeare was right "nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

© 2011 Elese Coit
If you wish to reprint, feel free, please link back here and if it's of use, include:
"Elese Coit is a leader in transformative personal change and Hosts the Radio Show A New Way To Handle Absolutely Everything. To see the world differently, reach for one of her '101 New Pairs of Glasses' on http://elesecoit.com"

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What to do when you are bitch-slapped by life

6/17/2011

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Pair #95 Life is hard and then you get your a*s handed to you

Ever thought...
"It's been years now, but I just can't forgive so and so."
"Every time I hear his voice, I just want to slump on the floor and cry."
"I can't stop thinking about how much they hurt me and it makes me so mad."
"I've just been told they are not sure if it's treatable."

No one disputes that you have good reasons to feel bad when you've just been told you have a disease or that your job is gone. And I'm not saying you should feel great and wonderful on the heels of some difficult life moment. Yet I am interested in the process by which we explain our feelings about them. Because where we see the cause of our feelings has everything to do with our recovery.

Although anger, grief, self-admonition, regret and concern are 'normal responses' we are often looking to resolve these emotions in the completely the wrong place. For years I remember thinking that if my father apologized to me for a particular childhood event, then finally I could feel better, put the grievance behind me and get on with life. Because of this kind of thinking, I wallowed in my own bad feelings for years later without any resolution, understanding or forward movement. Despite therapy, counseling and body work.

I knew I was stuck in the past. I think we've all experienced this -- and the helplessness that goes with it.

It seems like all the pain is coming from outside of us. It certainly seemed that way to me!

So let's consider for a moment how it is any outside experiences get 'inside' of us.

How did my father, who lived far away, actually make me miserable over the years, with an event that was long over and done with? How is it, for example that cancer actually creates emotional disturbance? How is that someone else uses their power to create sadness in you? How does that process, that alledged transference actually work?

If you examine closely you will see that it doesn't. All of my pain was old history carried through time -- by me. The same is true of everything we feel pain about, trivial or serious.

Consider this as an example. Let's take a friend of mine who knows someone at work who is very 'negative.' My friend will tell you that this person has such bad energy they can get into his space (or anyone else's) and ruin his day.

Know anyone right now who has that power in your world?

My friend told me, "There are just some people who have bad energy, and when they are around they are going to affect you. That's just not something you can change."

I considered that for a moment. How does that work? I thought...
I asked him, "Is there ever a time when that person doesn't affect you that way?"

"Well, sometimes. When I'm in a good mood after the weekend. I just go 'Whatever, dude!'"

"And are there some people who are friends with him and don't seem to think he has this 'bad energy?'"

"Well, yeah, actually. Which is strange"

"It is strange isn't it? How is that possible do you think?" I wondered with him. "If he is the cause of the 'bad vibe', you'd think he'd always be the cause? Not only for you but for everyone. Wouldn't everyone agree on who he is?

So where is the difference -- his behavior or your attitude?"

Someone I know discovered this for herself recently and described it as, "All I have to do is hear her shoes coming down the hall!"

As if the shoes created the feelings.

What we know about life, but often forget, is that no person or thing really has the power to make us feel anything at all. We are sovereign in our feelings.

What we do is look around and ATTRIBUTE our feelings.

But that doesn't give the shoes power.

Looking outside for the causes of our inside feelings is just a mis-attribution of cause.

Feelings don't arise out of nowhere. They are not 'provoked' out of us by job losses or diagnosis. They arise from the thoughts, judgements and stories we create about life around us and about what things mean.

So it is actually very true to say that things are not always what they seem - because we are not really seeing. We are only 'perceiving' via our thoughts. Like the projector shows whatever film is on. You feel what's happening in you. Not what is out there.

And that is good news on many fronts.

It means that you have the ability to have occur to you new ways of seeing things. You have the capacity that your heart may open suddenly without notice. The capacity to feel good is lying there within you and can pop to the surface anytime like a bobbing cork in the water. There is no limit and no barrier on your capacity for joy, love, and wisdom. Because you never learned those things, they just came with your human firmware installation.

And because of that, you really can relax.

So whenever a good feeling comes up naturally for you, you might like to notice that.

When I began to relax and see that all my past was gone, that my feelings were coming from my own thoughts, my father and I became the great friends that I always hoped we would be.

What I've noticed is that I have a natural tendency toward upwards. Toward love. Toward reconciliation. It is beautiful that we actually tend naturally toward good feeling. We can miss that wonderful fact when we are pointing the finger away from ourselves.

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There is no one out there

6/6/2011

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Pair #92 Now I see you, now I don't

They say we never really know someone.

This weekend while I was reflecting, I realized I don't know anyone.

I look at others and I meet them of course. I interact with them and most of the time you'd call that 'getting to know them.' Yet it struck me that I only know them via my thoughts about them. I literally experience my thinking, not them. And so I create my experience of them.

But only 100% of the time.

Now if you really want to bake your noodle on this, not only do I really not know anyone, but in a very strange sense, they don't even exist. They are standing there, but my experience of them is coming from me.

Which means that on one level, there is no 'other' at all.

Now, I do realize that saying other people don't exist sounds a bit odd. (Just a bit). But if it's true that we are thinking beings, thinking our way through life and that the only experience we are ever having is the experience of what is in our own mind, then it follows that we can't see anyone outside of our thinking about them. I mean, how could we?

So the only person I've ever met is a bunch of my own thoughts about them.

You know, isn't it true that time after time we are shocked when we find out that so-and-so had a secret lover, or was embezzling or actually hates chocolate? Have you never had the experience of talking about someone only to find out that others don't see them the way you do? Aren't we often deeply surprised when someone very close to us reveals a secret dream or longing, or a deep desire that we had no idea about? Don't we mainly assume people are basically like us and find it strange when they are not?

In fact, we are just walking around, looking at people, and making them up as we go.

We are self-contained, self-referenced, meaning-makers. Except that we also assume that what we are making is true and real.

So, I guess there is no real like your own real.

© 2010 Elese Coit
If you wish to reprint, feel free, please link back here and if it's of use, include:
"Elese Coit is a leader in transformative personal change and Hosts the Radio Show A New Way To Handle Absolutely Everything. To see the world differently, reach for one of her '101 New Pairs of Glasses' on http://elesecoit.com"

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The Kids Are Not Alright

4/12/2011

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Pair #87 There's no harm like self-harm

I am not sure it will shock any of you to know that we are raising a new generation of stressed out kids.

What I didn't know was the depth of where they go to release that stress. I think imagined the reasons why a child might reach for pills and alcohol.

What I did not imagine was stressed out kids who think that a viable option for dealing with stress is through harming themselves.

They call this de-stress practice
"cutting"

As I researched the topic for the show on The Truth About Stress, I discovered a dark fact on the forums and boards on the internet...

Children of 12, 13, 15, screaming for help to find a way out of their stress.

"I'm stressed OUT and I don't know what to do! I've tried everything - I've been cutting myself to relieve the stress"

Cutting themselves? To relieve stress? At 12 years old?

My heart beat in my throat as I read those almost exact words many times over.

And here is the worst part. Knowing what we know about how stress is created and how it does not come from something outsides ourselves - imagine cutting yourself to relieve the pain of your own thinking...

It's like thinking you need to shoot yourself with one hand so you'll stop hitting yourself with the other.

Cutting, drinking, drugs - all the myriad of "solutions" to the everyday problem of hugely over-wrought thinking.

Let's understand the nature of our own minds so we stop using them against ourselves

I'm not suggesting that any of us are harming ourselves because we are somehow wrong or stupid. We Each of us has come to understand the nature of life, to take distance from our problems, to see things from that shade outside of ourselves before we could see anything differently. Yet now we have our own children and look what we are passing on to them.

Some of these children will never become distant from their problems in the natural course of a life. They will give up hope long before then and give up on life

Failing to teach what we failed to learn

Remember the days when GPA was EVERYTHING, when getting into the University of your choice felt like a matter of LIFE AND DEATH, and if you broke up YOU WOULD NEVER LOVE AGAIN?

These dramatic, all-or-nothing beliefs were part of our thinking too at one time. Now we know better. Or do we?

As I shared my love, care, my experience and my perhaps more 'philosophical' point of view with some of these young people I wondered, how many of us have mastered our own understanding enough to really teach the children?

By the responses I saw, I'd say we are failing to.

And what will happen if we don't? I shudder.

Then I remember why I do what I do.
****
More on this topic in the radio archives
Spiritual Parenting with Ami Chen Mills Naim author of The Spark Inside

If you'd like to comment on this topic, or suggest more topics for discussion on the show that you find important, please do Send your comments

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Innies and Outies

6/28/2010

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Pair #54 Different inside and out?

Reading Ali Campbell’s book this week Just Get On With It! reminded me just how important it is to take a moment to become aware of the way our minds can work to sometimes sabotage our best laid plans (and lives!) and just how much we can actually do about it.

Ali has a great exercise where he suggests the following:
“I want you to imagine that everyone around you can hear your thinking. Imagine that everyone can hear your every thought.. How different would you be?”

He’s talking about how horrified we’d be if others could hear us and how different we are on the inside compared to what we try to portray on the outside. He’s pointing out the conflict we create inside ourselves and goes on to explain how to find your way through a conflicted, overthinking mind.

The reason I like this, and his book, so much is because when you actually picture and hear the kinds of things that you say to yourself on a regular basis, something else happens too...

You realize how mean you are to yourself

Most of us tolerate saying things to ourselves that we would never, ever tell a small child: how stupid we are, how useless we are, how pointless things are.

If our constant internal diarrhea would be embarrassing or unpleasant to speak outloud - just imagine the damage it’s doing! And of course, it’s not “it” doing this. It’s actually us.

If you can’t speak your inner dialogue aloud, why are you saying it at all?

I want to hear a really good reason.

By the way, Ali’s book is full of great exercises to help you hear yourself, know yourself and discover how you can change things in your life. I recommend it highly!

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Get Me Out of My Head

5/31/2010

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Pair #42 I just can't help thinking...

One of the things I’ve learned to do in the last few years (with some practice) is to identify some of my ‘stinking thinking’. I’ve learned to be discern better when I am hitting myself with my own stick ... so let’s say I feel a bit tired, it's nice to tell the difference between real physical exhaustion and the kind of tiredness that comes from whatever I am thinking. Or repeatedly thinking. Let me explain.

When we are telling ourselves things like “oh, no, not another day with more to do that I’ll ever get done!” it’s not all that surprising that our physical bodies feel sluggish or that we have an overwhelming need to go back to bed - or just not get up today.

I’ve often encouraged my clients and students to do exercises that help them to distinguish thoughts that precede feelings as a way of experiencing first-hand how their own feelings and thoughts are linked. And how they experience that link.
If you are doing any thought monitoring, you will notice that can be very useful.

However, we thinkers like to think and can start over-thinking our thinking.

For example, a true fear response or gut reaction may not need processing. Nobody needs to analyze their thoughts about a house fire... "Hm, I wonder if I should leave now?" They need to be able to rely on a flight-or-flight response to get the heck out of the burning building now. If someone is drowning, overthinking why we are concerned for their safety would just be silly. Equally, with peaceful thoughts. How much thinking about that do we need? They feel good. That’s good enough for me.

Checking in with thoughts can be as quick as 'is this really true?' or it can take some examination ‘Now, what was the thought that was just before this feeling of....X'

The usefulness of such a practice is not to make us think about everything we do and be in analysis all the time, but rather to get more adept at seeing how feelings arise from thoughts rather than things.

For me what this creates greater awareness. Awareness means more choice. And more choice means more freedom.

And I like that a lot.

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It's Kind To Be Human

What to do when you are bitch-slapped by life

There is no one out there

The Kids Are Not Alright

Innies and Outies

Get Me Out of My Head

101 New Pairs of Glasses

The Original Blog

Types of Glasses

The Drawers