When I first read this short blog post by my friend Bonnie, I knew I’d want to share with you all at some point. 
She writes about the evolution so many of us go through. I went through it too, very similar to how Bonnie describes it.
Imagine this—maybe you can relate: You’re floating through life pretty easily. You’re a kid and there’s a lot on your mind, but it doesn’t occur to you to take any of it too seriously.
As you grow up, things weigh you down and it feels like you lose your float a little. You start thinking about your thinking, wondering what it all means, and most all, thinking about yourself.
You assume you need to take matters into your own hands and help yourself, so perhaps you’re drawn to something called self-help.
You learn that you don’t have to see things the way they first appear. You don’t have to believe everything you think. You can turn thoughts around and enjoy a nicer experience.
But trying to monitor and change your thinking is hard. It takes a lot of time, and you’re a grown-up now, so time is in short supply. Plus, controlling your thinking doesn’t actually work all that well. You don’t want to admit that because you assume you’re just doing it wrong. After all, it seems to work for everyone else. But the freedom it brings is short-lived at best.
Thank God, there is another way.
At some point, perhaps you see that controlling your reaction to what’s “out there” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense given that “out there” is created by your own thinking to begin with. It looks like going to firefighter school so that you can fighting a fire that you start every day when you leave your curling iron on.
Perhaps you catch a glimpse of how thought really works. We live in an ocean of it, so much so that we can rarely see around it. We live in a never-ending stream of our own impersonal, always changing thought and we call that “out there”.
And there is nothing to control. Nothing to change because what you’ve seen takes you back to where you were as a kid…not thinking so much about your thinking. Not taking it seriously. Not focusing so much on yourself and your place in the world “out there”.
You are free to just be. Still with stuff on your mind most of the time, but seeing the stuff on your mind in a new way.
I really encourage you to check out how Bonnie writes about it too. It’s something very worth looking at.
