Learning This About the Brain Changed the Trajectory of my Life

I used to think I was very sensitive.

I would often feel overwhelmed by the state of the world, stress in my workplace, and even emotional crises happening with my family or friends.

I considered myself to be an empath with overly high empathy.

That's how I started my coaching business - focusing on empaths and helping those who considered themselves highly sensitive to function better in the world.

I loved it and really enjoyed doing that type of work.

Then one day I came across a piece of information about how the mind works that changed everything.

I learned the principle of thought which said all human beings experience the world through their thinking. And we are all living in the feeling of our thinking.

It is not our external circumstances that make us feel a certain way, rather it is our thinking about the world that leads to how we feel.

Now when I heard this felt as if the sky opened up and a lightning bolt came down and struck me on the head. To me it was that profound.

At the time I had my psychology degree, I was a meditation teacher, and I loved working with other people to help them feel calm and enjoy their life more.

But up until that point, my own personal thinking had continued to drive me crazy no matter how many times I meditated, how many books I read, or how much I worked on myself.

And so the realization that any stress or anxiety or negative feelings that I was feeling was simply a representation of the thoughts that I was thinking, really shook me.

I started to question everything.

Does that mean my whole experience is made of thought?

Are empaths even real or is it just a thought?

Am I actually sensitive or am I just thinking about it a lot?

I felt adrift; as if the foundation of how I experienced the world had been swept out from under me.

I had read and learned a lot of different theories in the personal development world but when I heard that, I knew it in my core to be true without having a rational reason of why.

Suddenly it made sense why there were so many different opinions in the world in terms of political parties, agendas, and everyone believing with so much conviction that they were right.

It's because every person is living in and feeling their own thinking.

That means we now have over 8 billion unique views of reality currently on our planet.

I can also see this to be true in terms of my own hypersensivitity.

Today, I still notice other's body language and their emotional state quite easily (Connector is my number one skill on the Top 5 Clifton Strengths Test), but the difference is after noticing body language, I am no longer doing a lot of thinking and making it personal, which was causing myself undo stress and emotional overwhelm.

Maybe you have noticed this in your own life with someone you know who really grinds your gears. On some days you feel very annoyed by them and on other days they don't seem so bad??

(It's not because they changed in that short period of time, it's simply a reflection of your thinking about them in the moment).

Needless to say it took me quite a while to feel like I was on solid ground again after learning how thought really works.

But now when I notice that I'm caught up in my thinking, I can remind myself that it's not the world making me feel a certain way (or politics, a relationship, etc,), it's just my thinking in that moment.

And I can't overstate what an impact this change in perspective has had on my life.

I no longer blame anything or anyone else outside of me for how I feel.

It's very liberating, to say the least.

And what I found behind all the thinking is my true nature who is always calm, content, and peaceful.

It's always here. It's always inside of me.

Now I don't get so caught up in my overthinking.

I get to enjoy life more.

Sometimes my thoughts still take me for a ride. And all that I need to do is remember to come back.