YOU ARE NOT YOUR THOUGHTS

“Sometimes the worst place to be is in your own head.” – quote

?A lot of us struggle with the things in our head. That voice that won’t let us be; we get so used to it and start to believe everything it says. We get fused with it. And there lies the problem.

Getting to find out that our thoughts are not always right about things, people or ourselves after a long time of believing so much in them can be hard to unlearn. For years, I battled in my mind with thoughts that threatened my own happiness.

Through research, we’re learned that we have over 60,000+ thoughts in a day. How can you believe all of these, when you’re often unaware of where most come from? How is it possible that you are all of these at once?

Where do these thoughts come from?

Some of these thoughts come from your ego defense stories: the stories the ego uses to protect you based on your life’s experiences, especially if you had been traumatized in any way. These stories are often victim focused because they mainly serve to defend you, thereby protecting you even from having new and different experiences.

Some are just coping mechanisms; negative or positive coping skills that have served you at a particular time, but may not help you truly experience your real self in the long term. The ego had formed these stories based on your challenges in order to help you cope with the situations at the time.

Others may be from your conditioning: beliefs about yourself based on opinions you heard others say about you, especially your care givers/parents, and the adults you had looked up said about you repeatedly. They might not give the right information about your true self. But have become adopted as your truth because you heard them all the time throughout your developmental stages from the people whose role it was to show you the way of life.

Some thoughts are picked from the happenings in the environment you had been exposed to over time: this means your background, family life, education, your upbringing, relationships, career and beliefs that had been passed on to you from different people; events, religious indoctrination, cultural practices, places and things you had been exposed.

At other times, these thoughts are just random stories from your perception of situations happening around you now or in the past. Or others' perceptions of the same.

If you look closely you’d see that you’ve had very limited control over what your thoughts are. Now, imagine believing all of them are the truth about your life, your essence? See why attachment with recurring negative thoughts have such mental damage to your psyche?

Meanwhile, this is how you’ve come to accept them as your personal reality over the years.

A lot of these thoughts, the mostly negative ones, are nothing more than flying opinions. And if you don’t understand this, you’d take them as your life thus allowing them to limit you, sabotage your true identity, and make you run from self. Part of your healing goals is in being aware of the most disturbing of these thoughts, something some people call your inner critics, and query them.

Are they really the truth? Are there evidence of their truth? Allow your curiousity go to work on them.

The thing about our thoughts is that they’ll always be there; no matter what we do. Just trying to think positive ones alone won’t resolve that. For as long as the earth remains, we will have various thoughts whether positive or negative. The key thing would be to see them as mostly stories and not become attached or take them too personally.

The moment you’re fused with any of the thoughts, especially the more negative ones, then you take it as who you are. It becomes a reference point. This is the problem.

Fusion with our mind’s stories or thoughts is the problem. Not the thought itself.

Healing from self-sabotaging thought is about understanding how not to believe everything we’re thinking. It is the awareness that you’re not your thoughts.

Some people become so attached to the demeaning thoughts running in their head because of negativity bias. Thus leaving them in a survival mode, in a place where they’re always fighting apparent danger because of the stories they’re taking personally through fusion with their negative thoughts.

Becoming healed from this survival mode is important. It is learning to defuse from the thoughts that make you feel small, ashamed, guilty, condemned, angry, insecure…most of the time. These kinds of thoughts make you grasp for survival alone.

You cannot live daily on survival emotions arising from these thought patterns. Because if you do, you’d become stressed out from expending so much energy for other areas.

This state is where many people become desperate for the things they should have naturally enjoyed by virtue of being human.

Healing involves moving from a survival emotional state to a more balanced elevated emotional state.

As you heal, you’ll start to experience more elevated emotions of love, happiness, gratitude, joy, confidence, and becoming more secure in yourself. I consider this our “home” state. Because we thrive more being there.

As an emotional healing guide, I’ve now realized that the major part of our healing journey is in being aware of how and what we think most of the time. This is even more important if you had been exposed to an environment that was quite traumatic and distressing, especially for the individuals who may have experienced any of the adverse childhood experiences.

For most people I’ve worked with, their own thoughts had become their enemy, where the loudest unfortunate voices about themselves were most heard and believed. This affects our quality of life. And it begins to form at the phase of our lives when we didn’t even know what was happening.

Children from the ages of 0-6 years old can barely think analytically for themselves. At this stage, most of what we believe about ourselves are from the environment we’ve been exposed to. It’s very important we know this. Otherwise, we’d spend our lives listening to all sorts of the thousands of thoughts from the experiences we have become unconscious of, not being aware that they are not thoughts from our true selves.

Have you wondered how an individual would be into self-sabotaging habits that threaten their own happiness, especially in relationships?

If we agree that one is as one thinks, shouldn’t we see, from what I had explained above as some sources of our thoughts, how we’ve come to believe in some lies about ourselves based on what we picked up from growing up in societies that had treated us in similar ways we now do to ourselves?

The cycle of life has a way of making us all victims of the societal patterns we’ve allowed to control our lives.

Almost all of us treat ourselves the way we had been treated by those before us. No wonder so much self-loathing! If you have been indulged in mostly survival emotions like self-loathing, hatred, guilt, anger, fear, complexes and insecure feelings, it’s important you know this isn’t all about you.

You’re MORE.

I believe that our true self is divine.

For the religious, this may be all that the prophets had come to let us know. That we’re divine, an extension of all that God is. And if God is often described as light and love, then, isn’t it a pointer to the kind of thoughts we should rather believe about ourselves as his kindred?

We must now be aware of how we are not everything we think. We must realize how the self-loathing, self-limiting, and defenses that won’t allow us experience happiness, peace and right beliefs about ourselves exist and detach where necessary for our right evolution.

Part of our healing journey is about unlearning first. It’s about becoming aware of all of these external factors that have contributed to how you think. And unlearning what they made you think.

The self-healing journey is this: becoming an observer of these events going on in your head, and dealing with the disadvantages they have caused you over the years, by noticing how they now affect your life. This is part of defusion-knowing how to separate your innate self from all the random thoughts.

Knowing that you’re NOT every thought in your head. Unless you become fused with the stories.

I hope you start this journey as soon as possible. May this write-up awaken that desire for a change.

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To your healing.

Joy ISEKI

-your healing partner