It's just a thought, isn't it? Oh yes, isn’t it. The most natural thing in the world. Thought, thinking, my thinking. It’s who I am. It's what I do. I rely on it for my survival in this world of uncertainty. I wouldn’t be me without it. How could I possibly be me without it? Better hold it close. Better feed it, shelter it, nurture it and defend it at all cost. Because after all who would I be and how would I survive without it? In fact, when I come to think about it, it IS me... Isn't it?
They are quite compelling thoughts about our thinking, aren’t they? I mean it sounds reasonable and pretty difficult to deny most of the time. But then what would we be denying if we were to try? And what would be doing that denying? Oh yes, more thinking. Is it possible then that amongst its possibly more useful attributes, thought also has a hidden agenda? Is it possible that ‘thinking’ has a vested interest in nothing more than perpetuating itself as itself? And what if this was in fact its first motivation before it’s particularly bothered about whether its content is particularly good for us or not.
What is the purpose of the thought that tells us we ARE our thoughts and all the horror stories of what it would mean if we were to stop thinking for very long? It’s an interesting concept to play with, isn’t it. Well, I’m hoping it’s not just me that thinks so anyway.
So what is a thought? Have you ever thought about it? Not about the content of the thought, but actual thought itself, as itself? Like, what is it made of? Where does it come from? Where does it go? What happens to it when it’s not here? Stuff like that.
It’s fascinating to me that as much as we all know about all the this’s and that’s in the world, like algebra, car engines, how to follow a knitting pattern, work a spreadsheet or cook a great roast dinner, it turns out that we mostly don’t have much idea about how a mind works.
It occurred to me at some point that seeing as how I had one and it seemed to have quite an impact on my life, then perhaps it would be useful to find out a bit more about it. Turns out the thing is full of thought…Thinking. I know right?! Perhaps I’m the only person who finds this a revelation. I dunno.
All that sounds interesting or at least I think it does but it could also seem a bit abstract so here is a personal story that might help with that.
For much of my younger life I had what I would describe as a fairly negative relationship with my body, or body image along with things whose fault it obviously was…Food. You’d have been hard pushed to see why from the outside, I mean I wasn’t overweight or underweight but this was only because of the battle going on inside me that I made sure I never lost, or that’s what I told myself then anyway.
Time in therapy helped me understand where this was probably coming from in my past, which was useful partly because it helped me make sense of it, which did go some way to lessening my anxiety surrounding the whole thing but it didn’t really seem to do much to rid me of the recurring thoughts surrounding my body and food, and the battle I had with them both, which seemed to plague me and have me endlessly yoyo dieting and feeling miserable about the thing ‘food’ which I really loved and wanted to be able to enjoy as part of my life.
So one day as I was sitting in my car waiting to get a tyre changed, one of my regular obsessive food thoughts popped into my mind. It was probably getting close to lunchtime or something, which was always a low-level anxiety time for me.
So usually when this happened and if I had time, like I did today, I would do my work with it. This involved some understanding, some relating to, some bargaining with it perhaps, some prayer if I was feeling particularly low on energy and fed up with it all, but today I saw something new.
This time as the 'food thought' popped into my mind totally uninvited as usual, instead of flirting with it in that familiar way, I found myself noticing instead that a few minutes earlier it hadn’t been there and I’d felt fine.
Then I found myself asking ‘Well where was that thought before it was here?’ And the answer seemed to be that it wasn’t anywhere that I could see. I literally couldn’t find it. I’d never looked at it this way. I’d always been so wrapped up in what it was telling me while it was there that I had never looked at ‘it’ In this moment I noticed that I seemed to feel some kind of hope or promise open up. It still felt a bit kind of ‘so what?’ for now though, but it seemed worth sticking with.
As I sat quietly watching the garage men rolling their tyres around, pondering my new half-cooked insight, I noticed an equation forming in my mind and it went something like this…
‘Food thought’ = more thinking about the food thought = often bad feelings = more thinking about what to do about the bad feelings and so on…Conclusion – Two options. Eat more food or make sure you don’t eat more food depending on mood and other attached thinking that day… Rinse repeat…
‘No Food thought’ = No bad feelings about food to think about or act on.
So hang on a minute… The ‘food thought’ came uninvited, so not much I seemed to be able to do about that part. But what I did see was that I didn’t start feeling bad or being driven to action by ‘the food thought’ until I started thinking about the food thought so perhaps there could be a moment of hope here. Perhaps intervention here somewhere was possible, before the hamster wheel of obsessive and frankly annoying 'thinking' began to gather its usual momentum. But really? Could it be that simple? So I put it to the test.
We tend to think of thoughts like ‘things’ Real, tangible meaningful, ‘things’ The problem with this is that once a thing is a thing in our mind then it’s always that thing and can never be another thing. Like an elephant is never going be a daffodil.
Not only that, but It’s ‘my’ thing and to take it a step further, it’s ‘ME’ I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard someone say, and even myself before understood better, ‘Oh that’s just me’ when what they are referring to in fact, is a thought they have about their self.
So if a thought is a thing and it's ‘me’ then it makes sense that if it’s been recurring for a long time then letting go of it, even all the evidence suggests it’s not a great one in terms of how it makes me feel, it still might seem a bit like losing a bit of myself like an arm or a leg, so why would I be keen to do it? And that’s why we need to check out what thought really is.
Back to my equation. So fed up was I with this recurring pattern of thinking surrounding my weight and food, which just felt like ‘me’ and took up so much of my thought capacity in a day, that if there was any chance I could loosen its grip I was going to give it a go and right now it felt like I might have a window of opportunity in which to do it.
Fast forward to today otherwise this would be a book, not a blog, boy I’m glad I bothered because a lot changed for me on that day and it remains changed to this day in terms of my well-being surrounding body image, my mental health and my actual weight, which there was never anything wrong with in the first place by the way. So what helped?
The sanity gap.
This is what I call our “moment”. Our chance to choose. A small fissure in the madness into which we can insert our true sane and wise self for just a fraction of a second, a momentary jam in the conveyor belt at the thought factory. A pencil shoved in the squeaky hamster wheel of selfing. (My personal favourite. It was a great relief for me as a child, when I realised I could stop the hamster running and running on his squeaky wheel when I was trying to get to sleep at night. Just stick a pencil in it :)
So what is so important about this often over-looked moment? In spiritual teaching, this moment can be referred to as the Holy Instant. It is our momentary chance to choose again. ‘This thought came to me, uninvited but since it’s here what shall I do with it now?’
Our next idea on that subject often looks something like this...
Have some more thinking about what the previous thought meant and how it made me feel.
2. Better still, have some more thinking about what that thought and its attached feeling might mean about me.
3. Then have some more thinking about the conclusion of the previous thought and, is the feeling it gives me nice or not.
3. About now it’s probably time to insert some problem-solving thinking into the equation depending on whether the previous thinking fostered a favourable feeling or not. (Perhaps a “thinking” Flow chart) If ‘no’ move to the next phase of more thinking that might help get rid of this feeling. If yes then start some new thinking about how to keep this feeling. Exhausting.
Perhaps you have some of your own. You’ll find there is usually an inexhaustibly available supply of potential thought options available. Our thought factory is always working hard to produce all sorts of attention-grabbing content to woo us. Like an old-fashioned sweet shop, with all the brightly coloured confectionary displayed, beckoning us to ‘choose me’ I remember always finding it so difficult to choose as child. I was only allowed so many and how would I know which ones tasted the best? What if I chose and got it wrong. Yeah… The thought factory.
Or we can stop… Just for a moment.
So in this moment, now, we’ve had a bit of a rummage about in it all, so let's come back out again and get practical. What can we do? How can we feel better? The simple version.
Well for me in that moment it was quite clear that my only chance was in the moment of becoming aware of the feeling and noticing the attached thought. It’s not always clear to me which comes first, but when the thought is there I know it and if the feeling is troublesome then I can be fairly sure it’s going to have an unhealthy thought attached to it.
It’s in this moment I begin to have a choice. A chance for ‘other’. Do I follow that thought or feed it with more related thoughts about it, almost like an addict or do I stop right there in time and look straight at it?
What would be the point in that you might ask?
The point in that would be, that when we dare to do that, we give ourselves the chance to see what ‘thought’ actually is. Not the content of it but the nature of it. And what we see is that it’s a momentary transient puff of wind carrying imaginary information, which may or may not be useful to our well-being. How do we know if it’s useful or not? Well If it makes me feel bad or urges me to do things I’d rather not, then it’s an unhealthy thought and can be tossed or dismissed for what it is, a puff of wind, or as Peter Ralston so eloquently puts it in his book ‘The Genius of Being’ nothing more significant than a burp.
As a brief aside, when presenting this in the past I’ve sometimes been confronted with the ‘yes but’ of, Don’t bad feelings inform me of things I might have done wrong that I may need to rectify. Don’t these feelings sometimes serve as my moral compass?
The way I experience this is that these feelings are only ever pointers to the fact that I’m currently looking in the wrong direction. I might have said something unkind to someone, I have a bad feeling about that later which is informing me ’Oh, I must have been looking in the wrong direction. Where could I look better next time?’ Rather than using it as permission for all the self-judgement or justification stories I could follow that feeling with.
Our most simple thinking always leads to greater peace.
So of course I didn’t instantly become a ninja at this. I am still learning and will be forever. It took and still takes some daily practice, attention and awareness but the payoff for learning more about it and bothering to put it into practice in my life, not just when it comes to the “misery battle” of cream buns and beer vs spinach and lentils, but everywhere in my life, has been so huge that ‘bothering’ is now a done deal for me and almost the new default. Because it feels so good and it makes life better. It’s as simple as that really. Now when it arrives it’s just… ‘The Food Thought’ and then it’s on its way, freeing me to think about things that are much more interesting.
Maxine Kemp is a transformative life coach based in East Suffolk UK who is dedicated to simplifying and demystifying the journey to greater peace well-being and empowerment.
"It’s not supposed to be that difficult."
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