Distributed by curators in Mindfulness | Self

Zen Habit of Seeing Your Thoughts Come and Go

Learn this key skill for mental health and well-being

Have you ever wondered about the origin of your thoughts? Who creates them? One answer is that nobody knows. But a more obvious answer is that you — to be specific, your subconscious mind — creates your thoughts.

If you sit quietly for a minute and pay attention to the specific thoughts and images that pop up in your head, you can notice them and note them down on a page. Are you creating your thoughts, or are they just popping up in your mind without your control?

Think of thoughts as trains and your mind as a train station. You can observe thoughts as trains that come to the train station and grab your attention. You can order a train to leave the station because you are the stationmaster.

You can imaginatively think about your thinking processes. If you don’t learn to let go of thoughts, your mind will soon become cluttered. You will start experiencing anxiety.

The work of Aaron Temkin Beck, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that anxious thoughts are usually magnified, overgeneralized, or just wrong. But your thinking can influence feelings and control your behaviors. Consider this:

When people don’t let go of anxious thoughts and turn them over in their minds, allowing them to seep into their body’s systems, they start experiencing the beginnings of insomnia, depression, and other mental health issues.

As we can think about our thinking, we may dissociate ourselves from our thinking using mindfulness meditation.

According to Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., mindfulness is the mental practice of living in the present moment in a nonjudgmental way. It boils down to the idea that you are separate from your thoughts. You are an observer of your deliberations, and you can pick and choose between different thoughts.

At the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Stress Reduction clinic developed into Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction where more than 25,000 people have completed the 8-Week program to respond more effectively to stress, pain, and illness:

“Practice sharing the fullness of your being, your best self, your enthusiasm, your vitality, your spirit, your trust, your openness, above all, your presence. Share it with yourself, with your family, with the world.”~ Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

How can you learn to observe your thoughts?

Teaching yourself to dissociate from your thoughts is complex. But with practice, you can realize that you can become an observer of your mental processes.

When a thought comes to your mind, such as “No one likes me!” you can express it by attaching words that describe your act of observation to it:

“I’m having the thought that no one likes me.”

Visualize thoughts as trains exercise

Sit somewhere and close your eyes. Breathe in and breathe out. Focus on your breath:

Tell yourself that your thoughts are trains that come to a train station — your mind — and then they leave the station. You can stand on the platform and observe the trains come and go. Imagine that you are the stationmaster.

Try to label every train with a specific name. If an anxious thought is not leaving the station, you can order it to leave the station.

Some trains stop at the station and some just pass by. When a train remains at the station for some time, you may feel certain emotions related to the thought. If you like the feeling, you can allow the train to stay.

Become aware and “watch” as the trains leave the station. Tell yourself that you remain at the station while all trains leave the station after some time.

This exercise can teach you that you don’t have to react to every thought by judging it somehow. You can simply observe your thoughts. The objective here is not to change your thoughts, but rather to change how you respond to them.

Conclusion

Over time, mindfulness meditation will help you to detach yourself from the thoughts that arise from your subconscious mind — that you don’t feel compelled to hop onto the first train that comes your way.

If you do get onto a train by mistake, you can get off it as soon as you realize that you are not a passenger but a stationmaster.

The more you try to make mindfulness meditation a part of your life, the more control you will have over the thoughts in your mind.

It was quadruple curated and distributed into: MINDFULNESS, SELF, PSYCHOLOGY, and MENTAL HEALTH. Since I first read the mantra, ‘All is well’, years ago, in a book written by Louis L. Hay, I have often overlooked its importance more times than any other thing. It feels simplistic, too simple to be true or effective, I don’t want to believe that it can work.

You don’t buy every book when you go to a book store. You read the book reviews for guidance. The curation is a review of your written piece — by Medium. What Medium wants and what you can do about it — an explanation of the requirements for successful curation.