“This morning I woke up feeling terrible and I remembered this choice thing you keep talking about." he tells me in our session one day.
"It’s amazing—I've just woken up and before I know it, my head is filled with bad thoughts, life sucks and everything’s hopeless.
It’s not easy to just change your thoughts!”
Then he looks at me warningly.
“If you tell me, ‘Just choose happier thoughts,’ I’m going to throw something at you!”
I jokingly glance toward my escape route and laugh...
“Well, maybe you could just start by not fighting off the thoughts you judge to be ‘bad’ or unwanted...?
When you think, I don’t want to feel this way; I don’t want this thought; I should think something else, you’re actually strengthening the very thing you don’t want by giving it your attention. When people say, ‘I don’t want this illness/ this life/ this relationship,’ that’s also a kind of an attachment.”
“That sounds right" he replies, "Both yesterday and this morning I tried to fight off the feelings I didn’t want.”
“We all do that. You can know the theory very well, practice it regularly and even write about it like I do, yet still get caught up in the whirlpool. This is a practice, a way of being, not something to get ‘right’.”
“I was trying to get it right this morning,” he says thoughtfully.
“Did you try the Love question?” I wonder aloud.
“Ugh, yes!” he says, wrinkling his nose. “Even that felt like a critique.
But this is what I wanted to tell you!
Finally, I said to myself, ‘All thoughts are available to me,’ and then I suddenly felt some relief.
I think because I wasn’t judging myself.
It was a statement of fact. If I have all thoughts available to me, I can choose any I want.
When I eased the pressure of thinking I must think and feel a certain way, I relaxed and felt out which thoughts were nicer to me, like we’ve practiced. Then I lingered on the nice ones a little more and slowly I felt more relaxed and open again. It was so cool!”
It's useful to remember that a lot of our suffering is actually due to us fighting off something we judge to be ‘bad’.
Nothing about you is ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
It just is.
Love it.
If you loved yourself, what would you choose to think now?
