#6 When Thoughts Clear

The person who stills their thoughts always says they feel peaceful. That peacefulness seems to always be there, just temporarily covered up by thoughts like clouds on a sunny day.

I've never met a person who got more stressed from calming down.

Whenever our thoughts begin to move slower or we just stop clinging so hard to them, a sense of peacefulness eventually appears.

Sometimes in smaller doses where its presence is only really noticed if we've got the awareness to pay attention to it.

Sometimes as overwhelming as a Greek wedding after the midnight hour has hit.

Except, calm.

For the longest time I considered the sense of feeling peaceful, at rest–to be a feeling that's created just like any other feeling by our thoughts.

But in my experience, and I've yet to find anyone with a contrary experience...

The absence of thoughts, or just the slowing down of them, seem to rather reveal what's already underneath rather than create something new that creates the peace.

It's not like they're mutually exclusive, all realities and feelings are just a single thought away (let's not create a false predicament of mastery though, we still don't control our thoughts and some become surface level and others hit us as deep insights).

This reveals something significant about human nature that's always present, just sometimes covered up.

Leap of Faith

This is not an intellectual exercise, but rather something that can be experienced first-hand and explored.

But it does need a certain leap of faith.

When you feel deeply stressed or are having any other feelings that's weighing down on you.

Consider that feeling as a barometer that shows the quality of your thinking in the moment.

Slow down, take your mind off of your problems and do something else.

This is the part where we need to have a certain trust that taking our mind off of our problems will actually be good for our problems.

When you're in a different feeling, come back and see if the situation looks the same.

It may or it may not–but now you'll be far more equipped to handle it.

It's not the external reality that's coming at you, it's the internal reality–the one consisting of thoughts.

If you let your thoughts change, so will your reality.

And if you allow them to slow down, that peacefulness can begin to show itself.

We often solve problems to stop worrying, but the worrying is more like the mind's laser pen that's always one.

When you remove one problem, it'll just beam to another, and then another and another etc.

You need to turn the laser pen off.

And that's a very different life.