Do You Know What’s Creating Your Reality?
With over 60,000 thoughts per day, we are mostly unconscious of what’s going on in our own minds.
Photo©Aaron Amat/123rf
Every day we get to decide the quality of our lives based on one thing, and one thing only — our thoughts. As the old adage goes, your thoughts create your beliefs, your beliefs create your habits, your habits create your actions, and your actions create your life.
But in order to make use of this reality, we must first know what it is we’re even thinking about to begin with. This is not as easy as it sounds.
We have on average 60,000 thoughts each day, with the vast majority of them being negative — what we have been thinking about for years! — and here’s the kicker, aren’t even aware of. Our thoughts are so comfortable and familiar to us — like the air we breathe — that we are mostly unconscious of what is going on in our own minds.
Not only are we often unaware of what we’re thinking, we believe all or most of our thoughts to be fact. Whether that thought is about who we are, who others are or how the world works, we believe the thoughts we think, are in fact, the truth. Even when our current lived situation may be pointing to another reality entirely, or even when our thoughts are creating suffering, our beliefs create our truth.
This past week I caught myself in one of these places. In my world, what I think about manifests itself in my life, including the health of my body. In a rare moment of clarity over struggling with a lingering cough for several weeks, I realized that with the exception of a few select moments, I had been locked in a very old, habitual thought pattern every day for weeks, thinking the same thing over and over again. This was manifesting as an unwanted cough, repeating over and over again, wearing me thin on many levels, and driven by my repetitive thinking.
What was I thinking about? What was my mind locked on? I feared if I coughed around other people, they would be disturbed, and I would somehow be made to pay for their disturbance. In my mind, to disturb another is to risk negative and even dangerous consequences of some sort. Maybe they will form an opinion of me I don’t feel is true. Maybe they will aggress on me with a cutting word. Maybe I’ll be kicked out of the relationship or emotionally annihilated.
While this last part may seem overly dramatic, it’s not. To the psyche that was forged in childhood, where all of our beliefs around safety, survival and belonging are formed, to fall out of the good graces of another, ie, the grown-ups in your life, is to risk everything from disapproval to punishment to abandonment. Without even knowing it, we are enslaved by our childhood beliefs about who we need to be in even the smallest of circumstances. Only by choosing to pay attention to what we are thinking, and consciously updating those thoughts to reflect what we really want to create in our lives, can we free ourselves from negative, repetitive thinking where we create more of what we don’t want.
Catch your thoughts across the day while asking yourself a question or two. What am I thinking about right now? What does it remind me of? Is this thought true? Is it even mine?
When you tap into thoughts that threaten your safety, like my fears that a cough will disturb someone enough to make them want to hurt me, there will be resistance to being with that thought because it’s scary to challenge what you previously did in the name of that safety.
But at some point, we reach the place where we begin to recognize that to continue on as we have been doing is just not worth the risk of missing out on one of the most important awarenesses in life: we have a right to be here, as is.
Susan McNamara is a woman who cares deeply about how we are living and how it is that we treat ourselves, each other, and the planet. To see all that Susan offers go to https://rememberingwhatmattersmost.com/.
