Separating Ourselves From Our Thoughts
When we meditate one of the things we come to see is that we are not our thinking mind. We come to see that this mind is just a tool or instrument that we can utilize if we want to, but that we aren’t obliged…
Control
Taking the Mickey
Happiness is a funny sort of a thing. It’s a funny sort of a thing because despite the fact that happiness is (supposedly) so very important to us, we don’t actually know anything about it! We have ideas about it for sure, but these ideas…
Thinking Because We Have To
We all tend to have an odd sort of relationship with our thinking in the sense that we tend to think compulsively rather than ‘thinking freely’. This is a point that may not immediately make sense to us, but it is nonetheless a point that…
Insight
When it comes down to it, in practice, we find that it is a very hard thing to work in a helpful way with our thoughts. What almost always happens is that we either end up fighting (in a perfectly futile way) against our thinking,…
The ‘Carrot and Stick’ Approach
Our normal attitude towards life is to say “I will accept the situation when it is right” or – alternatively – “I will accept myself when I am right (i.e. when I meet the required standard). This type of attitude makes perfect sense from the…
Not Scratching An Itchy Nose
The key to finding freedom from compulsivity (which is where we very strongly feel that we have to do something!) is being able to hang out in our discomfort zones. It is the inability to hang out in our discomfort zones that makes us helpless…