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One of the greatest hurdles in meditation is our mind

• In this session we will dive into the nature of the mind, thoughts, thinking
• This is where I’m going to show you how to change our relationship with your mind.

The Nature of Thoughts and Thinking

First step into a meditation practice is to understand the nature of thoughts and thinking.

• Thoughts and thinking are two completely different things.
• Thoughts come into your mind. You have no control over their frequency or their quality.
•  “What is your next thought going to be?” You cannot predict that. You can decide what you are going to think about, you can even decide how long you will think about a topic, but you have no control over what thoughts are going to come to you.

“The thoughts coming into our mind is not who we are”

Other Facts about Thoughts

• Your mind has around one hundred thousand thoughts a day.
• 60 to 80 % of those thoughts you had yesterday.
  • When the same things are repeated daily, they can become an addiction over time.
  • they create automatic responses.
• 80% of our thoughts are negative.

The nature of thoughts is that they may be

• True
• Real
• Or yours

Untrue Thoughts

• Some of your thoughts may contain lies you have been told or lies you have told yourself that have become your truth.
• Our thoughts change. They can change enough that they become untrue in the process.
• If you tell yourself subtle lies, over time you will come to believe these lies.
• Just because you think that something is a certain way, doesn’t make it so.

Unreal Thoughts

• The mind has a strong propensity to throw you into the past or the future.
•  A good portion of thoughts dropping into have nothing to do with the current moment.
• Fears and catastrophic thinking tend to fall into this category of thoughts. Our mind can create elaborate scenarios, all of which may not be happening.

Thoughts that are Not Yours

• A portion of your thoughts may be someone else’s words that you have been replaying in your mind for years.
• You may not even notice that those thoughts originated from someone else’s words. Once you realize this, it becomes much easier to let go of them each time they return.

At and early age we are programmed to be a good thinker, but you were not taught to let our thoughts go.

Thinking

Thinking is Much Different than Thoughts

• We have choice what we think about
• Explain how thoughts turn us to thinking
• Your mind can justify any position of thinking
• Thinking creates grooves in the mind
• Addicted to thinking

Thinking takes us out of meditation

• Meditation calls for us to be present
•  just watching without grabbing our thoughts
• In a healthy relationship with your mind, you learn how to pull back and not be affected by your thoughts

Thoughts can turn into feelings

How do we stop ourself from feeling a thought?

• It starts with understanding your relationship with your mind
• Allowing yourself to stop interacting with every thought that comes to mind
• With practice with small things

Here are a two exercises to practice not going into the feelings of the thoughts coming into you.

1. Just watch your thoughts. Try this out for an hour or even a day. When you notice that you have started to think about the thoughts in your head, just gently return to watching your thoughts as if they are a movie. When I refer to “watching your thoughts,” I mean you don’t get to talk to them or even silently think about them either.

• Pretend that your mind is a movie screen. Everything you see and hear is being projected on you like a movie. As in the above lesson, just watch the movie, but this time, include everything happening around you.