I confess that I can have “acorn” brain, small-minded, finite thoughts. Do you recognize these thoughts in yourself? Researchers have found that we have between 60,000 and 80,000 thoughts per day and many are not modeled after limitless Infinite thinking. The cause can be traced to the ego. “Your egoic mind is the small part of yourself that overly identifies with who you are as an individual. It’s the aspect of your consciousness that has a sense of self-importance and is concerned with your desires and your place in the world” says Roland Alexander, Ph.D. in his book “Wise Mind, Open Mind.
If outside validation defines you, then you are rocked by the winds and storms of life. Railing against them instead of, embracing them, which is what a person grounded in present moment awareness can achieve. Mindfulness is the process of noticing the self that is having the experience and the self that is witnessing it and is separate from it.
“Outside” validation is your ego, “acorn” brain, reminding you that you are less than someone or more than some, or a title you have and possessions you own define your happiness. In fact, it defines your self-worth.
Mindfulness (present moment awareness) is living from the “InsideOut ™”. You choose to live from the conscious thought that you have value without any outside validation. You are one with the Divine, God, or the Life Force, the Universe that created you. An Infinite, limitless force awaits your call. You can cultivate the witness or observer level of thinking and when you embrace all of what shows up in any moment you have linked up with that force. Especially when those moments don’t match up with your plan when your “acorn” brain attempts to define things as bad or unhappy and you learn to embrace those moments as well.
So how can you cultivate this witness/observer level of thinking and break the habit of believing the egoic, small mind?
Begin a practice of sitting quietly and simply observe your thoughts, resisting the urge to analyze and build a sensation or feeling as it arises. You simply observe the thought or feeling as it comes and then let the thought drift out of your awareness. “Continually observing the mind’s products, identifying them, and filing them away in the “to address later” file or the proverbial “circular file” teaches you that you have power over your mind and its activities,” says Dr. Alexander.
Over time, you will have cultivated this “present moment, observer level of thinking” into a new habit. You now can choose what thoughts to believe and not believe. You will see a new pattern emerge as you empty your mind of the useless chatter, discovering your creativity and the sense of spaciousness and possibility it has to offer. You will still have those “small-minded” thoughts and the difference is that you control them, you run them, they don’t run you.
You have to prove this to yourself. Don’t take my word for it. Give this process a year or two and see if what you desire manifests more easily.
You are the creator of your experience.
Which thoughts are you believing now?
Remember that “Life is Best Lived from the InsideOut.”
Gratefully yours,
Steve
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