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It doesn’t take long when you start to develop a practice of mindfulness before you realize that we are virtually continually bombarded by thoughts. So they are like weather patterns in the mind, and there are sometimes like nice clear sunny days, but there are an awful lot of cloudy days, tumultuous days, rainy days, turbulent stormy weather. And again, challenge is how are we to be in relationship to all of that stuff that’s driving our lives and our narrative of who I am. When you get in touch with what awareness really is, then the first thing you realize is that those thoughts are not me, and they’re not mine. They’re just like weather patterns, they’re impersonal weather patterns in the mind.
So then you can observe them like a scientist, like, “What is the nature of this thought? Where does it come from?” I mean, they come like bubbles coming off the bottom of a pot of boiling water. If you’ve ever watched a pot of boiling water, say a glass pot, the bubbles tend to nucleate at the bottom, and then they go through the water and they go puff at the surface. So the thoughts are very similar and people often use this term, the thoughts self liberate, you don’t have to get rid of them. People misunderstand meditation as, “Oh, I just sweep all my thoughts away, and then I’m in this like nirvana.” What you’ll get by trying to sweep all your thoughts away is a headache at the most, because there’s no way to sweep your thoughts away. They will get you every time.
But when you see that you’re not your thoughts, then you can watch them in this kind of impersonal, a more sort of, if you will, observing way with kindness, with self-compassion because a lot of them are heavily loaded with negative emotion. And you can see that if you don’t touch them, if you don’t do anything with them, if you don’t get caught in them, they self liberate naturally in awareness. It’s like touching a soap bubble, it’s fun for kids and fun for adults too, a soap bubble and you touch it, and it just goes puff. So I love that image, let the thought as the soap bubble and the emotion too, that’s balancing the thought. And you don’t need to anything with it because your awareness, it’s not even a finger, it’s not corporeal, the awareness just the embracing of it or the arising of it, like in the sky, it goes all puff all by itself. And don’t take my word for it. This is something that when you sit down and you begin to watch, you’ll see this is not rocket science, you don’t have to sit in a cave for 30 years to have that kind of experience. All you need to do is, in some sense, get out of your own way. Now. I’m not saying that’s easy. That’s really hard. But if you can have moments when you get out of your own way, then you’ll see that a lot of this stuff that we get so caught up in, it’s a mirage.