PEBBLE
You don’t have to control your thoughts. You just have to stop letting them control you.
-Dan Millman, shared by Deb in Phoenix, AZ
BOULDER
You don’t suffer because you have thoughts. You suffer because you judge them, resist them, believe them, wallow in them, or identify with them.
-unknown, shared by Mary Beth in Columbia, SC
PONDER
I’ve been in a cognitive swirl lately, a loop of thoughts zooming in and out of my brain: thoughts about the presentations I just finished and the ones I have coming up and the travel involved and the Covid 4th Wave…and then there is the Afghanistan quagmire and the climate stuff and racial reconciliation and on and on and on. It is a lot, and it is exhausting.
Can you relate?
Over the summer, a good buddy of mine turned me on to The Sedona Method, a simple technique that has helped many people change their relationship to unwanted feelings and thoughts. I’ve been using and appreciating the three questions to help dissipate some Big Feels that sometimes overwhelm me:
1. Can you welcome the feeling or thought?
2. Can you welcome your desire to fix it, eliminate it, manage it?
3. Can you welcome any way in which you identify with it (Do you attach meaning to its presence? Do you let it define who you think you are)?
Flash forward to this week and all of my thinking, thinking, thinking…well, I had forgotten that I could apply these questions to my THOUGHTS as well as my FEELINGS! It actually wasn’t until I sat down to work on this issue of Ripples that I made the connection. Gah! Within minutes, I had downshifted some of my repetitive thoughts and felt my shoulders drop and a smile come across my face….ahhhhhh.
If you’ve been struggling with lots of thoughts (or feels), I invite you to experiment with the triple welcoming, or at least a deep HERE NOW breath and see if you can befriend them.
Peace,
Paul
P.S. You’re welcome to enjoy this brief overview of The Sedona Method I recently shared with Ripplers on a recent Zoomy Zoom I do each month with Paul’s Patreon Peeps. We’d love to have you join us if you’re interested…you can learn more here.
