Have you gotten to the point in your life where you started observing your thinking?
It’s funny because everyone possesses this skill, but yet for many people in this world today the mind continues to run their life and keeps them from operating at their highest potential. If you are okay with a neurotic lying psychopath to be driving the car while you are the passenger, then just continue as you were. I for one have been that passenger for way too long in my life and therefore decided to start investigating if what the mind tells me is true and if the excessive mind activity is necessary.
You don’t need a PhD in research to become the observer of your own thoughts, it just takes some effort and alertness.
Here is a simple way to start…
Set your timer on your phone for 10 minutes. Throughout this 10 minutes just observe your thoughts. You don’t even have to be meditating per say, you can be walking, working on something, washing the dishes, etc. Whatever your doing in this 10 minutes just try and be aware of your thoughts without getting caught up in them, judging them, or trying to make them different.
Probably during this attempt you will get sucked into much of your thinking, try and just be aware of that too.
Once the timer goes off, just take a moment and recap all the thoughts that you were able to observe. If you’re honest with yourself you will have noticed that your mind was bombarding you with so much fiction and nonsense, that if it was a real physical entity, it would be locked up in a nut house. The even crazier part is that it captures you, either by you being totally caught up in it’s stories, or by you reacting to what it is telling you.
The key is to notice that the minds whole power is your attention and reaction, if you simply don’t listen or get drawn in, your attention can be put in other areas. These areas can be anything from the sensations that are going on throughout your body, to noticing life from a higher view, to seeing things outside of conceptualizations. You basically can become alive more deeply, as your stream of consciousness is able to go where you want it to go now, rather then just being caught up in thoughts.
Just because being consumed in thinking is the primary state of the world today, doesn’t mean it not a dysfunction. Cure yourself by being able to observe your thinking, rather then always being stuck in them.