Thought
Think of the flow of thoughts in your mind as a social media feed. Throughout your life, you have “subscribed” to different things without noticing. Now their posts keep showing up in your feed, and you don’t know from where. Some are true & interesting, but many are unhelpful or simply untrue.
Practical Meditation by Giovanni Dienstmann
This post really resonated with me. I just watched a video of a woman describing “metacogniton” – the ability of a person to observe their own thoughts and feelings and self correct. She said this skill is key to evolving as a human being. That makes sense to me… the Buddhists also talk about being aware of “the watcher” of thoughts and feelings, and how important it is to identify with the watcher and not with the thoughts and feelings. I think this is spot on.
I guess journaling is one way to observe your own thoughts. But what of the time-lag between thinking of what to say, and then putting those thoughts on paper?
The Watcher must be like a third person. She sees my thoughts that I’ve formed into words.
I think the idea is that you’re “watching” your thoughts and feelings as they occur, in real time. The act of watching them gives you the opportunity to identify with the watcher instead of the thought or feeling. And that gives us more control. The watcher consciousness becomes the pilot of our lives instead of the thoughts and feelings, which are often conditioned responses that depend on the narratives that we’ve created for our ourselves.