I heard this from Tara Brach, whom I love to listen to. “I don’t believe everything I think.”
My mind can be a beautiful place filled with love and compassion and a ton of healing and wholing best practices. My mind can also be a mine zone which isn’t filled so much with self-criticism anymore, actually, but which can certainly make up a few stories about me, about you, and about the world. Stories that don’t necessarily help me. Stories that aren’t necessarily true.
I don’t have to think something is true just because I think it. I don’t have to believe everything I think.
I can accept that I think something, even if I don’t like it. I can accept that I think it, even if I don’t believe it. I can allow the thoughts to appear…and then I can examine them to check their verity or their helpfulness to me and my desired happiness.
I can simply let them float away. At least sometimes.
My brain, when it’s not concussed, often serves me well. I’ve trained my eyes, ears, heart, soul, and mind to look for beauty and connection and joy and love.
Yet with this Post Traumatic Growth, I also still have the remnants of Complex Post Traumatic Disorder. I still have justifiable, somewhat automatic, deeply engrained fight, flight, freeze, or for me usually, fawn behaviors. These behaviors are way less than they used to be, but they’re there, and they may always be there.
But I don’t have to believe everything I think. Even those behaviors.
I also don’t have to act on everything I feel. I need to allow, acknowledge, and accept my feelings. I need to let myself feel them, even when they’re ways I was taught not to feel when I was a child.
But as I let them flow through me, I can also check their verity. Because, as I’ve learned, my feelings often, if not always, are a result of my perception and my perspective and my thoughts. And, again, my thoughts are not always true or helpful. Feelings are not facts, as first I heard in Al-Anon decades ago. Or my feelings may be hiding deeper, more painful feelings underneath them. Feelings that I don’t want to feel. Feelings that are, at least sometimes, based in deep, old, trauma and pain. Feelings that I, again, need to feel, even if I don’t have to do anything about them.
I, once again, get to choose.
I am allowing and accepting myself more and more. I am putting my hand on my heart and WAY upping my self-care and self-love and self-compassion.
I am also checking the stories that my mind is telling me. I am trusting myself WAY more than I used to, and I am shining a light on my thought patterns so that I can learn more about them…and me.
I don’t believe everything I think.
I’d love to hear your thoughts, and please share this post with others if it resonates with you!