Choosing your thoughts is a daily yoga. Recognize the reflections around you. | Andrea de Michaelis – Creating my own reality, one thought at a time

I wrote in Getting so caught in our own spin that we don’t see our own wobble about friends on the fast track whose lives are a routine of hurried sameness. They don’t have time to think about what they’d prefer instead, it’s all they can do to think about everything they have to think about to keep their current life in motion. No room for new thoughts. No time for new thoughts. That’s what their programmed mind keeps telling them. I’m not much different. I have the same thoughts, I just act on those thoughts far less often than I used to. I still feel rushed. I still feel the sense of urgency to do, do, do. I just recognize now that they are simply thoughts, and I can choose to release the thought and not act on it, and not react to it. A friend told me she was surprised and glad to read that I have the same thoughts. She said I always seem so calm and centered, she imagined I only had calm thoughts. That really made me laugh. The only difference is that – now – I just recognize they are simply thoughts, and I release the thought. I am the one in charge of what thoughts I choose to think. I am not always in charge of what thoughts pop into my mind, but I am in charge of what thoughts I choose to continue to think. I am in charge of how I react to each thought.

Choosing my thoughts used to be a daily yoga, back when I had lots more karma to burn up than I do now. I had boyfriends and husbands back then, so staying solitary has definitely added to the peace and serenity of my life 🙂 I also had a full time career as a criminal defense paralegal in large Miami law firms, dealing daily with a lot of people and a lot of personality conflicts. Now I don’t even think about the stuff that used to fill my daily thoughts – making judgments about this one and criticizing that one; being passive aggressive with this one, secretly favoring that one. What a clusterf*k of useless thought time that was. And that was years of my life spent that way.

I used to be involved in a lot of discussion groups and meetings – about 4 times a week, for decades. In so many of them, there was a constant political posturing going on that took the group’s focus off what I was attending for. A constant complaint was being surprised that would happen in such a group of supposed lightworkers. LOL Not realizing that’s what we’re here to work out, that’s why we’re thrown together, that’s why the person is sitting next to us at the meeting.

We all end up together in the same room, the same meeting, the same house, the same family, the same workplace, the same social group, because we vibrate in harmony with each other. We are all dialed to the same station, attuned to the same dial. And, until we understand that, it will piss us off because we don’t like what we see. We don’t recognize it as a mirror.

In computer science, reflection is the process by which a computer program can observe and modify its own structure and behavior. When we begin waking up and getting conscious, we do the same thing. We may call it spirituality, we may call it self help, we may call it new age, personal development, metaphysical, personal growth, yoga, meditation, contemplation. We may not call it anything. But when we begin getting conscious, we begin doing it.

And the problem with a reflection is that it takes time to figure out how it works. Everything is backward because it’s facing us. We can get caught up in studying every little image we see in it, that we can’t see the big picture. Sometimes all it takes is a little distortion to hide something in plain sight. So here are are with this group of grumpy, know it all misfits and wondering how we ended up here. We don’t recognize that the sooner we work it out with these people on this small scale, the sooner we become of value and a source of strength to the ones who don’t have our combined thought power.

But I found through the years that most of these groups chose to keep an undercurrent of infighting and posturing in place, because that is what they are used to. That is what feels familiar to them. They like to dream about taking the next step up the ladder, but it feels so safe on the ground floor, even if they have to share it with a gang of disgruntled others. When they can make themselves take the next step, those gripey people and those fighty circumstances will move out of their experience.

But for those who recognize we’re all in this together, we can make good use of our time. We can skip all the personality conflict nonsense and band together for whatever we signed up for. We can be there to use our combined thought power to bring about understanding and change so that we can all live happy, fruitful and meaningful lives.

Yes, choosing our thoughts is a daily yoga. But since choosing our thoughts is also choosing our relationships, our environment, our career, our social life, our health, our happiness, it’s a practice worth cultivating. When a conflict arises, and it will, recognize that it is simply a thought, and you can choose to release the thought and not react to it, and not get cuaght up in the distraction.

The result? Whereas I spent years of my life in frantic, hamster wheel thought patterns, now I spend very little time in thought about anything other than what’s delightful, right here, right now in this moment.

Upgrade!