YOUR THOUGHTS ARE NOT WHO YOU ARE

– Consciousness focused meditation

When it comes to meditation I have through my personal experience learned a lot, mostly about myself and how my thoughts affect me.  After having read a lot and attended workshops, events, and seminars I still remember to this day the ideas that changed my perception towards meditation completely. I was sitting in my apartment getting ready to get into the meditation mode I had learned in a seminar session the day before. I had my mantra ready when I glanced my eyes over my bookshelf stopping at a book I had been gifted years before. In hindsight, it’s very strange that I hadn’t opened it before because it was by Eckhart Tolle. Now to be clear,  I believe in a non-hierarchical world where no one person has more importance than someone else, but it is still fair to say that some of us have studied more and are more advanced in certain fields and this applies to the writings that I started to read. As I said before these writings changed my perception completely and this is why: they made me understand that we are not our thoughts because if we were, how can we explain the fact that we can judge our thoughts and sort of distance ourselves from them. This means that we have something else in our minds besides our thoughts and this is our consciousness.

But what does this essentially mean?

Well, it simply means that our thoughts are the results of our practical mind – the part that can extract information from our environments, from what we have been taught, etc. Our consciousness, on the other hand, is our truth and our truest self which knows that our thoughts have been learned, influenced, and in some cases brainwashed to think that they are who we really are; mere constructions of our thoughts.  In essence, this sort of means that we have a little bit of training to do, and here mediation based on this information comes in very strongly. Instead of trying to quiet our minds of the thoughts that we think we ARE according to what we have previously mentioned, we can start to firstly meditate with the intention to connect with our consciousness.

This sort of means to become comfortable with the part of you that just IS and is that from your core. It is not the part of you that has a fully planned calendar of things that you believe you have to do, or the part of you that is full of thoughts about how you need to change your life to fit into collectively approved thoughts about what a desirable life is. It is the part of you that can look at all those thoughts and discern if they are truly yours (or if they came from outside influences such as family/friends pressure or ideas, social media, or simply educational or other socially constructed thoughts). It is the calm part of you that is existing above those lower functioning thoughts which are merely practical parts of our minds.

When we commit to living from the truth of our consciousness we experience power because then we are connected to ourselves and this can be achieved with meditation focusing on this sort of connection. When we achieve the state of understating that thoughts are primarily a practical tool for our existence we can start to treat them as such and thank them for what they are but at the same time understanding that they are not who we are and they are not the truth.–

by Una Baldvinsdóttir –by-una.com