What are your thoughts saying?
Unfixed prompt
They call it peace of mind but maybe it should be peace from mind.
— Naval Ravikant
Stop reading for a moment. Listen. What are your thoughts saying today? Are they whispering sweet nothings or demanding impossibilities?
For the next four Thursdays, in anticipation of a new limited-series Unfixed Mind: Navigating Mental Health Today premiering October 29th at 2pm PST / 5pm EST, I will be focusing on the topic of mental health.
To begin the discussion, let’s explore our mental landscape. Many of you already have refined mindfulness practices and have spent decades “watching your thoughts.”
Often, my thoughts are a staticky collision of incomplete sentences, planning, looping nonsense. Perhaps an undiagnosed form of ADHD or just too many antennae. Therefore, in my personal practice, mindfulness is less about “taming the beast” and more allowing a spacious awareness to hold the noise, thereby lessening her grip on my daily life. I experience more peace letting my mind run free than tying her to a tree. What about you?
What does your mental landscape look like? When you pay attention to your thoughts, what do you hear?
How do your thoughts (and your relationship to them) change over time and circumstance?
What does “mental health” actually mean and how do you cultivate it?
Are you new to Unfixed? Or have you missed previous chapters? You can access them all for free with the link below. I recommend starting from the beginning.
I'm afraid I'm terribly literal and a bit boring... and my mental landscape looks a lot like our old lush, overgrown meadow in Vermont. Every now and then, different characters, or different creatures happen along, or even different weather breaks across it, and I'm mostly just an observer there... making up stories about what's occurring, connecting the disparate sets of knowledge, emotions, memories, hopes, fancies, disappointments, and imaginings to make up any sort of stories that make me feel better about the world and my place in it. If I’m following the arc of the hero’s journey in my life, that mental meadow is the place I always return to for solace... grassy and full of sky, an open field, yet still surrounded by a protective veil of woods.
While CBT therapy has its place, it really pushed my overthinking, pedantic, and obsessive self-criticism into overdrive. I interrogated every thought all day long. And during depressive episodes I was convinced every single thought was broken and wrong.
It has taken years, a decade nearly, to befriend my thoughts and stop being afraid of them. In meditation, I sometimes do the visualization where thoughts float down a river (like “ Pooh sticks” you watch pass under a bridge). I also use a visualization of having a sort of usher in my head...he welcomes each thought and gently sees it to its own special seat because every thought belongs (no matter how scary). It helps me to accept that no single one is more powerful than another. Thanks for the great question.