HuffPost – The Blog – Don’t Believe Everything You Think: 5 Tips for a Happier Mind – By James McCrae
William James wrote, “The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” Victor Frankl wrote, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
The core principal informing Cognitive therapy is that our thoughts create our reality…. and we’re NOT well-served to believe most of our thoughts.
That’s a lot to digest as a concept. And yet, once we realize it’s power and habituate the implementation of observing our thoughts as somewhat “unstable and often arbitrary, shifting depending on context and contradicting our better instincts,” we can avoid the snake hole of identifying with those thoughts. Problems start to fade away.
James McCrae, in his blog post on HuffPost’s The Blog, “Don’t Believe Everything You Think: 5 Tips for a Happier Mind” explains the concept with the Metaphor of the Sea: “You are the consciousness (the ocean) from which your thoughts (the waves) arise.” YOU ARE NOT YOUR THOUGHTS. With the freedom of that reality in mind, you can observe your thoughts non-judgmentally, with genuine curiosity. His “5 Tips For a Happier Mind” are worth considering.