A million negative thoughts and feelings can come to beat me down but as I “go silent” they pass on by. I don’t have to go where thoughts want to lead me and I don’t have to feel what they want me to feel. Dismissing thoughts is like standing under a see-through umbrella; the negative thoughts rain down like bird droppings; they hit and splatter, but they’re not actually landing on me. I may still flinch when I see one coming, but as long as I stay under the umbrella I’m safe and unsullied.
If I abandon the umbrella and connect with a negative thought then I run the risk of becoming obsessed by it. Thoughts need my focus in order to disturb my peace or drive me toward negative reactions. I’ll end up saying what I shouldn’t say and doing what I shouldn’t do – all because I put a single thought under a microscope and magnified it until it was all I could see. To detach from negative thoughts is to go back under the umbrella. I may always see them and hear them splatter, but I don”t have to be adversely affected by them. In this way I am in the world but not of it.
You say it well my friend!
From our Lord’s wisdom another teacher/writer said, that thoughts never truly live because thoughts can never die. What can never be purged by God’s holy fire is only fiction. True life always passes through death. We are thus reminded our thought life is as the chaff winnowed and stripped from the wheat and taken up by the winds.
Very well, said. Thanks for sharing your pearls of wisdom. We are all in this life together for a reason. When we each give our input we get a much fuller picture. I love you, Doreen…