Boggles - Mindfulness Videos Articles and Tips

Coaching Videos & Tips - July 18 2019 No.612

HOW ABOUT A LITTLE POSITIVE THINKING

How positive (as in how good an approach) is positive thinking? To what extent does how we employ our thinking impact on the management of our state of mind? What impact do positive thoughts have on us?

 

Today's Quick Tip

Stop thinking for a couple of minutes and start simply observing... whatever is before your eyes, whatever sound or noise is filling your ears. Just observe. Don't think about what you're observing, just notice it.

Don't evaluate. Don't analyse. Just watch and listen. Don't say to yourself "Oh that's a cup of coffee" - it may well be but you even saying that takes you into the world ov evaluative thought... and, in life, that is not where the real action is.

And, if you'd like to go a little deeper, don't forget that you can browse all 611 "back issues" in The Archive!

When you think you distance yourself from now. When you think, you think in patterned circles. When you allow your thinking mind to take over, you can literally end up anywhere. However, the one thing you can be absolutely sure of is that, wherever you end up, it will, at best, only having a passing resemblence to the reality of where you actually are now.

Although thinking is designed to filter the here and now so that you can make sense of it, unlike filtering, where things come out the other end clearer, thinking muddies the waters. It creates a version of the reality of the moment that is unique to the thinker. And that is when all the trouble starts because, having come to the conclusion that we know what's going on (in reality we think we know what's going on which is quite a different thing), we behave, interact and react based on this false understanding. Thought is at the root of all problems.

Does this include positive thought? Well, you're going to have to watch today's video which explores this particular conundrum. But, if you glance at today's Quick Tip, it will immediately become apparent that you should be training your mind to not think... to let what's really going on do the talking, without your reinterpreting the moment through the same dirty filter that you've been carrying around with you, that has been clogging your mind all of your adult life.

In short, it's time to stop thinking and start being... we are human beings after all.

My infinitely better half is just back from a holiday with her own family in Ireland and has experienced, first hand, what she often thought was an Irish culinary joke on my part.

My original story related to a meal myself and a colleague had in an Irish hotel, that shall remain nameless, many years ago. My friend ordered spaghetti bolognses which arrived nicely arranged in a beaufiul white bowl. But, just as he was about to take the first mouthful, the waitress dumped half a ton of mashed potato and another half a ton of mashed turnip on top of his meal. And so the story passed into legend.

Fastforward to 2019. Lisa orders a dish of crabs claws in a well known restaurant in the West of Ireland. Just as she daintily picks up the first one, what is dumped on her plate?!

   

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