Thought Pattern Dissolve

Thought Pattern Dissolve.

Dedication.

This book is dedicated to anyone who at their lowest hour decided to keep going because they believed at some point in the future there is even the slightest possibility of a better life.

This book is dedicated to my psychologist who spent three sessions a week every week for three months and waited years just to get paid back after I lost my job to help me through my darkest depression.

This book is dedicated to my father,

Rob Bernstein,

Who changed the focus of his career to autism treatment and spent countless hours to help me have the ability to relate to others.

This book is dedicated to anyone who has the conviction within the core of their being that it's possible to control the mind,

Who despite endless years of the mind winning the battle has the will and determination to keep pushing on,

To keep experimenting,

To keep trying.

I'm going to tell you a story about the author.

I was born with OCD and autism.

I would be the kid on the playground sitting alone or digging the ground for bugs while the other children played together.

By 17,

I had also developed severe depression and general anxiety disorder.

Pulling away from my inner turmoil has been a lifelong process,

But it has been an essential one.

I've been forced to consistently look for techniques,

Methods,

And teachings to escape from my thought processes because my symptoms were so severe.

To be caught in them would be to live a life not worth living.

I have tried everything I could find.

I have taken risks.

I have thrown caution to the wind.

I've given up everything and crossed continents to find answers,

To be free.

There is nothing that motivates me more than to help others escape the confines of their minds and find peace and freedom.

I offer group meditation sessions to further assist in breaking down mental barriers and heal physically and on all levels.

These are donation-based.

All are welcome.

My journey with thoughts.

At first,

I used meditation.

I read books about Zen,

Went to Hindu temples,

Got instruction from my psychiatrist,

David Janeway.

I focused on the breath.

I counted.

I did this for years.

It was always helpful to relax before bed.

After an hour or so,

The mind would calm down and I could fall asleep more easily.

But during the day,

The turmoil would resume.

There was no real progress.

My thoughts tied into the depression and anxiety.

Later on,

When I began to analyze my thought categories,

As we'll do later in this book,

I understood that I had a huge category on finding problems,

Mining for all the things that were wrong,

Hadn't gone well,

And could go wrong.

All the focus on bad outcomes and negativity perpetuated and exacerbated the depression and the anxiety.

There was a moment during one of my long job searches.

I was alone in the cold basement of the Harvard Medical School library.

And for the first time,

I stopped my mind to get to the root feeling behind the thoughts.

What I felt was a sensation of such harsh pain in my chest,

It felt like a panic attack.

It felt like I was trapped inside a straitjacket.

This was the true character behind my thoughts.

In time,

Using this method,

I realized that the thoughts that I thought were only trying to help me were actually,

In their very nature,

Driven by very painful emotions and stored trapped energy.

How this process is different.

This process is for people like me.

People who cannot just stop the thoughts.

People who have thought trains,

Thought loops,

Thought marathons,

And thought tornadoes going on inside their head.

There are some methods that can stop the thoughts directly.

These are great later on.

But if you're in the middle of a consistent thought tsunami,

There are too many thoughts coming.

Moreover,

The binding of my awareness to the thoughts was so high that I could not break that attachment right away.

A bridge was needed.

A way to make incremental progress slowly but surely that would in time give me the mental strength and control to step away from the thoughts.

My meditation until this point had not been as productive as it could have been because I was skipping steps.

I was trying to completely stop the thinking when I was nowhere near having the strength of my mental grip to actually do so.

In humility,

I took a step back,

Admitted that I was not yet strong enough to just stop the thoughts,

That I had to work with the thoughts first in order to untangle them,

In order to make them weaker,

And I later realized in order to leverage the deeper aspects of the mind to do a lot of this work on my behalf and make the conscious effort required easier.

So if you can just stop your thoughts,

Great.

I refer you to Ramana Maharshi.

But if you cannot just stop your thoughts,

This process is for you.

This is your bridge.

When to use this technique.

Use it every day.

Use it when you are overwhelmed with the thinking going on inside your head.

Use it when after getting stuck in a thought loop for a while,

You finally realized what happened.

And just before you get pulled back into your thinking,

Whip it out.

This technique is in your arsenal now.

You're armed with a tool to interrupt the thinking that was going on and turn it back on itself.

Make this resolution.

The days the thoughts could just run on their own continuously in your mind are over.

It's a new day.

These thoughts are now not in total control running your show.

How it works.

After using this method for several months,

I look back.

I realized that I no longer had any thoughts mining for things that had gone wrong.

That whole category of thought was just no longer there.

There were other thoughts there about other things.

The other categories I had not yet eliminated were still generating thoughts,

But there were fewer categories.

I had gone from around 22 to 8.

And I do recommend that as you start this process,

Take out a pencil and paper and,

You know,

Just journal down the thought categories you have.

As you get a new thought on another topic,

Add that category to your list.

The flashbacks to the past still occurred,

But now only for a split second.

I would just see one image and not feel pulled to starting an investigation to learn from the memory all that I could.

The drive and pull to do that mental undertaking just was no longer there anymore.

This process works by changing the prioritization of the subconscious mind.

We are helping this part of the mind lift itself out of its own turmoil.

It learns to understand and feel that these thought categories actually are not helpful,

Not in your interest,

Not actually helping you to survive.

The mind as a marketer.

Think of your mind as a social media advertiser.

Your awareness is the consumer.

The marketer will keep showing ads,

Thoughts that it thinks will grab your attention.

Every second you follow the ad is a win for the marketer.

Its goal is to keep you glued and watching as long as possible,

To take 100% of your time in its process.

If you had 1% of the time for yourself,

The marketer would be at risk of losing its hold.

Keeping your attention hostage is how it keeps control.

Now,

We need to tell this marketer that we are simply no longer interested.

We don't want to watch any longer.

We know these ads are not going to solve any of our problems.

In fact,

They are the problem.

Losing our attention and mental space takes away our abilities to be creative,

To enjoy life,

And to actually solve and make progress on all the problems that the mind purports to address.

Grab back your attentional space.

The marketer does not deserve to control your most valuable asset.

Now,

The problem is that we cannot simply affirm,

Get away,

Marketer.

I know you are no longer useful.

If we try this and try just pushing it away,

Nothing happens.

I felt that I could spend my entire life steadfastly pursuing these techniques and nothing would happen.

This is because the mind is operating from a subconscious level and needs to be trained,

Needs to unwind itself.

It needs to do an excavation,

An elimination,

A reconstruction in order to fundamentally be different.

And only after this process did the change happen for me.

And then the mind just becomes different.

It acts differently because it is different at its core.

The operating system it runs on is no longer serving up thought categories and is more comfortable to let us untether from the thoughts.

The method.

Now,

We now begin to learn the method.

This is a series of questions that we ask ourselves when we find ourselves in the midst of a persistent or recurring thought pattern.

Step one.

Categorize.

We need to get a handle on the thoughts.

If we know something about them,

We are at once looking from an external perspective.

Our awareness is no longer fully united with the thought.

Let's take a moment to appreciate this.

If we are looking at the thought,

If we are saying,

This is what you are,

You are a thought about perhaps what I need.

We cannot at the same time be completely consumed by the thought.

And when our awareness is in this reflective standpoint,

The tides have shifted.

We are already winning the battle.

Categorization provides us with useful information.

We gain yardsticks by which to measure the marketer's activity.

We are building our marketing analytics platform.

To start our process,

We are looking for a small break in the thought process,

Just enough to give us the opportunity to begin asking these questions.

Once we start asking the questions,

We are in control and can proceed down our list here.

Internally,

We ask our higher self,

What kind of thought is this?

This is the question for step one categorization.

If we have seen this type of thought before,

We can place it into a category.

Examples of thought categories you might come across include next actions,

Problems,

Memories,

Conversation rehearsal,

Family problems,

Being hurt by others.

Come up with a short,

Concise name for each thought category that will be easy to remember,

Easy to store in the database we're building and assembling of all these categories.

For example,

After a thought,

We ask what kind of thought is this and realize,

Oh,

I'm planning my day.

It's a thought about what I need to do next.

Then come up with a category name and stick with it,

Such as planning.

I'm having a planning thought.

We're building a definition in our mind for this category.

We're training our internal algorithm to recognize any thought that looks similar to this,

And we're creating this internal algorithm now,

The thought category dissolution algorithm that's going to move and work to keep dissolving these categories one at a time.

The more we keep doing it,

The more we give it examples,

The better our internal pattern recognition algorithm becomes.

Ultimately,

We can more completely eliminate,

Diffuse,

And delete this entire category of thought.

Step two,

Purpose.

We need to get at an understanding of the actual fundamental driver of this thought,

Not what it appears to be on the surface level,

But what it's trying to do for us.

Is it trying to protect us?

Are we looking to hide,

And that's why this thought is coming up?

Do we not want to miss out?

Ask internally,

What is the purpose of this thought?

Wait for an intuitive answer to come.

The actual core purpose of the thought may be nothing like what it appears on the surface.

On the surface,

We just hear the content talking in our brain.

Although the content changes depending on our situation,

The purpose is the same for many of the thoughts we have over time.

And we are looking to get down to that core driver,

Intellectually invalidate it,

And move the thought out of our system.

If you understand the purpose of the thought,

You have its address,

You know where it lives,

And we are training our thought pattern dissolution software on where to find these thoughts,

To gather them for elimination.

Step three,

Invalidate.

We are now ready to challenge the thought.

We have created enough distance from the thought with categorization.

We know what we're actually dealing with,

With step two,

Purpose.

Now we have to prove to ourselves,

Intellectually,

That we really do not actually need this thought now.

If there is any remaining part of our mind that actually believes this thought is useful,

Then it is impossible to get rid of the thought.

We keep clinging onto it.

There is a remaining voice in the mind that actually believes the thought is necessary and creates the attachment and the bonding to the thought.

Once the mind knows at all levels,

Including the subconscious level,

That this thought is utterly useless,

We lose interest in the thought.

The marketer does not have an audience any longer.

We change the channel.

The question for this step,

Is this thought really necessary right now?

Is this thought useful?

Is this thought leading to better outcomes in my life?

Am I better off because I'm having this thought?

If the answer to these questions is yes,

Then ask yourself,

Is this thought repetitive?

And finally,

Is it actionable now?

Can I take whatever action is needed and leave it alone?

What we want to do is what is necessary and useful.

Take the actions in the world inspired by good thinking,

But then get ourselves out of these thought loops.

Let go of whatever it is we couldn't or didn't accomplish.

It just isn't worth it to keep having the thoughts.

The thoughts are ruining our lives more than whatever outcomes they are trying to achieve.

So even if we don't accomplish what the thought is saying,

It's better just not to have the thought.

We'll just be better without the thought.

If you're in meditation and having these thoughts,

This is a good sign that they are coming from the lower level of the mind or are just repetitive at this point and being repeated by the marketer just to steal more attention.

These thoughts are not actually needed.

In this step,

We gain the internal realization and conviction that I am better off without this type of thought.

Step three,

Release.

We now transition from the intellectual level to the feeling level.

The question we ask ourselves is,

Show me the feeling behind this thought,

Then wait.

There is no need to talk with the mind more now.

Wait and feel what sensation emerges.

When we stop the thought,

What we get is the feeling that was driving the thought.

The feeling is no longer being translated into mind verbalization and emerges into our awareness in its raw naked form.

The feeling,

The emotion,

Feel it in your body,

Feel it in your chest,

Your throat,

Your solar plexus.

Feel it and stay with it.

Feel it until it gently fades.

The more you feel it,

The more you get comfortable with it,

The more you are subconsciously sending the message that I am okay with you.

You do not need to speak with me any longer.

Conclusion.

Practice these steps.

Give it time and patience.

Tell yourself that you're thinking anyway.

You might as well do something constructive to solve the root problem of unnecessary thoughts.

And I want to hear from you.

Let me know how this process is going for you.

What are your most common thought types?

Drop me a line and let's help folks get better.

There's no limit to the people we can help.