Letting Go Of Habitual Thinking

Practicing embodied presence,

Moving from the unfelt known into the felt unknown of our lived experience.

Let's look more closely at exactly what it takes to shift away from our habitual ways of orienting to the world around us,

Particularly as it has to do with our mental thinking.

Let's practice looking more clearly and more closely at all those habitual thoughts that go unexamined or unquestioned.

And let's become more aware of how much we use our mental thinking to override and overtake our sensate experiences of living.

While our identification with our thoughts can often help us to feel like we know ourselves,

They are often not very helpful when we're wanting to feel connected to the world.

The thoughts that we have most often are simply thoughts that have become quite familiar to us.

They give us a sense of what is known.

It's typically through the familiarity of our thoughts that we know ourselves to be.

However,

We can become over-identified with our habitual thinking,

As well as with our thinking minds.

How often do you notice when your mind begins to override or interrupt your experience of living?

Well,

At least whenever you notice this,

You have the awareness of your mind taking over,

And it holds the potential for it being called into question and allows you to shift into another way of being.

In practicing the orientation of radical wholeness proposed by Philip Shepard,

It's a big deal to give ourselves permission to slide past habitually troubling thoughts that happen in our minds and instead dropping into the presence of our own embodiment.

We all have familiar thoughts that trouble us and create obstacles for us.

And when this happens,

We feel our thoughts thinking us.

And when we find that our thoughts are thinking us,

Our thoughts are kind of like an echo chamber,

Repeating themselves to us in their familiar ways.

Being able to drop out of these fixed loops of thought rather than fighting with them or indulging them is liberating.

But how do we let go of thoughts that seem to cling to us?

An embodiment practice is so important because our thoughts have to let go into something else,

Into a larger container.

We have to be able to surrender our thoughts into our bodily experience where we can feel contained with our very being.

And in order to be embodied,

We must learn to tolerate feeling our physical sensations long enough to more fully inhabit them.

It takes an ongoing practice to allow our thoughts to melt back into sensations and to feel awareness of our physical being as a presence.

I'll say that again.

It takes an ongoing practice to allow our thoughts to melt back into sensations,

Bodily sensations,

And to have an awareness of our physical being as a living presence.

It's hard enough to do this when we have untroubled thoughts in our minds.

And it's so much more difficult to do this when we're having troubling thoughts.

Isn't it something the way a particular thought can set off an inner alarm?

Then trouble grows inside,

Makes us anxious.

It's striking how real that trouble starts to appear to us in our minds and how our thoughts can have a life of their own inside our heads.

Perhaps you're wanting to learn to call into question some of these habitual thoughts you hold in mind.

Or perhaps you're deciding to challenge some fixed belief or common assumptions you've held about the world that cause you to suffer.

And because of this,

Really needs to shift.

Or maybe you just want to learn how to let go of your thoughts and live more from an embodied experience.

We need opportunities to practice the questions of familiar troubling thoughts or beliefs that tend to go unexamined.

In the work of Christopher Bullis,

He refers to these assumed and unexplored thoughts and beliefs as the unthought known.

The unthought known.

And the unthought known is just what we already know that requires no further thinking.

We don't tend to wonder about or feel into those thoughts we simply take for granted.

And the benefit and the cost of this is we don't have to think about our pattern thinking.

It's like driving on the familiar streets of my neighborhood.

The roads are just there and driving on them is unthought.

Requires no thought for me.

And whatever is very well known and understood becomes a fixed pattern in us,

Kind of like a default setting in our mind.

So it's always running,

For better and for worse,

In the background of our subconscious minds.

And we don't appreciate how much trouble our minds can make from these oversimplified expectations,

Assumptions about reality that we don't even think about anymore.

And of course,

When our minds are making this kind of familiar trouble,

The solutions we come up with in our minds actually become the real trouble.

I'll say that again,

When our minds are making familiar trouble,

The solutions we come up with in our minds sometimes are actually the real trouble because our solution-seeking minds will tend to have the same level of consciousness that started the trouble in the first place.

Questioning our habitual thinking can be really hard to see and do on our own because our thoughts just make so much sense to us.

This doesn't mean that our thinking necessarily works.

Our thoughts just feel right because they feel familiar.

We identify with them and we can easily understand them.

In fact,

Much of our thinking is created to protect us from the world around us and therefore is defensive in its functioning.

And our thoughts can serve to remove us from our experience of reality or to cope with our experience of reality rather than to accept our realities and learn to live with them and to live in reality.

So instead of simply engaging our habitual thinking,

Which requires no real effort on our part,

We're learning to practice letting go of what we tend to habitually think.

And instead,

We practice allowing our bodies to become resonators for us.

This is how we go deeper and get past the familiar trouble in our minds.

Our bodies can be felt as resonators.

They work like vibrating instruments,

Just like a bell that rings out when struck.

And whether or not we are aware of this,

Our bodies are always resonating.

We're always being impacted by what is happening around us.

However,

When we overthink,

We tend to constrict and contract in our bodies.

It's very difficult to hold a fixed thought in our minds without also having our bodies' musculature becoming fixed and tense as well.

For those of us with obsessive-compulsive tendencies,

It will be quite anxiety-producing for us to consider letting go of our thoughts and not at all relaxing to let go into a felt sense of our bodies,

At least not at first.

Have you noticed how surprisingly difficult it can be to let go of a thought?

Have you noticed how profound and unnerving it can be to simply let go into your body's felt sense of what is?

And if it feels quite difficult at first to let go,

Then we can think that it's harder than it really is and we don't tend to stay with the process.

And if it's easy to let go,

Sometimes we don't value it as it doesn't count to us or we just don't appreciate it.

Regardless,

If we could just keep shifting from the unfelt known of our current experiences into the felt sense of what is yet unknown,

What could that do for us?

What if you could practice suspending the familiar trouble of your mind's overriding judgments or suspicions or interrogations and remind yourself that what is making you anxious is most likely not at all about to happen and simply come back to the reality of your embodied sensations and your breath?

The minute we become aware once again of our body's basic grounding,

Practicing embodiment with the intent to drop deeper into the solid ground of our own being and into the ground of the earth,

And when we practice letting our breath gradually drop down into our pelvic bowl,

We can begin to feel and sense the quality of our own settled presence.

Once we are there and grounded and settled,

We can shift our awareness to others who may be with us,

To the presence of the room that we're in,

Or perhaps the presence of nature that surrounds us if we're outdoors,

And simply begin feeling into that and having an exchange with that.