Hello and welcome to 5 minutes in nature with me Liz Scott.
It's quite mild for this time of year,
We've had a lot of rain,
A lot of dampness,
Underfoot is quite mucky and muddy and the trees now,
There's only a few that are clinging on to their leaves,
Most of them have been whipped off in the gusty stormy weather and you can probably hear it's still very windy with me today,
The wind is rustling through the trees,
The branches and the remaining leaves on this particular oak tree I can see right beside me.
And today I want to spend a bit more time exploring the nature of thought and I heard this really lovely metaphor to explain what happens with thought and I want to share it with you.
The way to understand thought is to see it a bit like,
Well maybe let's use the analogy of fallen leaves,
Leaves on a stream or river.
It's like the fallen leaves that are floating downstream on the river and the river is covered in these colourful yellowy orange leaves that have fallen from the trees and the river is taking these leaves downstream.
If you see thought as a river with these leaves in it and you imagine that the leaves all represent different thoughts,
Then the way it seems to work is that we get distracted by some of the thoughts that whiz through our minds.
Now bear in mind I read somewhere or heard someone say that we have thousands of thoughts a day,
Maybe a hundred thousand thoughts a day,
I can't remember the exact figure but there's a lot of thoughts and we don't believe them all,
We don't act on them all.
What happens though is if we've got a river of thought with all these hundreds of thousands or thousands of thoughts running by every day,
We tend to just pick some of those thoughts from the river and believe them.
So rather than seeing them and just letting them go on by,
We pick them up.
Another analogy came to me and I imagined looking inside a wardrobe with all these different clothes or costumes that you might like to wear.
Now the costume only comes alive when you've got somebody who's inside it operating it as a costume.
Imagine a Halloween costume or a Father Christmas costume or you're going to a fancy dress party in a costume.
The costume in the wardrobe is just a bit of cloth but when we step into it and inhabit it,
We become it,
We become the costume.
Does that make sense?
So the costume is like thought,
It's like some thoughts we might take out of the river and some thoughts we might put on ourselves as if they were a costume and we become them.
So one of my very common thoughts for example is a sense of overwhelm.
Sometimes I just feel as though I've got too much on and the world is overwhelming and I get lost in overwhelming thoughts.
Now I put on the costume of overwhelm and the whole world looks overwhelming to me.
Everything looks overwhelming.
Another way of describing thoughts is that you've got tinted colour spectacles that you put on.
If I put red tinted spectacles on then the whole world is tinted red.
So if I've got a thought that say for example is I'm not good enough or I lack confidence and you put those spectacles on of I'm not good enough then you look around you and the whole world is tinted with that belief I am not good enough and you start to see evidence to support the thought.
Today is all about looking at the power of thought and when you start to see the nature of thought that you don't have to pull it out of the river,
You don't have to put those spectacles on,
You don't have to step into the costume.
When you see thought as neutral until you give it energy then you're seeing life as it actually is and we forget you me and everyone and we put those tinted glasses on and we see the world in a frightening way.
But when you start to see the nature of thought then you don't do that so often it makes no sense and when you see the nature of thought you align yourself with how the world actually works.
So whether you see it as a river of thoughts maybe thoughts running down a river or a pair of glasses you put on or a costume you might step into remember that thoughts are neutral until we give them energy.
See what turns up for you today as you reflect on the neutrality of thought.
