Thought – The Creative Power That Shapes Your Entire Experience

Untriggered: Discovering the Three Principles That Dissolve Triggers, Anxiety, and Stress
A six-part blog series for regaining the power to live your life how you want.

Part 4: Thought – The Creative Power That Shapes Your Entire Experience 

The third principle is called Thought.

This is different from our personal thinking, individual thoughts, habitual thoughts, inspiration, positive thinking, ideas, opinions, psychology, personalities—all habits of thought.

The principle of Thought is the creative force or energy resident in the Universe that is without form until we bring it into being as personal thought in all its various forms. We use this creative potential to shape our world.

The power at the tip of our minds is boggling. It's limitless. We are nexuses of pure life energy, taking unformed raw creative potential and constantly creating and forming powerful forces into being—unconsciously—with every breath, every heartbeat.

This might seem obvious. Yes, human beings think. Duh!

But stop a minute to think about it (ha!). The fact that we think and the fact that we can think are actually incredible.

Nothing exists until we give it thought. We create our entire world out of Thought. The creative energy of existence.

Our feelings and emotions come entirely from this creative power. Sometimes it's pretty one-to-one: I think something is sad → I feel sadness. I think something is wrong → anger. Scary thoughts → fear.

At other times, we think and think, going around in circles fast. We feel tired, fuzzy, confused. We double down, trying to think our way out—and become anxious. Anxiety, worry, tension aren't really emotions. They're the body's alarm system: “Slow down, stop the fast thinking—it's harming the system,” like pain telling us to change behaviour. Pull your hand off the hot stove! 

Natural emotions—sadness and anger felt in the flow of life—don't cause breakdown. We feel them and move on when done.

But we get very good at over-analyzing and overthinking. This creates problems—a toxic soup. The body breaks down under the onslaught. We call it “stress” and think it's natural. It's not. 

Stress on the body happens when we ignore the alarm and keep on going with the overthinking.

The simple truth is: We feel our thoughts—conscious and unconscious, aware and unaware.

This isn't a problem. A full life includes all emotions. We flow from one to another.

It only becomes a problem if we don't understand where feelings come from and double down on getting stuck in them.

I was working with a client who had been let go from their job, and they were having doubts about their capacity for a future high-performance role. What if they just weren't good enough?

They were being bombarded with familiar and true-feeling thoughts about how this job loss meant that they were "just like their dad after all" and "I'll never be good enough to make it, and why is my family still with me, my wife should leave me". 

Perhaps you have your own version of this. Where you go mentally when you want to beat yourself up, or maybe a habitual pattern because you think you deserve it or that it somehow motivates you to work harder. 

These types of habits of thought serve no purpose. They are expressions of life wisdom from the past. At one time, it would have been useful, somehow, to think this, and it has long, long outstayed its welcome.

Here's the kicker, though. As long as the specific thinking is attributed to something outside of ourselves in this moment, it continues. Our brain will try to fix it, but will go to "the wrong place" to do it. Creating a never-ending cycle of crappy feelings and thinking.

My client kept saying, "Well, it must be true because I keep thinking it. I just have to face facts."
 
The instant they saw that this thought creation was arising from them in this moment and not the past and not for any reason other than habit, it dissipated and left.
 
They grinned and instantly had full energy and capacity back. It looked inevitable that they would get a new position soon and likely a better, more enjoyable one than they had.

When someone begins to see where their experience comes from—and their part in it—everything changes. All on its own. Our system is meant to handle it. We can do this when we understand how it works.

We don't need to control thought, dissect it, or understand its content. We simply allow our inborn system to kick in. Creation flows naturally: We create what we need, then thoughts flow back into formlessness easily. We need do nothing.

In fact, trying to clear our minds often makes thoughts sticky. If a thought won't go away, it's because we're engaging with it somehow (even unintentionally—it's tempting!).

Once you know how it works, you live in flow—in an always-present now—rather than a stuck, frame-by-frame existence like an old movie stuttering along. You live freely, no brakes, letting go of control. And you discover there are no cliffs, no high waves to surf—they only existed in mind.

Understanding Thought is key to undoing triggers and stress—they're body responses to thought creations in the moment, not solid reality or truths about you or your past or even your future. 

What thought feels sticky for you right now? Notice it without fighting—what happens? I'd love to know.

(Next: Part 5 – Why Stress Isn't Inevitable – And How to Walk Away from It)

With Love, 

Sara Joy
 

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