You Are Not Your Thoughts

We live our lives in our own minds. Our perception comes from our perspective, and since we can’t view the world in any other way, we don’t think to question it. But you are not your thoughts. 

Even though our thoughts are produced from our minds, they cannot be taken as truth. They’re biased by years of conditioning and teaching from unverified, unregulated sources. And it’s hard to understand because we don’t know any different. Like an animal that’s lived in captivity, we don’t have the perspective to imagine anything else. But that doesn’t guarantee our thoughts are right or accurate. It simply our best interpretation of events that's filtered through the small slice of consciousness we’ve acquired.

I’d heard this insight before but it landed again in conversation with a friend and mentor of mine, Larry Kesslin. This is what he said:

“I always believed that my thoughts were me, and for 61 years of my life that’s how I lived. And that I’ve been through a few experiences that have gotten me outside of my being, and that I’m more than my thoughts and I’m more than my feelings.

So in the first chapter of the book I talk about this concept that we’re three parts: We are mind, body, and soul. And our soul is the guide.

Our soul is the sky, our thoughts are the clouds, and the weather is our feelings. The sky just sees the clouds and experiences the feelings. It is not the clouds and it is not the weather. So who are we?

And as soon as I realized that I am more than my thoughts and feelings, I started to gain agency over my thoughts and my feelings. When I could get to the point where I’d have a thought and say ‘I don’t like that thought, next’, life started to change.”

What I make of this is, we can acquire a whole new perspective when we separate from our thoughts and feelings, and observe them. They’re not you, they’re just things being expressed by you externally. So when you have a negative, scary, or disempowering thought that doesn’t serve you, you don’t need to believe it. And because of that you don’t need to get so critical or judgmental that there’s something wrong with you. You can choose to believe what you want to believe about yourself, and act from that frequency instead.

This is just a snippet from a longer conversation I had with Larry where we go into way more detail about his new book, ‘The Joy Molecule’, and he tells some incredible stories about how he and others have found a deeply fulfilling joy.

Watch a recording of that conversation!

Order a copy of 'The Joy Molecule'