I’ve been getting more and more into mindfulness and meditation lately. I’ve been listening to the Waking Up app, and have been getting more invested in the idea that we are not our thoughts and feelings, we are merely a container for them.
When we feel stressed, or down, or get stuck in a loop of thinking it can be really easy to invest in the thoughts and feelings. We identify with them, we think they mean a lot more about us than they actually do.
I find myself over identifying with the feeling of sadness. If I feel sad I make up the story that it means I’m failing in some way. I tell myself I’ve made bad choices and I have to change things up in order to emerge out of the sadness, and become a better human.
In reality, sadness is just sadness, and it’s just temporary. When I see myself as a container for sadness, as the Waking Up app encourages me to, I can see that sadness is just a part of being human, and it comes in and it goes out. It doesn’t actually mean anything about me, it just is.
And when I do the same with thoughts – just notice them and let them come and go without investing heavily in them and making them mean all sorts of things about whether I am failing at life or not, everything feels so much easier, and lighter. I observe my thoughts, rather than attaching meaning to them.
Seeing ourselves as a container through which thoughts and feelings travel in and out takes us to a place of acceptance, it takes us to a place of peace. We are not our thoughts or feelings, we are merely observing them as they move in and out of our consciousness.
With love as always, Hannah and Team Bird
Photo by Matt Hardy on Unsplash