This is the foundation of all of this work. Catching your thoughts as they come in is one of the most powerful tools you can use to see, know, and hear yourself and others. Picture a heart monitor at a hospital, the one where you can look up and see the screen as it reads the activity of your heart. What if there was a similar monitor for our thoughts — can you imagine watching as our average of 6,200 thoughts per day pass on that screen? I sure wouldn’t want anyone else to see that screen, yikes.
The real trick to catching thoughts is once we are aware of them, we need to figure out what to do with them. We need to figure out whether they help us or hurt us. A good metric to determining the nature of our thoughts is to ask: Is this thought true? Is it right, is it good? If it’s not, what do I need to replace it with? When you monitor your thoughts as they come in, you may find that some assumptions or judgments have crept into your thinking about a particular thing or person and it’s impacting your attitude or feelings toward them. Catch that thought right there, wrestle it to the ground if need be, and replace it with a fresh perspective. Regular processing and releasing of any false assumptions or judgments will lead to less bitterness and more forgiveness, thus creating more space for us to see ourselves and others as they are.
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