There have been times in my life when I felt this need to constantly work on improving myself. If I had some time to myself in the evenings I "had" to read a book that was helping me to "improve" some aspect of myself. I often thought about putting the book down and just enjoying a little television but I felt this constant pull that I had to be reading something that was "taking" me somewhere.
It wasn't until I learned about the Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought that I thought okay to take time off of constantly working on me. It was quite weird at first I will admit but what I found was the more I decided to just "relax" the more calm and peace I felt.
Now, what I really believe is happening is many of us have a very busy mind. We may be thinking about our marriage, our kids, our job, the economy, what food I'm going to eat, the next thing I want to purchase, what's on my to-do list, etc. All this thinking causes us to feel anxiety and worry to some extent. More for some and less for others. We may be thinking that constantly thinking about our nutrition, exercise, the books we want to read, what's next on our "self improvement" list is a good thing, but too much thinking about anything can be a negative thing. Remember, we are feeling our thinking from moment to moment. We feel our thinking NOT our circumstances. So, even constant thinking about things we see as "good" things can cause our mind to ramp up and get spun up.
I heard a really cool analogy regarding water flowing through a pipe. Imagine the pipe is your mind and when your mind is clear (or the pipe is clear) water is able to flow freely and effortlessly. Now imagine you have a bunch of thoughts in your mind and your thoughts are really ramping up. When this happens these thoughts get stuck on the sides of the pipe and now the water can't flow as freely as it did before. When you have too many thoughts going on or what I call a thought storm, the water has a hard time flowing and at some times it cannot flow at all. This takes us out of the present moment. These are the moments when we are so ramped up in our thinking we are having what some people would call a panic attack or we get into this fight or flight mode.
The water is going to flow no matter what just like we are going to have thoughts, no matter what. When we let those thoughts go and don't take them so seriously, they will flow on by and the next wave of thoughts will come. We may simply wave and think "wow, that was a silly thought I just had". When the water flows freely, we are able to listen to the innate intelligence we were born with. We are able to listen to our common sense or our gut instinct. We'll have great ideas and have no idea where they came from.
If we are constantly thinking we leave no room for new ideas to come to life. We leave very little room for joy and just sitting in the peace and calm.
I'll say it one more time. We are living in the feeling of our personal thinking from moment to moment. We DO NOT feel our circumstances and we DO NOT need to search for something "out there" or look at the circumstances of our life to "try and figure out" why we are feeling what we are feeling.
Here's the takeaway.
Constantly focusing on how you can improve yourself is likely keeping you from feeling joy in the present moment. You will think all day long no matter what. But, your thoughts are never real and they don't mean anything until you give them focus and meaning. Be okay with doing nothing and not having to work on your to-do list. If you do that you will be amazed at what will come up and how much you will enjoy the present moment.
Until next time.
Jackson
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