Are You Paying Attention?

elcome back. Over the last few weeks, I've been very busy with other things including some teaching. So it's been a while since I've made a post.

In my last post I talked about stalking your thoughts. I suggested that by examining your thoughts you might be able to discover the underlying beliefs, which are programmed into your mind, and how that belief got programmed in the first place. From that you could then go on and examine the learnings which placed those beliefs in your mind. Then you would be able to question these learnings and decide for yourself whether they were really true. So, for example, if someone told you when you were young that you should dress warmly or are you would catch a cold, you might find that later in life you caught cold quite easily. Examination of the belief might lead you to conclude that this learning was an erroneous one. As you let go of this unuseful learning, you might find yourself less susceptible to colds. The actual process of how this works is beyond this discussion, and will be covered in a future post. For now just be aware that, while the process is often more involved than this, if followed through to its conclusion it does work. You may be wondering whether it is possible to stop these unuseful learnings from interfering with your mind-body processes before they get a foothold. I believe this is very possible and in today's post I will talk about what you need to do to succeed at this. In order to stop unwanted thoughts and attitudes from influencing, or even controlling your life you need to do several things. I'll discuss three of these in this post. Awareness: If you wish to capture unwanted thoughts and feelings and prevent them from influencing your life you need to be aware of them. This means you need to be present.

If your mind starts generating its own thoughts and emotions, and distracts you from full awareness of inputs through your senses, these inputs will then be able to establish themselves in your mind. Left unattended to these inputs (thoughts, feelings, visual inputs etc.) will now be able to influence your view of your world. They begin to work on "auto-pilot", influencing your thoughts, beliefs, emotions and often even your physical sensations and health. This can occur without you being aware of it. Instead, you want to be aware of what is influencing your body and mind. Focus: You'll also need to focus on the thoughts, feelings, and visualizations etc. which are coming into your awareness in order to manage them. Multitasking will interfere with this process. If you're trying to do three or four things at once some of these thoughts etc. will be able to slip by your consciousness without your awareness. So it's important that you really focus on the one issue you are dealing with. Attention: Another factor which affects the process is the attention you give to the issue. If you allow yourself to be distracted, whether by other happenings occurring at the same time or by mentally drifting, you will find thoughts talking difficult. However, if you pay attention and stay on task, you will find this to be quite effective as a mental management tool. While there are other factors involved in the process, these three, awareness, focus and attention seem to be the main aspects you need to control in order for thought stalking to be effective for you. The process of thought stalking is not limited to dealing with negative issues or mind programs which affect your life. It can also be used in enhancing positive aspects of your life as well as in examining events in the learnings which occurred far in your past.