Navigating Life with Ease – What Thought Vs Thinking Means from a 3 Principles Perspective

Welcome. This podcast is a series of candid conversations exploring the human experience from a completely new perspective. In it, we will be diving deeply into the meaning of commonly used words and pointing you away from that old stressful way of looking at life and towards a new paradigm. This will help you find a sense of calm, cultivate meaningful relationships, and create harmony in every aspect of your life. Here is Navigating Life with Ease with Michaela Ellis and Claire Downer.

Oh, dang it.

We keep saying this. I know better. So we know who's saying hello. Maybe if it's your word, you say hello or vice versa. Anyway, sure.

Hello here. That's what we'll use going forward.

Yeah.

Hello. Nice to see you, Claire. Yeah, I'm good.

You too? Good.

Yeah. I have a word, actually. It's, it's coming up as two words.

Go on then.

But they're close enough. They're so close. I think that it really would be helpful to explore it. Thought versus thinking.

That's a good one. And, and one that I think we can get quite tangled up in when we're in this conversation, which is why I don't really, I don't really. Yeah. Hang much on thinking really these days because, because it, it is, can be just so tangled and messy. But I guess like traditionally, I suppose in the three principles we, you know, thought is this energy, the creative energy of the universe, I suppose is what people tend to say. It's this aliveness, it's. It's something that we all have access to or we all are maybe. Whereas thinking is something we do far too much of. Interest. Interestingly, I was, I'm, I'm part of a mentoring scheme in the UK and we have these little sessions where we get together and me and some other mentors and, and yesterday I really noticed that as, as these people were asking for some support with, with things they were struggling with, with the clients they had, that busy mindedness seemed to be top of the list of things that they were struggling with really. And you could wrap all sorts of other things around it, but doing a lot of thinking was pretty much it. You know, that was the diagnosis, doing too much thinking. And maybe that is like the diagnosis for everything really. I think Sydney Banks said that, didn't he? Something like that. That there only is one mental illness and it's thinking of, you know, whatever flavor. We happen to be caught up in the moment. And that's it, isn't it? That we're all doing the thinking thing all the time. And yeah, we, we create Our reality through that. And everybody else is doing thinking also, but they're doing a different flavor of their thinking. And thus people don't like each other and people fall out with each other and people fight with each other and, you know, blow each other's countries up and whatever the heck else people do. All because of thinking. Mad, when you think about it. Yeah, thinking's the tricky, the tricky one, I think. But, you know, also, I guess thought, the, you know, the versus bit, thought is what means that you and I can make a P podcast while you're sitting in Canada and I'm sitting in the uk. It's this, this somebody thought of this system called Streamyard that we use for recording our podcast. How the heck did they do that? Well, because somebody had an idea and, and that to me is more like ideas, I feel like thought, universal thought, this intelligence, the universe that, that's, that's got this sort of newness to it. New ideas, new things that come to life, new things like, you know, the ability to have conversation across thousands of miles, whereas thinking is that very personal, repetitive, you know, when you have some thoughts and you, when you begin to see this, you just start to go, I've been having that same stupid, horrible thought for the last 40 odd years or 50 odd years. Oh, my God. I've thought that about myself or about the world or about what I think's right and wrong for literally for decades. And it's just repeating the same old habitual thinking day and night, which is crazy really, when you think about it. So, yeah, two, two things, and I think they both come with a feeling. So I think when we access that energy, when we access that, connect to that, it either things that come from that space have this. Yeah, there's just this peace to them. You know, the peace, love and wisdom bit. And the thinking you're thinking, you know, that old repetitive, habitual, often not very nice stuff is. Comes with a feeling too. And that's a feeling that's not very nice. Uncomfortable, perhaps you would call it tight and stressed and tense sensations in the body. And that's a gift. The differentiation between the two is really easy when you start to get into your body rather than your head. Because often people say, you know, how do I know if it's wisdom? How do I know if it's, you know, universal thought? And, and, well, really just trust the feeling that she guide. Good one. It's officially three words that Michaela.

Yeah, it is. Yeah.

There. I've got no thinking about that. All really.

I Did have a little bit of thinking about it before, but it's just like, you know what. This is how it's coming up. So. Going with it. Yeah, yeah, I've. You know, from. No, I was going to say from the beginning, but it wasn't really from the beginning. Sometime along my journey after, you know, first coming into this conversation about how the mind works. What are. What we're really experiencing. It was a ways in before I could even consider thought. And, you know, Sydney Banks, I believe he talked about little thought, you know, with a capital T and a lower T or small T and thinking. And it's like I couldn't even go there. It's like, wait, I'm just. Let me. It's like. Well, this idea about levels of consciousness that you see something and then you almost have to kind of live it. And then you'll. You're able to see something more. And I've. I've seen something more about this thought versus thinking. And it was way simpler what I see now than what I did, what I used to see. And yeah, this idea about thought because that we have no control over the thoughts that come to mind. They're just gonna come. Just like we speak about thought being clouds in the sky. You know, we can't control them. They come up and they go away, they change, they mutate, they become something. The thing about them is the thinking part is our activity of. And it's a simple activity of as I'm seeing it now. And I'm curious to see how you. How you see it too. But it's like it's an activity that we do with our attention. We give it attention. We put some focus on it and we think about it. We maybe mull it over. We. We expand, we shrink it. We, we, we, we. It's like the association game where, you know, a thought will come to mind and. And then we might grab on to it and then it's like, ooh, well, if that's that, then it could be this or, or that could happen or. Or whatever. And with every. Every association with. With more thinking about that thought, we are feeling something. And yeah, the, the body, as you said, lets you know whether it's something worth thinking about or not. I was speaking to a client yesterday and we were talking about.

How the.

World that we've created. And we each create our own unique little world that only we see it in that particular way. And the. And it's created with thought. And when you kind of see that, we went into that. We were Talking about, you know that it's a choice whether you think about a thought, whether you put action to it, attention to it, whether you do anything with it or you just let it go by. And she said, well, what, well what if it's a good thought? Because we were talking about some things that weren't having her feel very good. And she said, well, what if it's a good thought? Then I said, go for it. Think, think, think, think, think about it. If it's feeling good to you, go for it. And it's like, oh, that's the thing. Thought and thinking are two different things. A thought, we have no control over it either. It comes to mind unbidden. Sometimes we go looking for things, for thoughts. We look for things, but we still don't have any control over what comes to mind. It'll just come up. What we do have some choice in is went.

Is.

Is. Is holding it there, is jumping into it, is tangling about in it, thinking about it, pulling it apart. And as you said, it's like once you are really, when you're, when you have, when you allow yourself time to just be quiet and, and notice what's happened, I always see it kind of as a stepping back and you can see what's happening. Often when it feels good, we kind of go in full bore and when it doesn't feel good, we kind of get stopped. We might still be in full bore and we might dive in deeper trying to change it. But actually just noticing how that feels in the body is the indication of, oh, a reminder. Oh, this is the choice, choice point. This is the point where I get to choose whether I want to continue to think about this or carry on, let it drop and, you know, carry on really. Because another thought is going to come in as soon as you allow that one. Like, allow your attention to fall away from it. And there's many ways, of course, that you can do that. Yeah, it's.

It.

See, it seems so much simpler than I saw it when I had a look at it a long time ago. Now it just is like, oh, this feels way simpler. And it does get simpler the more you are willing to see how.

To.

Really notice how your experience is created, to notice how your mind works, to notice that, oh yeah, whether it's a, a thought from universal intelligence which is just like, you know, it, it has a feeling to it, or whether it's a thought that comes from another place, our personal mind, something may be trying to scare us or push us or motivate us. I've been into this pushy thinking. I've been pushing myself around a bit over the last while with my own thoughts, with my own thinking. We can do all that. But the good news is that you can change at any time. Once when you notice. When you notice it. Yeah.

You have to see it in the moment, don't you? And you don't always. And I think that's something to put in here as a caveat really is that some, some days you're gonna catch it and other days you're not. Some days you're going to get on the train to crazy town in your mind and not realize that you don't actually have to get on that train. You could get on the next one that's going somewhere really nice. And we all, we all do that. We all get lost in thought sometimes in thinking and I think it's, it's good to know that's okay because otherwise what I see happening with the people I work with who often are very. Have a very loud inner critic anyway, that there's some sense of failure and then there's just more thinking about more busy mindedness and then less clarity. Less clarity is available and it just makes the mind even busier. There's just more thinking really. And that, and I think sometimes self compassion can almost be the antidote to that top layer of top layer, bottom layer. I don't know which side it is of thinking that's very judgmental when, when we go right, well we've been listening to Michaela and Claire talk about this and we know, we know it intellectually and yet still we've snapped at somebody or we've done something we wish we hadn't done and we believe some thinking maybe for a little while and that's not felt good and it's made us behave in ways that we might not appreciate. I think maybe the first bit of thinking to put down there is the hardness on ourselves and being. I actually think compassion is the circuit breaker really there self compassion and, and you know, maybe compassion for other others who equally are believing their thinking. You know I did a live on insight timer the other day about separate realities because you know it's like, it's like if you think about like.

If.

You imagine ice cream going through an ice cream factory and it probably to a point goes through exactly the same process if it's in the same ice cream factory, you know, the same ingredients are going in and then at some point there's going to be a swirl of something put into the ice cream it might be raspberry ripple or it might be chocolate and I don't know, little things. Haagen, Das and Ben and Joey's put. All other ice cream is available. They put lots of fun things in their ice cream and. But before that ice cream is. It's going through the same process. Like we're all thinkers and we're all doing the thinking and it's just we've got our own unique flavor of that and everybody's got their own unique flavor of that and and to every one of us that looks flipping real. That looks like the truth, doesn't it? And we can come, we can butt heads with other people if we think that there's only one way of thinking about things. And again, you know, we can see that by the feeling, can't we? Because if we're in a. If we are but in the heads with somebody else, there's. There's definitely a God awful feeling that comes with that, isn't there? You know, most of the time I should know. I have a lot of thinking about other people's behavior and how people don't live life Claire's way, you know. But yeah, not, not funny for a long time because I really did think that was the case and I believed that thinking for years, quite frankly. But there was one way of doing life right and it was mine. Everybody else was wrong based. I mean there's something there about siege. It's just so powerful, isn't it? The illusion. I love the Jack Pranc which you know, that all we are is peace and love and wisdom and the ability to create the illusion that we are not that. That's one of my favorite quotes in this understanding. Just so true, isn't it that that thinking creates the illusion that we are not. Peace, love and wisdom.

On that beautiful note.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you Claire.

Appreciate you being three words. Thank you. I'll see you again. Thank you everyone. Take care. Most love how. Bye.

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