Jake Burhans explains how anxious thoughts capture your attention like a spotlight, intensifying the emotions attached to them. The skill is learning to observe the thought without getting pulled in, then shifting your focus back to what you're doing. This practice, drawn from Michael Singer and Eckhart Tolle, helps you return to a calm state.
I need you to understand that thoughts are what are disturbing your inner peace because we have an anxious thought, right? Think about your awareness like a spotlight, and that spotlight is constantly shining on 3 different things, either an external event, a thought, or an emotion, right? Our awareness is separate. Wherever we're putting our attention, right, where attention goes, energy flows. So if we're putting our attention and our energy on an anxious thought, or a fearful thought or a guilty thought, we are then going to feel that emotion. So as thoughts come into our environment, we have to learn to develop our awareness to observe that thought and then let the thought go. And then we return to a regulated state of being. But that's why we're so dysregulated. That's why you don't have inner peace is because these thoughts are coming into your field just like a cloud. Oh, there's that negative thought. And you put your awareness on it and you're just shining the spotlight on it. You can't take the spotlight off it. You have to— okay, spot your awareness is kind of all over the place all the time, right? It is illuminating that negative thought, but then we have to move the spotlight off of it back to what we're doing, right? So, okay, I'm working, I am building the business. Okay. Oh, negative thought comes in. What if the— what if we go out of business, right? Your spotlight goes on that for a second, but we need to return the spotlight to what we're doing, to the task at hand. And that is the practice of letting go that Michael Singer talks about, that Eckhart Tolle talks about. We need to develop our skill of awareness and our ability to observe these things, let them go, and you will return to a level of peace that you're looking for.
