Jake Burhans teaches that thoughts and emotions are predictions your brain generates, not commands you must follow. Spend 5-10 minutes writing down every thought that arises to see how random they are. Recognizing them as events creates space to respond instead of react.
Day 2 of the Awareness Edge Challenge. We are helping you build the skill of awareness over the next 30 days so that you can stop being so stressed, so anxious, so overwhelmed, and you can have some inner clarity. So day 2's lesson is that thoughts are events, they are not commands. The brain's job is to predict. It's constantly trying to predict based on its past experience. Oftentimes we take all these thoughts in our heads and we treat them as commands of reality and we have to follow them. A really good integration exercise that you can do is sit down for 5, 10 minutes and just write down every thought that comes to mind on that piece of paper. And then look at how ridiculous and random all those thoughts are. And then reflect on the fact that you were just listening to all those thoughts. You had a thought that you had to go here and you had to fix this thing, you had to talk to this person, and what if I can't do it? What if I can do it? The mind is all over the place and its thoughts are so random and scattered because it's just constantly trying to predict all the time. So seeing thoughts as events and not commands starts to give you some space in your life to create separation, and you're then able to respond to things instead of reacting all the time. So you observe that thought again, it comes into your field, you observe it. It's not a command, doesn't mean— it's not the truth of anything, it's just the brain trying to predict. You can observe it, oh yeah, there it is, and let it go. So simply just reframing that, and we're really building that skill of awareness. And not only are your thoughts events, so are your emotions. We can start to look at our emotional states like this as well. When we feel anxious, angry, sad, guilty, doubtful, worried, those are just feelings in the body. We can separate from them mentally. But practice that today. I want you to keep in mind that thoughts are events. Thoughts are things. They are not commands.
