"Mary, how do I not listen to my thinking?!"

Hello, hello, this is Mary Schiller, author and coach of MarySchiller.com, coming to you from Paris, France on this Monday in January 2018. As you can tell, I have a little bit of a cold, nothing major, feeling better today, got my voice back a little bit, so please forgive the slightly nasal quality to my speaking voice. I wanted to do this Facebook Live about a topic that came up the other day in my Let's Make Money Honey membership program. And just as an aside, if you're interested in joining that program, it is open for enrollment. You can find the information at maryschiller.com/money. And the question that was coming up in our private Facebook group for that membership program had to do with how not to listen to thoughts that we don't like or stressful thinking or anything that is creating a feeling that we would rather not experience. And I need to back up for a second because Even just understanding that your feeling is coming from a thought is an incredible leap in terms of what most of the rest of the world understands. So I need to point that out because, like I was for my entire life, most people are very confused about where their feelings are coming from. They think that they're coming from all kinds of stuff out there, events, circumstances, situations, other people, money, as in the case of our money group, you know, all kinds of things that can kind of have the appearance of creating a feeling in us. But in the conversation that you and I are having about the 3 principles, we know better. We know that in essence, there isn't anything out there. It's all being generated from within ourselves, from the thoughts that kind of randomly pop into our minds. We have certain feelings. And we're not even aware of most of these thoughts, by the way. They're flowing like a river all the time. And Again, seemingly randomly, we will sort of pounce on one and randomly deem that it's important enough to listen to. And so what do we do then if we pounce on thinking that seems stressful and we kind of follow it down that rabbit hole and we end up in a bad feeling? What do we do? Well, really, there's two things here. And I'll start with the simpler thing to explain, and then I'll get on to the slightly larger thing. The simplest thing to explain is that we don't have to do anything about this. If we are feeling badly, and I'm using that in a broad way, any feeling that we don't particularly like, there's nothing we have to do about it because It isn't like it's coming from a situation out there that we then have to try to change in order to have a better feeling. No, thoughts change all the time, just like water flowing in the river. They constantly moving, constantly shifting. And all we have to do is nothing, just wait it out. As I've mentioned before, when I first started to see this for myself, I experimented constantly with this to see if that would happen. So I would feel stressed out and I would just sit with that feeling and wait and see what would happen if I just didn't do anything. I didn't jump into trying to manage my experience and fix my thoughts. And if I had any judgmental thinking about whatever I was experiencing, like what's wrong with me, I just ignored all that too. And they found out through these experiments that if I just sat there and did nothing, the feeling moved on. Sometimes it would take mere seconds and I wouldn't even realize that that's what had happened. And suddenly I'd be like, oh, I feel fine now. What was I so upset about? Other times it would take longer. But it always moved along on its own. And it's a mirage. That we're looking at, if we think that we actually have something to do with that, we spend an awful lot of time trying to do something about that, that we could be spending doing other things like actually living our life. And so that's the first major piece is that there isn't anything to do. But there's another piece of this that's much bigger than that even, and that's pretty big. But when you know this one thing, it becomes super easy to ignore and kind of sit with those feelings that you know are coming from thoughts. Hi, Antonio, thank you so much for being here. So yeah, you're getting at the point I'm trying to make, Antonio, which is that we're looking at something that is all of the drops in the river. When we're looking at our thoughts instead of seeing the river itself. And instead of seeing the source of the river up here, you know, however you want to look at that. If you imagine that we're out in nature, we can spend our time analyzing all the little drops that are floating by in the river, or we can start exploring upstream and seeing what's happening at the source that is making all of this beautiful experience that we're having. And when you see that there is Thought with a capital T, meaning you're not focusing in on the minutiae of every single feeling that you're having, when you, you know, pull the camera back and you're like, whoa, I'm sitting in front of this amazing river called Thought, capital T, that is flowing in me and around me and through me and over me and behind me and all over and is giving me this incredible visceral experience of being alive. That makes it really easy to stop caring so much about what each individual droplet of water is doing at any given time. And in the program that I'm running that starts today called Living the Principles, the major focus of our conversation for 6 months is going to be looking at the source, looking towards the source. What is that? What is the source of thought? What is going on behind all of this thinking that we experience all the time? And how can we experience more of the calm, composed, relaxed, peaceful self that is always present no matter if the stream is sort of trickling along, or if it's rushing through and creating all kinds of waves that we are having some difficulty writing, it seems. So I would love to hear your thoughts and comments on this. Please feel free to post them wherever you're watching this video. And one note on that program called Living the Principles, it's a rolling enrollment. I plan to run it for at least a year. So if the timing isn't right for you to join right now, you can join anytime. You'll have access to all of the recordings of the previous calls as well. So I'll put the link to that also in the Facebook post here, and if you're watching this on YouTube, I'll place it there as well. Thank you so much for being here. If you want to reach out to me directly, please feel free to email me at mary@maryschiller.com. I'll talk to you again soon. Bye.