119 How Do I Stop My Thoughts and Stay in the Present? Q & A

A beginning meditator is working her way through these podcasts starting at 1, the introduction, and moving forward.  She wrote in asking how to stop her thoughts and her mind from roaming and how to stay in the present?  Though I am a psychotherapist and these podcasts are offered to be spiritually helpful, they are not psychotherapy.  If psychotherapy is ever needed, please reach out to a psychotherapist. 

These podcasts are here to support your personal path of awakening whatever that might be. I feel they are most powerful when listened to in sequence from podcast one forward because each is built on the last. Though they, also, all stand on their own. If anything does not resonate, please disregard it and follow your heart. All my podcasts and website are free. Enjoy!

Though I am a psychotherapist, and these podcasts are offered to be spiritually helpful, they are not psychotherapy. If psychotherapy is ever needed, please reach out to a psychotherapist.

www.williamecooper.wordpress.com for more support. You may, especially, enjoy the short contemplations and the resource page which gives you some supportive material.

Transcript

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Hello everybody, I hope your week is going well. Welcome to Awakening Together, Relaxing into Happiness. This is William Cooper. Just recently, somebody sent me an email asking me a question, so I thought I would take this podcast and answer this question because I feel like it affects all of us on some level. Natalie wrote, Dear William, this week I stumbled across your teaching on the Insight app. I've been listening to a couple of podcasts each day and I'm at number 12. Right now, by the way, I have about 118 published podcasts, so she's on number 12. She continues, I have a question which I wondered if you could help me with. I started to meditate and when I'm not busy with work or general life, I'm just perhaps at home with my husband. How can I keep my mind from wandering into quote unquote thoughts? For example, we've eaten and perhaps we'll spend an hour on the sofa. I either do some work or we watch TV. How do I stop my mind roaming and stay in the present? Kind regards, Natalie. Great question, Natalie. I really like it because it gets to the heart of the awakening process. It has us look at our mind, what our thoughts, what is awakening, what is happiness, what is our being. There's a lot of embedded information to be talked about within that question. Let's start and let's talk about it. First, Natalie, I really like how you're starting with the beginning of this series of podcasts, starting with number one, the introduction, and working your way forward. Although each of these podcasts stand alone, they're very powerful when you start at the beginning because each podcast builds on the last. What I attempt to do in these podcasts is take lots of major experiences that I've personally had and condense them in an orderly fashion to be helpful to those that are awakening and to shine some light on perhaps what your path might open up into. Some of my experiences won't apply to you at all, so just disregard those, but the ones that do might get you thinking about what's going on within you. What are the mechanics of awakening? In a later email with Natalie, when I asked her if it was all right for me to use her email, she said yes. She hoped it would help others. Also, she said that she was a new meditator, and so a lot of this information that's available from various sources, although is very good, is sometimes scattered and not well organized. In this series of podcasts, I attempt to pull a central focus together so that anybody can listen, find their center, and then from there, listen to all the other good teachers that are out there, but you have some sort of organizing principle at your core. An organizing principle that will make sense to you because with each podcast, you can check in with yourself and see how much of that podcast really applies and makes sense to you. Does it or does it not? The last sentence of Natalie's question is, how do I stop my mind roaming and stay in the present? Very good question. So first, we're always in the present. There is no other place to be. The real question is, are we experiencing the qualities of our being, which is joy, love, happiness, well-being, peace? Every good experience that you would imagine is the quality of our being. Are we experiencing that completely or are we separate from our being? And because we are separate, we're feeling pain. We're feeling anxiety and fear and hurt and abandonment and anger and frustration. Those are the qualities of separation. We can feel them in the present moment. We're still in the present moment, but we're experiencing perhaps those negative qualities of separation rather than the radiance and light of who we are. So that's often what people are referring to when they say how to stay in the present. It's not really staying in the present. It's because we can't not be in the present. It's how do I feel my fullness of my true self rather than the pain of my false self, my separated self? I told Natalie in another email that I was glad that she was listening to all of my podcasts because as she advances through the podcast, she will find the answers because we open up step by step by step and cover a lot in each and every one of these podcasts. I'm going to try to condense and put together a lot of parts in this one podcast that she will discover as she listens to all of the other podcasts. And she'll discover it more thoroughly because she'll have more content to listen to as well as more time to check inside of her and her own practice to see what's true for her and integrate and deepen. For now, let's start with who we are. Our being, every single one of us is the same. Our being is made of light and love and well-being, peace. It's radiance and it's an explosion. It's like electricity. That's all we are, a brilliant light. Each and every one of us is that. The problem is we are either distracted away from experiencing who we are all the time and we're involved in other thoughts and emotions that are capturing our attention or we've shut our eyes to who we are and we're just blocking it out. We're usually either blocked or distracted by our thoughts and our emotions. So let's look at thoughts and emotions for a moment. What are thoughts and what are emotions? Will we make them up? There are hallucinations. There are helpful tools that we can bring into creation as a hallucination. We can picture what an elephant looks like. We can picture how to fix our car. We can picture how to go to work, how to travel, how to do so many things. We picture these things. We hallucinate them. When we want to carry even more information, we condense it into emotions that give us a lot of information about different situations. We can feel fear and anxiety or hurt or reluctance or frustration. So many pieces of information. You notice that all that I just talked about, hurt, fear and anger, those aren't positive pieces of information. The reason why is because emotions are created by putting an overlay on what we always experience. If we didn't block ourselves, we would always experience ourselves as light and love and peace and well-being. So emotions can be used to tamp down all those good qualities. And just like a light going through a projector, create an image on a screen by blocking some of that light. Well, that's what our emotions can do. And the more light they block, the more they seem like there's not so much light present. They seem like anger or fear or hurt. Those are the blocks that occur when we feel separated from ourselves. So to the degree that we feel separate, we are blocking ourselves. When we block ourselves, by definition, we don't feel what we actually are because we're blocked. We don't feel that we're love. We do not feel that we are light or well-being or peace or wonder or every good quality. Instead, we feel that we are not those things. Because we feel that we aren't what we already are, we start looking for what we feel that we don't have. Although we are love, we start looking for love. Although we are peace, we start trying to get peace because we're blocked. We don't feel the peace that we are. Although we are fulfillment itself, because we're blocked, we don't have the benefit of feeling and experiencing that. So we spend a lifetime trying to create that. Why is that important in the context of Natalie's question? Because most of our thoughts, about 95% of them, are what I would call psychologically motivated thoughts, which are trying to get very important things, things that you need to live your life happily that you don't feel that you have, that none of us feel that we have when we're separated from ourselves. So we spend a lifetime trying to get love and generate a lot of thoughts around that. Or a lifetime trying to get peace and calmness. And we spend a lifetime trying to get happiness. But we are happiness. We are love. We are peace. It's just that we don't feel that. So we generate lots and lots of thoughts. Sadly, those thoughts will never stop until we dissolve the separation and start to experience ourselves as what we already are. When we start to experience ourselves as deep love and happiness and well-being, ah, we relax. We don't need to think so much. Because we're not looking. We got what we want. We are it. When we feel very peaceful, we don't have to think and fret and worry because, ah, we're peaceful. When we feel fulfilled, we don't have to scramble around to accomplish things so that we can be fulfilled because, ah, we are fulfilled. Now, short of experiencing ourselves as who we truly are, we will forever be scrambling and thinking and emoting and worrying. That's where all these thoughts are coming from. And there's no stopping them. We can short-circuit them. But the deepest way to stop thoughts is to find out that we don't need them. So let's look at thoughts for a second. There are different kinds of thoughts. They're functional thoughts. Those aren't psychological. They're simply how to start the car, how to screw in a light bulb, how to mow the lawn, things like that. They're neutral. They're just using thoughts as tools. There's also creative thoughts or putting words on intuitions that come to you. An intuition comes from a place that's beyond thinking. It's a knowing. It's an experiencing. And then you might use thoughts to describe it to somebody else or to put it down on paper. That's not psychological. That's expressive. Or you could use thoughts in another creative way. Like a song comes from a deep place and you write it down or you sing it or art or things like that. An expression of a deeper part of you that's beyond your mind. You're expressing from a place that's beyond your mind. That's not psychological. As I said earlier, 95% of our thoughts, though, are psychological because we do feel separate from ourselves. And because we're separate, we have separation anxiety and fear. And we feel that the universe has abandoned us. So we have existential hurt and abandonment. And we have deep frustration because life isn't as we had pictured it or wanted. Why? Because we're separate from ourselves and everything else. You can't be one with everything else if you're separate from yourself at the very core. You start out separate and you end up separately. Now, the good news is we're really not separate. So the path of awakening is to open up. And enjoy yourself and therefore let go of the need to incessantly think and emote. We know we're not our thoughts because sometimes we don't know that. Sometimes early on, I remember at one time in my life, I thought I was my thoughts. I thought I was my personality. But we know we're not our thoughts because we could have a moment of not thinking and we're still here. So just by logic, we know that we are creating our thoughts, but we are not them. Same with emotions. We could have a moment without an emotion and we'd still be here. Well, the personality is built strictly of thoughts and emotions. And so if we're not our thoughts and our emotions, we are not any other construction that we have made out of thoughts and emotions, such as our personality. And of course, we know we can change our personality. That's why people go to therapy and do a lot of different things. That's why they do spiritual practices. So we're not our thoughts, we're not our emotions, and we're not our personalities. Good to know. We are what is much deeper than our thoughts and our emotions. We are radiant being. We don't have to create it. We're always that, whether we feel it or not. So what is the structure or the architecture of separation? If we experience separation a lot, let's look at how we do that. How do we separate from ourselves? Well, we can get lost in our thoughts, our hallucinations, just like we can get lost in a TV show. If I'm at the Grand Canyon, but I'm actually in my cabin watching TV all the time, I don't get to experience the Grand Canyon. I am separated from the wonder of the nature all around me because I'm lost in my TV show. The same for us when we're lost in our thoughts, our daydreams and our thinking and our worrying. We miss who we are because we're distracted. Another thing that happens is we, in the past, when we have unresolved information or we're wondering how to accomplish something that's beyond us, we will encode it in thoughts and emotions such as, oh, somebody did something to me. I don't know if I should forgive them or not. I feel really uncomfortable when I'm around them. So I've now created this thought and emotion. Because it's uncomfortable, I stick it to the side. I push it away and I carry on with life thinking, I'll figure this out later. Or there's a task that I have like, should I have done this or should I have done that or how do I do it? It's over my head. I'm worried about it. So I create thoughts and emotions that it's like a structure. When I create it, it's a thing. It's an actual creation, just like building a house. I've created it out of consciousness. I've created a thought emotion complex, which is a structure and it generates energy. If it has fear involved in it, it will constantly generate fear or if it has anxiety or anger or whatever's in there, it will generate it and it will generate multiple thoughts. Maybe I should do this. Maybe I should do that. Maybe I should do this. Anyway, there are so many different reasons to make these structures that we do it all of our life. But what we don't know is unless we discreate them, they're inside of us all the time forever because they've never been discreated. In Western psychology, we might say that they're repressed or there are unconscious mind or something like that, which is giving acknowledgement that these things are existing and affecting us outside of our normal range of consciousness. Perhaps one or two of these structures wouldn't be any big deal. But if through our life, we create thousands of them, it's just like filling a giant room in our house with all of our old clutter and one sock isn't going to make a lot of difference. But when you get thousands of dirty socks and dishes and furniture and cobwebs and dead insects and who knows what, filling this room after a while, you don't even want to go in this room. It's painful. But when this room is you, is our personality, that which we use to get through life and it's all clouded up, we don't feel so great. We don't feel our qualities of radiance of light and love and well-being. We don't feel radiant. We don't feel happy. We might just feel depressed. So, because we feel so bad, we might try to escape. Let's watch some TV or let's take drugs or let's become an alcoholic or something. Because we're just trying to get some relief. And I'm not saying it's bad to get relief. It is good to get relief. But sometimes it can be destructive. Other times we can find non or less destructive ways to get relief, like say watching TV or movies or going for a jog. Some of them can be healthy. Going for a jog might be healthy. But in the end, they don't take care of the fundamental problem that we are so clouded up by these thoughts and emotions that keep ticking away and ticking away and clouding us right under the surface. We might find a little window that's not clouded up where we feel good if we just sort of stay in one place. But if somebody says anything that sets us off, suddenly we're carried off into all these old pains. It reminds me of this. It reminds me of that. Now I forgot about this, but now I remember it. And it's causing me depression and anxiety. This can happen all through the day. I'm standing in the line at the bank and somebody does this or they don't pay attention to me or they dismiss me or they don't answer my questions. And now I feel angry and all these things. Well, that anger is based on other angers. There's only one anger. There's only one fear and there's only one abandonment. Yet it takes many different forms that we develop all through our personality, kind of like a kaleidoscope, using all these fear, the one fear, but changing it into lots of variations. There's a story about a guru in India and a man comes up and slaps him in the face and he feels very angry. He then goes and thanks the man who slaps him in the face and says, well, thank you for showing me that I still have anger left in me because if I didn't have anger left in me, I wouldn't have gotten angry when you slap me in my face. If I had dissolved all the anger, all these old complexes that carried anger and separation, anger that comes from separation. If I had truly dissolved the last one, I wouldn't feel anger because I wouldn't be separated from myself. All I would feel is compassion, love, well-being and peace, the qualities of my being. I might feel the sting, the physical sting of you slapping me on the face, but emotionally or energetically coming from the qualities of my being, I might have a thought of compassion for you. Like, why would you slap me in the face? Are you okay? What's going on with you? How can I help? I would have those kind of thoughts and feelings. When I'm separated from myself, those kind of thoughts and feelings are very rare. When somebody comes and slaps you in the face or does something disrespectful or so many other things that can happen during our day. So our day is basically filled with a rendition of all the stuff that's trapped inside of us, exposing itself, poking its nose out, waving at us, expressing energy. Like, wow, I have all this pain inside of me and I'm seeing it every hour of every day. And that's why I have all these thoughts, because the thoughts are simply more hallucinations on how to control this pain that is coming up, either fantasizing to get away from it or thinking about solutions. Like, I should talk to this guy about that, or I should use this tone of voice, or maybe if I called this person, they would resolve that problem for me because it's causing me lots of trouble. Okay. So our thoughts are generated, our emotions are generated because we are separate from ourselves. Well, how do we stop these thoughts? I'll give you a couple of options, and if you can find some others, that's good too. The first option is just dissolve the underlying engines of the thoughts. Dissolve these complexes that were created by us way in the past, the thought-emotion complex that I just described earlier. Discreate them. I created them, now I can discreate them. How? Well, all the podcasts before this talk about different ways of how to discreate them, but I'm going to talk about it in a condensed version today. But before I do, I want to say the second way to control thoughts. First way is to dissolve what's creating the thoughts. That is the separation that I just mentioned. The second way to do that is to try to control the thoughts or stop the thoughts through willpower or some concentration technique. There's both a positive way to do that and perhaps a bit of a negative way to do that that might have ill effects. A long time ago, I was with an awakened teacher named Tony Parsons from England, and I was in a group and a man asked a question and he said, Tony, I have been working to stop my thoughts for years. And I've worked very hard at it. And you know what? I have stopped my thoughts. I have by willpower stopped my thoughts. But he started crying and saying, it's like a desert inside, though, Tony, and I feel devastated. I feel so much pain and I feel dry inside. I feel like I'm not alive and I'm just in total pain. Am I doing something wrong? And Tony, with great compassion, looked at this man who had spent years, maybe a decade or two stopping his thoughts because that's what he had heard you're supposed to do. And Tony said, yes, you are doing something wrong. You have stopped your thoughts by shutting yourself down. And so you're experiencing a life of being shut down. That's not the way to stop your thoughts. So I wanted to bring that up right now. The second way to stop thoughts that might be more positive is to find a way to stop yourself from jumping into them. Why do we jump into them? Well, remember, when we're separated from ourselves by ourselves, we don't feel the love that we are or the peace that we are or the well-being that we are. We don't feel our own life force in a very positive way because we are by definition separated from ourselves. We did it. But nonetheless, we are separated from ourselves. Well, it's very important to all of us to live a happy life, to feel love, to feel well-being, to feel our life force, our radiance. We want that. That's so vital to life itself. So we're desperate. And in our desperation, we start to think and we cannot resist our thoughts. Once we create our thoughts, we jump into them. So if somebody says, meditate and just observe your thoughts, we're desperate. And like an alcoholic, we have to drink that thought because we think it's our only avenue of escape. It's our only solution is to find a way to get back to ourselves. And we have to do that by thinking. Unfortunately, what is blocking us is our very thoughts, is our very emotions. So we can't put the thoughts down long enough to observe them so that for them to dissolve. So we jump into them and it's an addiction. It's the same as an addiction to alcohol or any kind of drug. When you desperately want relief, you go for what it is that you think will provide you relief, even if you know it won't. That's what happens with thoughts and our addiction to them. So what to do when you sit still, that's called meditation. All of this repressed material comes up. You can't repress things when you sit still. So by sitting still, your repressed material comes up. And if you don't jump into it, if you don't think your thoughts, but rather observe your thoughts, quite different to drink a bottle of wine than it is to look at the bottle of wine. In this case, look at your thoughts as they arise. If you just look at them, they will start to expend a lot of energy. They will be desperate for you to jump into them. Because as I just described, they're screaming and saying they're your only way to solve your problem of feeling separate, to solve your problem of fear, anxiety, anger, lack of peace, frustration. So they're begging you to jump into them. But if you just sit and watch them, they will expend so much energy and emote, and it will be very uncomfortable, but they will start to fall apart. And as they start to fall apart, almost like a rubber band that's wound very tightly, you let go of one end and it releases lots of inner energy and spends and spends and spends. It used to be all knotted up with tension, this rubber band, but after it expends its energy, it's loose and limp and relaxed. Well, that's how you become. You expend your energy by not jumping into these thoughts and emotions. They expend their energy and then you become relaxed and peaceful and start to flow again. You restore your life force, your flow, simply by releasing these mind, emotion, thought, emotion complexes, simply by letting go. The second part of this is in the letting go, you actually receive the goodness of life around you. I know it might not seem like it now, but as you awaken, you will discover that all of creation, all of matter is one thing, and that is made of love and well-being and bliss and joy. And just as the qualities of your being are love, bliss, and joy, everything around you is made of love, bliss, and joy. So as your separations, as these blocks melt away, you flow in and out and connect very deeply to creation around you and you receive the joy of the universe around you. You receive the joy of nature. You receive the joy of just touching the wall or seeing a bird or walking on the floor because everything is made of love and you begin to feel it bit by bit by bit. Now, when you are so fulfilled and so open and so happy, do you think a lot? No, because you've already gotten your dreams. You've gotten everything that you want, happiness, love, well-being, and a deep trust that everything is great. Everything is okay and the universe is on your side and your life will be and is great. So you don't have to think and scheme and work. So that naturally slows your thoughts down and then you start to use your thoughts in the categories that are not psychological. So since 95% of all your thoughts are psychological, your thought count goes way down and then you simply start using thoughts as helpful tools. You create a thought to start the car or how to walk to the store or how to speak English or things like that or to express creative impulses that come through your intuition. You use your thoughts in a functional way and they don't separate yourself from yourself anymore. This kind of meditation that we talked about, I label it awakening meditation and I talk about it a number of times and walk you through it a number of times and the podcast that precede this one. So just look and see awakening meditation in the title and it will show you how to do that. Another helpful podcast, if you haven't listened to this or a series of helpful podcasts are podcast 26 through 30, which talk about post-traumatic stress disorder, which can happen when you have a lot of stress in your life, could even be low level stress over a long period of time and often that happens in childhood. So you might not think of yourself as having PTSD, but you might, and I would guess a lot of people do. And so this talks about how to begin to release that and what are the symptoms of PTSD the way that I'm using it in this podcast. The symptoms would be you meditate and meditate and meditate, but you don't seem to be releasing certain blocks or pain. It just seems to be there in your regular life. Year after year after year, things just don't release. They're stuck and it's more like a muscle cramp than a thought or emotion. It's very fixed in your body and mind. So listen to those podcasts if you like. Really, I recommend just starting with number one, the first podcast and working your way forward. Okay, but a deep level of letting go is the awakening meditation, just sitting still, letting things unwind and then receiving the goodness around you. And in that full receiving, when there are no barriers, all there is is oneness, right? That's all there is because they're not barriers. They're not. There's no separation left. So you are one with your surroundings. Your being is beautiful and everything around you is beautiful. And there's a flow between you and everything in the universe is you. The universe is you. So it's going to take care of itself. And you feel that that's called trust. It's a direct experience, not a philosophy, because you feel it. You experience it. So that gets to the heart. The problem is, you know, realistically, we spent a lot of time clogging ourselves up and separating ourselves from ourselves. So this is not a quick process. It's day by day. Consistent meditation is the most positive way and the quickest way to do it. But still, it's a long time to let all this stuff go. It takes some time, so it's good to be patient. Have you ever heard of the Tao Te Ching? It's a beautiful set of 107 verses from China, way back, written by Lao Tzu. And most of it's written from an awakened perspective. And it's very profound. If you haven't read it, you might enjoy it. I'm going to read you a little bit of the Tao Te Ching that is relevant to what we're speaking of right now. One of the verses says, do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself? That's meditation. That's exactly what we're talking about. It takes some time. Do you have the patience to wait until all of that mud settles? When these obstructions settle, then you're not separated anymore. Your water is clear. Your being is clear. And because you have remained unmoving and you are now clear, the universe flows through you and right action arises by itself. You don't have to do anything by willpower. Things that you do by willpower are not going to amount to much. But things that happen from your heart, from a flow, those are very powerful in your life because they're authentic. They're coming from who you truly are. You're flowing from your deepest self. Another verse in the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu says, to the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders. To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders. Because you're still, you're not obstructed. The mud has settled. The universe flows through you. Well, you have the power of the universe flowing through you. The universe is you. The whole universe surrenders because you are one. There's no fight anymore. It's all good. I like what Jesus says about this whole process in the book of Thomas, the gospel of Thomas. In the second verse, Jesus says, seek and you will find. When you find, you will be troubled. When you are troubled, you will inherit the kingdom of heaven. And what he means is you're on your spiritual practice. You're seeking. You find, what do you find? All these obstructions inside. They're troubling. But you can see them now. To see is to be free. And awareness is curative. You can see. And as you see, they unwind. They release their energy. You receive the goodness of the universe. So what feels troubling at first It opens up and you find that you inherit the kingdom of heaven or the universe is you. They're all saying the same thing, basically. But that's the process. That's the deep awakening process. However, this does take some time. And if you listen to my podcast, number five called, why can't I meditate? You'll see that it's hard for people because you're releasing all of this pent up hurt and it does not feel good. So again, we jump back into our addiction of trying to jump into our thoughts to find a solution rather than watch our thoughts and let them release pain. Because who wants to sit there and feel pain? That's why we repressed it in the first place. My friend, Bob says that the first step to awakening is to get out of the pounding surf. If you're being pounded around and it's too hard, you're going to quit or you're not going to be peaceful enough to continue. You're going to get worn out. So what I would tell you is take baby steps. Don't try to solve this all at once. Just take baby steps. Feel what you can feel. And when you can't take it anymore or before you get to that point, stop. Take a break. Go for a jog. Watch some TV. Walk in nature. Talk to a friend. Do some exercise. Do some yoga. Take a break. That's enough for today. You know, just give yourself a break. Get out of the pounding surf. There are other ways to get out of the pounding surf and to take a break as well. And so let me give you an analogy. Let's say you have a car and the engine is running quite rapidly and the tires are spinning and the car is going 90 miles an hour. And you want to stop that car. One way to stop it is to turn off the engine. Stop the engine. In our life, if you want to stop the thoughts, you turn off the engine to the thoughts, which are these hurts and fears and separations and barriers and thought emotion complexes. You dissolve them, which is turning off the engine that's producing more and more thoughts. You just turn off the engine. That's called the awakening meditation. Take some time, as I described, but that's turning off the engine. The other way, let's say I don't have time or I need to take a break from that. How else could I stop that car? Well, if I have the tires are spinning, but I have a giant cement structure in front of that car and the car is resting in front of that cement structure. If I don't turn that car off, the tires are going to spin and spin and spin and spin, and it's going to burn out the tires and probably blow up the car. And it's going to be very painful for the car. That's what happened to the guy that used his willpower to just stop his thoughts. He didn't either disengage the transmission or turn off the engine. He just suppressed the entire car and it was very painful. So we could turn off the engine or we could take the car out of gear and put it into neutral. So even before the engine is stopped, we haven't turned off the engine, but the tires aren't spinning. And that will also stop the car and not blow it up. Well, there's a process to do that in meditation. You might want to do one kind of meditation that turns off the engine. That's called the awakening meditation. And you might want to consider another kind of meditation that would simply disengage the clutch or put the car into neutral. And that's called a mantra meditation. It does get you out of gear and it can be a good starting or transition meditation. When you use a mantra and you can go to my podcast number 93, the first part of 93 and 95, where I talk about a certain kind of mantra meditation and how it works in greater detail. But for here, when you have a mantra, let's say the mantra OM or perhaps just a nonsense syllable M, when you have that mantra and you say that mantra, when you repeat it right before you feel tempted to jump in a thought, it interrupts the process of you jumping into your thought. And so it short circuits that process, like right when you feel a thought starting to grip you, you say M and you concentrate on M and then you let M go and the thought go. Or you concentrate on OM and then you let OM drift away along with the thought. You have let the whole thing go and so you haven't jumped into it and gotten lost in it. But you've short circuited it out and because you've short circuited the process of addiction into your thoughts, you're more able to rest into the qualities of your being. Your being might start to shine through more and more because you're not getting lost in your thoughts. You might start feeling yourself as light and love and peace because that's always there. And if you're not getting separated by the thoughts themselves because you're short circuiting them out, you're more available to feel your natural qualities of being anyway. So that's another way to do it. Use a mantra meditation. You can also use mantras in your daily life outside of quote unquote meditation. For instance, you're standing in the line at the bank and you begin to ruminate about something. Before you get into the rumination, you'll say OM to yourself and let it all go. And get used to just using your mantras in everyday life. That will help short circuit and release thoughts as you move through your day. The most powerful mantra, and I talk about this in the mantra podcast that I described earlier, and also you might want to listen to podcast 94 because I get into that there too, but the most powerful kind of mantra, rather than simply a sound or a word, you could use as a mantra, the peace that you actually feel. If you feel peace shining through you, let's say you actually feel the peace, like peace coming through. You haven't resolved all the troubles that you have, all the separations and thought emotion barriers, but still peace is there all the time. Nonetheless, as well as these created barriers that you have not uncreated yet, all of those things are present. So if you feel the peace or the love, you could just say peace, but let it come from the actual experience of peace that you're feeling. Or you could say the word love and let it come from the actual experience of love. That's much more powerful because it's more than merely a label or a word or a vibration. It's coming from the depths of your being and you're putting words on it. It helps you stay in tune with that power. It's like finding the electric current and not letting yourself get distracted away from it. For instance, you might feel the power of your heart, your love. And so as you go through the day, every time you almost get distracted away from feeling your love, you just say love to yourself silently, love, love. And that's very powerful. Neem Karoli Baba, Ram Dass's guru, he always used to say the mantra Ram, Ram, Ram. Ram is one of the names of God or the infinite. So it kept him connected to the infinite that he felt flowing through himself. The universe and I are one. Jesus would say the father and I are one. He was connected. He would express that he stayed connected, even through the most trying of times. The father and I are one. So that's a very powerful use of a mantra. The thing in our spiritual practice though is better to start small, take baby steps and pace yourself and do what you can do now. Like it's a starting point. When I started, I just used a mantra, just a sound. I wasn't connected to anything. I didn't feel any power. I just did it. I just did it 20 minutes, twice a day. And slowly there was an unfolding. And eventually I worked into the awakening meditation. So be true to where you are. I will say this, that from my direct experience, you are complete love. This is not a philosophy. You are complete light. There's nothing you have to do. And you are far beyond that. You're even out of this existence. You're everything. And it's palpable and any tension, any emotional pain you feel in your body, you have created that and you can let it go. You can just create it. If you're feeling tension at all, any emotional pain at all, any, if you're feeling anything but love and wellbeing, you know, there's some work left to do. And what happens as thoughts dissolve underneath them or associated with them will be emotions. They will dissolve. They will expend a great deal of energy underneath that you will notice attention. That will still be there. You put your attention on that and you let it receive the goodness of the universe that's all around you and running through you. And eventually as that tension breathes in, that is the barrier of separation as it breathes in and it opens up, then you become one. It's not that you become one, you experience oneness. You're already one. But that delusion, that artificial block that we create, that final tension, it releases, relax, and let go. So what else can be helpful to stop thoughts? Being in your oneness stops thoughts because they're not needed. You don't need them to get love, peace, and wellbeing because you are. But until you're there, other things that can help slow them down is exercise that can burn off energy. It doesn't dissolve the underlying problem, but it helps burn off excess energy. Yoga helps open things up. Often thoughts and emotions are stored in our muscles. So even as we work through our thoughts and emotions, when you do yoga, it releases even a deeper part of that separation complex that's fueling these thoughts that we have, these incessant thoughts, this monkey mind. So physical yoga can be very helpful. You can find a yoga teacher. There are many of them online. You can just watch them. They often don't charge anything, or you can go to a local yoga teacher and be in a group in your city or in your community. And that's really nice because you meet people there and you have like-minded people that you are with. I have also found a sort of yoga that was invented by Yogananda called the Energization Exercises, and you can look that up online and you'll have people walk you through it. There are about 30 different short exercises, and they often release pent-up separations that are in the muscles or in your joints. So you'll find your own ways, walking in nature, eating good food, lots of different things. Art, music can help relax and release. A good guided meditation can help get you out of the pounding surf. It helps calm your nerves and get you back to a baseline so you can be productive. Not pushing yourself too fast, because if you push yourself too fast, you'll lock up. So taking baby steps can be very helpful in the process of relaxing your mind, letting your thoughts go. Therapy, psychotherapy can be very important, and I did a podcast on that. It can be very important to unsnarl things that keep perpetuating these thoughts. So we are multi-dimensional beings, and there are many different methods to loosen and to let go and to dissolve back into our oneness, our natural state. So use whatever works for you. In this podcast, I've tried to direct you to some of the mechanics of it and give you some general guidance. In the end, though, you follow your heart, you listen to yourself, and you open up into your path. You listen to others, take what works, disregard the rest. That's the most powerful, because it's your flow. Okay, Natalie, thank you again for your wonderful question. I hope that helps. And by the way, if any of you find these podcasts helpful, please tell a friend. I'd like to spread good things around, and that's the way we do it. Okay, thanks so much. Take care. I look forward to talking to you soon. Bye.