JKLTIP It’s different for everyone, so try a bunch of different ways to ground yourself in the present moment
Sadly the behaviour, actions and beliefs that got us in jail, are often what keep us there. An every day example of this exists right before our eyes. Thoughts, obsessive overthinking plagues society today, holding many of us in jail. Containing, constraining, captivating, imprisoning. We sit in this jail in the micro, not able to speak words we want to speak, like “I disagree with that” or “I love you”. We sit in this jail in the macro, never sharing our stories with the world, never starting our business ideas, or getting that gym membership. We become frozen
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Just like anyone sitting in a physical, custodial jail, our patterns repeat themselves and so what got us here tends to happen again. An addiction to thinking, the compulsion to think our way out of things, a notion of “just let me think for a second”, becoming distracted, frustrated, anxious and upset. We do not lack creative action, direction and purpose in life for any lack of thinking, rather for an inability to stop thinking. Over thinking is the only way something like “writer’s block” could exist
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If we think traditional substance addictions are terrible, arguably addiction to thought is just as bad. The brain, the ego project themselves into the future to ensure survival, which leads to thoughts of “One day when this, or one day when that, I’ll be at peace.” Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present, it is fake, because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an end, to get something in the future
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Thinking and suffering are important, they help us learn and no one of us would operate, or thrive without them. When we want to be creative, problem solvers, living with vitality and low stress, or anxiety we need the skills to turn the thinker off. Like any tool to put it on the shelf, until we need to use it again. It’s different for everyone, so we should ask ourselves, how can we learn to think less?