Drop the Rock

The more we clean up our emotional pain from our past the more addressing our thinking comes to the forefront of our transformational work.When we are carrying emotional pain we can be easily triggered into emotional dysfunction until we clear up the pain we carry within us. Having carried this pain for much of our lives these pains have helped to form our perceptions and in particular our thinking: thoughts, ideas, beliefs, and patterns of thought.Thoughts can also be a source of emotional dysfunction and are often dysfunctional themselves.Dysfunctional thoughts are ones that are simply not true. I estimate that 90% of our thoughts about other people are not true, in particular thoughts about other people that have an emotional component.We often have dysfunctional thoughts about ourselves, life, god, the future, the past, our jobs, our friends.The function of thoughts are to support us, to make us more effective, to help us actualize our lives. Thoughts that undermine us, that make us feel bad, that make us less effective, obscure the truth, interfere with relationships, bring us down, block support, keep us from learning are dysfunctional.I have developed and have been using a technique for addressing these thoughts I call Drop the Rock.I often use a quality I call buoyancy to describe a quality in myself that I value. I used to feel like I had to swim really hard to stay up and if I didn’t I would sink, my life was just a struggle to stay afloat, so the idea of being buoyant in life has a real appeal to me.In my metaphor for thoughts I imagine floating in the Dead Sea or some body of water that makes me naturally super buoyant, I can just float effortlessly (how I want to be in life).Then I imagine that when a dysfunctional thought comes in it is like someone tossing me a rock, big or small, depending on the thought.Now it becomes more difficult to stay buoyant, now I have to struggle/work to stay at the surface, the bigger the rock, or the more of them, the more the struggle/work to stay afloat. Some rocks can even sink me, make me feel like I am drowning.Now with each thought I can go on struggling and working to stay afloat or I can simply drop the rock (the thought), let it go. Once I drop the rock, let go of the dysfunctional thought, my natural buoyancy takes me right back to the surface, and I am back to fully participating in my life.How many rocks are you keeping afloat right now? Which parts of your thinking are dysfunctional?Sometimes identifying these dysfunctional thoughts are difficult at first, but as with anything practice it will help you to see them more clearly. It is also helpful to find someone who does not believe in your dysfunctional thoughts to help you, or even someone who has been around The Garden Company or learned The Inquiry Method from me, to help.See if you can become aware of your natural buoyancy.See if you can catch yourself in a dysfunctional thought; visualize it as a rock and just picture it dropping. It may take a few minutes for your natural buoyancy to float you back up to your natural state.I love to be around buoyant people, don’t you?