May 16, 2022.
I mentioned this a couple of times in previous reflections but felt that I needed to dig deeper. For most of my life, I assumed that all thoughts were voluntary or there was some level of will I had exerted on my mind to produce the thought. I learned of a different paradigm that I choose to believe now. When we are growing up, our minds absorb everything around us, and we accept without questioning. It’s only when we are older that we develop critical thinking faculties. We aren’t aware of the conditioning we have until it shows up in interactions with other people or if we actively search within ourselves. The paradigm shift I had was that your brain churns out thoughts and whatever you choose to focus on consciously becomes a voluntary thought. Meaning not all thoughts that enter your mind are yours.
Have you ever had an absurd idea pop into your head, and you said to yourself” where did that come from?” I don’t know if there’s an explanation for all thoughts, but a good amount of them come from the conditioning in your past environments. It’s easier to trace back in the case of self-criticism. Think of one critical thing you say to yourself often. Now think back to when you were younger. Did someone say that to you or stress that a certain quality is unacceptable? What would it mean to you to not criticize yourself in that manner anymore? Knowing that it’s something you were conditioned to think, do you want to continue thinking that thought?
Here’s my experience with disregarding thoughts
If I think something that I don’t want to engage with, I say to myself, ” that’s not my thought and I choose not to focus on it.” You have to keep telling yourself that, because these thoughts behave like ads on social media. You have to keep ignoring them until the algorithm gets the message and changes the ads. I hear my voice in my head most times and its always looking for something to say. Sometimes I will hear something, and I have to say, “no, let’s not go down that road,” and a new thought pops up.
A good book that explains how our brains are conditioned to produce certain thoughts and behaviors is Glennon Dolyle’s Untamed. She points out how this conditioning even produces different gender thinking patterns in children. An example she gives is that women are conditioned to tune to their environments first before themselves. A group of young boys when asked to make a decision on something and all yelled their answers without consulting each other. When they went to ask the girls of the same age, the girls looked at each other’s faces to see how everyone is feeling about the options before saying anything. Afterwards, one girl spoke for the group. Given these were children with some being siblings across the genders, you can see how far-reaching and automatic the conditioning can be.
Question of the day:
- What self-critical thoughts am I having, and do I know the source?
Comment your thoughts and share with a friend who might benefit from reading this!