WHEN OUR THOUGHTS BECOME OUR STORIES

Our thoughts rule our minds as long as we allow them to… as long as we want them to. Yes, as long as we hold them in our minds!

If we believe a thought to be true, it lives there in our minds. Else, it has no business to be there!

The thoughts have never tortured any of us… It is our interpretation of thoughts - the story we tell in our minds – that brings about the torture, the constant suffering inside.

So, someone says something to us… Our mind immediately starts processing those words… interpret them, attach meaning to them, read motives behind them… and, thereby, weave a dramatic story out of them – Yes, just out of someone’s words!

Now, this story – this belief – gives life and power to the words, which have, by now, become robust thoughts…

In the same way, someone behaves before us, even without words… and, our minds are already on job – analyzing, interpreting and concluding!

Byron Katie fondly calls this familiar word/thought-processing activity of ours as ‘the story’…

“Yes, sweetheart, it is just a story… You need to examine it, challenge it.”… Mrs. Katie’s famous therapy – which is simply known as ‘The Work’ – involves just four straight questions to us. If any thought is weighing us down, causing stress and misery in our lives, she has only this four-questions-therapy for us to feel peaceful, liberated…

We need to first contemplate on our stressful thought and then write it down. Yes, in black and white.

I think, that itself is the most challenging part of the therapy…

We need to focus on the thought that weighs us down, and put is on paper exactly as we feel it

Then, we need to read out our problem… Each part, each blame, each segment of the story… and, Mrs. Katie will ask us her four questions:

Q1. “Sweetheart, is it true?”

Q2. “Can you know it is absolutely true?”

Q3. “How do you react – what happens – when you believe that thought?”

Q4. “What would you be without that thought?”

Too simple to be effective?

No, it is too simple and effective!

Because, I can’t lie to myself… When I believe in the thought, the story, that a person has made me angry, mad or whatever… What he has said, how he has behaved, how he has cheated or whatever – I can see so clearly how it is all there in my mind as a stressful thought… And, the deeper my belief, the deeper run the roots of my stress and suffering…

It causes blame, victim-hood and imprisonment.

So, when Madam Katie asks the third question, I know the answer:  I feel stressful, imprisoned, tortured, and miserable when I believe in the story…

And, when madam asks the final question, I know the answer, too: I feel peaceful, light and free…

So, was the story true?

No, it wasn’t.

That’s why many psychologists tell us, so beautifully, holding a glass of water before us: “Honey, it is neither the weight of the glass nor the weight of the water that makes it heavy… it is how long we hold that glass of water in our hands!”

“And, yes, why!”

GERALD D’CUNHA

Pic.: Vivek D'Cunha