Beyond Emotional Intelligence

5You Don't Have to Believe Everything YouThink

You are the sky. Everything else—it's just the weather.

—Pema Chodron

We have the capacity to notice our thoughts and whatever passes through our field of awareness. Our attention can follow our thoughts, or we can abandon and let go of them the moment we notice their movement. We can examine them, as we look for their origin or try to follow them to discover where they disappear. We can become lost in our thoughts, swept up in the current of their movement within our own mindstream. We can ruminate or perseverate on our thoughts. We can question or doubt our thoughts, or we can accept them at face value. We can put stock in them, believing them to be true, or we can get curious and test whether they hold merit. And we can look into the natural face of our own awareness that perceives them to begin with. These are just a few possible ways we can position our own awareness to relate to our thoughts and mental movement. But perhaps most importantly, we can invite a new relationship to our own awareness and whatever appears in the field of our perception, such as bodily sensations, thoughts, feelings, emotions, concepts, memories, and ideas.

When someone first learns how to meditate, within a Buddhist context, we don't typically make a point of distinguishing among the various kinds of mental phenomena. We don't necessarily make a point of differentiating between categories or types of mental movement, such as thought, feeling, ...