2am.
The mind is not the problem
You are not your thoughts.
I could never quite make sense of that. Not while I was in the corporate world.
It was when I picked up meditation. Another tool that was supposed to help with a restless mind.
My thoughts were always racing. Not only at work, even more so after. Late at night, when I couldn’t fall asleep. Worse, at 2am, when I woke up and gave in to every story of catastrophe, of frustration, of everything that could go wrong.
Meditation, I thought, would help me overcome this.
What I failed to see was that no method brings peace with your mind while you’re still fighting it. While you still believe the mind is something to switch off. While you still believe you’re in control.
That’s what you do all day at work. Exert influence. Hold power. Control how things go.
And then one day you notice: your mind is the limit. Your thoughts arrive at the most inconvenient moments, and you cannot switch them off.
That’s the thing about thoughts.
They’re not a choice. They come and go as they please.
The only choice is whether I believe every story my mind is telling or whether I see some of them as exactly that. Stories. And put them back on the shelf.
Once I started watching my thoughts, I understood what it meant.
And now I see it’s not about peace of mind. It’s peace with my mind.
Because I am not my thoughts.
.