‘The cat ignored becomes the tiger.’

Carl Jung

‘Allowing your thoughts’ is the second of Christopher Germer’s ‘Five Pathways to Self Compassion’. When we are caught in unhelpful thinking patterns, it can be tempting to try and control our thoughts. Yet as the quote by Carl Jung illustrates, this can often lead to giving thoughts more strength and power instead. In fact, one of the main ways in which we can get entangled in negative thinking is by giving thoughts far more power than they deserve. As the wonderful quote from Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy goes:

‘Thoughts are not facts, even the ones that say they are.’

‘Allowing your thoughts’ doesn’t mean letting our thoughts run riot and out of control. For example, if we’re obsessed with thoughts of revenge, or enmeshed in a constant stream of negative self-talk, this is clearly not helpful. Yet positive thinking, where we manically try to replace negative thoughts with positive ones, also doesn’t work, because it’s not based on reality. The mindful approach to our thoughts is to avoid either extreme – we don’t suppress our thoughts, but neither do we let them run our lives.

Thoughts become powerful when we get entangled in them, when we invest them with emotional energy and a narrative. For example, we might feel that during a meeting at work, other people were listened to far more attentively and respectfully than we were. This may in fact be what happened. If we have a strong narrative in our lives about being treated unjustly, this may evoke powerful emotions in us, leading to obsess about this for days to come. And because of our strong confirmation bias, where we actively seek out evidence which supports our beliefs, any future slight, whether real or imagined, will feed the flame of unhelpful thinking.

Mindfulness helps to bring us back to earth – to be aware of what is happening right now, rather than what we might be imagining. Next week, we will look at some simple mindfulness practices which can help us to allow the natural flow of our thoughts to occur, neither blocking them, nor becoming entangled by them.

Weekly practice idea:

Take time this week to notice your patterns of thinking. Are there certain thinking patterns you seem to return to again and again?

Anja Tanhane