While stressing and worrying about things yesterday I came upon a revelation. While the information may not be all that new, it helped me to deal with something that’s been an issue of mine for a long time.

I used to be afraid of my thoughts. I was so afraid that what I thought, and what my brain came up with, was who I was. Because of this I identified myself with some of the crazy, horrid things my brain let pop into existence. What I never bothered realizing, was that the brain, like so many other things with your body, is simply something that is on autopilot and reacts based on what it’s been trained to do.

As when you’re learning, you develop pathways in your brain. The more you study or work on learning different things, supposedly, the stronger the pathways get between one section of your brain and the other become.

As we all know, it’s hard to shake a habit. Obviously if your body has been trained to react a certain way, it happens more often. But what about your thoughts? If you grew up in certain environments, surrounded by certain groups of thinking, you’ll have more pathways ingrained and you’ll have a tendency to have certain thoughts pop up more often.

The great part about that? These thoughts might show up more often, because you’ve been programmed more to think about toast with jam instead of toast with peanut butter, but these thoughts are just that, thoughts. You have the choice to allow those thoughts more time in your brain.

I thought of the brain as this mass that would create these clouds of ideas. These ideas, or as Robey thinks of it webs of thought, are created in reaction to outside stimuli. These webs are simply your brain’s reaction. You make the choice on which part of the web to dwell on.

Recognizing that thinking doesn’t mean who you are is a big step for me. It’s simply a knee jerk brain creation, and one that you can push away. A thought, like a dream, is not always reality.