Don't Follow It

Patterns show up... thoughts about needing to be something else, needing to be more, needing to fix some imagined flaw. Thoughts about unworthiness, about not being enough, about falling short of some invisible standard. They come the same way weather comes moving through without asking permission.

These thoughts and feelings can always arise. They come from conditioning that's baked deep in the system, old recordings that play in the mind without warning. Any of it can appear at any time, it is just the mind doing what the mind does. The important thing is simple… do not follow it.

When I first spoke with John Wheeler, I told him about these thoughts. I told him how convincing they felt, how they seemed to point to something wrong with me. John listened, and then he said something that cut right through the whole story… he said not to follow them. He said the thoughts are not the problem, following them is the problem… that stayed with me.

John did not get wrapped in the loop of asking who is there to follow it. He did not turn it into a puzzle. He knew the mind is just thought arising, and those thoughts create the sense of following. Yes, there is no one there to follow, but the thoughts are still followed. They are attached to, believed in, and taken as some kind of truth… that is how identification forms. It is not a person doing it, just the movement of thought being taken as real.

A thought can say anything. It can say you are broken, you are incomplete, you are unworthy, and you need to become something else. But the moment you look at the thought instead of believing it, the whole thing loses its weight. It is just a movement in mind, it has no authority on its own.

John pointed me back to the simple seeing that is already here, the open clarity that does not need improvement. The quiet presence that is not touched by the stories that pass through it. He pointed me back to what is aware of the thought, not the thought itself.

He also said that after enough time, the thoughts are still seen, but the relationship changes. They rise up and instead of pulling you in, there is a simple recognition, aquiet, almost gentle, “oh yes, that is what that is.” The thought appears, but it no longer carries the old weight. It is just another recording playing itself out.  The thought may still speak, but it no longer leads.