Is there really such a thing as a negative thought? By the end of this I do not think you will say yes.
Wait for your next thought. You cannot make one. You do not know what it will be. So whose thought is it. Your subconscious has no idea what is positive or negative. A good haul is a positive thought to a burglar. It has no timeline either, no tomorrow, no last week. It hands you what it thinks you need right now. My mind is a twenty four hour committee meeting of about ten thousand voices arguing, and I have stopped trying to chair it.
One thing to try: Sit three minutes and just wait for thoughts. Be the one who notices them arriving, not the one arguing.
In this episode
(3:06) Everything in your body has a job, including the mind
(4:12) Wait for your next thought. You cannot make one
(6:18) You have thoughts. You are not the thoughts
(7:54) To a burglar, a good haul is a positive thought
(9:01) Your subconscious has no tomorrow and no last week
(12:59) Ten thousand voices, arguing, all day
(14:10) You cannot look at your own eyes
(15:24) Three minutes, if you are somewhere safe
(16:15) Become the watcher of thoughts
Support the podcast and join the Weekly Calm: stevenwebb.uk
Thank you for listening.
Steven
The question this answers
Is there really such a thing as a negative thought?
By the end of this one I do not think you will say yes. I used to tell people to change their negative thoughts into positive ones. I was wrong about that, and about the category itself.
The heart of it
You cannot make a thought. Wait for the next one and see. You do not know what it will be, which rather raises the question of whose it is.
Your subconscious has no idea what is positive or negative. A good haul is a positive thought to a burglar.
Try it now. Sit back, let the body settle, and wait for the next thought. It goes blank for a second, and then something arrives that you did not choose.
Nor does it have a timeline. No tomorrow, no last week. It only knows this moment and it hands you whatever it reckons you need in it.
Then there is the getting on. A thought arrives, mint chocolate chip in my case, and I can go with it. When did I last have one. There was that disappointing one. There was that time on the beach. Now I am twenty miles down a track thinking I am driving, and I am sat behind the driver deciding whether to keep patting him on the back.
The patting is emotion. Strong feeling, good or bad, and the subconscious files it as a hit and sends more of that kind. Like telling a child once that green sweets are your favourite. They will still be handing you green ones in thirty years.
My mind is a twenty four hour committee meeting of about ten thousand voices arguing, and I have stopped trying to chair it.
Changing a thought once it has arrived is like trying to change the colour of the top you are wearing by thinking about it.
And there are not more thoughts when you meditate, which surprises people. There are exactly the same number. You have simply stopped giving your brain something else to hold, which is also why they arrive the moment your head hits the pillow.
A brain that is not constantly thinking is a dead one. Nobody actually wants no thinking. They want nicer thinking.
One small thing to try
Sit three minutes and just wait for thoughts. Be the one who notices them arriving, not the one arguing.
Say hello to each one if it helps. Hi, thought. Then do nothing at all. Not my monkeys, not my fight, applied to the inside of your own head.
Do that once an hour and something shifts over weeks. The gap between the thought and your answer to it gets wider, and everything good lives in that gap.
Questions people ask
So there are no bad thoughts at all?
There are thoughts you like and thoughts you do not, and that is a real difference. What there is not is a category the mind itself recognises. It only measures whether you reacted.
If I cannot change a thought, what can I change?
Which ones you board. Over time that changes what gets sent, which is a slower and far more reliable route than trying to edit them on arrival.
How do I know I am not my thoughts?
Because you can watch them. You cannot look at your own eyes without a mirror, and you cannot bite your own teeth. If you can observe the thing, you are not only the thing.
Read along
The transcript
It follows the audio. Press any line to jump there.
In this episode
overthinking · mindfulness
Read the transcript
Hi, and welcome to Stillness in the Storms. I'm Steven Webb, your host, and I'm going to convince you there's
no such thing as a positive thought or a negative thought by the end of this podcast. Bear with me.
And it's a conversation I've been having more and more recently. And I remember always talking to people about, you
can change your thoughts. You can, you know, just think more positive thoughts. Just do that. Well, I've come to
the conclusion you cannot choose which thoughts to have, but you can choose which thoughts to get on. And
there's no such thing as a positive or negative thought when it comes to the bigger picture. However, we have
thoughts that we like and we have thoughts that we dislike, and we can choose which ones to go on.
So that's what I want to talk about on today's podcast. Because I think when we understand the way the
mind works, what its job is and things like that, we just suffer a whole lot less. And I think
that's why, the reason why, even being paralysed, even being a city councillor, being in politics, being
a frustrated meditation teacher or just a meditator, that my mind never shuts up. All those things
why I don't suffer too much, because I can observe the thoughts and go, ah, it's just a thought.
And then I can choose whether to get on it or not. So that's what I want to talk about
today on today's podcast. So welcome. You're in the right place if you want to have a little less suffering
in life. And this is what led me to meditation, because I just was fed up with suffering.
I hit my rock bottom the age of 40, and it was a pretty rough time. You would have thought
being paralysed, having all those problems and all that would been reliable on everybody else. From wiping my bum
to everything in life. I literally cannot make my own toast. So I've got to put up with toast the
way I get it half of the time, you know, and if you. If If you know me and you've
been on this podcast more than, like, I don't know, 20 minutes, you realise that I'm obsessed with toast and
the million different ways of doing toast. But I've suffered a lot. And that's why what led me to
meditation. It led me to understanding my thoughts, and it led me to, oh,
moving from just think positive. Let's just have happy thoughts to. It's not that simple, but it's actually more simpler
than that. So what is a thought? Where does it come from? Well, your brain, your mind, is designed to
think, it evolved to think. That is its only job. Just like your heart is there to pump the blood
around your body, your liver is there to filter the blood, your muscles there to move something when you want
it things like that. So everything in your body has a job. Your mind's job is to work out the
chemicals and tell the body to do different things. It's to think stuff and then tell the
different places to do it. So the mind has a way of having a memory in order to help and
protect us. So the mind in any given moment is just thinking stuff up and giving you those thoughts. The
thoughts already happen by the time we're aware of it. So bear with me on this because this is like
really quite important. The process is really important. So right now you're not in charge of what thoughts come into
your head. You're not even in charge of what goes into your eyes, goes into your ears. But you're not
in control of what sensations happen to you, just the same as you're not in control of what thoughts come
up. And we can prove this, because if I say to you, now just just sit back, just relax your
body a little bit, just allow your body to relax and just wait for the next thought. Do this with
me now. Wait for the next thought.
Well, a, your mind goes completely blank for a moment, but you don't know what your next thought is going
to be. You cannot create a thought. All you can do is move on to another thought. You're
asking your subconscious mind for a thought and your subconscious mind gives you it. You're not in control of it,
but what you are in control of is what you do with a thought. So I use the analogy that
you're sat in a train station and the trains that come in are the thoughts. You can choose to get
on them or choose not to. And if you choose to get on the thoughts that you like, the subconscious
mind will give you more of those thoughts. If you choose. If you get on all the thoughts, the subconscious
mind will just give you loads of thoughts if you And what I mean by getting on a thought, I
mean by you have a thought, say you're thinking about um A thought comes into your mind. Let's say
mint chocolate chip ice cream, which is my favourite ice cream.
And I always think that whenever I go, what's a thought And it always comes back to that, always that
and my stomach nearly always anyway. And then instantly I can choose to go on it. I can think, oh
when's last time I had that? I can Then go down, oh, I had a not very nice one the
other day, or I had it at the beach, or, oh, I can't believe I haven't had them. And we
create a story. That's what I mean by that. You create a story. If I think about relationships, I could
go down to what relationships I've had and what's happened to them. If I think about pain, where's the pain
in my body? How did it come about? And so if I just mention politics, that'll lead to a train
of thoughts with view and politics. If you're in America right now, you'll probably think about the election and all
that stuff. If you're in Australia, you'll probably think about the kings just visited and all that, and should you
become a republic So these are stories you're getting on it. But if you understand the fact that you don't
have to do that with your thoughts, when
you understand the concept of you have thoughts but you're not the thoughts, and then you can sit back and
observe the thoughts, Ah, there's a thought. And you can label it as one thing you can do but you
can also just have a thought and go, ah, there's a thought and do nothing with it.
You don't have to get on it, you don't have to make it into a story. And then you end
up with this, like, superpower. You move from this reacting to every thought that comes into your head. You feel
like you gotta do something with it or you you go off on it anyway um You join the story
and you make up all kinds of things. One thought leads to another, leads to another, and before you know
it, you're 20 miles down the track on a train where you don't want to be. You think you're the
driver, you're not. You're sitting behind the driver, and the driver is your subconscious mind that's actually making all the
decisions for you. And you're just deciding whether or not to keep patting him on the back. And when, I
mean by patting on the back, you reward your subconscious mind with deep emotions. So if you have a
thought and you're really happy about it, that's then like
adrenaline to your subconscious mind. It's like, ah, I got it right. And if you have a thought and it
like really makes you frightened or angry, the subconscious mind, I got it right, because it's a strong emotion. Your
subconscious mind doesn't know good nor bad, positive or negative. To a. For example, to somebody
that I
don't know, let's Take somebody that wants to burgle a house, a positive thought would be a good loot. But
to someone whose house that is, someone burglary that's a negative thought, that's bad. So it depends on perspective. It
depends on the person to what is a positive and negative thought. And we're all in different situations you know
It's quite a negative thought for me to think about going swimming in the anywhere really. I don't like water,
you know, I broke my neck in the swimming pool. That's a negative thought for me for somebody else, that's
a positive thought. But it's not the thought, it's what we, whether we like it or not, it's whether we
want it or not. So the subconscious mind will give you the thoughts that your subconscious mind thinks you want.
And
there's one other thing that the subconscious mind wants to do is it will give you thoughts to keep you
alive and keep you safe in the present moment. But
it doesn't have no timeline. It doesn't understand tomorrow, last week, next month or any All it is, is in
this moment. So it's just giving you the thoughts that it thinks you need in this moment.
And that's it. That's its only job.
So we allow it to do its job and then we can consciously choose which ones to go on.
And while consciously choosing which ones to go on, we then have some kind of influence
over what comes next. If you're not getting on any of the trains that you don't want, the subconscious mind
will eventually stop sending those trains in. Just the same as if you tell the um a child, yeah, my
favourite sweets are green. They'll give you green sweets for the next 50 years. You've got to re-educate it and
say, no, I don't want green, now stop taking the green. And that's the reality of the subconscious mind. It
is like a monkey kind of child that's just repeating and doing the same things it's learned all the time.
So the more and more we train it to what thoughts we get on, the less suffering we have because
the more thoughts that we actually want. So when you have a thought that you want of gratitude or something
like that, enjoy it, move with it, really sit down and go, hmm, I like this thought.
And then the more of them you'll have. But while we're trying to change a thought and talking about changing
a negative thought into a positive and things like that, you cannot change a thought. Changing a thought is like
trying to change the colour of your top by thinking, try it now. I Don't know. You might be wearing
a white t-shirt Try just thinking, I want to change my t-shirt to a different colour. It's futile, you know
that. But that's what we're trying to do like just change your thoughts, Change your thoughts parents And we get
told this all the time, just think positive. Change your negative thoughts into a positive thoughts and then you'll all
be happy. No, it just doesn't work like that. You cannot change what's already happened. You
cannot change what's already happened. I know I repeated that, but it's really important to understand that notion. So
then what do we do with it? How do we do this? Well, if you spend just a minute or
so, a day or a minute or so every hour, just sit back and go, okay, I'm ready for my
thoughts. Let me have them and just watch them come and
just observe them and see that they're just thoughts and learn to not get on them, learn to do
nothing with them. And
it'll be a really new concept. There's a difference between knowing this and actually doing it. So when you learn
to, there's a thought I don't have to do anything with it?
You know, you might hear something in the street or something and you have to get involved where you can
choose to hmm I'm gonna stay out of this.
Not my monkeys, not my fight.
And you can do the same thing with your thoughts. You know, this is a thought. I'm just not getting
on today. And
you create this gap between the thought and how you respond to life. And
you suddenly become clearer minded, you become more peaceful, you'll become happier, you'll become more wiser and more in control.
And all these things will just suddenly have a profound impact on your life as time goes on. And
you'll just become calmer and
you'll certainly become wiser because you'll be in the one or two percent that actually recognizes their thoughts aren't real.
They're just random and they're crazy. My mind is like a 24-7 committee meeting of about
10,000 different voices all arguing with each other constantly. And I just sit back and watch them happen.
I'm not going to stop my brain thinking.
you can't do that. It's impossible. You will not stop your brain thinking. And
I just wanted to share that with you. It's thoughts and what I've been and conversations I've had the last
few days. It's not a new concept. It's in Buddhism and Zen meditation all those different things.
But I just wanted to put it in perspective. And I don't want to make anything big out of it
because it's not. It really is quite simple. You
are not your thoughts because if you were your thoughts, you couldn't observe your thoughts. You
cannot see something that you are is That's like saying. That's like without a mirror or anything on the outside
have a look at your eyes,
it's like biting your own teeth, you
know you can't do it.
It's. Yeah. Looking at your own eyes. That's funny. Try it. Yeah um you just can't do it.
It's impossible. You can look in a mirror, of course, and you can talk to someone about your thoughts. You
can, but you cannot see what you are.
So the fact that you can witness your thoughts and you can see your thoughts, you
know, you cannot feel the actual electrical stimulation. You cannot actually see that. Of course you can, but
you can actually witness the thought. So you must be something deeper. There must be something beyond that thought that
you are. Otherwise you would not be aware that you had the thought. You
couldn't label it
if that makes sense. There's no way you can label a thought just by. So I've got another
podcast called Inner Peace Meditations. And they're just meditations that are all kinds of things just to give you a
little more stillness in the storms And let's just do a quick three, four minute
meditation now and there'll be an extended version on the Inner Peace meditations. So just wiggle your arms,
make yourself a little bit comfortable. If you're driving a car, don't do this. But if you're in a safe
place where you can just take three minutes out, please do this. So just allow your arms to relax. Allow
your body to relax
And become aware of your breath.
And imagine you're breathing in calm, breathing out. Relax.
You don't have to do anything else here right this moment.
You don't have to change your breath. Your body knows how to breathe,
Your body knows how to relax.
Your body knows how to be
in calm, breathing out. Relax
as you do So just
soften your gaze or close your eyes
And just become the watcher of thoughts.
I'm just waiting for thoughts and I'm going to be aware of them.
And a thought could be, oh, I've got an itch or I've got to do something later, or
really, I don't want to be sitting here doing nothing.
And just be curious and amused by the thought.
You can even say, hi, thought.
And just by actively acknowledging it, you can just let it go.
I have thoughts, but I'm not those thoughts.
And that's it really. So just shake out your arms and come back, come back in the room to me.
So if you think about it, just if you can learn to cultivate that in everyday life a bit more.
When I sit down to meditate, my thoughts come thick and fast. There are actually no more thoughts in meditation
than there are in normal life. But in normal life, you're busier, you're walking, you're doing something, you might be
holding something, you're you're actively reading or watching telly. So therefore you, your brain is already
preoccupied with a lot of those thoughts in meditation. Just like when you lie down to go sleep at night,
your brain hasn't got all those other things to do, so suddenly you're aware of all these thoughts coming up,
you're actually not thinking anything more. It's just your brain is constantly thinking because that's what it does. A brain
that is not constantly thinking is dead. You know, that's the reality. Yet we all want no thinking. No, you
don't. You just want nice thoughts. Let's be honest. Or if you want to go sleep you just want less
thoughts. You want peaceful thoughts of going to sleep And that's why my deep sleep meditation works so well. Because
I don't say about get rid of all thoughts. I give you a thought to help you go sleep.
You know, a thought of safety and calm. And who knew I had a voice that helps people go sleep?
That's a talent. You know, I could read the car manual when people fall asleep. Something the world really needs
right now probably Sleep is one of the greatest things um But yeah, when we understand that
we don't have to get on every thought suddenly, we can have more peace and less suffering. We
can have a thought of anger that would normally make us angry because the thought leads to a feeling the
feeling leads to story leads to more thoughts and more story, and then the cycle continues. What if you can
just go, hmm, not doing it this time. And a few minutes later, the mind will think of another thought
to go into. And that's it. That's okay. So I'm Steven Webb. This is Stillness in the Storms. And I
want to thank everybody that donates and treats me to a coffee. You really help keep this podcast and the
Inner Peace Meditations podcast, totally free. You can go to StevenWebb.uk and where you can just
donate a coffee and buy a coffee for me. It just helps pay for the podcast and do all that.
So thank you deeply to all those that do that. I want to keep them free for everybody because who
likes to listen to adverts? Not me. Take care, guys. And I love you
