Last week saw the arrival of autumnal misty mornings and with that the once invisible spiders webs, made visible by the glistening drops of dew. It got me thinking about how spiders webs are just like thought…
What is Thought?
I’m certain I’ve explored this before on the blog but also in my free 5 day online course.
Thought is something universal. It’s something that all humans experience. I like to call it blips of energy that pass through us. Or to use a metaphor, like a conveyor belt of different foods.
Scientists believe we have over 50,000 thoughts a day but how many of those are you actually aware of?
I’m guessing very few and that’s because Thought is neutral. It goes by un-noticed. A stream of energy passing through our mind.
Except when it becomes noticed. Then we add personal thinking to it and create something more substantial than the original passing energy.
We become pre-occupied; the thinking can become all consuming and we disappear into our heads and are unable to engage properly with the outside world.
Until we pop back out again having noticed a different thought.
Which incidentally happens all on its own. There is nothing we need to do to make thoughts disappear; they do that all by themselves when we stop paying attention to them!
Thoughts and feelings
Thoughts and feelings are like two sides of the same coin. You cannot have a thought without a feeling.
Try it out; think of something scary and feel that in your body. Then think of something relaxing and feel that in your body.
Can you have a feeling without a thought? Not that I’m aware of because in order to know the feeling there needs to be a thought that identifies it. We often don’t know what the thought is but that’s because it’s invisible.
Where do spiders fit in to this?
Now whether you love or hate spiders you cannot deny that they are rather magical creatures. Anything that can create a silvery thread that can span a footpath is remarkable in my book.
Not to mention the intelligence behind creating the web in order to trap its food; built in intelligence. They don’t get taught how to make webs, it seems that they just know how to do it.
Anyway, that intelligence is a topic for another blog.
The webs themselves are all but invisible. How many times have you walked into one because you didn’t see it? They are all around us, yet we don’t see them.
And it is for this reason that spiders webs are like thoughts.
When we are caught in whatever our flavour of thought storm is (have you noticed that you have familiar places you go with your thinking?) it is often invisible to us.
We don’t notice that we’re caught in a sticky web of thought but we certainly can feel it because of the reason outlined above.
When a fly gets trapped in a web, struggling only serves to get it stuck more tightly and it’s the same with thoughts.
When we struggle and fight out experience, trying to change it or make it different, we get stuck tighter. By adding more thinking, we add more invisible threads.
So how do we change our experience when we don’t like it?
This is such a common question that I get asked by clients.
And my answer is simple; you can’t change your experience directly and the more you try by using your intellect the further away you’ll get.
The harder you try, the more stuck in the web of thoughts you become because you’re creating more thinking to try and manage the original thought.
It seems to me there are two solutions.
- Wait until something makes the thinking visible (like the mist in the example of the spiders web). When you truly See that the experience you are having is coming from your thinking, it dissolves the web. That’s the beauty of the Three Principles Understanding; it dissolves the webs.
- Stop struggling! Relax and soften into the experience. Try not to add any additional thinking or judgement to it.
If you’re interested in seeing how this understanding could make a difference in your life please book a free 30 minute exploratory call with me.
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