Having finished a 40-day twice-daily hours long meditation streak, I sat down for the first day of my next 40-day cycle. And what came up was “living an awakened life.” Living an awakened life means living from a place of wonder, love and possibility. Going through life with an open heart and a sense and deep feeling of conviction that everything will fall into place and great things are going to come if only I go through life with that very feeling.
I literally manifest the life I live through the thoughts I think and not the other way around: I am not a victim of circumstances but rather I am continuously creating my circumstances through my way of being which is informed by what I am thinking from moment to moment.
My subconscious mind keeps presenting me with thoughts based on the past, challenges and obstacles as well as thoughts of a beautiful future, the one I have been dreaming about. It is me who chooses which thoughts I engage with and my habituated selecting needs to be broken. A new habit needs to be built that choses and explores the positive, empowering thoughts that come up rather than the ruminating, negative and full of limitations ones.
If I want to live an awakened life, I have to awake to the reality that thoughts create my world. I don’t choose the thoughts that pop up in my mind but I do choose which one’s I accept and engage with. Thoughts are like trains coming into a train station. I don’t control the trains but I can choose which train I get on and how long I ride it.
And the very trains I ride determine where I am going and how my life is unfolding. Living an awakened life means being very conscious about this process and choosing my trains with a lot of care. This is a skill that needs to be learned, it’s not innate, and that takes time and effort. Without training, I naturally follow my thoughts on autopilot as they pop out of the seeming nothingness of my mind, errounously believing I am my thoughts and they are reality.
As I am getting more conscious about which thoughts, the empowering rather than the limiting, negative ones, I want to ride, my subconscious is learning in the background overwriting my old programs that are the origin of all these negative thoughts in the first place. And so little by little the thoughts that pop out of my subconscious mind are changing and it’s becoming easier and easier to just ride positive ones.
And there comes a day when that’s what all thoughts will be. That is living an awakened life, one of being empowered, truly being in the driver seat. And not being determined by my past and my past thinking, conditioning and memories but creating a new version of myself every day, that is ever more empowered, freer, lighter, more expansive and set in the future I envision.
This is not about so-called “positive thinking.” This is not about suppressing negative thoughts. This is about consciously choosing which trains I ride rather than being in denial saying that I’m no longer thinking negative thoughts. Pushing those away only gives them more power because I am engaging with them. The brain doesn't understand not. If I tell you not to think about an elephant, you will most definitely think about one now.
So life becomes like a meditation: A thought comes up, I just notice the thought and then let it move on. I am in the train station and not getting on any train, that is what I am doing in my meditation, no matter what the thought is. And sometimes, and sometimes more often, I will get on a train unconsciously and when I notice I step out of it again and let it go. Standing again at a train station observing my thoughts without riding them.
That is why meditation is so powerful. It helps me to see my thoughts for what they are rather than me becoming them. Meditation is the training to learn that I am not my thoughts but that they simply arise from my subconscious which is a product of my memories and past experiences. If I want to create a different future, instead of a continuation of the past, I have to let the old thinking go and ride new, consciously chosen thoughts.
Bringing that skill into daily life means intentionally picking the thoughts I want to ride thereby feeling better, making different choices, creating different outcomes and thereby life becomes a consciously created one rather than one that happened to me.
Even better, this new life is creating new empowering memories and thought patterns that feed back into my subconscious mind and suddenly the thoughts that I am being presented with are the very ones I would have consciously want to pick myself. I no longer have to deal with those negative ones, a new Vincent has been born.
And the life he has been meaning to live is now unfolding by itself. Effortlessly. And that’s the promise of living an awakened life.
11/ choosing which trains to ride