Corinne Austin: Deep musings on distinguishing thought from being

We can watch our minds act throughout the creation and interaction of our thoughts, but we are separate to those thoughts, writes Corinne Austin. Photo / Getty Images

NO EXCUSES

"I'll not be by my own content caught, for I am the thinker and not the thought."

I listened to a podcast as I went to sleep the other night, and it helped me understand a distinction that is crucial to our own understanding of power, who we are, and who we can be.

That distinction is the one between thought (mind) and being. We have thought, and we are a being. But that thought does not have to translate into who or what we are being.

We have a mind. And we can see that we are thinking or that we have thought. So we can watch our minds act throughout the creation and interaction of our thoughts, but we are separate to those thoughts, and we have the choice to not accept them, to not express them, to not become them.

It's a shift in our consciousness through which our thinking, and our awareness of that thinking, is separate.

"When you recognise that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking. When you notice that voice, you realise that who you are is not the voice - the thinker - but the one who is aware of it." - Eckhart Tolle.

What we think about has the potential to stifle and suffocate change, progress, and success. Photo /Getty Images

It's a deep musing for many of us, but I wanted to share as there's immense power and relevance in it.

If our thoughts are such a powerful construct, and we haven't the awareness to separate thought from our being, then the frustrated, sore, tired, unmotivated body that we may currently have could be being reinforced over and over the more energy we give to those negative or unnecessary thoughts. And that becomes our being. Because until we can make that distinction, what we think about often is what we could inevitably become...

But that has the potential to stifle and suffocate change, progress, and success.

However, we can of course think and reinforce positive thoughts and positive constructs of ourselves, both current and future. And we can seed and water those. Because those kinds of things we do want to become, we do want to experience.

So, it's not to say that just because we can separate thought from being that we should.

It's awakening to the idea that the negative thoughts that we have can be observed from the sidelines, and they can be left to play their own game, while at the other end of the field we can construct a far more effective stream of thoughts which, upon awareness of our higher self, can be welcomed to manifest in their most rich and pure way.

I hope this way of thinking can bring a new layer of awareness to you in your creation of the happy body you long to design and live in.

• Corinne Austin is a health and movement coach, corinne@fitfixnz.co.nz .