We used to believe – you are what you think about.

So much has changed. Now we realize we are not our thoughts.

Our thoughts are a function that goes along with being human. We have the ability to think, just like most of us have the ability to see, hear, taste, smell, feel, breathe, move about in the world and intuit. We have reactions to all of the things we experience, and we are not our reactions.

What are we? We are the awareness of the human part of us. Our soul, or our spirit, are perfectly at peace hanging out with our human self, watching what the human incarnation does in Earth School. The human part of us maybe doesn’t, or didn’t realize, that we are in Earth School. The human will feel out of alignment until it realizes the soul, and a sense of wanting to do well in Earth School.

Wanting to do well is very human. As beautiful souls, we are aware of the human foibles, and we guide ourselves through the human dream. The mind is not the same as our thoughts, but the mind does house and analyze all of the data, including the thoughts and the emotional reactions to all of the incoming data. We are not our mind, but in Earth School we can actually use our mind to overcome the challenges being brought on by thoughts that may occupy too much space in the mental continuum.

Once we start filling our mind with negative thoughts, the entire lens of the mind becomes heavy because of the lower frequency that negative thoughts reside at. So in this, the colors we see will be more dull, our food won’t taste as good, maybe people are especially crabby at work. When our thoughts hit a high point, let’s say we have just fallen in love, the whole world looks bright and the same annoyances from a week ago don’t exist anymore. We feel like we are walking on air.

This is the power of thoughts, and our reactions to them, on the mind. The conscious part of the mind is our most human based area of thought and it is used for analyzing the “outer world.” The subconscious mind is “the back of the mind” that taps into the collective and exists without the limits of the human body but with a connection to it. The superconscious, or the big mind, is the collective consciousness of all sentient beings.

If we point our thoughts toward using the mind in a way that will help us thrive and live a life that is colored with vibrant frequencies and fulfilling experiences, we won’t escape the human emotions, such as grief and sadness, but we bring them into a mind that operates at a lighter frequency.

We don’t have to get sucked into feeling like life is meaningless and happiness is fleeting when we get disappointed. We can be in control of using the mind to acknowledge that disappointments are just human happenings we don’t want to accept. Having patience – accepting how things are without wanting them to be any different.

Thoughts Will Do as They Have Always Done Until We Interrupt Them

The thoughts will try to take the same route they’ve always taken, and gaining control means the conscious part of our mind looks at the thoughts, laughs, and rewrites the thoughts every time the thoughts go back to the lower vibrations. If suddenly you are directing hate at another person, your awareness can indicate – ‘oopsie! There they go again, those reactionary human thoughts doing their dance. Nope. Let’s find a more mindful way of thinking.‘

Being mindful means being aware of what’s in the mind, including the self awareness of how the full mind affects the human behaviors and outcomes. A mind can be full of too much muck, drama, anger, justifications, excuses and pessimism that any awareness of it can send a person into a victim state instead of inspiring them to grab onto a higher frequency.

When we look at the various areas of our life, we can often find areas where we function in alignment with our highest vibration and we then have some areas where we just can’t seem to get anything going. For over achievers, this is actually painful, because they want to leap ahead and feel instantly good when they succeed at the next project, but the feeling of being incomplete and constantly frustrated stays. Identifying which areas seem to be out of alignment is a first step in using the mind as a tool to create the life we want for ourselves.

Maybe the overachiever seems to have it all but struggles with anxiety, depression and can’t communicate well in interpersonal relationships when there is discomfort. Maybe their emotional and mental health is starting to cause physical symptoms, like stomach issues, or high blood pressure. Maybe they use alcohol to self medicate.

In any area of life where we still function with our old coping skills and lower vibrational thoughts, we can use our mind to manipulate use or inspire us to get back to a better position.

Noticing our thoughts and noticing where we go dark can be a little uncomfortable. We are in the business of personal growth, so we should be able to look at the discomfort as growing pains, and maybe try to be excited about that. I’m uncomfortable? Good, I must be doing some good work!

It can help to acknowledge our humanity and how everyone has gone through disappointments in life. Sometimes we can feel like it is always happening to us. Why can’t it work out for me? But the reality to keep in mind is that we are a part of a human collective and our experiences highly overlap. If you really look at our culture, people are complaining about their disappointments all the time! It’s not at all a unique experience, it’s a rather frequent human experience.

We Can Use a Formula to Retrain the Mind

We can retrain our mind to understand that we don’t have to pay attention and give power to thoughts that say we are the victim, or cursed, or unlucky, or not good enough. Notice these thoughts, stop them once noticed, rewrite the script, repeat. This is the formula, and a catalyst is appreciation of self and gratitude for all that we have.

When we get in a rut, it can be easy to have the “mid life crisis” moments where we just have regrets and many of them are about what we still haven’t done. Again, once we notice we’re complaining to ourselves, we can really think about how far we have come, how we went places and did things that were amazing, and that we’re lucky enough to be on a path toward more experiences and realizations.

We don’t have to trick ourselves into optimism, we are just appreciating the person we’re becoming and acknowledging all the good times, respecting and honoring the positive parts of our past and present. We must allow ourselves to truly love our human self. What we tend to be annoyed by, or even hurt by, are traits in the other that are very human.

A soul isn’t malicious, but a human act may come out as a selfish action that causes negative reactions. When we are mindful of our thoughts, and of our instinct to react, we can prevent acting out on these things, knowing we are not our thoughts and feelings. When we have strong and passionate human feelings, it is quite ok to observe that and not act impulsively. Impulse control is a necessary part of mindfulness.

There is a lot to mindfulness. It’s a lifelong practice to gain control over the human self. The human thought-generator is the ego, the sense of needing to survive in a threatened state, and we haven’t been used to watching this ego and trying to tame it. Can the ego tame the ego? Yes. This is how we use our mind to live from our heart and soul.

Our heart center is the place in us that is also a very human emotional experience of compassion for life. The heart center is our connectedness to our whole collective consciousness and houses our ability in the human realm to have empathy and help each other survive. It can function opposite the ego, but here, our aim is to connect these two human realms. Our ego will join once it fully realizes its survival depends on love and compassion for the collective.

Our soul is always pure and in a perfect state. Our spirit is housed there but permeates every aspect of being human and the parts of us that exist beyond the human realm. The heart center and the mind are each a necessary part of experiencing the human journey. The human journey is extremely mystical and intense. We witness a wild, paradoxical reality, through all of our senses, and must figure out how to use our mind to navigate through everything life brings to us.

So when we are having negative thoughts that seem to take over our mind, we can remember to let the thoughts pass through and go, then rewrite the script for a more positive vision of life. We can know that all the challenges that go along with being human, are shared by us all. We can look at all the good and all of the growth that has already happened personally and world wide.

We can look at the positive outcomes that we will enjoy when we begin to grab onto the higher vibrational way of keeping us mindful of the lighter vibrations of heart centered compassion and gratitude. We expand our consciousness, and feel lighter.