Good morning, God, and thank you for today. It's going to be another cold and snowy day--winter is back, with a bit of a vengeance, isn't it? That's okay, though, as it's still winter and the few spring-like weeks of weather that we had were very nice to experience. Thanks very much for them--they will make the end of winter something much more bearable.
I guess my major concern today is with nagging thoughts--thoughts and ideas that are always at the back of my mind, trying to bring me down in one way or another, making me think about things that I don't want to think about, making me worry about things that I don't want to worry about. They're almost always there, making me worry or stress about things that are outside of my control. They're about money, about people, about tasks that are ahead of me or already done, about others judging me and/or things that I do. They're about students and colleagues, they're doubts and concerns, they're tiny but they're very strong. I make my very best effort to keep them at the back of my mind, but the truth is that sometimes my best isn't as good as it could be--I still feel stress and I still feel fear.
I wish there were some way that I could banish them for good, or even just evict them whenever they show up to bother me. I know that there are those people who would say that they're the result of a lack of faith, but I don't buy that--my faith is quite strong, and I know that it's not the source of these thoughts. The source is fear, and fear has always been a pretty constant presence in my life. Rarely do these thoughts grow strong enough to ruin a day or create extreme amounts of stress, but they are consistent, and they are unnecessary--they accomplish nothing for me. Any thoughts?
A response:
Of course there are thoughts. First of all, you're welcome. Enjoy the day and all that it brings to you. That's why I made it in the first place.
Second, thoughts like this are a problem for virtually everyone. You have a bit of an advantage in the fact that you're able and willing to recognize them for what they are and accept the fact that they're there--most people do themselves quite a bit of damage when they refuse to acknowledge their existence, much less take them on and try to do something about them.
Your faith does have something to do with them--no, they're not "caused" by a lack of faith, per se. They're not punishment for not believing something strongly enough. But they are let into the back of your mind through spots that your faith isn't strong enough to fill. Think of a bucket full of water--it it's completely full, there's no place for anything else to fit in the bucket. But if there's room anywhere, there's space for something else to get into that bucket. In a way, it depends upon what you fill your mind with, and how full you fill it. You've noticed that when you get completely immersed in something, your mind somehow doesn't have space for those nagging thoughts to be running around in there because you're concentrating so fully on something else. The nagging thoughts that you mention tend to be with you during times when you're not concentrating fully and intensely, no? They kind of sneak in there when there's open space to sneak into.
If that's the case, then it seems obvious that one way of dealing with such thoughts is to keep your mind occupied. That hardly seems possible, does it. Another way of dealing with them is to keep your mind empty, through meditation, which is something that you've never really tried. One of the goals of meditation is to empty the mind of thoughts that are there in order to achieve peace and balance. It's a very effective way of dealing with such thoughts, but in reality, relatively few people choose to meditate regularly.
Another way of dealing with those thoughts is to deal with them actively without banishing them or crowding them out. Accept them, consider them, and learn about them. If it's a thought about money (and many such thoughts are), understand why the worry about money is there and keep in mind that worrying won't change the money situation. Perhaps you're afraid that you'll run out of money--that fear is logical and understandable, but the thoughts that results from that fear are not. Understand that they originate in that fear and that by running around in your mind, they're perpetuating the fear that you feel. The fear may even be subconscious, but it's manifesting itself in your consciousness by creating thoughts that plague you throughout the day. So accept the thought and try to understand it so that you can understand some of what's going on in your mind on deeper levels.
It takes work. It takes effort. Most worthy endeavors do. But freedom from such thoughts most certainly is worth any effort that you may expend in an effort to reach it, isn't it?
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