Stop Overthinking - The Simple Secret to Mental Freedom - E158

Please let me know if you can hear me on Substack. If you could be so kind. I see Matthew Brownfield. Matthew, can you hear me on Substack? Just wanna make sure that we can hear one another on Substack. Sounds good. All right, cool. Great morning, everybody. Great morning, world, great morning, humans. This is Dr. JC Dornick, and welcome to another edition of the Make Sense with Dr. JC podcast. And this would be our live edition. And we are streaming all over the place. This is so much fun. Just taking risks and enjoying this live process. And I hope you guys enjoy kind of seeing the behind the scenes and getting a little bit of a live version of this. It ends up getting all cleaned up and going on, you know, an edited version for YouTube and an edited version for the podcast. But I just think it's so cool to just do it live and just feel so honored and blessed to be able to do this. And I wanna say something about that. Bloomington has joined. Good to see everybody. We're on Substack and we're on YouTube. And I see that we've got some folks joining us from YouTube as well. I just wanna share with you from a place of gratitude that it's really crazy to think about what has happened with my podcast and all of this. I mean, it makes sense because I've been doing it for so long Bloomington, Ramel Samantha Smith and our friends from YouTube. But I just want you to, I wanna remind you and maybe there's a lesson in this that I come from this world where I struggled terribly with anxiety, with public speaking and stuff like that. So this started off as, you know, exposure therapy for me. Years and years and years ago. And it's definitely easier. It's not easy. Hi, JC. The live appears vertically and you are in center. I don't know. Am I in center? Let's see. Okay. I have to get back in center. There we go. All right, cool. So in any case, I just wanna share with you that this whole thing that I do here is really a blessing for me. You know, it's something that, like I said before, it's something that I do for my own mental health. But I just realized today how fortunate I am to have this ability to come to you. I mean, I've grown so much from this experience and a lot of people from the outside in kinda maybe look at me as somebody that knows what I'm doing. I'm just a human being that's been through tons and tons of hard times in my life. And I owe a lot of my personal growth to having this luxury, this amazing opportunity to come to you in the morning and share some things that I've been, you know, saying, hmm, about. So anyway, that's just me saying thank you. Just so honored and privileged. I see TimeBinder is here from Substack. We got a lot of people coming in. So anyway, that was just my way of saying thanks. And I'm really excited about this episode here today. And just as a reminder, you know, we've got so many different things going on in the Make Sense ecosystem. We've got our new YouTube channel now thanks to the amazing Leah who's here with us right now. TimeBinder sent me a little bit of one of those things. I love that stuff. That goes a long way, by the way. But we've got the YouTube channel at Dr. J.C. Dornick. We're on Substack, Make Sense, Substack. We've got the Make Sense podcast. And it's just, you know, it's crazy. It's crazy to think about all of this stuff happening at once, but it all comes from this place of me just deciding that what I had to say was worth saying, you know, kind of like Ted Talks. And I never knew if anybody was gonna be interested in it. But then I realized that everything that everybody here with us today, everything that's in your mind, in your heart, it's worth saying. It's worth sharing, you know. I love, that's why I love the interaction that we have with one another. When you guys make comments and you ask questions and you say kind things or even mean things, I just love interaction with human beings. And I just feel so blessed and I wanted to share that with you right now. And we are streaming live on YouTube. And I guess what we're doing today is we're coming at you vertical in YouTube. And we're gonna start in a second, but I'm just getting used to all these different screens that are popping up. Kathy Mitchell, the famous ballroom dancer. Great morning, my friend. Good to see you. All right, so let's begin. It begins with a question. Do you ever wish that you could hit mute on your own thoughts for just five minutes? Have you thought of that? We've been conditioned, if you think about it, take a look around at your environment. We've been conditioned to think that if we're thinking it, well, then it must be true. But the truth is, or the potential truth is, your brain, my brain is just really a suggestion box. And you don't have to agree with everything that it says. We're gonna play with this idea today. And here's the advantage. If you stick with me today, this video is going to be a platform where I'm gonna share a simple, but mind-blowing question that's gonna really shut down the stress instantaneously. That's the hypothetical. We're gonna share something today that is super powerful and it might help you shut down your stress instantly. So it's time to stop letting your, it's time to stop letting your mind run the show and start being the person in charge. So we're gonna make sense today of overthinking. I find that overthinking is just hilarious. You know, we're gonna get into it and I'm gonna point some things out today, but the whole concept of overthinking is just really, really silly if you think about it. And I think the reason why we overthink is just because we're lacking the awareness of what thoughts are and what they actually mean and what they don't mean. So I see Jamie Lundgren is here on YouTube. Hey, James, Leah is saying hello. Yeah, so we have this live broadcast happening on multiple platforms right now. So I hope that you'll consider sharing it around. It is a message worth spreading, but so is your message. And if you join me in this conversation today and you share some things, it very well might end up on the podcast. And that means that a lot of people are going to, a lot are gonna hear about it. So I see T-Rays, T-Rays us up with Teresa has joined us. That's a great sub-stack name. So let's get into this. And as a just quick reminder, I'll keep saying it. You are welcome to join this conversation. And for me personally, I would much rather hear what you have to say and speak about that, how these things that I'm about to share, how they land, if they land, if you're confused, ask questions, and that would just make me super, super happy. You'll be my day maker. So as we go along, feel free to interact. I'm watching on sub-stack and I've got my comments up for YouTube. I would love to just pause and discuss things with you in on this topic. So here's the core concept. And I call it the thought thunderstorm. So come with me for a sec. We're gonna talk about overthinking. Do you ever struggle with your thoughts? And what I mean by that is buying into them and finding them controlling or persuading your reality. Of course, right? Is anybody here willing to tell the truth about that? So in my new book, Makes Sense, How to Rewire Your Mind and Transform Your Life, I call this the thought thunderstorm. So think about a thunderstorm for a second. A thunderstorm is not something that we really control. Always looking to discern, this is called the dichotomy of control, the things that we do and don't control. When we wake up in the morning, whether you can see it or not, the sun rises. And when a thunderstorm happens, you don't really have any control over it. So I love the idea of recognizing that our thoughts are sometimes perceived as things that we don't or we can't control. Hence the reason why I call it a thought thunderstorm. But here's where it makes, or here's where this gets a little bit tricky. Sometimes that storm, it feels personal and it feels like yours. Sometimes it even feels like you, but it's not. If we really break it down, which we're gonna do today, it's not. Your brain thinks the same way that your heart beats. That's what it does. In Buddhism, they always talk about the idea of greeting their thoughts by just saying, verbalizing, thinking, and that's their way in Buddhism of reminding themselves that that's what the brain does. It would be the equivalent of looking at your lungs, focusing on your lungs and saying breathing, or your heart and saying beating. Think about what that would do for you. If you just recognize that your brain is doing something that it automatically does, the thunderstorm indicates no matter what, right? You don't have a say in your thoughts. That's what we're gonna play with today. But we have this tendency of analyzing everything, but do we analyze our heartbeat? No, we don't sit there and analyze every beat of our heart, but for some reason, we analyze, judge, and emotionally invest in almost every thought that we can catch. Now, we can't catch every thought, right? We get about 40 to 70,000 thoughts that flow through our head. But the ones that we catch, very, very dangerous. Sometimes they become our reality, but we analyze them and we get emotionally invested. Why is that? So today's episode and this conversation that we're having today kind of popped up. I always think about this. I've spoken about this concept many, many times with you, but it really, really hit me the other day because I was listening to something or someone and it really captured my attention, captured my curiosity the other day. So for those of you that don't know Rupert Spira, he's just one of the most amazing thought leaders and I just love him. I was listening to a YouTube video that he was talking about. He very often just interviews his audience live, kind of like we're doing right now, but in this case, they were actually in a room and they were just videotaping it. For those of you that are readers, Rupert Spira, if you want an introductory book to him, because he's pretty heavy and you're gonna hear a little bit of him today, he wrote a book called The Shining of Being and it's just a fantastic book. It's a great way to dip your toes or jump into the world of Rupert Spira. And in this particular video, someone in the audience, in the live audience, raised their hand and they asked him about racing thoughts. They were talking about their own racing thoughts. So I want you to think about how this interprets in your own world. They explained that they were feeling like their thoughts or their mind, we're calling that the thought thunderstorm, was running the show, et cetera. So they're basically explaining something that we hear very often that their thoughts were dictating their reality. But Rupert is a very unique individual and instead of giving them a strategy or telling them what to do, what he did that he so commonly does is he just asked them a simple question and he said to this particular woman in the audience, he says, let me ask you a question. Who is it that is aware of your thoughts? I'll just pause on that for a second. When you consider your thoughts, I'm asking you this question as well, just as he posed it to his audience member. Who is it that is aware of your thoughts? Feel free to chime in there and answer. I just want to see, I'm analyzing you. Jackie Moon, Jackie Moon, I know who you are. No, I don't. So I want to just give Jackie Moon a shout out because Jackie Moon is asking me if I'm gay. They said, hmm, are you gay? So that's an interesting question right there, right? The first thing that pops into my mind is, I wonder why Jackie was compelled to ask me that question. So naturally I'm thinking Jackie, am I portraying right now that I'm gay? Is it just that I'm here live with you guys or have you done some research on me and thought about that? So I'm not discounting what you're saying. I'm just wondering what's going on on Planet Jackie right now. And then the other thing that's coming up is I'm thinking, why did Jackie decide in this public forum where people can see, because Jackie, people can see that you've just posted that at 8.13 a.m., people can see that you asked that question. So I'm just wondering, I'm like, huh, I'm gonna throw a, hmm, back at you Jackie. I wonder why you wanted people to see you ask that question. Right, so I'm married, very happily married. I'm almost certain, because I'm not certain of everything. Remember, I haven't made up my mind up about anything yet, but I'm pretty certain that I'm not gay and I'm assuming that you mean, do I have a preference for men? I'm not sure exactly what you're coming from. So there's another aspect Jackie, I'm not even sure what you're asking. So maybe in the comments, you could, you know, go a little bit further past your analyzation of me and tell me what you mean. And also, if you'd be so kind, just because I love human behavior, let me know why you wanted to know. Is there something about that topic that is interesting to you? Or, and either one is fine, or you aren't happy, time binder? Are you saying I'm not happy, time binder? Okay, so now we've got someone saying, asking me if I'm gay and also challenging whether I'm happy, burning down the patriarchy has joined us well. So Jackie, please do us a favor and elaborate a little bit, because I'm just curious. I'm okay with the question though. I see Mylene Cervana is here. Great morning, awesome to see all of you guys. Okay, so let's get into this. Rupert Spira asked a question of his audience member. He said, who is it that is aware of your thoughts? So after like making this face, this woman in the audience, I mean, think about how you would respond to a question like that. Who is aware of your thoughts? Who is it that is aware of your thoughts? So she had this face like, well, that's a strange fucking question to ask me, right? But her answer was, she said, it is me. So he asked her, who is aware of your thoughts? And then her answer was me. And then he asked a question. I love this. This is what I love about Rupert Spira. He asked a question, he says, okay, great. He says, tell me more about that. Tell me more about me. Now that was obviously a great question to ask her back because it helps her focus a little bit more on this thing that is happening before the thoughts. And that's kind of where we're gonna go right now. But when you sit with this, something really starts to shift. So consider these kind of scenarios here. Before the thoughts. So we're talking about recognizing the thoughts in our head. And this is powerful if you can grasp this. And Jackie, if you're commenting, I can't see it right now, I'll come back to it to entertain the gay question. But consider this, before our thoughts, there's you. During our thoughts, while we're actually experiencing our thoughts, they're here, we're experiencing them, there's you. And then after the thoughts, which is an indication that thoughts come and go sometimes, right? There's a lot of power in that. But after the thoughts, there's you. Which means, if we think of the thoughts as that thunderstorm, which means you're not the thunderstorm, you are the sky where the thunderstorm is taking place. Unspeakable level, what does that mean? You are not happy, unspeakable level. Time binder, I'm not understanding. So my whole ecosystem is about making sense of things. So please elaborate a little bit on that. Let me see if Jackie is still here. Ubi Gunan. So JXRASTIK just chimed in and said, Ubi Gunan. Man, human beings are so fascinating, right? So I'm not really sure what Gunan means, but I'm also wondering once again, like when you come into a chat and somebody's doing a Zoom, by the way, guys, this is what really fascinates me. It's human behavior, right? I don't have any idea who JXRASTIK is, and that's from YouTube. But he or she just popped into the chat where everybody can see them and just felt like saying, Ubi Gunan. So please, once again, just like Jackie, elaborate. What does Gunan mean? I'm 54 years old. I'm a little bit lame in that sense. Maybe my daughter or my kids would know what that means. They'd be like, dad, that's not a good thing that JXRASTIK said. So please, elaborate, elaborate. And also once again, let me know, or let everybody else know, why you wanted to put that in view of everybody else. Isn't that fascinating? Now, I've done it all, guys. I've said crazy things. I went through a phase of my life where I was very, very insecure with myself. Jackie, not in a sexual sense, but I was very insecure with myself, and I found myself very often doing things to either get attention, and this is just me. I'm not saying that's what it is for you guys, but I would do things to get attention, but also found myself very often downplaying other people or trying to do something to make somebody else feel less than, because I guess it made me feel a little bit more than, I'm not sure. So please, if you enter the conversation and you say something in this format, anything goes, guys. I mean, as long as it's totally not inappropriate, but what does goonin' means? And how am I gooning right now? Because I don't understand that. All right, so let's get back in. Before the thoughts, there's you. During the thoughts, there's you. And even after the thoughts, there's still you. And what that means is that you're not the thunderstorm. You're the sky. So I wanna talk to you about something that I call the uninvited guest. Now, there's so many different ways we can interpret this. We're talking about the thoughts in our head right now, but there's people showing up at this live right now that, I mean, I guess they were invited in some sort of a situation, because I'm posting about it and I'm letting people know, but I didn't like say, hey, please come in here and tell me what you think about me and things like that. So we're having lots of uninvited, unsolicited things happen in life, but right now we're focused on our thoughts. So this is where this concept that I've been thinking about and also heard Rupert Spira talk about, it really hit me. Our thoughts, if you think about it, are uninvited guests at a dinner party. This is like a scenario. Just imagine having a dinner party, there's a knock at the door, and somebody that you didn't invite wants to come in. So our thoughts are uninvited guests at a dinner party. They just show up very often uninvited, unannounced, unfiltered. We just heard some things, I've never heard of that before, goonin'. I mean, I remember in a cartoon, I think it was maybe a puppy or something, there was a cartoon named Alice the Goon, but I can't interpret how I would be gooning, but either way, that was unsolicited and a little bit unfiltered, just like our thoughts. So sometimes our thoughts are loud, sometimes our thoughts are critical, and we're seeing this in human behavior as well. That's what I love about this stuff. I love you guys that kind of challenge me as well. And I would assume those people have gone away, I hope they come back. But sometimes our thoughts in our head are loud, sometimes critical, and also sometimes they have a little bit of an element of anxiousness to them. Do you ever get any thoughts in your head or a little bit anxious in nature? Now, while that stuff is going on, we still feel this strange obligation to let them in. I'm just completely fascinated with how society gives us these weird feelings that we have to be certain, we talked about that last week, that we have to respond. You know, like when somebody comes in and they say something to you, or you say something to yourself, we live in a world where we feel like we have to respond, right, and we have to come up with an answer, and we have to, and if we're not certain, we can't be uncertain about things. But there's this strange obligation that we have with our thoughts to entertain them, right? And if we're looking at our thoughts as uninvited guests, that would be the equivalent of letting them in the door, sit them down, entertain them, feed them the uninvited guest, and you can see the correlation with our thoughts, and also consider that what they're saying, these thoughts in our head, consider them. Like even give, entertain them and listen to them. Why do we feel compelled to do that when we have a thought in our head? So who made us the host of every thought that tries to enter our minds? Isn't that an interesting thing to come? So let's see, Timebinder says, driving but, let's see, driving but look up, oh God, I can't pronounce that, cause it was structural differential. Okay, so if you do me a favor, I know what Netty Netty is, I love that, so you got a little bit of a Buddhist vibe to you. Please reach out to me and share that source. I will look it up. I haven't made up my mind about anything, and I'm very fascinated with just about everything. So what we're talking about is the uninvited guest and wondering why we feel compelled to let them in and feed them and entertain them and even consider them. I'm wearing a shirt right now that says breaking news, I don't care. Now, that doesn't mean I don't care about anything. What it means is I don't care about stupid shit. Now, what I consider stupid shit, and you have your own version of this, is stuff that doesn't matter, stuff that doesn't support or align with not only me, but the things that matter most to me. That's something I've gotten very, very efficient with, is not being so careless with what I care about. So I do that with my thoughts as well. And if you look at the interface response system, if you've got my book, it's really just a system of filtering things and asking questions. And we're gonna kind of go into some of those questions right now. So if you have a couple of questions that are coming from a curious place in your mind, when you get these uninvited guests, these thoughts, you can ask a question like this. Well, who asked you? Isn't that an interesting question? Now, if you say that to a person, you might offend them, we're talking about thoughts. But even when a person gives you some sort of unsolicited criticism, they come into your life and they say, now I'm inviting that, so everybody here is welcome to give me criticism. I'm giving you an open invitation to it. But very often it's unsolicited, just like our thoughts, the uninvited guests. But we all have the right one, we get that unsolicited criticism to say, well, who asked you? So when a thought shows up in our head and says something like, what if everything goes wrong? What if everything goes wrong, JC, or you're not good enough? Did you invite that? Whenever you hear that thought, you can just always ask, is that something that I asked for? Did I ask for that? And there's a very, very strong pattern interrupt right there. If you question, well, did I ask you? You know, who asked you, is that something that I wanted to know? Or did you just think that I wanted to know? Did it just appear? Of course it did. That's why we're calling them uninvited guests. And here's a deeper one. If you didn't intentionally create the thought, though we're here entertaining, guys, we're not here to make up our mind, I'm not here to tell you what to do, I'm here to brainwash you. And what that means is not convince you to think what I'm thinking, I'm here to brainwash you in this sense of washing your brain free just for a moment of everything that you are certain of and just allowing you, almost like a vacation, to enter a space of entertaining alternative perspectives. Outside of even your certainty, you are free to go back, in fact, you don't even have to listen to me, but you're free to go back to your old ways of thinking. If you didn't intentionally create the thought, why do you automatically trust it? So there's a pattern interrupt right there. So if we consider that the thoughts are uninvited guests, and we know that we didn't intentionally create them, and we know that because there's 40 to 70,000 of them that come in through our minds a day, and we just mysteriously select like three or four and make it our identity. But if we didn't create intentionally create that thought, why do we automatically trust it and get impacted by it? Or even given a moment, as I said before, of consideration. So let's get a little science involved into this equation right now. Your brain, if you really think about it, if you back off from it and look at it, your brain is a prediction machine. Its job is to scan, stimulate, and simulate. Now, I'm a big fan of the simulation hypothesis. I've had Rizwan Verk on my show. I definitely have not made up my mind whether or not everything that we're experiencing is real, but I'm a big fan of this concept, this idea that we're living in a simulation. I just play with the idea. I don't know it for sure. But if you think about it, this conversation that we're having shows you that there is a simulation going on in your mind. So our brain's job is to scan, simulate, stimulate, and prepare, and that's how humans have learned how to survive. So there's an interesting thing to consider when you're thinking about your brain and your thoughts. It's a survival mechanism. So I love to give myself grace, and I love to say to people, you're forgiven for you know not what you do. We don't always think about these things since we don't always have time, but our brains and this concept of the thought thunderstorm and the reason why we entertain them, it's a survival mechanism. And it's helped us get here today. Remember, there's this whole, only the strong survive natural selection thing going on. We have to survive out in the world. And a lot of the problems that we face with our thoughts and our feelings are part of this survival technique that we have. But here's the catch, not everything that it produces is true. Now you have to be able to entertain that, that not everything that our brain produces, all these thoughts is true. So the goal isn't to stop thinking. I'm not saying be thoughtless. The goal is to not stop thinking because that's impossible. The goal rather here that we're entertaining is to stop automatically believing. Do you have the power to stop or at least pause or even slow down the automatic believing that you have of thought? It would be the difference between separating yourself from participating with them. You could think about them and entertain them, but if you participate with them, there's that automatic believing. And we're gonna flip a switch and we're just gonna go into observation mode. That's why the Buddhists say thinking, that's why we were giving the analogy of the heart beating. We don't analyze the beats. We don't analyze the breaths. So with our thoughts, we're gonna look at it the same way and just observe them and recognize them, but not necessarily have to believe in them. So we're talking about a big shift here. So let me just see what we got here. Matthew says we all live within a narrative. Right. And sometimes the narrative is good, Matthew, right? We don't have to always look at the narrative. If we make some shit up in our mind, but it suits us, then that's great. That's why I never challenge anybody that has a religious belief or anything like that. It's all good, right? If it suits you and you're happy, then that is what is. And I never contest anybody else's narratives, but it's interesting. Only a conscious wise person like yourself, Matthew, recognizes that it's a narrative because a lot of people don't see it as a narrative. Let's see what else we have. So Timebinder says he's feeling a little bit anxious today. If you want to elaborate on that, I would say it's pretty hard to not feel anxious in this world, right? And the real question about anxiousness, I mean, God, I'm a season pro with feeling anxious, Timebinder, but how is it serving you? I always like to ask that question as well. And in contemplating, in disputing things, in questioning things, we're moving into this space of impermanence, by the way. It's when we buy into things, like let's take Timebinder, he says not as much now. I don't even know if Timebinder is a guy or a girl, by the way, I just labeled Timebinder as a guy. So I apologize about that, but I'd love to know why you're not as much anxious now. I can tell you from transparency that I typically am anxious before I start these live broadcasts, naturally, right? But speaking, talk therapy for me, that's why I'm so grateful that I have this opportunity, is very, very helpful for me. So the more we interact with one another, you'll probably all feel better. And another thing about that is a lot of you, just like, oh, he's a male, I was right. My intuition was right, Timebinder. But a lot of you have just amazing stuff inside of you to share. And sometimes we leave it inside. That's why I've heard many, many people say that the cemetery is the most valuable, richest plot of land in the world, where everybody dies with their creative ideas and their song's still in them. So, oh, Pepsi is here. Pepsi. And then we got another goon. So Pepsi, we had somebody said that you be goonin'. I don't know what gooning is, man. Maybe that makes me a goon. Like if we were to label goons as like ignorant, stupid people in your terms, then I'm goonin', right? But at this time, I don't know what gooning means. And even if you tell me what gooning means, it's just gonna be what you think it means, right? But I very well might be gooning right now. It wasn't really defined Timebender, it was just a feeling. Okay, look at that. That is something that I will leave on the show. So Timebinder from Substack was saying that he was feeling anxious. And he's saying not as much right now, but he just made a distinction that it wasn't really defined. It was undefined the anxiousness and it was just a feeling. How cool is it that he was able to identify it as just a feeling, not an actual identifier and reality? So that's huge. That's this stuff, the interface responses some in action. Okay, so let's go over the shift here. This is where the entire game of this conversation changes. Instead of reacting to every thought, what we're gonna do, and you have to allow and permit yourself to do this when we have a thought. And these are the thoughts in our head, but I'm showing this to you in real time when somebody says something to me that I could easily perceive just like I could perceive with my thoughts is coming from a negative place. That's what I love about the interaction guys. Telling me I'm gooning or questioning whether or not I'm gay and things like that. My automatic reflex, the same one that automatically believes in my thoughts, and automatically makes them real. The same thing happens when I interface with human beings. I could easily come up with this idea that it's negative. So what I'm gonna do instead is I'm going to pause. Before I make up my mind, I wanna give myself a fighting chance to not take it personal and to not identify with it. Cause I could, it could ruminate all day. If someone says something mean or I say something defeating or mean in my thoughts and I automatically buy into it and believe it, that could occupy my whole day. And I don't know how many days I have left. I don't know if anybody here knows, but I don't. So I don't want it to envelop my whole day. So we're gonna pause and we're gonna start learning how to formulate some questions. So one of the greatest questions that I have with a thought or when somebody chimes in and I keep it to myself typically, but I say, I'm so sorry, but who asked you? Cause maybe I asked, but at this time I don't know if I asked. So I do that with my thoughts or even better. Is this a thought that I wanna engage with? Do you ever allow yourself, whether you're thinking about your thoughts or contemplating your thoughts or somebody or interacting with somebody, do you ever ask yourself whether or not it's something that you want to engage with? Is this something that serves me? Did I even ask for it? Do I even give a shit about it? Remember I said before, sometimes we're very careless with what we care about. Aren't we? That's why I wear this shirt. So if my ego was talking, I would say something rude and say something either to my thoughts or to somebody else and say something like, I'm sorry, I'm just not sure if I give a shit. I'm not sure if I care about that. Would you give me some time to think about that? And what's interesting when you're doing that with your thoughts or with another person is you'll notice that they'll amplify before they go away. Because when something comes to you that you didn't invite, it wants an answer, it wants a response. And if you don't do that, so Calpana says that you do this, explain what you do. You ask these questions, that's great. But here's the truth. Thoughts don't need your permission to show up. Thoughts don't need your permission to show up. Neither do the people that challenge you or criticize you. They don't need your permission to show up, but they do need your participation to stay. So what we've just done there is we've just potentially reclaimed control. Thoughts and flow burglars, people that come around to steal your thunder, they don't need your permission or invitation to show up, but they need it to stay. And they also need it to become part of your day. Am I right? Well, maybe. Okay, so this is a reframe. And we're gonna just look at this idea of letting them pass. So I love this concept of this two shall pass, but here's what Rupert Spira says. God, I love Rupert Spira. Go look him up on YouTube, if you don't like reading books, there's just tons and tons of stuff there. So what does Calpana say? That's the dichotomy of control. Yeah, you got that. You be goonin'. I'm gonna decide because nobody in the goon squad there told me what gooning means. So I'm just gonna decide right now because I get to decide that gooning means that you're coming up with great ideas and adding value. So Matthew, you be goonin' right now. I see that Starboy the Knight just shared a bunch of horoscope pictures. Way, truth, life, Starboy the Knight. So there's another one. What does that mean? I mean, I can decide what it means. Way, true, life, gooning, all these things. I would love to know what way, true, life means. It sounds profound. So Starboy the Knight, what does it mean when you say way, true, life? Way, truth, life. That's what it says. I'm sorry, I'm corrected. So please, let me know, I'll come back to it. Though Rupert Spira says this, here's the reframe. If you leave your thoughts alone and if you leave Flo Burglar, unsolicited criticism from people, if you leave your thoughts alone, they will eventually go away. They leave you alone and they do so just like the clouds in the sky that just pass on by. Remember something, the moment that you engage in them in the thoughts or the unsolicited criticism. Because if you don't engage, if somebody criticizes you and you don't give them an answer, or you just say, hmm, and leave it at that, that's not what they want. I mean, if somebody joins alive like this and in front of everybody says something that is a little bit negative or threatening, they just bounced a ball at you and they're waiting for that ball to bounce back at them. If that ball doesn't bounce back at them, guess what? There's no game. There's no validity in their identification. It's the same thing with thoughts. If you leave your thoughts alone, they will eventually go away. They leave you alone. And I said, like the clouds in the sky, they just pass on by. But the moment that we engage with them, what happens is we create weather. Remember, we called this the thought thunderstorm. The only reason it's a thunderstorm and weather is because of our engagement in them. But what we just heard from Rupert Spira is, if you leave them alone, they will just pass on by. Try that sometime. If you have somebody that's giving you a lot of shit, and by the way, the more and more you put yourself out there, the more criticism you're gonna get. There's a really interesting thing about human behavior. And unfortunately, I've participated in this many times. Whoever's giving me hearts, thank you. And I'm also curious, like, where's that coming from? Somebody's supporting me right now for what? But there's an interesting thing in human behavior when you see people rising up, and I spent a great majority of my life like this. We have this knack of wanting to knock them down, because when somebody takes off and goes for it in life, and you're not, well, that makes you feel like shit, it highlights that you're not. That's the whole they hate you, cause they ain't you. But if you don't respond to it, they'll go away. They're going to go find somebody else, just like a narcissistic person. They need a response. So what I'm saying right now is there is such a thing, there's a such a response called the no response. I don't care, you're allowed to do that, but I'm just fascinated with all human behavior, and I don't take anything personally. So they'll just leave you alone. So trying to solve something that was never meant to be solved, which is what we're entertaining, is like trying to nail a piece of Jell-O to the ceiling. Go try to nail a piece of Jell-O to the ceiling. It's very, very hard. It's like drinking water with a fork, or teaching a goldfish to climb a tree. And we spent a lot of times, Matthew said the dichotomy of control, we spent a lot of time trying to do things that we can't do. Okay, build an airplane in the sky, you've heard them all. So let's bridge this to awareness right now. So maybe learning how to stop overthinking, which is what we're talking about today, isn't about controlling our mind. Maybe rather it's about recognizing your role in the relationship, in the relationship of your overthinking. You're not the thinker, and we're entertaining that today. You're not the thinker, you're the noticer. If you really peel back who you are before the thinking, because remember, the thinking just shows up uninvited. You're not the thinker, you're the noticer before the thinking. We were talking to a group of people the other day about know thyself. How do we even entertain knowing ourselves if we don't understand who we are before the thinking? Just the noticer, the witness. I love reminding myself that that's who I really am before the dragon and JC and my personality and my mask and my whole persona shows up and my five senses start to feed me things and they've been programmed to a certain degree. Who am I before all of that? I'm the sky, not the clouds, not the weather. So here's something that we can sit with today. If your mind is constantly producing thoughts, and it is, the degree to which you're noticing them is debatable, but if your mind is constantly producing thoughts and most of them are uninvited, which for the most part they are, unless you're actually sitting and contemplating and breaking something down, then the question isn't, how do I stop the thoughts? That's not the question. The question is rather, why do I keep opening the door? Why do I keep opening the door for the thoughts? It's the uninvited guest and we're allowing all of them to come on inside and then we entertain sitting them down and feeding them and all that. So I'm gonna give you one of my favorite quotes and it comes from one of my favorite songs called Redemption Song by Bob Marley. Any Bob Marley fans out there? So in that he says, emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds. One of the greatest lyrics that I think it was ever written, emancipate yourself from mental slavery, from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds. What would your life feel like if you stopped hosting every anxious timebinder, right? What would your life look and feel like if you stopped hosting every anxious, critical and fearful thought? If you stopped hosting them and opened the door, remember we can remove the participation element and just be an observer. And instead, chose to only give your energy to those that actually support and serve you. When you learn the interface response system in the book, so we've got the Make Sense book and starting on chapter 14, you learn about this interface response system. It teaches you something about, something called the sorting filter. So what we're basically gonna do is start having a quality control system that entertains, that lets things, your thoughts or people, run through a filter that has questions. Do I care? Does this matter? Does this support and serve me? You guys have a choice. Because the moment that you realize this stuff, that you were never required to entertain every thought and you're also not required to entertain any invited guest in your life, uninvited. You were never meant to entertain all uninvited guests, your thoughts or people in your life. Every thought, every person. That's the moment that you stop being controlled by them. Now we know that shit happens. We don't control what happens. We control how we respond to it. And for the most part, because we're not thinking, we're just reacting. That's that automatic believing, the auto response, which has a lot of value if a car's coming at you, but not a lot of cars coming at you right now. Nobody's throwing a rock at your head right now. Just a bunch of people making shit up and you're calling it reality. But if we choose to only give our energy to the things that actually support and serve us, that's the moment that we stop being controlled by them. And maybe, just maybe, that's where what Bob Marley was talking about, about emancipate yourself from mental slavery. Maybe that's where mental freedom begins. So what I love about this topic is we're not running away from low burglars and unsolicited criticism and thoughts. We're not running away from them at all. We're taking note of them, but what we're doing is we're realizing that we get to decide what it means. And one of the things that it could mean is nothing. Nothing. And there's a lot of really, really good ways of practicing this every day. And that's what I'm talking about in the book. And the makes sense sub-stack and on this podcast. So if you learn something today, give it away, that's how it's gonna stay. That's what the highest form of self-actualization is if you heard something today and it resonated with you and it is of value to you, go teach it to somebody else. Share the podcast, share any of my elements. If you've bought my book, join our free mastermind. In the mastermind, by the way, that's where we will have some rules, right? Because we won't let anybody in this environment, you guys are free to have at it. But in the mastermind, we will, you know, ask people to be cordial because we wanna do some actual work, right? We don't wanna just make people feel like crap. We wanna do some work. So if you've bought my book, go to makesensebook.com forward slash proof, enter proof that you bought the book. It'll ask you for the number and you'll get invited to our monthly Every Second Tuesday, which I'm excited about the next one coming up. Every Second Tuesday, we have our mastermind. So I love and appreciate you all, please. You know, I hope that you'll, if you're, you know, 75% of the people that are listening to us on YouTube are not subscribed. You know, if anything that I said is of value, definitely, you know, consider subscribing and supporting, you know, subscribing to the podcast, rating and reviewing it and all of that stuff. But if you're just a cloud that's just passing on by, then just continue and continue to pass on by because I'm not the clouds. I'm not the thunderstorm. I'm not the weather and neither are you. I'm this guy and this guy is blue. So love and appreciate you all. We've got a couple minutes here to answer any questions. Does anybody have any questions? Thank you, Kalpana. Learned a lot. We'll certainly share with people who are interested. Yeah, right? You can't share with people that are not interested, right? But does anybody have any questions or anything regarding this topic or some distinctions or something personal to share? Namaste, Timebinder. See, when Timebinder came in, I was wondering if he was a flow burglar, you know? And Timebinder's actually a big thinker, a wise thinker, you know? So Timebinder, remember, I don't get access to all these comments that are there. So DM me if you wanna share that information that you shared. I forget the name, it started with a K, but I love learning. So I will definitely check that out. Book I just read and just interviewed him, New York Times bestseller, near IEL, fantastic book, Beyond Belief. One of the greatest books that I've ever read is a teeny little book. Also another one here, right? So that's On the Shortness of Life. I think a lot of people need to read that by Seneca, the Stoics. And I see people are still just joining here right now, but any questions on this topic of overthinking? Let's go over to YouTube. Cameron says, you look like a gooner. God, I guess there's like a goon squad out there. You know, there's an interesting behavior about unsolicited criticism. So we've got all these people that will come. It's called the stick and move, right? They don't stay around to like validate what it is, but there's this goon theme. So I guess there's a group of people that are like into the goon thing. You gotta understand that I don't know what gooning means. So that is gonna give me the ability to assume that it's a compliment. So if it's not a compliment, Cameron, and you want to like get under my skin, you're gonna have to define it. Cause right now I'm assuming that you're a nice guy, just like Starboy and Pepsi and all of you folks. I don't know what a goon is. So as it stands, it's a compliment. So if you didn't mean to compliment me and you wanted to get under my skin, there you go. When you tug on the totem pole. So, I mean, does that mean, are you talking about like masturbation? What are you talking about right now? Is tugging on the totem pole a bad thing? Like really let me know what's the goal. Because as of right now, like I think totem poles are cool, right? I mean, like you're making me think about like a beautiful hand carved totem pole. And I like hugging trees too, you know? But there's an undertone there. I'm assuming that there's something in that that you wanna like, when I get a reaction or something like that. But right now I'm taking it as a compliment. So if it's not a compliment, please elaborate. Like just come out and say it. Just be like, I've decided that I don't like you. Okay, the good old spit and shine. You're dancing around it, man. I'm seeing a lack of confidence, right? Tell me what the goal is. Tell me what the goal is. Or if this is just you entertaining some friends, then I get it, you know, maybe some high fives. Talk about it over a beer later. But right now you're talking to somebody that doesn't give a shit about like negative comments and stuff like that. So let's see. Tearrays, I have a persistent thought that stays with me, that someone won't forgive me. It keeps coming back. It's unwanted. Okay, unwanted is not always something that gets rid of it. Uninvited, right? There's a big difference between unwanted and uninvited. So if you have this thought that somebody won't forgive you, right? Look at that thought and ask, say, did I ask you? Right? Because if it's unwanted, sometimes when we run from things, they get stronger, as you know. So been there three months, how can I kick it? And the guilt I feel when it pops up. So if there's guilt associated with it, it sounds like there's something unresolved, you know? So I'll put it into terms. I'm not a guru or a master with that. So if I know that I did somebody wrong, now either I know what I did wrong or somebody's told me I'd done something wrong and I'm ruminating about that. If I don't get closure about it, then I'll always analyze it. I'll contemplate it, right? It'll ruminate, that's what it is. It's kind of like a scent and it doesn't go away. So what I do in that situation, and I don't know if this is possible for you, but I'll seek closure. Either I'll approach somebody that I've done something wrong too and I've had a lot of people that I had to do that. And I'll just say, listen, I just want you to know that I know what I did wrong or I know the mistake that I made. It wasn't my intention, but I just want to make sure you know that I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Or whatever the scenario is, right? So that gives you, yes, hmm, I haven't made up my mind, Cameron. Now you're thinking, now you're thinking. But if you have kind of unresolved stuff, that might be why you keep analyzing it and looking at it from all different angles. So it sounds to me like there's probably something you can do confronting somebody or resolving it. And by the way, when you apologize to someone that you've wronged, even if it was a complete mistake, sometimes I'll say things that I didn't mean and then I'll go back and apologize. And there's no forgiveness, right? You very often people, and it's typically people that are not engaged in conversations like this, very often people are not gonna let it go. And that's fine, but at least you resolved it. Because if it's ruminating in your mind and you're feeling guilt, typically that is part of the problem. Because as soon as you take responsibility for something, that's why I'm giving these guys that say these things, I know they're good guys, they're just having fun. And it makes them feel good to call people names and stuff like that and challenge their sexuality. It gives them power. It makes them feel like human in a world where we're in a loneliness epidemic. Most people don't feel like they are worth a damn. So what we do is we go around and we start trying to hurt people's feelings, feel like we have power. I've done it my whole life. I just stopped, but it's totally normal to make mistakes and it's totally normal to say something you didn't mean. But if somebody's not willing to forgive you, that's the part of it that's out of your control, right? So you can't kick it to the curb, okay? Just bouncing back on them, needs help, yep. You can't just like forget about something until it's resolved. So that's the only thing that I would say. And this is real shit, you know what I mean? Like not taking things personal, recognizing that you didn't invite it. You know, this thought that you keep having about this guilt and stuff like that, that's the uninvited guest, right? Now, if it's still there for three months, I just want you to also recognize for whatever reason and it might be serving you. You might be in a little bit of a masochistic phase of your life where for some reason you keep opening the door. If you show up at school every day and the same bully punches you in the nose and you stood up for yourself, the teachers won't do anything, stop going to that event. Stop going back to the feeding trough and having the same thing happen over and over and over again. So if you're having these thoughts for three months right now, you might want to ask yourself why you're allowing them, why do you keep opening the door? Why do you keep entertaining them? Because sometimes we find that these things serve us, right, for whatever reason. So anyway, love and appreciate you. And I want to give a special shout out to the folks on YouTube that called me many times a goon. I'm not even going to look it up, by the way, because I'm in control of my day today and I've just decided I'm going to have a great day. I'm going to be a good dad. I'm going to be a good husband. I'm going to be a good son, all that stuff. So I don't care, you know, if anybody has, gives me criticism, including my thoughts that I didn't ask for. So I'm just going to sit and say thank you for everybody. Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you for challenging me. I think I grew today. I hope some of you guys grew today as well. Love and appreciate you. I hope that you'll follow all of our stuff in the ecosystem. And really, we're really trying to grow the YouTube channel and please subscribe, pass it around and all of that stuff. Thank you, Kalpana. Have a great day. Love and appreciate you. And we'll see you next Monday. This will drop on Friday this week, the edited version. I'll throw a little bit of the goon stuff in there and make you guys feel important. Bye-bye. If you liked the show, please take a moment to rate, review and subscribe. It really does help the show to grow. Thank you for listening.