Let’s keep moving on our journey

I read somewhere, and it stuck with me, that there are two fundamental drivers for all human behaviour.
• Love
• Fear
In other words if you ask why enough times, you’ll find one of these two at the root.
It might be fear of failure, love for another, fear of losing someone, love of danger etc. Somehow I find this reassuring on my journey and in my quest to help others, that when you boil it all down it comes to these two things.
Now let us carry on with a useful device.
The observer
This device is going to be the single most important tool on your journey and if you take nothing else at all from this BLOG other than this, then I, as the author will feel, writing the BLOG was worthwhile.
Like Athony DeMello says in his book ‘Awareness’ , no one can show you a technique, no one can really help you. What I will do is share with you what worked for me.
To create your Observer, imagine an entity that is able to hear all your thoughts, see what you are seeing and through doing that, it can tell what you are paying attention to, what you are feeling, what emotion is present within you. If you like, it is a reporter watching you and listening to you very intently and when you ask it, is able to report what it notices you are feeling / thinking / paying attention to.
The reason we need one, is to catch ourselves following patterns in order to become consciously aware of what they are, so that, for instance, we can choose to change them. It is important to be detached and not become absorbed by, or overwhelmed by what the observer is noticing, for instance depression. If you are saying to yourself ‘I am depressed’ that is not observing, you need to be able to say, ‘there is depression within me , or there is sadness in me.
Interestingly what you are doing here is creating a brain pattern called the Observer and as for most patterns stored in our minds, your brain needs to ‘learn’ how to do this new thing. To do that, it needs to practice, so that the new pattern will get laid down.

To get started with this, when you are driving, or riding a  bike, or a horse 🙂 or walking, or running, ask yourself as you come to various parts of your journey, what am I paying attention to here?

In my experience, what I pay attention to at a roundabout is very different to what I pay attention to on a motorway.

It may help to keep a journal of your thoughts, to really establish ‘The Observer”

As you learn to (and remember to) invoke the observer:-

• What do you notice about your thoughts / thinking in various situations?
• Are they mostly positive / negative?
• What beliefs do you notice ‘kicking in’?