Annoyed middle-aged man at desk - We Are Not Our Thoughts—But We Can Observe Them Mindfully

WE ARE NOT OUR THOUGHTS: Mindfully witnessing our thoughts from an observer’s perspective

A mantra I often ask clients to repeat is this: “I am not my thoughts. I have thoughts. Some thoughts I create but most I do not, and it is those thoughts that can unknowingly create me.”

Leonardo da Vinci said, “There are those that know. There are those that know after they are shown. There are those that do not know.”

When we understand and live in the perspective that we’re not our thoughts, then we’re the master of who we are and what we experience. However, when we don’t know, and when we live within our thoughts, we’re easily manipulated by the media, those around us, and even the programming that we ourselves have installed at one time or another in our subconscious.

Getting to the place where we’re both the observer and the master of our thinking is a skill, like all things in life. This skill is rarely taught, at least in Western culture. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn and master it.

When we’re in this observer perspective, we can be conscious of it, and yet, describing the experience is beyond the realm of linguistics. During a coaching session, a client once said to me, “I want to know what it feels like to go through the day as you. What does it feel like to experience the day as you do?”

I said I’d answer his question after he described the colour blue to me. He looked at me with a contemplative face for just long enough to process the impossibility of my request and then smiled, saying, “Never mind, I get it.”

The experience of referencing your life from the viewpoint of who you really are and not from the programming that has been installed, either knowingly or unknowingly by you or someone else, is beyond words. This conscious knowing is not unlike seeing a sunset or being in love. We know these perspectives only when we experience them personally. And like an artist, dancer or musician, we increase our skill through practice, and the experience becomes deeper and easier to elicit on demand.

The conscious and the subconscious mind


Annoyed middle-aged man at desk - We Are Not Our Thoughts—But We Can Observe Them Mindfully

As da Vinci said, “There are those that know after they are shown.” During a coaching session with a rather confident client, we were talking about the difference between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. The client said he didn’t agree with my assessment. He felt that he was always “thinking” his thoughts and that he was consciously creating them with his will.

To make my point and give him a conscious experience of his own, I responded by telling him that I was the coach and he was the client. I said that he needed to sit there and keep his mouth shut until I told him to speak. As you’d expect, his reaction was very predictable. His body language changed into a defensive posture. His facial expression was one of irritation and anger.

I asked him, “Did you consciously choose to create what you’re experiencing right now? Do you like feeling the way you feel right now? Are you in control of how you feel right now?” I then explained that he’d installed a response to my tone of voice in his subconscious long ago. It was sitting there on his hard drive, a file waiting to be executed. I merely gave him the stimulus that called it forth.

I knew that this man, like most of us, lived most of his day being in his thoughts and not from a perspective of observing them, and his response to my words and tone reflected the emotional content of those thoughts. I knew he’d relinquish his privilege of choice rather than respond as he’d most like to. He probably wasn’t even aware that he had a choice. He surrendered who he was and became a servant to a mind that was just playing a program that it thought was the response he wanted.

Of course, I apologized for my comment and let him know that I certainly didn’t mean what I’d said. I asked him to tell me how he was processing what we were talking about. His face softened, his shoulders relaxed and he broke into a half smile, laughing to himself, and thanked me for such an incredible moment of awakening.

Our minds have changed


Four kids using smartphones outdoors - We Are Not Our Thoughts—But We Can Observe Them Mindfully

It has been 17 years since my first book, The Practicing Mind, was published. I actually wrote that book about 24 years ago, but I didn’t self-publish the first edition until 2005. I make that point because, since then, we’ve learned so much about how our mind works. We keep peeling away the mysterious layers of the nature of consciousness. Where does our mind end and we begin? Is there a difference?

I should also note that our minds were different back then. For the most part, they weren’t in such a state of constant turbulence, constant overstimulation. Cell phones were in a very infant state, and they weren’t very “smart.” You could make a phone call, that was it. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. If you made a call out of your service area, that was considered roaming and was charged extra.

Today, of course, smartphones do much more than make phone calls. They connect us to any place, to any person and to any source of information instantly, regardless of where in the world we happen to be. Combined with the internet, smartphones are a truly amazing technology. However, there is a downside that can be quite toxic. That technology works two ways. It gives the ever-expanding forms of media access to us 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because we’re so connected, even addicted, to our phones.

I recently read an article by a sailor who made a telling observation. He was vacationing in the Caribbean, sitting on his boat in a marina, when a few slips away, he noticed a family of four—a mother, father and two young children below the age of 12—sitting in the cockpit of their sailboat. An incredibly beautiful sunset was happening, the kind that only occurs in the islands, and yet it was going completely unnoticed by this family because each of them had their heads down, staring at their phones.

No one was noticing. No one was talking. They were absorbed in their screens. What could’ve been more important on a screen than what was going on around them, what they’d travelled who knows how far to experience?

The level of dysfunctionality that this scene evokes is difficult to comprehend, and sad to say, it’s getting worse. For older people in my generation, we at least lived most of our lives without this technology, so it could be argued that we have a foundation that gives us some perspective, a point of comparison for how much things are changing. But for younger generations, it’s all they know, and it’s deteriorating their attention spans and their ability to imagine, for sure. The data doesn’t lie.

Our brain is being given a constant stream of information to process and decode. This never-ceasing mental processing creates compulsive thinking. We can’t turn it off. We struggle to just be still and fully engaged in an activity like reading a book for more than a few moments. The thoughts created by this nonstop thinking also unconsciously and involuntarily create our perspective of reality.

Our constant connection to media gives others the power to affect and even dictate how we feel about ourselves, each other and the world in general. But probably the worst part is that this loss of control feels normal.

A short exercise


Woman meditating in desk chair - We Are Not Our Thoughts—But We Can Observe Them Mindfully

Not too long ago, I was teaching a class on present-moment functioning to a group of high school kids. I started off the session by telling them we were going to do a short task. I wanted them to close their eyes and stop thinking for just two minutes. I set a timer, said go, and all they had to do was close their eyes and stop thinking.

When the time was up and I told them to open their eyes, they immediately began chattering. None of them had been able to stop thinking. Of course, this wasn’t any surprise to me, but it was a moment of awakening for them.

Despite their lack of success, most of them still experienced a brief period of much-reduced thinking, and that was enough to make an impression. This was the first time in their lives that they’d become the observers of what their minds were doing without their permission. I asked them what it meant if they were commanding their mind to stop thinking, using their will, and their mind was totally ignoring them.

“If you’re telling your mind to stop thinking and it refuses to comply, who’s really in control, because it’s not you?”

Since they looked somewhat confused, I rephrased the question and asked, “If you’re telling your mind to stop thinking and it refuses to comply, who’s really in control, because it’s not you?” 

I suggest you try this exercise for yourself right now: Stop reading, and set a timer for two minutes. Sit in a chair that has good back support. When you start the timer, close your eyes to reduce external distractions and take a few deliberate deep breaths. As you exhale, let your shoulders drop and feel your body relax.

Now try to stop thinking and notice what happens. Very quickly your mind will get bored and go looking for something to think about. Just keep using your willpower to try and stop the process. You won’t be able to stop the constant motion of your mind, but you’ll be able to slow it down, even if just a small amount.

This was truly a life-changing perspective for these young people, as was the experience of meditation itself. The hint of inner stillness where there was no anxiety, no anticipation of anything, and no judgment was very seductive and created in them a way of feeling they had never experienced before. Though they couldn’t articulate it, it was a brief experience of “I am not my thoughts; some thoughts I do create, but most I do not.”

For a number of these young adults, this inspired them to develop a thought awareness practice that led to improvements in their personalities and their academic achievements, according to the parents who contacted me afterward.

The need to understand how our minds work and what the relationship is between we the observers and our minds is more important today than it has ever been. Division among people is growing as our minds become more agitated and filled with thoughts of fear and anger. These divisive thoughts are produced by unconscious, involuntary and uncontrolled thinking. If we don’t understand where our thoughts come from, and we aren’t in control of that process, then we become prisoners of ourselves, prisoners of our own thinking. Our thoughts dictate what we feel.

Ask yourself: “If I didn’t think, could I feel stress? Could I feel anxiety? Could I feel joy?” The answer is no because thought is the vehicle for all of these experiences. The thought happens, we interpret the thought and then we experience the emotional content.

We need to change ourselves if we’re going to change the world we live in and experience. Indeed, the path we’re on isn’t sustainable if we wish to survive, if we wish to find joy in our lives and if we wish to pass on the same opportunities we’ve been gifted to the next generations.

Thomas M. Sterner is the author of The Practicing Mind, Fully Engaged and most recently, It’s Just a Thought: Emotional Freedom through Deliberate Thinking. As the CEO of the Practicing Mind Institute, Sterner is an in-demand speaker and coach working with high-performance industry groups and individuals, including athletes, to help them operate effectively in high-stress situations and experience new levels of mastery. Visit him online at www.tomsterner.com.

Excerpted from the book It’s Just a Thought: Emotional Freedom through Deliberate Thinking ©2023 by Thomas M. Sterner. Printed with permission from New World Library—www.newworldlibrary.com.

Front cover of It's Just a Thought by Thomas M. Sterner

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