Most of us see “What is” as the start of a question. But lately it has shown itself to be a statement of fact and therefore the start of a letting go process for me.

Over the decades I have invested huge amounts of energy fighting against “what is” in all its incarnations. I have railed against it; I have shouted, cried, whinged and whined. I have let it affect my mood, my attitude, my actions. I have also wished during those years that I could change myself—my attitudes, my responses. I have tried in ways that I now think of as being from the outside in. But perhaps there is another way—an internal way—that once accomplished will affect my responses without much further effort on my part.

Some of the thoughts that I have wasted my precious energy on, day after day, are like these: I should be more tolerant. He could pick up after himself. She should appreciate me more. They should do more to help. The world should be a safer place.

I have found two things that are helping me at the moment. One is the idea of business. Whose business is this? If it’s something to do with ‘out there’, it’s God’s business. If it has to do with my partner, my mother, my colleague, or any other person in the world, it’s their business individually. Only when it concerns me and me alone is it my business.

So now the only ‘should’ I need to consider is my own. Letting myself stay out of other people’s business is giving me so much more free mental time  that I often actually ‘hear’ what I am thinking—and the ‘should’ word has started to stand out like a neon light. Discovering how thoughts can circle and circle around a topic like carrion waiting to land is fascinating and empowering. Empowering because once I realise what I am thinking it is almost effortlessly morphing into a case of I do … or I do not. This applies to subjects big and small. I donate money towards starving people and third world country start-ups instead of saying that someone should do something. I pick up the clothes on the floor instead of criticising others for not doing it. I tidy up after them because I am the one who wants the tidy house, not them. Or I do not, and I am okay with that too.

This is so liberating when it comes to how I think about other people. They are who they are and they do what they do. They shouldn’t be anyone else or do anything else. It is also working for myself. I don’t have so many thoughts along the lines of,  I should be more understanding, patient, tolerant or I should be less intense, judgemental, critical. Those parts of my personality are very much dictated by how I perceive the other person or event. Once I stop trying to be the puppeteer—the strings I have been unhappily yanking at haven’t given me the desired result anyway!—those parts of my personality lose much of their negativity. I now find myself, when I am experiencing these thoughts, starting to think more about what is underneath them—and so far it has always been that it is me thinking that someone or something else should be different. As I have more clarity about this—as I see it earlier and earlier in my thought processes—the whole problem of not being understanding enough, patient enough, tolerant enough; pretty much fades away. As I invest less personality to my thoughts, I am unexpectedly happier.

Instead of fighting with ‘what is’, I am more and more simply seeing it. Once identified as something out of my realm, I can relax. If it’s something to do with me, I can roll up my sleeves and get to work.

Credit:
With thanks to Byron Katie and her book “Loving What Is” or making me think about ‘what is’ in a totally different way.

Certain things happen in this life—in any and every day. They are the bones. Then we apportion our own meanings to them, flesh them out in the way our minds work and they become stories. They are created into gods or goblins (or at least good or bad), depending on our mindset that day, that year, that lifetime.

And yet in reality they are much more scant than that. They are what they are, not what our emotions paint them to be. With our ‘good’ stories, we paint and repaint until our canvas is thick with meaning, with what really happened and why. We do something similar with our ‘bad’ stories; sometimes we even revel in portraying the situation as blacker than it was in actuality.

In the end, does it matter why? We spend so much of our lifetime trying to find the why. If we could just accept the bones as bones and let them stand or lie where they are, giving passing consideration to them but not weaving stories around them, we would live much more in the present, more in reality and less weighed down by untruths and stories we have concocted to try to make sense of these bones.

Now, to do my conjuring trick to change this philosophical moment into a health-oriented thought:  Bone both is good. We should consume that often, perhaps more often than we eat meat.

Have you ever had the experience of feeling upset with someone over something they’ve done only to find they didn’t actualy do it? That whole, “Grrrr, I wish they didn’t do that,” that plays over in your mind like a scratched record from the sixties?

When you found out that person wasn’t guilty of whatever heinous crime you thought they’d committed, how did you feel? Deflated? A bit silly? Or powerful and excited?

Powerful and excited, right? In that moment, you realised the power that your thoughts have on your emotions and your personal reality. You realised that to a large extent, your thoughts create the ‘reality’ that you live. It was a stellar moment in your life because from that instant you took away with you a lesson so deep that you knew life would never be the same for you again.

No, didn’t think so. Me neither. But I think I know why. We’re so wrapped up in our little ‘realities’ and our egos that we don’t see this example for the life-changing powerhouse that it really is. If we really thought about this, we might indeed have a life-changing moment.

It’s actually exciting to find out you were wrong about something and to look back and realise that the emotions you were feeling from the thoughts you generated were all in your own mind. If your mind can erroneously believe something that is not truth, then perhaps you can train it to believe things that are true but which you don’t yet believe.

The potentially powerful moment in your life, which usually passes by without a whimper, is well worth exploring.

For the last little while I haven’t been eating brilliantly. I’ve been doing other things that will eventually move me towards better health, but the eating patterns have totally regressed to encompass all the high sugar hits I once fought and conquered.

And that brings me to today’s topic. You need the right mindset to make a change. As soon as I didn’t really care, all my horrid eating habits came galloping back. So it was a case of two steps forward, two steps back.

What I think I’ve learned from this is that there might be two totally different ways that people succeed in changing the way they eat. One way might be to:

1. Emotionally invest – first and foremost!
2. Make the change.
3. Make it easier to follow the changed habit than the old habit.

The other, diametrically opposed:
1. Take the emotion totally out of the equation.
2. Make the change.
3. Make it easier to follow the changed habit than the old habit.

When you’re the one who buys and prepares all the food, a great deal of your time is spent thinking about food and being in the kitchen. Kitchen means food preparation, which means eating. And eating can be an emotional topic.

I suppose it shouldn’t be. It should be simply a case of fuelling the body. But for me, at least at this time, it’s emotional. I use it as a pick-me-up when I’m tired. I sometimes eat quite sinfully when I’m unhappy. I eat when I have a task to do that I’d like to avoid. I eat while I prepare dinner. It would be fair to say I quite like eating. It would even be fair to say I love eating.

I’ve been pretty tired for the past two months. I’m kind of dragging myself through each day, and of course sugar is your friend as well as your enemy at times like this. It’s probably the main culprit but the problem is, of course, it gives you that bit of energy when you’re desperately looking for it.

I’ve been emotionally invested in something other than improving the way I eat, and it shows. But the only reason this has derailed me is that my habit base wasn’t strong enough to survive without the mental motivation. And habit is a better platform on which to base change than my emotional state. Emotions can be a rollercoaster unless you can learn to understand where they come from and how they are created. I’m doing some study on that at the moment and I must say my mind is blown away by how simple change can be.

Eating well should be a deeply ingrained habit. I do it best when I don’t have to think too much about the topic in general. When it all gets to be pretty automatic, my eating life runs on oiled rails. When I have few queries on what I should eat, because I’ve already made up my mind what kinds of foods are healthy for me, life is on an even keel.

When I’m poring over recipes and thinking about food all the time, that’s when I seem to come unstuck. And that brings me to the other argument. Food should not be an emotional topic. And that means that you need to heal your thinking processes before you’ll ever improve your eating. So, back to the drawing board on this one.