Blink your eyes. It’s said the mind moves through something like a thousand thoughts in the time it takes to wink once. Wink again — another thousand. You get the picture. And yet we can only truly hold one of those thoughts at any single moment. The rest drift into the vast, quiet abyss of the subconscious.
Whichever thought we find ourselves attaching to in a given moment tends to carry a feeling with it. That feeling could be summed up simply: yum or yuck, pleasure or pain, ease or unease. Once we sense which way a thought tilts, an emotion can attach to it — if we let it. Say a memory surfaces, one we’d file under painful or hard.
We feel that ache somewhere in the body, and then we emote — we tie a feeling to it: sadness, anger, regret. From there, that emotion can shape a desire, all of it tracing back to the original thought we chose to follow. And here’s the thing: all along the way there are exits. At each intersection we get to choose whether to keep moving forward with a thought, or to let it pass and settle quietly back into the subconscious.
Choice is a constant, living motion in our lives, and every single choice contributes to the life we’re actually living. As we consciously choose our thoughts — or at least choose which thoughts to charge with feeling, emotion, and action — we’re writing the script and scoring the soundtrack of our own days. We are, quite literally, sculpting our own story.
So what becomes of all the unfollowed thoughts and feelings that settle into the subconscious? Left unattended, they can cloud and clutter our clarity, dulling our ability to discern what we let into our awareness. Our five senses are the doorways to the mind; tending and clearing them is part of the work. What the senses bring us is the raw material of our creativity, our authenticity, and our direction.
This is where yoga and Ayurveda offer such grounding tools — practices to clear the senses, settle the mind, and quiet the noise. We have real creative license in how we choose to think, and ultimately how we choose to live, today and every day. We can move with honesty, integrity, and compassion — first of all toward ourselves — as we colour our thoughts with words, feelings, and judgments. And weaving in well-chosen daily routines, herbs, and oils, matched to our own nature, adds an even deeper, more nourishing foundation to the whole of it.
This kind of intention is at the heart of how we work — a calm, deliberate way of meeting the mind. If it resonates, it’s a thread worth pulling.
Namaste — the light in me sees, acknowledges, and honours the light in you.
— Jo