“I’ll skip lunch, so I stay thin.”

“That’s not the underlying emotion,” Mary says. “You’ve built flawed logic on top of your emotion.”

The conflict that arises is what you call an eating disorder. But conflict is good.

You are messing up. That’s okay. Everybody messes things up.

Recognize the idea, Mary says.
That’s all you have to do.

Notice that you want to skip lunch.
And then eat anyway.

Thoughts come together in one big wave

they say, one by one

but I saw you for what you were

immediately

Consciousness is getting to know your own body.

From all different sides.

It’s spectacular—like a never-ending adventure, both within yourself and outside.

I once saw a force field around my body...

Rhythm of Thought

How to pace your mind

Most people eventually discover this: thoughts don’t arrive one by one.
They come together, as a single wave.

Do you know that ring toss game—the one filled with water, where you squeeze two buttons and try to catch the floating rings?

That’s how I experience my thoughts.

Each time I squeeze my heart, like a manual hand pump, everything moves at once.
An entire ocean of thoughts rushes over me in one wave.

It only seems as if thoughts arrive individually. In reality, they always come together—simultaneously.

Learning to notice that is the hard part.

When you become skilled at consciousness, you walk through life as if you’re standing in an ocean of ideas.

And it’s fantastic.

*ChatGPT sharpened

Rhythm of Thought

Thoughts don’t come one by one.
They arrive as a single wave.

Like that water ring toss game:
one squeeze, and everything moves.

That’s how I pace my thoughts.
One squeeze of the heart, an ocean responds.

It only looks as if thoughts are separate.
They never are.

When you notice this, you walk through life
surrounded by ideas.

And it feels good.

*ChatGPT sharpened

No little one, don’t fear your thoughts.
That’s your body speaking.

It was you all along.

Never silence yourself.
If it’s bad, it’s bad.
If it hurts, it hurts.

Don’t lie to yourself.
There’s no point.

When you’re alone,
tell the truth.

*ChatGPT sharpened

I was in the forest
of my deepest thoughts.
I could hardly speak.

Then you appeared,
like an angel
without disguise.

“What are you doing here?” you asked.
“Just walking,” I said.
“I didn’t expect you.”

But I’m glad
you came anyway.

*ChatGPT sharpened

I wanted to know
how my brain worked.
So I asked.

“Here is your answer,”
my brain said.

“I am a black box.
You’ll have to do most of it yourself.

I will resist you.
I will deceive you.

But it’s for the greater good.”

*ChatGPT sharpened

A bad feeling shows up.
You don’t say anything.
You turn it into: “I won’t eat lunch today.”

That’s how an eating problem can start.

When children don’t get time to think about their feelings,
and adults say, “Hurry up, be better,”
something goes wrong.

Then we learn to say: “Okay, then I just won’t eat.”

*ChatGPT sharpened

I am identical to my body.

My whole body is one me.

A thought is a small thing within me. If I stack all my thoughts, emotions, organs, and everything I can think of together, you get one me.

And that one me progresses over time—with new thoughts, new emotions.

What Buddhists do is flip this and say, “You are not identical to your physical body,” or “You are not your thoughts,” which approaches it from the wrong angle.

Sometimes an example is given like: “In your dreams, you are powerless; you literally believe that—that’s how naive we are.” But if that were really the case, we wouldn’t even know what a dream was. It’s because of consciousness that we differentiate dreams from consciousness.

What you do in meditation is stabilize the wave of thoughts rolling in, so that there is less friction—but there is no point in doing that.