The illusion of positive thinking

 The illusion of positive thinking


There are so many approaches out there that say they can support you to think more positively. The growth mindset movement has made its way into schools teaching children that they can have power over what they think and that they can change up negative thoughts for positive thoughts. The issue is that this whole system is built on the belief that we have power over what we think and that it is us doing the thinking!!

I sat in a session the other day with a child who was telling me about how she had a poster in her classroom with an image of a tree. On one half of the tree were positive thoughts with a green background and on the other half of the tree were negative thoughts, with a red background. Now this interested me, and as we sat there and drew out the image of the tree with the thoughts on either side to represent positive and negative, I watched her response as I explained how thought functions. 

I explained that thought is like the pendulum of an old-fashioned clock and it swings between thoughts of the past and thoughts about the future. We wrote some examples down and she could clearly see that both sides of the swing were of the same structure. Then we chatted about the now and thought’s inability to discuss the now. By the time it tries to, the now has already gone and it’s commenting on what is now the past. She could clearly see in that moment that thought was nothing more than past images and imagined future ones. 

We spoke about how we can watch thought and how it swings from positive to negative thoughts and how we can watch them from an impartial perspective. In that moment she looked at the tree image and said, 

“So positive thoughts and negative thoughts are all connected within the same system but if we can watch them we can’t be in the system, right!?” It doesn’t matter if the thoughts are positive or negative…it’s still the same system. We are not in that system. 


In that moment she had seen all she had to see and was already set up to be free of believing that she IS thought at all. 


This is why I do what I do and why raising collective consciousness in this way is the only way for us to see what we are truly here for...

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