So you’re going about your day. Turning this way, turning that way … Seemingly just ‘thinking along‘, kind of nonchalantly.
And then, then you realise – you’re not quite sure how long after – that you have been revolving around the same train of thinking for quite some while. You have literally become lost in a loop, picking up every facet of the same thought with no awareness whatsoever that you are turning in circles, mesmerised by the incessant thinking.
As you spin around the thought, mulling it over, distracting yourself deeper in to a narrowed chain that seems to perpetually proliferate, you are quite literally stuck. Stuck TO the thought. Rather then getting anywhere (which you are of course attempting to do), as you hold tight, the thought just keeps on expanding. Ballooning and bloating, getting more and more lost within itself as it breeds off of its own self-involvement, deeper and deeper, on and on.
Without the gaze of awareness, you become lost in the overfamiliar exhausted ‘story‘. A ‘story‘ that has you stuck, time and again, with no seeming way out, with no seeming respite, with no seeming freedom.
A torrent of thinking is set in to motion through one seemingly ‘innocent‘ thought … No matter where you apparently ‘begin‘, you seem to always find your way back to this same wearied story, triggering the loop, spinning imagined scenarios, caught in anxiety and self-doubt, overcome with loneliness, hostage to the inflated ego . . . Stuck, once more.
The territory is overly familiar, and yet still plays on repeat.
You attempt, again and again, to find a way out. To somehow figure it out once and for all this time. And yet, as you again land on your ‘favourite‘ thought, it magnifies up, dominating the landscape of your present moment.
Like a bone you return to gnaw on over and over, it is a habit – A deliciously familiar one (though not at all delicious really) at that. Without even realising, you have chosen (over and over) to remain stuck to this same thought, with no pause to see the freedom that is.
And so.
Can you PAUSE?
Pausing the monologue long enough to unstick from the thought?
Become AWARE that you are caught in a habit – and it really is ONLY a habit.
And then choose to UNSTICK.
Rest within this moment of awareness, with a willingness to see the habit for what it is.
Rest within this moment of awareness, with a willingness to allow space, and to one moment at a time begin to see that you are stuck to nothing … stuck to a thought, and that thought is only a habit.