Make Thinking Your Art Form

Choose something you would like to change in your own life.  Focus on how you would like it to be different.  Suppose your work environment is oppressive and you would like to feel respected, instead.  Or that you aren’t feeling fully appreciated in your love life and you would much prefer that you were.  Maybe you’re just not getting all you want out of life, and you know more is possible.  If it were changed to suit you, what would this change mean to you?  How you would know it was different?  How would it feel?  Notice how it feels to just consider the possibility.  Spend thirty seconds or more enjoying it in your imagination.  How do you feel now?

Most of us consider thinking to be a passive thing, a time of doing nothing (or perhaps “not much, just thinking”).  Most of the time, thoughts and life just happen, and then we deal with it, or we don’t.  John Lennon’s famous comment, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”, describes how most of us really feel about it.  Yet, just the opposite is true; thinking is your most powerful activity.  Consider the possibility that all of your life experiences are dictated by your thinking.  

Gaining control or awareness of your thinking is a perennial topic; there is no shortage of teachings about the value of harnessing your mind to produce great results.  New programs or methods show up in every year’s new book lists.  Mainstream movies such as What the *Bleep* Do We Know and The Secret explore the importance of expanding your thoughts and increasing the ratio of positive thoughts to negative ones.  Literally millions of books describing the benefits of controlling your own thoughts have been sold.  The concept that controlling your thinking can work to your enormous benefit has legs; it has been around for centuries; there are entire religions built around it, and many variations on the theme show up in every year.  

The big question is, How do I do that?  

Do I find a guru (and how would I do that), join a religion, learn Zen meditation, sit on a mountain top, or follow some mystical teaching?  These are traditional ways of doing it.  You could adopt one of any number of disciplines and work toward mastery.  These paths require long periods of practice, based on teachings that have been passed down through centuries.  The practices are for “taming your wild mind”, for dominating a chaotic, random activity and bringing it into some intentional processes.  They offer a variety of support systems for the novice, most of which require a life commitment, because the disciplines they teach are difficult to assimilate and can’t usually be accomplished otherwise. 

When will-power and imagination come into conflict, will-power nearly always loses.  Discipline suggests you make yourself do something even though you may not want to.  Imagination allows you to escape that; it’s your path to freedom.  So discipline may not be everybody’s most productive way to change habits of thinking.

You can use imagination rather than discipline.  What if you consider thinking as your art form, which would require the use of your imagination?  After all, it’s something that’s completely under your control, it’s a talent and skill you already have, it’s the most creative act possible – because thinking, itself, is generative – and making it do what you want requires attention and improves with practice.  Well-developed thinking can require finesse and control.  And like most arts, it usually doesn’t perform well in response to being forced; it likes to be elicited, coaxed, nurtured, allowed to blunder or make mistakes,  and learn from its previous efforts.   

In any art form, you don’t start as an expert.  In painting, for example, you begin by putting some color on paper or canvas, and “push it around” until you either have something you like or you learn something.  You allow yourself to make “mistakes”, and you have fun with it.  You experiment a bit, you enjoy it, you check out how others you admire do it.  But mostly, you do it over and over, paying conscious attention to it,  until you get results that satisfy you. 

The issue in managing your thinking probably isn’t that you need to be convinced to do it, it’s more likely to be that you don’t know how to do it.  The issue is moving from reflexive, habitual thoughts to thoughts that support you in feeling and experiencing the things you would prefer.  (If you don’t already know that what you think is what you get, it’s unlikely that you would be reading this in the first place, so that’s probably not the issue.) 

Teachers are right when they say you can have anything you want, or that you can realize your dreams, or that you can raise your consciousness, or that you can change any part of your life you want to change.  And they all agree that it begins in your mind.  What comes up is this: How do I do that?  How do I change my habits of thought?  How do I manage  them?  How do people get great ideas?  My thoughts just happen, so how can I control what they are, and who knows where they even come from?  And the answer is much simpler than people think.

Read the first paragraph again and add this idea.  (These are the “don’ts”) Don’t compare what you want with what you have.  Don’t justify, or make it okay, or rationalize that you would like something.  Don’t think about reasons for wanting it.  Don’t worry about what anyone else would think about it.  Don’t worry about deserving it.  Don’t bother with how it could occur.  Let go, entirely, of everything except your desire, and hang on to that for at least thirty seconds. 

Then notice that spending that little bit of time on something you chose to think about made you feel better.  When you think about things that make you feel better you are changing more things than you can imagine, because your body chemistry changes, your mood gets better, your energy is more attractive, your creativity increases, your physical health can actually improve, and your life will feel more satisfying.  And you have just created a piece of living art.  It’s internal to you, it’s private, but it is your own creation, your own small piece of art. 

If you’ll do this several times a day, you will begin to feel that you are a practicing artist, and thinking will be your art form.  It’s a powerful start to managing your mind and mastering your life.