It’s amazing what can change when you become more aware of your thinking. The benefits seem boundless and are best understood through direct personal experience.
To that end, here are three ways to become more aware of your thinking:
1) Journaling
There’s something transformative about the power of the pen. By writing down thoughts, we inherently give them our full attention and for this reason, journaling provides the perfect opportunity to become more aware of our thinking. Writing down thoughts allows us to witness them, and witnessing them helps us learn to transcend them, let them go, and make space for new ones to come.
2) Improv classes
Improv classes are great for helping us see two things: 1) how much we aren’t present and tend to get lost in thought, and 2) how much we get in our own way. These two things are often related, and ultimately help us become more aware of our thinking patterns. Plus, the classes are a lot of fun (even if they seem scary at first).
3) Meditation
In any moment in life, there are two aspects to our experience: what’s happening around us, plus what’s happening within us. Meditation allows us to take the focus off of the external so that we can focus purely on our inner world, which can be a bit of an adjustment at first (or at least it was for me). Giving ourselves space to intentionally direct attention inward is an invitation to listen to our thoughts, notice our feelings, and watch them come and go.
There are many ways we can become more aware of our thinking, and the ones listed here are some of my favourites. What are yours?