Bubbles

“Your thoughts are bubbles waiting to be popped.” Jon Kabat-Zinn

The focus of the Daily Calm today was on how thoughts just tend to happen, that they are neither good or bad, they just are. Thoughts are how our brains compartmentalize various issues and start to make sense of our world around us. Quite often, we cannot control our thoughts – I know I cannot.

My brain is designed to pick the most negative thing and follow it all the way down the rabbit hole until I can no longer function. The thing is thoughts are nothing. They are bubbles – there are here for a brief time, and some are lovely and some are non-descript – and once popped, they are gone.

I need to learn to let go of those thoughts, that internal dialogue that takes me down into the darkness. It’s hard after a lifetime of listening to them, but I have to learn they are nothing but bubbles.


Something else I am doing is doing my own daily “tarot” meditations. I have three different tarot sets, but for meditation practice, I use the Osho Zen Tarot. It is very different from the typical tarot cards in that it is entirely designed around Eastern philosophy, tied to Zen Buddhist practices. It is far more complicated to explain the practice, and really that is not my intention here.

For daily meditation, I am following teachings I learned from a T’ai Chi instructor years ago that I still find very helpful in working on my mental health. As part of that, I have started drawing a daily meditation tarot card from my set.

Yesterday I pulled my card in the morning and then did the Daily Calm meditation in the early afternoon. Today, I pulled a card after I finished today’s Daily Calm, and wrote my reflections on it.

Today’s card: “Awareness” VII (Major Arcana)

The symbolism ties in perfectly with the Daily Calm meditation; it is about the transitory nature of awareness and thoughts, about letting go and justĀ being. To me, that means being aware of how my mind is working, being aware of the thoughts I am having, and being aware enough to let them go. And it is okay to let them go. Nothing bad will happen when I have good days; “the what-if’s” the depression likes to pull from my brain are only “bubbles waiting to be popped.”

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