Don’t Believe Everything You Think (Expanded Edition) by Joseph Nguyen đź“š
If you’ve kicked the tires on the mindfulness space before nothing in this book is likely to feel fresh and new. But it is a great all-in-one, no fluff read to remind you.
It boils down to: thoughts are great, thinking is where you get into trouble.
Or, as Joseph writes in the book: “Thoughts create. Thinking destroys.”
There are a lot of parallels to Steven Pressfield’s Resistance.
He recommends a “five-step process to help you let go of your thinking, which you’ll notice conveniently spells out the acronym PAUSE.”
Suffering comes not from our emotions but from the thinking we attach to the emotions.
There are two sources of goals: goals created out of inspiration and goals created out of desperation.
Thoughts lead to goals rooted in inspiration.
Thinking leads to goals rooted in desperation.
The value of a daily practice towards your goals is the daily part:
What matters is not how long you are doing it each day but that you are doing it to some capacity every day.
One step forward every day.
A question to guide your goal setting:
If I had infinite money, had no fear, and didn’t feel the need to receive any recognition, what would I do or create?
or
What are some of your favorite ways to express your creativity?
Allow your true dreams to reveal themselves without shutting them down. To a mind without the limits of thinking, anything is possible.
Philosopher Sydney Banks once said, “Thought is not reality, yet it is through thought that our realities are created."
The root cause of our suffering is our own thinking.
the moment we stop thinking is when our happiness begins.
Our mind’s duty is to keep us alive. Our consciousness’s duty is to help us feel fulfilled
Your mind’s job is to anticipate threats. Your body’s job is to regulate the resulting emotions
the path to self-actualization
isn’t to try to improve ourselves
because we think we’re not enough
but to let go of the illusion
that we’re not already enough as we are
Positive emotions are not a byproduct of thinking but the organic result of being fully in the present moment and connected to life rather than thinking about it.
Only in the present moment can the truth be found
Space has the illusion of emptiness on the surface. It is not empty but filled with infinite possibilities for us to choose a new experience of life.
Instead of looking for right or wrong, good or bad, look for truth without judgment
What you obtain externally can always be lost, but what you find within yourself can never be taken away.
Nothing that grows can stay the same—especially you.
It’s not what we have but how we feel inside that is the true measure of success, joy, and fulfillment.
We have the gift of imagination, which means our creative potential is limitless, but we create stress for ourselves when we think we need to figure out “the how” to make it happen
Judgment closes the mind, while questions open it.
what we do not question
controls us
what we question
frees us
Living life through non-thinking is accepting reality as it is instead of what we think it should be.
Your mind is the greatest salesperson and knows exactly what to say to lure you back into its vicious cycle of destructive thinking
When we let go of needing reasons to love one another, there is no end to how much love we can discover.
“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished; that will be the beginning.” —Louis L’Amour
truth is not something you think but something you know and feel deep in your sou
Although our fear will tell us that we are afraid of external things, such as a negative event, really what we fear is how we imagine we’ll feel if an undesired outcome happens. Fear is internal, not external.
To overcome fear, you must question what it is you are truly afraid of and then see the truth behind this fear—that it is an illusion designed to keep us in our comfort zones and nothing more