Combo -Thoughts 3-25-2018

The more I visit Aladdin’s closet the more I am noticing that my thinking in the closet is much more insightful as well as more fun. It’s like being on the practice range at golf or building sand castles at the beach. This time for no apparent reason I started thinking about water balloons. And then I realized the connection. I had been practicing a technique of combining thoughts about opposite emotions. The goal was to lessen the length of time an unwanted emotion echoes and lingers in your mind.

Imagine you had a fender bender and now your shiny new car is scratched. The irritating thought of that starts to slither back into your mind in the middle of your concentrating on finishing a work project. You know that it would be better to let go of the irritating thought but it keeps surfacing. The technique is to recall some other good experience, lets say, buying that new shiny car. The next step is to take a few minutes and focus on both thoughts, the fender bender and the purchase of the new car, at the same time. Gradually the thoughts merge and the lingering emotional response to each drops a few notches.   The goal here is to drop the irritating thoughts below the level of awareness so that you can finish you work project more effectively in peace 

The water balloon helped me visualize the experience of combining two thoughts. When I was a kid ( up until about 3 months ago) I would try to fill a water balloon with just the right amount of water. Too much water and it bursts all over me during the filling. Too little and sometimes it just bounces and does not burst on impact. With practice I learned the trick of holding an almost filled water balloon in the middle, with about half the balloon on one side and half on the other, and then squeezing from one side to the other. Again too much pressure on one side might burst the balloon but allowing a flow, or a combining of both sides (both emotions) kept things safe, peaceful and dry; until ready to use. The balloons or thoughts were no longer interfering with the work at hand.