Makeovers Meditation Exercises.
Watching the Cars Go By.
Life can go along just fine as long as nothing gets thrown out of balance.
However, our lives do not stay on track.
Life brings us unexpected situations and challenges.
When life gets thrown off balance, we learn our lessons.
When our lives veer off the pavement and take a different direction,
it can be difficult to change course and get our thoughts back on track.
We can easily become frustrated when we don’t know what to do or how to bring our thoughts back into balance.
This exercise is a basic training exercise.
It will helps us towards accomplishing an important goal in meditation: The ability to control our thoughts.
Watching the Cars Go By helps to train our brains by making us aware of our own emotions and thoughts before acting or reacting.
Awareness is the key to making conscious and measured choices instead of allowing our thoughts to control us.
It is often said that “Life is a Highway.”
Highways are built so that people can travel from
point A to point B more efficiently.
As our thoughts race everyday—like cars on the highway—it is easy to let emotion drive our thoughts.
If we visualize our minds to be a highway itself, we can see how our thoughts are like the cars that travel there.
When our thoughts are driven by emotions, our actions are as well.
Every thought we think is attached in some way to your emotions. Emotions, if we are not aware of them, can turn into roadblocks that create a downward spiral of out of control thoughts.
Out of control thoughts eventually lead to out of control or thoughtless actions—living life in automatic.
Living life in automatic is not a place where we want to be!
In real traffic traveling down an actual highway, if one of the cars went out of control or just stopped completely, there would be a
traffic jam or an accident.
It is the same with our thoughts.
When emotion stops the thought process,
our lives can turns into a traffic jam of thoughts.
When that happens, our brains no longer have the power to control reaction. Whenever you have a thought that spurs on more thoughts of the same topic, just stop.
Label these thoughts, "cars on the highway".
Let them pass.
Don’t let yourself get more involved in any one of them than you need to.
Let all thoughts just pass by with no emotional charge.
This exercise—Watching the Cars Go By—is just that.
Watching.
Cultivating a sense of awareness in your own thought process builds an important bridge between your emotions, thoughts, and actions.
You can build this bridge by simply
watching your thoughts go by
without attaching emotion or action.
Awareness creates a very useful place for us to rest before we act or react to a situation based on pure emotion.
When we create the bridge of awareness,
we create a choice for yourselves.
The choice is whether or not to involve ourselves in a situation
or to just stand back and watch.
Once we’ve made the choice to just watch, our minds begin a different process than they would have taken if we chose to jump right into a situation.
When simply watching our thoughts go by,
our minds takes on the role of the observer.
Observation enables an awareness where emotions are not on high alert and will not be driving the thought process.
Watching the Cars Go By is an exercise that serves as a bridge between the rapid thoughts in your mind and your ability to control them.
When our brains become aware and find the power of thought control,
we become empowered.
This is why meditation is so important.
Controlled thoughts mean controlled actions.
It is that simple.
Training our minds in this way will help us gain control of the chaos of our daily thoughts.
We will be more likely to stay in a peaceful state no matter what life throws in our direction.
Take your time with this exercise.
It is one of the most important in the Makeoverslife program.
Exercise:
1. Find a quiet spot. Close your eyes.
2. Quiet your mind.
3. Visualize your mind as a highway. Label your thoughts as cars and visualize them, too. Stay with the theme of every thought as a car on the highway—one absolutely no different than the rest.
4. Think of nothing but the cars on the highway.
5. Let your thoughts come up one at a time and watch them pass. Make no emotional attachments to your thoughts as you visualize them traveling down the road.
6. Stay with this exercise as long as you wish.
7. When you are finished, say to yourself, “I am done now. Peace.”
