Day 71 – The Anatomy of High-Value Thoughts
We're going to look a bit deeper into the nature of our high-value thoughts (HVTs) and find out how they're made. This will allow us to have more of them.
An HVT involves all four levels of your brain, starting with the connection between your highest-level observing human/awareness and your deepest-level sensational reptile/body brain. Body sensations are the grandparents of every thought you have, but in lower-value thoughts, this connection gets obscured in two ways (generally speaking):
Our day-to-day superficial thoughts come largely from our thinking/monkey mind.
Our deeper reactive thoughts (including core beliefs) come largely from our reactive/mammal mind.
In both of the above cases, the critical body component of our thinking is missing. In order to prepare your mind to produce HVTs, you will learn to build and sustain awareness of your body sensations, and then include all of the other levels.
Body sensations are the foundation of your intuitive intelligence, which then gathers your emotional intelligence (without being emotionally hijacked!), and which then flowers in your thinking intelligence (where you have made some space) as a recognisable thought.
Finally, it is your human awareness that manages this process of staying connected to your body while not getting stuck in your emotions and day-to-day thoughts, and which gathers the fruits of your high-value thoughts.
PRACTICE
Pay attention to the indirect process of producing HVTs. Notice what sort of thoughts you have when you:
Keep some awareness of your body/breath
Don't get stuck in reactivity
Don't get lost in superficial thoughts
You may have to wait a while for these very different sort of thoughts to show up! Your job is simply to prepare the ground and then to be patient.