feelings, thoughts and trains

I just woke up, not knowing where I was or what time it was. Timelessness felt right.. content.. and light. It freed me of many chains for that brief moment. Not that I have to do anything on a hot & lazy saturday night, but there is this dreadful thought process rushing at the back of your mind, always checking if you're in line.. making you feel you're one or two steps behind at the schedule of life. never-ending to do lists, to do free-time-killers, to do relationships, to do parties... If nothing else, Turkish people have a country to save from the sheria-minded-führer of the ruling party, spreading out his own disease... So if you want rest, you have to wait for that timeless moment or proactively clear your cluttered mind out of its dirty stripes. The easiest way -besides getting high or drunk- is minding our body instead of minding our minds. But minding the body is not about making it move, you don't stop thinking when you do. It's more about sensations. I know it sounds boring, but it does pay out. 


So, in order to switch our attention from the (baaad) parasitic tape to (goood) sensations, we first should understand how thoughts and feelings co-exist. 


If you think of it, the thoughts running in your head are different combinations of feelings that were impactful enough to be coded into the brain earlier. Remember the feelings you get when you think of memories? That's that. Even 2x2=4 has a certain color, a feeling, of the confidence of certainty, in between your lovely neurons. Your sole feelings, on the other hand, create nothing but thoughts (coded & linked feelings) or more feelings. Your volatile attention keeps jumping from one of these two to another, always as a reaction to what came before. 


Three things happen during this process: 

1. You create more associations by linking the feelings and thoughts in your head.. and even beliefs, when you have the links strong enough. 

2. Physical traces appear: in the head for these links (the usual brain activity), and in the body for the rest of the fanfare (heart does ache after all).

3. In time, you destroy some of your associations "that don't feel right" to re-arrange new ones. BUT, people have a tendency to jam their unassociated-current-feelings into their reasoned-coded-linked-packed-feeling/thought-thread, instead of re-arranging this tread to make it a better host for the current feeling. They don't waste time with identifying what it is that they really feel, just to establish order as quick as possible. 


That's when minding the bodily traces gains importance. Your unassociated-current-feeling is the only place you can be before you jump back on this speedy-train-of-thought, and you can hold on to this feeling by only focusing into where it occurs in the body. This should grant you some peace and possibly prevent you from jumping into the wrong wagon.