The Wisdom of No Escape: How to love yourself and your world

by Pema Chödrön

The experience of labeling your thoughts ‘thinking’ also, over time, becomes much more vivid. You may be completely caught up in a fantasy, in remembering the past or planning for the future, completely caught up, as if you had gotten on an airplane and flown away someplace. You’re elsewhere and you are with other people and you’ve redecorated a room or you’ve relived a pleasant or unpleasant experience or you’ve gotten all caught up in worrying about something that might happen or you’re getting a lot of pleasure from thinking about something that may happen, but you’re completely involved as if in a dream. Then suddenly you realize, and you just come back. It happens automatically. You say to yourself, ‘Thinking,’ and as you’re saying that, basically what you are doing is letting go of those thoughts. You don’t repress the thoughts. You acknowledge them as ‘thinking’ very clearly and kindly, but then you let them go. Once you begin to get the hang of this, it’s incredibly powerful that you could be completely obsessed with hope and fear and all kinds of other thoughts and you could realize what you’ve been doing – without criticizing it – and you could let it go. This is probably one of the most amazing tools that you could be given, the ability to just let things go, not to be caught in the grip of your own angry thoughts or passionate thoughts or worried thoughts or depressed thoughts.