The Mind as a River

The mind is as a river. The mind,like moving water, is continuously active and flowing. The mind is a stream ofenergy, constantly winding and turning. It contains both calm and frantictendencies. It is ever-changing and forceful, affecting, shaping, andinfluencing the surrounding environment.

A river slowly erodes the land, picking up and sweeping away allthat comes into its path, just like the mind picks up and carries with it thingsfrom the past, experiences, teachings, hardships, and pains. Just as a rivercontains sediments, minerals, fish, bacteria, and usually debris and pollutants,so the mind contains a plethora of energetic outbursts through thoughts,emotions, sensations, and usually pollutants like negative self talk, personal criticism,past traumas, and depreciating, destructive mental patterns.

To get through this life with a deep sense of joy, happiness,and satisfaction, we need to train ourselves to be fishermen of the mind. It isso easy to develop the tendency to pick up and hold onto everything weencounter while flowing downstream. Past traumas, self-defeating thoughts,emotional baggage, and simply bad teachings either through parenting, media, orpeers has polluted our minds. Just as too much debris can halt a river down toa trickle, so these mental and emotional burdens we carry with us halt our ownprogress.

As we work through our lives, we can learn to understand whatwe carry, what flows through us from day to day. We can accept our baggage, wecan acknowledge that it exists, process and understanding it, and then we can workto move past it. And we all have debris. We all have pollutants muddying thewaters of our mind.

What we need as good fishermen of the mind is a reliable netin which to catch and filter out the harmful things flowing through our stream.Knowing how to use your net and what exactly to catch will take time,meditation, therapy, and introspection. Take your thoughts for example. Rightnow, many of us are allowing all of our thoughts to hold some kind of emotionalweight. We have thoughts, we react emotionally to them, and we allow them toimpact us and affect how we see the world.

The trick is to capture those thoughts that muddy the water,the debris and pollutants of the mind. Evaluate your net, see what thoughts areholding you back, creating self-doubt, sparking anxiety, rendering youmiserable in any situation. Understand that they are there as part of thestream, hold them in your hand and see them, and then let them go. Flush themaway without holding them as having any validity. They are just thoughts. Theyare not truths.

 What happens when youbegin to capture and understand the nature of these thoughts is that they havehelped mold your reality. When you learn to filter your thoughts, not stop yourthoughts, but know what thoughts to emotionally resonate with and what thoughtsto discard, then you will have a more clear, pure, and vibrant stream. A clearvision of yourself and the world will emerge, and you will find the clearstream of your mind nourishing and invigorating. The world around you willtransform. You will feel a more natural symbiosis between you and nature.

Allow your thoughts to be encouraging, motivating,empowering, and loving. Embrace the best in you and love yourself enough topurify your mind. Clean the waters of your mind. Create a crisp, serene stream ofyour mind, like a peaceful flowing, babbling forest stream, pure of thought andintention, clean and rejuvenating. Heightening and elevating, feel the tranquilityof a purified current wash over you, bathing you, baptizing you into a newlight. Serenity of mind is waiting for you and what will follow will be a beautifulworld. Remember, everything is mental. Will your thoughts be used to discourageand victimize you, or uplift and motivate you to new peaks? You are the creator,the fisherman, and the drifter and you decide how you want the waters to impactyou. Happy flowing 😊