Do Your Thoughts Get Dark and Gloomy?

Mine do, from time to time. As a matter of fact, mine are just clearing up. I was in a low place emotionally for a few days, as if my mood was deliberately matching our weather in the northeast: dark, cloudy skies punctuated here and there by a few patches of sunlight, but otherwise gray, gray gray. In the past, my moodiness would have lasted for weeks rather than days, and I would have gotten horribly tangled up in an endless loop of trying to figure out how could things ever have sunken so low and what I should do to change my life. And then, because of all the training I’ve had in fixing things and thinking I should know better, I’d judge the heck out of myself not only for entertaining negative thoughts but allowing them to appear in the first place.

We all have our ups and downs. It’s part of being human, but when our mood is low we get very uncomfortable and somehow forget this fact of life so we put lots of effort into maintaining the highs and avoiding or denying the lows. But what if trying to control and manage is a reactive strategy and actually makes things worse? What if a proactive understanding could significantly reduce how long we stay stuck in a bad mood that keeps us from doing the things we want to do in our lives?

It’s a fact of nature that, regardless of cloud cover, the sun is a constant and will eventually reappear. We don’t (and can’t) do anything about it. We may want the sun to come out, telling ourselves how much more we could do or how much better it would feel, but that doesn’t change the basic fact the sun is always behind the clouds and powers our world.

The same fact of life is true about us, too. We have our own internal sun that powers our lives - that’s who we really are. The sun we see in the sky is unbelievably resilient, powerful and strong. It’s beyond our capacity to understand or even describe it very well. By it’s very nature it’s not affected in the least by the coming and going of clouds and storms no matter how severe or long lasting. The external sun isn’t afraid or incapable of handling changes in the weather, and neither is our internal sun.

We forget about the amazing capacity of the sun when we get distracted by the clouds - how thick they are or how dark or what’s coming out of them. We forget that the light of the sun, although obscured, is always present - otherwise we couldn’t see the clouds at all and we’d be in total darkness.

So, for me, when I realized I was caught up with the dramatic display of my own thought clouds and had forgotten the simple constant of my own internal sun, I relaxed. I saw, once again, that clouds by their very nature will move out on their own. And despite the lightning or thunder that may be accompanying those clouds, all that noise isn’t predictive of the future (or the present) - it’s just what’s passing across the my sun at any given moment. I was able to get on with living my life and not give those clouds more attention than they deserved. Yes, there was a certain momentum to the attention I had paid to them, but that, too, came to a stop of it’s own accord.

The truth is that you are incredibly resilient and strong at the core of who you are. You don’t need to keep reaching for strategies to put you in a better mood. The moods will pass. Beneath all the moodiness in our lives is an innate wisdom and creativity that's always available to power our lives. This is true for every human being on the planet. And this is the starting place for all of us, to notice what’s really true. From there, our inherent wisdom will show us the way forward.