The Thought Stopping Exercise that ACTUALLY WORKS

[00:00:08] I was having a conversation today. [00:00:18] Shall let me start somewhere else. [00:00:22] So today, we, um, was it today or was it yesterday? Yesterday, I rescued a dog from the pound, uh, absolutely gorgeous Australian cattle dog. She's been in there about a month in this little cage with all these other dogs and, [00:00:40] From what I could gather, it came from a good home, but the family was working long hours and moved from the country into town, and they only had a small little yard for her out the back, paved yard, and the dog was alone all day. [00:00:52] And so the owners realized the dog wasn't being looked after and, I'm not sure how it ended up in a pound and not advertised on classifieds or something, but that's what happened. [00:01:03] And the dog won't get out of the car, if you go anywhere near the car it wants to jump in because it's afraid you're going to leave without it. It's afraid to be alone and abandonment. So, it loves being in the car. It's in the car now sleeping, and it's looks like it's going to be its home for a little while until we can help her with this little issue. It's abandonment issue. [00:01:27] And we will, it'll happen. But she's a real sweetheart and she's so happy to have found a home. [00:01:35] If you don't know about Australian cattle dogs or Blue Heelers, they're incredibly intelligent. I mean, she's almost got human intelligence. Her awareness is astounding. And her heart is beautiful, just so loving. And so grateful that she's out and about, she's probably gone for five or six hours walks in the last 24 hours, had a couple of swims in the river and played with other dogs and run around. She goes for a run and comes back and walks next to you and runs off again, comes back. Very good dog. Very beautiful. [00:02:08] And, um, there's something I've taught a few times, I, how to stop the mind. [00:02:18] How to stop the mind from running. How to stop endless circular looping thoughts. Endless thoughts. And this is an example. So, the first walk I took, Satya on, the dog, [00:02:31] was around a beautiful little town she was in, an hour from Perth, an hour from the city called York. [00:02:39] And she was in there at the pound with a lovely lady looking after her. Real country girl, cowboy hat, cowboy youth. Just beautiful woman, just real down to earth lady. [00:02:51] And I took her for a walk around the river and I'm holding onto, well, first off, she tried to jump through the window of my car but she's about 15 to 20% overweight because she's on, been unexercised. That failed miserably, and she ended up trying to scratch my car. So, I opened the door for her, where she jumped in and bounced around my car for about a minute. [00:03:13] Finally, we got to settle down on a towel on the chair and we went down to the river and I took her for a walk on the lead. Or rather, lead first of course, in a ball, and she's pulling me everywhere. I'm trying to train, train her, just without pushing her too much. She's enjoying herself and getting under control herself and it was a constant pulling on the lead. Constant being pulled. I took her near the river bank. She nearly pulled me into the river as she wanted to go in for a swim and a muddy river, I nearly ended up swimming with her. It was very close. She's very strong, very tough dog. And um, went for a long walk with her, and constantly trying to keep her close. I had some food with me and was treating her every time she did the right thing and sat and did all the good things. Within no time of calibrating to what it's like to live with a human and work with a human, instead of just being one of many dogs, or her memory came back of sitting and being gentle, but she wouldn't stop pulling on the lead. And it's like the mind when you pull, when you try to stop the mind and control it and stop your thoughts, it's just not going to happen. You're just going to be in an endless tug of war. It's exactly the same. No, this came from, I learnt this from Ajahn Shanti, who was very famous and a very good teacher many years ago. I haven't, hadn't heard anyone say it. It's a great analogy. And it's like that. If you try to stop the thoughts, they're just going to keep tugging and tugging and tugging because what you're doing as a resistance. [00:04:49] And resistance is the problem that got you in this situation in the first place. All of us, in this endless chatter that distracts us from the moment continuously. [00:05:02] And we think we can because we can resist everything else in the world and adjust it well, a lot of things. And think we're winning, but this is one of those things that doesn't work. Resistance doesn't actually work anywhere really. It causes other problems. It's a pressure when you put a force onto something. The force is going to appear elsewhere. Just like I'm pulling on the dog's lead, I'm forcing it one way, she's forcing the other way. Just like the mind, you try to stop it, force it to stop and it's going to keep running. [00:05:32] But I was in a situation with a dog where I'm in this town, I don't know. Going for a walk with a dog, I don't know if she bites people. I don't know if she was going to swim off and not come back. So, I used to have a dog like that would swim off and drown before it came back. So, I was being cautious with her. I'm getting her to know me a little bit, and making friends. And um, when I brought her back to Perth last night from York, I, um, took her to a place on the river here, a massive big open wetland area. It's absolutely beautiful. It's a hidden treasure. I didn't know it existed on this level. After walking through it, absolutely magnificent. There's dogs everywhere and birds and just this beautiful open expanse. I, I let Satya off the lead and she bolted. And I was like, "Oh God, here we go." And I thought, "I'll give it a go, here we go." And she just bolted and she's running for her life and I just went, I called out to her, "Satya, Satya." And she stopped, turned around and ran back and sat at my feet and looked up at me, wagging a tail for a pat. [00:06:40] And I patted her and stood up, and she ran off again and did it again. Did it like four or five times. She started looking back and kept looking back. Went off for about half an hour, about half an hour or 40 minutes, just letting her run free, run around with other dogs, have fun wagging a tail, jump like a maniac. She got a little bit tired because she is a bit overweight, hasn't been exercised. And she came up and just started walking alongside me with her head right at my knees. And that was it. [00:07:14] And I said, "It's probably what we do with the mind. Let it go. Let it go for a run. If it wants to run, let it run. It'll give up, it'll come back and it'll stand next to you." Now, instead of being your master, it will be your servant. Not that these dogs are servants, but you get the metaphor. And it's exactly the same. It's really important. So many people spend decades trying to control the mind. Just let it go, let it run out of energy. It mightn't stop immediately, but this practice is a hidden treasure because it works. [00:07:48] And that's the nature of this game. There's so many people studying things that they think might work but that aren't working, and they don't check in and look to see if it's working or not really. And just like the dog, it will come back and it will be your best friend. It'll be an incredible, powerful tool instead of this thing driving you crazy. [00:08:18] And all I had to do was let go. I let go of the lead and put some trust in that. Just let's see what happens here. I'm not sure what's going to happen, but let's try. Let's see what happens. And fortunately, it worked. The dog was pulling on the lead because it wasn't used to being controlled and held back and manipulated. So, it resisted and fought it. When it was given freedom to do what it wanted, it let it, it gave up on running around like an idiot, like a madman. A mad dog, an uncontrolled, uh, and we had a beautiful walk together and she went for a little run here and there, but she stayed much closer to me. So each time we go for a walk now, and she's full of energy and full of beans, which maybe when you get up in the morning if we're using this metaphor, your mind might want to go for a run. Let it go for a run or go jump in a cold shower, which is, you know, a dog running for half an hour, that's like the dog running for one minute, achieving the same result. They jump in a cold shower, jump in a cold ocean, a cold pool, and achieve the same result. And then let go. But we can hack this. [00:09:46] Resistance is futile. Resistance isn't the way. And this is a continual teaching. It's a continual ongoing experience and so many different forms in the world of what works and what doesn't. Resistance doesn't work, stop it. [00:10:12] Stop shaking your fist. As Alan Watts used to say, "Stop shaking your fist at God." or what you are. You've got it wrong. From this tiny little mind that uses 26 letters of an alphabet, mixes them up into different sequences and makes some funny sounds and things. We run the show. I have control over it. It's ridiculous. And even a beauty in this really weird camera angle. So, simple. In Satcher, the dog's name was Satcha S-A-T-C-H-A. I thought, "Oh, that's beautiful because I can change that to Satya, and she'll still understand it." because it's only very slight change. So I call her Satya now. That's a new name on a microchip. Satya, S-A-T-Y-A. And Satcher's Sanskrit for truth. So, every time I call out Satya, I'm calling out truth, truth, truth. So, if you hear me talking to Satcher, you hear the name, it's a reminder because dogs live in truth. They just are. They don't have a phantom concept of who they are, an imaginary concept of how special or unspecial they are. They just are. It's truth. It doesn't have this extra addition hanging on its shoulder on each shoulder whispering into its ear. [00:11:54] So, if this dog is in the pound for a week, some of them are there for six months I hear. It's a shed with a few little cages in it. The people there are nice. They're doing their best, they care for the dogs very deeply. They walk them every day. They give them a lot of care. And none of them get put down at this place thankfully. It takes up to six months. But none of the dogs get, get put down. They, they do a good job. But they turned up and they had the dog out of its cage and was in the yard and I drove up, she's just looking at me. And this dog's so intelligent. She hadn't, it was as if she knew what was happening. And she was just standing there happily. [00:13:54] Even if they got some bugs in their system, it just is. The animal kingdom is in truth, the plant kingdom is in truth. The human condition is illusion, humans are creating an illusionary, uh, phantom world, it runs in parallel with the real world, which blocks it from seeing beyond this world also. The gateway is silence. Let go, let him go. I have evidence. So do many other teachers. If you try to stop the mind, just let it go, let it run out of energy. It mightn't stop immediately, but this practice is a hidden treasure, because it works. And we think we can resist everything else in the world. We can adjust it, a lot of things, but this doesn’t work. Resistance doesn’t actually work anywhere really. It causes other problems, it is pressure. So many people spend decades trying to control the mind from running. [00:15:54] If you've got the movie, you know, you get the movie strip films with little holes in it, old school, get all those images, slice them all up, and there's a million per second, let's say. There's a lot more but let's say there's a million per second, and instead of having them all linear, we take all the images out and stack them on top of each other. Now that's all in the moment, isn't it? Everything's now in the moment. It's not this, this part of the movie, then that part of the movie. It's all in the moment, it's all vertically stacked. In the now. And we're the screen watching the images. And more, but we just start with the screen for now. Some people already know that. And we're working on them with the next bits, probably. But now it's, it's, I am. We are everything. It's the black belt. That's the start of the game. That's when the game truly starts with that understanding. You get your black belt. The teacher starts teaching you the proper stuff. And a dog’s a dog, a cat’s a cat. And they all got little personalities, their personalities are okay. They might have a few little bugs in their system, but they don't hate themselves over it. Most of the bugs they got in the system were given to them by humans and the pain they share with their dogs and if the dog doesn't have another side next to him going, "Oh, I really don't like this about myself, I'm going to hurt myself about this every hour for the next five years and be negative towards myself." It just is.

• The Mitoté (The Fog)
  The endless, circular internal chatter that results from resisting what is. It's the mental 'tug of war' that distracts from the present reality.
• Inner Engineering
  The process of deconstructing flawed mental patterns. Instead of adding 'techniques,' it involves removing the core malfunction, such as resistance.
• The Direct Path
  A method that bypasses gradual self-improvement in favor of a direct, non-negotiable seeing of reality. Letting the mind 'run' is a direct path to its cessation.
• Pattern Interruption
  A skillful intervention that breaks a habitual mental loop. Letting the dog off the lead interrupts the pattern of pulling and resistance.
• Stalking the Self
  The precise observation of one's own mechanical behaviors and reactions, such as noticing the impulse to control or resist thoughts.
• Cessation of Suffering
  The natural state that arises when resistance to reality ceases. It is not an achievement but a return to equilibrium.
• Ego-Structures
  The phantom, imaginary concept of self that creates conflict and suffering. Animals lack this and therefore 'live in truth.'
• Direct Seeing
  Perceiving reality without the filter of mental chatter or pre-existing agreements; recognizing that resistance is futile is an act of Direct Seeing.
• Skillful Means
  The precise medicine or action required for a specific situation. Letting the dog run free was the skillful means to end its pulling.
• Agreements / Domestications
  Internalized beliefs that dictate our reactions, such as the agreement that 'I must control my thoughts through force.'