Hello and welcome back to practicing human, the podcast where every day we're getting a little better at life.

I'm your host, Corey Miscara, and in today's episode, we're going to talk about working with thoughts.

More to come on that in a moment. First, let's settle in together with the sound of the bells.

Okay, so I'd like to start by sharing a quote.

It's by a gentleman you may have heard of called the Buddha.

And the Buddha said,

We are shaped by our thoughts.

We become what we think.

When the mind is pure, joy follows like a never-departing shadow.

Notice how that quote lands for you.

I think it can bring up different emotions.

It can be inspiring, but it can also feel, I think, a bit deflating,

especially if we're struggling with difficult thoughts. And I think this is one of those quotes earlier on in my journey, my personal growth journey, and especially my meditation journey, that I would

have heard and interpreted differently from how I would interpret it now, perhaps in a more

one-dimensional way. And I think this is some of the issues with taking quotes from different wisdom traditions, and also

translating them, translation issues, so we can't always capture the nuance here. And I do think

there's more nuance to this quote, because this quote can leave us thinking that if we have nothing but pure thoughts that in

some sense we're really messing up our life and I disagree with that and I also go out on a limb here

and say that the Buddha would disagree with that just by exploring the teachings in Buddhism and other contemplative traditions.

It's not saying that there should be just pure positive thoughts in every moment all the time.

And one of the key teachings of working with difficult or negative thoughts is that we can actually relate to them

as objects of our consciousness such that we are identifying more with the observer than the

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