 What is required, I'm sorry, no, wrong word. What is worthy of your worship? What is worthy of your worship? Woo-hoo-hoo! Good question, isn't it? Is it mother nature? Is that worthy of you worshiping? Is it your mom, your dad, your family life? Is it some celebrity, some YouTuber that you watch? Is it a band? Do you worship a band or music? Do you worship yourself and your own identity? What do you worship? And what is worthy of your worship? Is it a higher power? Is God worthy of your worship? Now, let's all take a firm stance together of what is not worthy of worship in our lives. That is our own mind. Yeah. To worship ourselves, and I don't mean this in a way to put yourself down and think less of yourself, there's a difference between thinking less of yourself and thinking of yourself less. Okay, so if we worship the mind and we worship our thoughts, what does this mean? This means that everything that pops into our heads is worthy of our attention and praise and admiration and we believe it to be true. Wrong. We know this. You know this and I know this. And sometimes it's hard to decipher what's true and what's not about ourselves. But what we do know about our thoughts is that we don't know where they come from. That's one thing we know. The second thing we know is that based on your past experience in mind, a lot of what comes up in here isn't true, isn't useful at all. And it's not worthy of our admiration and attention and worship. But what we'd like to do is we have a thought and then we say, hello, come on in. Let's see what you're trying to tell me. Let's see what you're all about. Hey, here's another thought. Come on in. We got leftovers. Come sit at my table and dine with all of the other thoughts. Let's see what you have to tell me about myself and the world and the reality in which I live. Sit down, have a glass of wine. We got dessert. We got tiramisu coming out. Take a seat. So many of our thoughts, everyone, do not require worship, which is why the mind doesn't require us to worship it. I fall into that trap. Of course I do. Of course I do. When one thought comes in and it's like something self-critical, right? Some worry that I'm worrying about the future, that I don't know where I'm supposed to be or I said that thing. Maybe I said the wrong thing. Maybe they looked at me differently and I made them feel, but all of this stuff comes in and makes me question certain things. And if I were to be one to always worship every thought, I'd be stuck in my mind all day overanalyzing, overthinking, believing that every thought is true and every thought is not true. You do not have to believe everything you think. One more time for the kids. You do not have to believe everything you think. Everything you think. What is it, 30,000 thoughts a day? You think all of those are true? No, no, they might seem true. Sure, okay? And there's all these kind of things we can do with cognitive behavioral therapy to see if any of those thoughts hold any water if you wanna have fun with them. See if they really exist in reality. See if they're really true and you can play that game with yourself. Just ask yourself, is that really true based on what I've done in my past experience? Probably not, okay? And is this a useful thought? So when we say worshiping the mind, you don't have to. I don't think it's worthy of your worship. I think we can learn to be objective about our thinking through meditation, which we'll do in a moment, and to be a witness to what's happening, which is all about mindfulness and meditation, right? Be a witness to the thought and what's going on and choose to engage. Choose to engage in some of these things and have the awareness and have the discipline to not engage sometimes. And be the parent. Be the parent of your life. And this is something I've had to come to terms with sometimes where, Scott, I love thinking. I love thinking. I can think all day. You could meet me in 10 years, okay? 10 years. And you'd be like, Scott, what have you been up to? New jobs? New this? No, I've just been thinking. It's been the best 10 years ever though. I've thought about so much stuff, right? My mind can be so entertaining and I can have so much fun in there and imagine and all of this. And we have to realize, and I have to realize that sometimes we have to be a parent and say, one enough is enough for ourselves. That's enough of thinking. Let's go do things. That's enough of looking into that scenario. You've had enough there. You've dug deep enough. Let's get out of there, okay? So this is about being a witness to what's happening, not worshiping what's happening in the mind and being a bit of a parent to ourselves, all right? So with all of that being said, I hope you take a bit from that and know that, you know what, maybe Scott, maybe a smidge of that I notice in my own life, in my own mind, where I get caught up in a story. I get caught up in some kind of scenario build about the future. And I believe all that to be true and I believe all that to be useful. It's not worthy of your worship most of the time, okay? So wherever you are in the world, thanks for tuning in and wherever you are in a room, come into the space a bit. Let's just sit with each other, sit with yourself. And when you're ready, you can just softly close your eyes. Close your eyes. What do you see? Nothing, Scott, my eyes are closed. I know, I know, chill, chill, chill. Are any images popping up in your mind? Just as you sit there. So as you sit, be a witness, be a watcher, totally objective, you know, be like a scientist and you're looking at like one of those, what are they called? Those kind of glass slides where you have a specimen on them, right? And you're just looking objectively at what's happening. As a scientist, it's just you don't have a bias. You're just watching, noticing what comes up. So just watch the mind and see what pops up. And when you have an image or a thought, you can say out loud, oh, I'm thinking. Oh, I'm imagining, that's all. Just be a watcher for just a few moments in silence. Now, if you need a place to come back to, just come back to your breathing. Simple as that. Nothing extra, nothing more, nothing less. And if thoughts come up, you just say thinking. And if any images come up, you can just say, oh, I'm imagining. And just see it for what it is. No need to judge, no need to be hard on yourself. Just say, oh, okay, I'm thinking. And come back to breathing. And when you're ready, you can just open your eyes slowly, gently, softly, coming on back. You don't have to look at the screen if you don't want, and if you're on the podcast, hey, no screen necessary. Now, what a lot of you may have noticed in that simple little exercise is that maybe you weren't having a lot of thoughts and images. Yes, I think some of you might be not in your head because I gave an intention and expectation to be the watcher, to be the watcher. So you're already in a state of alertness and awareness, you're kind of waiting for the thought, waiting for it. And when there's a really cool exercise where if you're really overthinking and come to a seated position and ask yourself, I wonder what my next thought will be. And as you become a witness and as you remove yourself a little bit and just watch, oh, nothing's coming. Nothing's coming because you're waiting for it and you're like, where is this thought creation mechanism starting, when's it gonna actually pop up? And you're experiencing this state of awareness of your own mind. So a lot of you may have in that exercise, maybe not a lot was coming up. And when it did, if it did, you said, okay, that's just thinking and I come back. My friends, let's not complicate the meditation thing. It's been complicated. You see all of these apps, you see all of this science coming out about it, you see all of these different techniques too. If you're a beginner here, even if you're not, just sit with yourself for a few minutes and just watch the mind. That's it. You don't need an app, you don't need me guiding you, just sit with yourself if you can, even 30 seconds at a time. And this is the practice. This is the practice, okay? So a few things there. No more worshiping the mind. I don't think it's worthy of your worship. Don't believe everything you think, okay? Be an objective observer. Be the scientist with the glass slide and a specimen. Those are your thoughts, just watch it. Just watch it with no bias, right? No good or bad, it's just, yeah, it's thinking. Yes, I'm imagining. Another tool is to be in that little state of observation. Ask yourself, I wonder what my next thought will be and you wait for it and you just wait and see, okay? I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, you know, some of these techniques, and there's a whole lot more with the anxiety course I put together, which is in the description, it's not on scotsaintmarie.com anymore. It's just in the YouTube description. So I'll put the link in the podcast description. There's free videos if you just want some extra tools for your mental health toolbox. And if anxiety is something that you experience, as I do, as every human does, some more, some less, some more frequent, some less frequent, we don't need to put you on a scale, okay? Your experience is your own. If you want some extra tools, there's a free, what did I even call it? Free six-part series and it's just free videos and it's a mini course. And if you find that would be useful, and go do it, I guess. Okay, now I wonder what the next, I wonder what you're doing today. I hope you have a great day. I hope this was a bit centering for you. I hope this was useful for you. And I hope you have a wonderful day, my friend. And keep being you, take it easy, enjoy life the best you can and enjoy the day the best you can, all right? We'll talk to you soon. Great job being human, it's weird, it's funky, it's fucked up, but we're doing it together. All right, bye-bye.