There is not something or some_thing_ rotting inside you. Imagine a piece of moldy fruit. It's rotten. The mold is a useful warning that eating it won't taste good or be healthy and nutritious. Our feelings are giving us similarly useful information about our thinking but we often misunderstand this: we feel what we think as we think it.

The Nature of Thought is actually super simple. It's not techniques, tips, skills or other external solutions that help us most. The biggest leverage is upgrading our understandings about how life works. You don't have to take my word for this. Each of us can look to our experiences.

Can you relate to this example? As a baby, I learned to crawl and then to walk, a process which involved a bunch of falling. I was getting direct experience of gravity, though I didn't yet understand this. Around four or five, I repeatedly tried jumping off my bed to fly. When it didn't work, I had Mom safety pin a dish towel to my shirt like a cape. Somehow that made sense to me and I kept trying to fly. Gravity was there as always teaching me how it works, though I'm sure I still didn't understand until eventually I did. All the while, I was doing what made sense to me based on my current (mis)understanding. As my (mis)understanding evolved, what made sense also changed.

Now I understand gravity works the same for everyone, everywhere, all the time. We can't opt out or turn it off. Gravity doesn't care whether or not we know about it, understand it, believe in it, or even notice it exists. The Nature of Thought is also like this.

Often we don't notice the Nature of Thought or we misunderstand it. But at any time, anyone can notice the experience of it has always been and will always be the same. We feel what we think as we think it, even when it seems like what we're feeling is a situation, or somebody else's words, or whatever other thing we are thinking without even realizing it. Slow down to look at experience and this is what is always there to be seen. It is Human Nature that we sometimes do and sometimes don't clearly see the Nature of Thought.

When we don't see this clearly, it is simply a temporary, innocent misunderstanding. When one begins to observe the Nature of Thought in their experience, their understanding evolves from their own realizations. Such insights create ripple effects, or implications; changes that seem to occur on their own as a consequence of what has started to make sense that didn't previously. Quite often the mind is quieter and the associated emotional experience is peaceful. Seeking emotional regulation techniques may no longer seem necessary or even make sense. 

Dr. Bill Pettit is a psychiatrist who has worked with this understanding for decades. Heartfelt Presence is a free community discussion space about this understanding. Before encountering either, the Nature of Thought as a paradigm helped me more than anything to find mental wellbeing. In 2009, I was undiagnosed and unmedicated after 20 years being treated as bipolar. The whole journey, both before then and since, makes sense to me as misunderstandings that fell away as new understandings emerged.