𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗳𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝘀𝗽𝗿𝗮𝘆.

I love playing practical jokes on people. When I was in college, I recall going to the mall and stopping in Spencer’s, a gag gift store. I bought fake dog poop and fart smelling spray. When I got back to my dorm room, I placed the fake dog poop on my roommate’s backpack which was on his desk next to a newly toasted bagel with cream cheese on it, and I sprayed a ton of fart smelling spray all around our dorm room. Then I left the room knowing my roommate would be back from visiting the friends next door.  You can just imagine his reaction when he arrived. I’m laughing out loud just thinking back.

If you try to wave the fart smell away, it spreads. You lose your appetite. Your food smells like farts because the smell is in your nose hairs. Wait for the fart smell to dissipate. Or you can just leave the room. Allow the smell to go away on its own because it will, perhaps not as quickly as you’d like. It will go away in due time... Be patient.

Like farts, our thoughts are spontaneous, unprompted, and impermanent and the smell is not an indicator of how your life is going. We live in a thought created world. Our thoughts determine our experiences, and our thoughts are illusions. They are not truth.

Our brain has 60-70,000 thoughts per day and the average brain recalls less than 1% of those thoughts. This means that nearly 70,000 thoughts per day are in our subconscious brain and only 700 are in our conscious brain. Oftentimes thoughts from our subconscious creep into our mind and mess with us. 95% of our brain activity is unconscious and 5% is conscious. This is why we must work on our self-awareness and ensure the 5% brain activity is filled with positive thoughts.

Having negative thoughts and emotions is natural, normal and okay. What’s not okay is sitting in those emotions and making them worse by giving them more power than they truly have. You don’t need to waste your energy finding out why you feel the way you do because you may not ever find out why, and if you find out why, by the time you do, the thought is gone. Just like the fart smell.