Microscope to Telescope: Expand Your Perspective

Video Transcript

Take a moment to settle in wherever you are and however you are arriving. Remember, your life is this very moment you are living, the only moment that is guaranteed.

As you stop and settle in, be aware of your thoughts and all the chatter that is happening in your mind right now. Allow your thoughts to express themselves. A thought is an opportunity for going deeper and expanding your observations.

I invite you to identify a thought you’ve been carrying around with you. Perhaps it’s a thought about your life, a relationship, a reaction to the state of the world, a health concern, an anxiousness about something happening in your life right now. Whatever the thought, fully welcome it in.

Now imagine that you can take this thought and put it under a microscope to observe it more intimately. No longer is it a passive thought, it’s now under examination. With your microscope in hand, focus in on the thought. What feelings does this thought bring up for you? What does this thought have to tell you about this present moment? Is it a helpful, distracting, or honest thought? As you continue to focus on this thought, examine whether it is revealing anything to you. Perhaps it is affirming something important for you to understand about yourself, or how you are feeling in this moment or this period in your life.

Familiarizing yourself with this thought whether it’s new or recurring, sit with it and try to name the feelings and observations that arise.

Now, let’s look at this thought from an expansive point of view. Rather than only focusing on your life and this thought at a microscopic level, let’s look at it like a distant object requiring a telescope. By creating some space between you and your thought, you can observe the thought in a new light. After all, the moon looks one way to the naked eye, as a shimmering ball in the sky, but suddenly you can see crater holes and a topography when you look at it differently through the telescope.

So I invite you to take a few steps back from your thought, and imagine you’re looking at it through this telescope. Between you and the thought are an unknowable amount of ways to perceive and respond to the thought. So observe it, and ask, what about this thought could be seen differently by someone else? Who does this thought serve, and is it helpful to me? Who contributed to creating this thought? What is this thought connected to, what’s its gravitational pull that I could miss if I didn’t slow to observe it?

As these observations come to mind and your exploration of the thought continues, you may experience insights that help you decide what to do with this thought. Does the thought expand your perspective or narrow it? Is the thought true and good? Do you want to carry the thought forward or release it and move on?

Your conclusions will help you go forward, approaching the next moment with less, or different, mind clutter. So take a moment to store your observations to memory so that you can return to what you have seen as a result of expanding your perspective.