For most of my life, I thought I was my thoughts.
Every emotion, every feeling, every storm inside my mind—I believed they were me. When anxiety hit, I was anxious. When anger rose, I was angry. When sadness settled, I became sadness itself.
But Buddhism taught me something strange, something simple, and something that changed me completely:
I am not my thoughts. I am the one watching them.
At first, this idea felt ridiculous.
How could I not be the thing I experience every single day?
But then I noticed something: my emotions changed constantly, my thoughts appeared in my mind without my permission, and my moods shifted like weather. If I were truly all of these things, then I would be constantly changing too—never stable, never centered.
Yet there’s a part of me that doesn’t change.
A quiet observer.
A still awareness behind the chaos.
In Buddhism, this is the true self—not the ego, not the narrative voice in your head, not the constantly shifting thoughts, but the awareness that notices them.
The moment I saw this clearly, I felt lighter.
I had spent years fighting every emotion, arguing with every thought, reacting to every experience like it was a personal attack. But if I am not my thoughts, then I don’t need to fight them. I can observe them. Let them rise. Let them fall. Let them pass.
Clouds come and go.
The sky stays untouched.
Peace is not found by controlling the mind.
Peace comes from realizing you were never the mind to begin with.