The Thought Diet: Feeding the Mind That Creates Your World

What if thoughts are like food?

We know the old adage - you are what you eat, but perhaps more quietly, more mysteriously, we are also what we think.

There was a grace filled moment I experienced 2 years ago, when a particularly impactful piece of truth landed like a freight train in my psyche.

I was sitting in the parking lot of my daughter’s dance studio. Yes. You heard me correctly. Her dance studio. Not meditating on a mountaintop, not chanting in a cathedral, but simply in my car waiting for my 6-year old’s dance class to end. I’m telling you folks these things can happen anywhere at any time! And out of nowhere the knowing washed over me like a strong and fierce waterfall. A spontaneous satori that words could never do justice:

I am not my thoughts!

That realization cracked something open in me. I felt as if I had escaped from a prison, been released from some sort of inhumane, torturous life sentence. Tears came. I felt free. In the days and months following, my experience of my thoughts completely and organically shifted. With no effort, I watched my thoughts rise and fall like clouds and felt the relief of not clinging to them. My new experience of these thoughts felt akin to listening to music on the radio. I heard them, but not as extensions of myself. They were not who I was. They required no action or reaction, no more than lyrics to a song on the radio would dictate my behavior. I often found myself laughing at how preposterous these thoughts were. As I observed them it was plain to see these thoughts were merely algorithms put into my consciousness by experiences, relationships, and other things I was exposed to in my environment over the course of my life. The thoughts I was hearing weren’t truth. They were merely echoes of trauma, programming, and other people’s voices I had absorbed.

For a time, I lived in the spaciousness of that knowing. I needed that space. It was holy. But eventually, a quieter wisdom arrived:

Wait for it…

“I am not my thoughts” is a thought.

And yet what a powerful one. A thought rooted in a beautiful universal truth. One that changed the landscape of my entire life. It wasn’t just an idea it was a doorway. A spark. A new lens through which the world looked clearer, truer, and more alive. That thought allowed me to begin co-creating with God rather than reacting from old circuitry.

Because thoughts are not nothing.

They are subtle matter - energetic imprints we swallow, absorb, and become. We wear them, walk in them, breathe them into every interaction. They shape the vibrational signature of our being. They shape what we see.

The Invisible Diet That Shapes Our Reality

We don’t question it when it comes to the body. Eat donuts for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and the effects are easy to track. In this regard, nobody would argue with the fact that what we consume we become.

But the same is true for thoughts.

What we feed the mind becomes the atmosphere of our inner world, and our inner world becomes the reality we experience. If we’re constantly consuming fear, judgment, comparison, and self-hate, whether through our inner dialogue, relationships, media, or a toxic culture we may be a part of, it becomes our diet. And over time, that diet shapes us. Not because we’re bad or broken, but because that’s how nourishment works. What we take in, what we attach to we become.

When we begin to feed on thoughts rooted in deep truth, stillness, trust, gentleness, and presence, we nourish the soul. As we question the beliefs we’ve swallowed whole and become more intentional about what we consume, we create space for peace, love, and clarity to take root. The more we feast on truth, the more our lives reflect harmony, clarity, and authentic joy.

Suffering as the Signal

Suffering is often the holy signal. A whisper from deep within saying something here isn’t true, isn’t life supporting. We think the suffering is telling us we’re broken, but what if it is simply a sign we’ve been consuming falsehood - feasting on thoughts that were never ours, stories we inherited, bought into, clung to, until we became them? What if suffering is a blaring alarm, a built-in life-saving device that alerts us to the fact that we’re believing the radio singing away in the depths of our minds is who we are? What if suffering is the body and soul asking for a better, more nourishing meal?

We become what we think. Just as much as we become what we eat.

And the miracle is we can change both.

The Holy Choice: Heaven or Hell, Moment by Moment

We make this choice not once, but constantly. To believe the old story or open to the new one. To react or respond. To eat the donut or the apple. To choose war or peace within.

Do we have the spiritual discipline to choose the thought that heals over the one that harms? Can we learn to recognize the voice of truth inside us - the one that nourishes, uplifts, expands? Because maybe that’s what free will really is - the quiet, holy agency to create either heaven or hell - one thought at a time.

I’ve come to love the notion that we can consciously choose our polarity in every moment of our existence on this planet. Love over fear. Truth over distortion. Service to others over the small self’s need to control. Yes, both ends of the polarity will teach, but the more I live on the end of radical love and truth, the more intuitive discerning this truth becomes, and the more natural choosing love feels. No other choice make sense anymore. I now see choosing truth and love over distortion and fear not as a lofty goal, but as a way of life. I can wholeheartedly attest to the fact that repeatedly and consciously choosing higher vibrational thoughts is undeniably morphing my life into deeper and more intensely beautiful iterations of Heaven on Earth.

The Kingdom Within

“The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” (Luke 17:21).

I’ve heard that phrase a thousand times. But lately… I feel it. Not as poetry, but as reality. Heaven is not a distant promise. It’s not reserved for saints or mystics or those who get it “right.” It is a frequency we can learn to embody through the way we love, speak, pray… and think.

Jesus taught - not by bread alone, but by every word… (Matthew 4:4)

You become what you digest.

Is your thought diet lifting you into light or weighing you down?

Is your plate full of peace or poison?

Let your thoughts be seasoned with grace,

And flavored with the authenticity of truth.

Let your mind be a table of love.