Cake - Making a Gentle Decision

Recently, I was telling someone that I was going for coffee with some of the people with whom I attend a dance class. He said there would inevitably be cake (we had been having a conversation about health). My response was that I wouldn’t be having cake.

Now I like a piece of cake as much as the next person but at the time, I was paying attention to what I was putting in my body, so eating cake just didn’t fit in.

I didn’t put any effort into that determination though. I simply made what I call a ‘gentle decision’, like a cloud passing through my mind and that was that and indeed, I didn’t participate in any cake eating.

My point in telling you this is to suggest that we can perhaps engage in this kind of gentle decision-making more frequently than we might think. Very often when we think we might do something we really don’t want to, we put a lot of mental energy into ‘forbidding’ ourselves. The thought of temptation or ‘giving in’ creates a conflict in our minds and that’s when we are most likely …to do the very thing we don’t want to.

So what is happening here? Well in that situation, we have added a lot of emotion, usually through some kind of mental self-flagellation. As human beings, we are motivated by emotion. It is our emotions that drive us - for better or worse.

I’m not suggesting that all our unwanted habits or actions will be solved in this way. Sometimes we need help to deal with old traumas or beliefs in order to get in touch more fully with the inner resources that help us navigate these things.

But what if you just tried it in different situations? You make the gentle decision to only eat a small plate of food when you go to that party. You make the gentle decision to only have one glass of wine at the restaurant. You make the gentle decision to only have one cup of coffee in the morning. You make the gentle decision to ask your boss for a raise.

The gentle decision is just a simple thought that passes through your mind and you gently take it into yourself. That thing is no big deal.

This is how I actually stopped smoking many years ago. I made a gentle decision and didn’t make a deal of it. No thoughts about how I would cope. No thoughts about cravings, no counting how many days since I last had a cigarette. And smoking just faded out of my life.

So maybe you would like to try this idea with all sorts of different things, letting that ‘gentle decision’ be like a soft cloud in a blue sky inside your mind.