mrlimbic wrote:

Good point! It is not important to eliminate irrelevant thoughts but to simply not respond to the irrelevant ones. By practice you develop a "trance" which does this filtering process for you. This is what happens when I play music for instance. Thoughts that are irrelevant to the performance still happen but do not feed into your spontaneous unconscious behaviour. In my experience it usually takes me a few months to develop this kind of state consistently for a new skill.

I think trying to "resist", "fight" or "eliminate" thoughts will just create more chaos in your brain and more distractions that interfere with natural progress. Get a little Zen about it, Don't fight it, just let it go past. With practice it becomes the norm for that task and you will build an anchor for the state. So with the music example walking on stage, picking up an instrument becomes a trigger for it.

Thanks John. I just wonder if there is a faster way to get this to work. Is it really going to take three months? I do really like this one. I'll have to use it in combination with other techniques that work sooner.