“You don’t even know what you’re looking for yet.” It was more of a statement, said with a kind of quiet certainty, than a question.

Part of me wanted to take it as a challenge and lie and say that I did actually know and I was looking for [blank]. Instead I just admitted, “No, I guess I don’t know exactly.” I wasn’t even aware up until this point that people ever actually knew what it was they were looking for in cases such as mine. “But I can tell you with one hundred percent certainty that I feel it. I feel it calling me towards it.”

This interchange was one of many shared between myself and Gary Van Warmerdam, author and self-styled “Happiness Coach” holding court at a website called “Pathway to Happiness.” Several months ago, Gary had found an article I had written about “overcoming thought addiction,” and contacted me, asking if I’d like to learn how to stop this endless chain of obsessive thought. He claimed that he could teach me a simple exercise over the phone that would take only ten or twenty minutes which would eventually enable me to turn down the chattering part of my mind for good.

Intrigued but occupied with other things, I rolled around Gary’s offer in the back of my head for weeks that eventually turned into months. Until one day I decided to take him up on his offer, despite the warnings and hysterical protestations of some readers of my site who perhaps feared I would become part of some kind of cult – a mindless drone at the flip of a switch via one simple phone call. I like to think I am a bit stronger and more deeply developed as a person than all that, but I will leave it up to the reader to discern whether or not my interaction with Gary and the exercise he described to me turned me into an automaton.

Gary talked a bit about his own background, having gotten into this realm of spirituality by way of some deeply difficult personal events and the disintegration of important relationships in his life. A friend introduced him to Don Miguel Ruiz, a Mexican shaman or nagual, who is also the author of the wildly best-selling, The Four Agreements. While I’ve never read that book and don’t know much of anything about Ruiz, talking to Gary about the subject at least convinced me that he himself had been deeply moved by his experiences working with Ruiz.

The main exercise which Gary described to me over a short phone conversation has to do with visual awareness, and with seeing things as they really are rather than through the linguistic and conceptual filters we commonly use to describe the world with. The exercise started with me walking around my house, and Gary asking me to notice how my eyes move. I took several minutes observing myself observing.

My eyes darted back and forth, jumping from object to object, point to point as I scanned the rooms I passed through. I reported this to Gary who explained that was the “normal” way people look at things. What he went on to describe then was an intentional effort to see through your eyes more like they were a video camera. He seemed to mean by that that one’s eyes could be used in such a way that you take in the whole of a scene - a gestalt - without fixating or focusing on any one particular thing or object. It was actually slightly harder than it sounded to get into this headspace (or eyespace), and even moreso to maintain it indefinitely.

He went on to describe in greater detail the physical cues and sensations which go along with this alternate style of visual perception. You begin to become more aware that your field of vision is bouncing up and down - exactly as it would when you are watching footage taken from a video camer held by a person on foot (imagine the Blair Witch Project as the camera bounces through the woods). Gary pointed out that our field of vision is always bouncing around like this when we are moving about, but that our brains automatically adjust for it, smoothing our the roughness of motion so that we don’t really even experience it consciously.

Practicing this exercise during our conversation and on subsequent walks around my neighborhood, I can attest to its effectiveness at quieting the mind. I’m sure Gary would be able to explain it in more detail (and perhaps he does somewhere on his website), but it when you sort of “climb into the backseat” so to speak, and stop letting your eyes jump around like crazy, the same thing seems to happen with your mind. Thoughts stop running around like millions of headless chickens and you come a great deal closer to simply being in the moment and aware of what’s happening within and around you.

It sounds deceptively simple, I know. Which is why I recommend you try it out for yourself. I find myself only able to maintain it for smaller rather than extended periods of time. And my mind is usually jumping around so much that I rarely think to practice it. But that’s more my fault than anything inherent in the exercise itself.

Speaking with Gary was definitely an interesting experience and came at such a time when I found it to be very valuable to be able to connect in a personal way with someone else very deeply involved with spiritual exploration and dedicated to making peoples’ lives better through it. Though my “thought addiction” has certainly not been put to rest by any means, he certainly has given me a lot of things to think about. Which I know is probably pretty ironic, but hey…

In any event, I also recommend reading Gary’s article “Voice in my head” for more on this subject of why we become so addicted to our thoughts in the first place, and what freeing yourself from that has the potential to open up in your life. Gary also has a blog and some podcasts you ought to check out if any of this interests you.

Thanks again Gary! Hopefully sometime soon I will not only find what I am looking for, but actually start knowing what it is!