The Cloud Method

The Cloud Method
A New Psycho-philosophical approach or How to turn black clouds white.

Intro

We have ultimate control over every thought that crosses our mind. We are not a passive vessel being filled with thoughts by any external force. Neither are we bound to the character traits we are born with. When we say “Obviously, I found that situation stressful, I’ve always been highly strung”, we are reinforcing the mistaken belief that we could not have felt otherwise about the situation. The fact is, we do have a choice. We can choose every emotion that we feel. We are not helpless and at the mercy of emotions that swoop down on us like black birds and nest in our heads. Emotions are nothing but a construct and however they were constructed or whoever constructed them is immaterial. The point is that we can deconstruct our emotional patterns and reconstruct them into something better.

If you are willing to accept this manifesto (at least hypothetically for now) then you are ready to undertake The Cloud Method.

Stage One: Mind-Sky, Thought-Clouds

Because we are attempting to restructure our emotional patterns from within we must start from within, that is to say, with our own minds. At this early stage it is essential to remember that you are in control. For this reason, the making of excuses is absolutely detrimental to the success of the Method. An excuse is an assertion that you are not to blame, you are not responsible, you are not entirely free to control your own emotions. We know this to be a fallacy. More on this later.

Read the following instructions carefully, memorise them and then follow them (try as hard as possible to achieve each step before moving on to the next):

• Close your eyes.
• You will see orange/red or black. Try as hard as you can to imagine sky blue.
• Call to mind a memory of a clear blue sky.
• Now imagine there are small, fluffy, white clouds moving very slowly across your sky from left to right (you are able to see four or five at any one time).

You have now completed Stage One of The Cloud Method. You mind is the sky and the clouds are your thoughts. For example, the first cloud to float across your sky could be “I can still see red”, the second “I wonder if these clouds are the right size”. Each cloud is an individual thought. Therefore a more complex phrase, such as “Oh good, my sky is blue” should be broken down into two clouds, “I’m pleased” and “My sky is blue”. A complex thought can be a sequence of individual clouds, for example “I’m pleased” “My sky is blue” “I must be good at The Cloud Method!”

We do not differentiate between emotions and thoughts in The Cloud Method but to keep things simple we will use the umbrella term of “thought”. It is crucial to remember that value-judgements are detrimental to the Method. Assessing the validity or “goodness” of a cloud is not useful. It would be incorrect to say that each cloud is as valid as the next because validity is simply not an issue when contemplating clouds. We must try to be objective, rational and keep things simple. If we were looking at the real sky we might feel that a white cloud was “good” and a black cloud was “bad” but such judgements cannot be included in our Mind-Sky.

Now we have established that each cloud is a thought that has been stripped of its emotional, judgemental and evaluative content: it is a simple rational statement. A useful way to enforce this is with the following exercise:

The Film Star Exercise

• Close your eyes.
• Imagine you are flicking through TV channels and stop at a film.
• It is not a particularly engaging or exciting film, just a person going about their daily business (making a cup of tea or walking their dog, for example).
• For this reason you are not emotionally engaged with the film, simply watching it as one may watch traffic out of a window.
• Now, imagine that this person in the film is you. You are watching yourself going about your own daily activities.
• Again, you are taking no special interest in watching these activities, merely objectively observing them as you might objectively observe traffic out of a window.

Well done, you have now better equipped yourself to succeed in the Method. The purpose of The Film Star Exercise is to teach us to be objective about our own thoughts: ‘daily activities’ in the film are ‘thoughts’ that cross our minds. Thinking in this way about ourselves helps us to be rational about our thoughts (and therefore emotions too).


Stage Two: White Clouds/Black Clouds

We have learned that we must try our hardest to simplify each thought or emotion into a single cloud; we must not place value-judgements on our clouds, merely observe them rationally and objectively. In Stage Two we will learn to create big clouds and to identify black clouds and white clouds.

In Stage One we learned that a complex thought is a sequence of clouds. Now, we can create a big cloud. As before, follow these steps and try not to move on to the next step until you have completed the last:
• Close your eyes.
• Imagine your Mind-Sky.
• Imagine your Clouds.
• Let your Clouds run slowly across your Mind-Sky from left to right for a while, but do not attach thoughts to them at this stage.
• Once they are flowing freely you may imagine them as Thought-Clouds.
• Imagine a complex thought as a series of Thought-Clouds.
• Now imagine the clouds stopping and merging into one big cloud.
• This is your new Thought-Cloud.

Keeping things simple, we will equate white Thought-Clouds with positive thoughts and black Thought-Clouds with negative thoughts. For example, “I am happy” is a white cloud and “I feel sad” is a black cloud.