How do you make yourself see things differently? How do you see light when it feels dark? How do you see a clear way forward, when everything feels confusing? How do you change your mood?

An approach common to every culture and religion is to use stories, analogies and parables to illuminate understanding, make points more memorable and help us make positive changes.

You can use metaphors to create alternative ways of looking at things, to see the world in a different light. Just that alone, seeing your thoughts differently, will help you to create a distance between you and your thoughts that will help you to stand back, observe more objectively and make wiser decisions about how to react.

Today and over the next few days we explore 3 metaphors that people have found useful to manage their thoughts. Here's the first one.

Picture yourself driving a bus which is full of noisy passengers (your thoughts), doing their best to distract you with comments about your poor driving and giving you competing instructions on where to go. Does that mean you can't drive the bus safely and in the right direction? Of course not. You concentrate on the road ahead (the task in hand) and let the passengers chatter away. As you focus on your task, their voices fade into the background.