Is Your Life a Mess?
Do you worry? Do you demean or belittle yourself? Are you driven? Do you judge or criticize yourself? Do you feel you are in some way defective or inadequate? Do you think that whatever you do, is it never enough?
These are all signs of your mind running amok, and it is extremely destructive to you. You need to turn this around. The mind needs to serve you, not the other way around.
Other symptoms of your mind running amok are when you feel powerless about what others are doing to you; if you continuously feel guilty or are in self-pity; or if you blame others for mishaps in your life.
Your Time Has Come to Take Back Your Mind.
A good friend of mine wrote a book: “End your Story, Begin Your Life.” *) What a simple and elegant one-sentence description of what you need to do to turn around all the misery and misfortunes in your life.
You see, we have a mind. It shows itself as the internal dialogue that continuously goes on in our head, or we think that’s where it is. Actually the mind is part of our eternal self and connects to us via our brain. However, if you have not trained your mind to be your servant (it is a little bit like animal obedience training,) then it is most likely running amok, meaning you have no control over what it speaks and when.
Test yourself. Can you have absolute silence in your mind for more than 15 seconds? If you can, your life is probably going pretty well, and you can stop reading right here. But if you cannot, then please read on.
The Basics About Your Mind
You have about 50,000 thoughts a day. Most of them are repetitions of previous thoughts. The trick is to figure out what you’re continuously thinking about. What is your mind “speaking” to you? You need to monitor that dialogue.
Let’s say that you go to your car and you realize that you have left the keys inside the house. What do you say to yourself? Is it some sort of criticism? Do you tell yourself that you are forgetful or stupid?
This is just one simple example of a situation where you failed, made an omission or a mistake. How do you justify these situations to yourself? We all have our favorites. “I’m too weak, too stupid, too poor (when you cannot afford something,) too inadequate, too unfortunate,” or whatever else you may say to yourself.
Why Is That Bad?
What you may not know is that every time you say this, you are continuing your negative story of yourself and your life. You are maintaining and perpetuating your circumstances in your life. You see, thoughts are energy. When you are repeating negative self-talk, you are creating the energy of that self-talk. And since like attracts like, the universe will now send you circumstances in your life that confirm and substantiate that negative self-talk.
So now you believe your inferiority even more, repeat it to yourself even more, and get more misfortunes. You are in a self-induced vicious cycle.
So how do you get out of this vicious cycle?
You must absolutely not have any self-defeating self-talk any longer. I know this is not easy, as a lot of it is very habitual. Besides, you are not listening to your inner voice all the time. But if, and when you do, and if you catch yourself a having bad thoughts about yourself, you have to immediately stop. Not a single word more!
Command your mind to think of something good and pleasant. You may want to have some pre-thought and pre-arranged subjects, like what it is going to be during your next vacation, or how much fun you are going to have going to town and partying, or what you are going to do with all the money you win at the lottery, or whatever you think is fun. So when you find yourself in negative self-talk, you command your mind to think about those pleasant situations you have already thought about.
A New Basic Routine
Here is a very good exercise your can do to train your mind to be more obedient. Practice total silence in your mind. Get it to 15 seconds or longer, but 15 seconds is a good benchmark. Just become relaxed, you may want to close your eyes, and simply stop your internal dialogue. Tell it to stop and be in the void. If it will not stop, be more forceful. Command it to stop right now. If it will still not do it, prolong the “stop”. Say “sto-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-p!!!” You can prolong the “o” sound for 30 seconds or so. If you do that there may be two or three seconds of total silence. Just repeat this practice until you get at least 15 seconds. When you achieve this, your mind will be willing to think about whatever you command it to do.
And by having no more self-defeating thoughts, your life will change. You can even insert some self-validating and self-expanding thoughts, and now your life will really take off in a good direction for you.
I wish you all the best with that new adventure.
Here is to your greater well-being,
Daniel
*) “End Your Story, Begin Your Life” by Jim Dreaver.