This blog has been a lesson on how to take control over your mind. As my life sped out of control down its slippery slope, I came to a point on that road when I realized the slope was being paved by my very own thoughts. The very process by which my mind functioned; its thought process, was accelerating the speed of my emotional crash. Once I realized my thoughts were the reason I was in the negative emotionally overwhelming hell in the first place, somewhere out from the ever most edges of my mind, was the idea that if my thoughts got me in, then my thoughts could get me out; out of wherever this abstract, subjective, negative place might be.
I have learned that I am an expanding thought human being, meaning that I was meant to come here and to expand my thoughts, and that when I am put in a position where growth and expansion are thwarted, I am filled with daunting negative emotion in the form of frustration. When I feel I am not heard, or when I feel that others are exploiting or drawing attention to what they or society might consider a flaw, or when I am being lied about, or when my relationships are ones that are not permitted to grow in love and warmth, I am easily frustrated.
For years I swallowed that frustration and tried only harder to "fit in" or "be what others might have wanted me to be" all in the tattered hopes of feeling loved and validated.
I have since learned that the only love I needed was the delicious love of self. The only opinion that mattered, was the opinion I had of me, and until I fully swallowed how "incredibly good" a human being I was, my thoughts would always be "other directed" and peace would never be mine.
I have learned to treat my personal thoughts, especially the frightening ones like conversations with good friends. When I hear my mind playing with a fearful thought, I hush it away with the whispers of a nurturing mom. I have learned to go easy with my fears rather than to allow the fear to grow or to feel guilt or shame for having them gallop through my mind.
I have trained my mind NOT to value others as good or bad or situations as good or bad. Things are the way they are because of the choices I have made about them somewhere along my journey. My perceptions are the result of my childhood programming as well as an unobserved mind. If ever I have been depressed, it has been on the heels of lining the people, and situations up in my life in columns labeled "good and bad". My depression has always been attached to thoughts that have been eaten by my obsession to judge and compartmentalize my life into good and bad columns. Freeing myself of the need to judge anything or anyone has opened my heart to more love than I ever imagined possible.
It also helped me stop judging me.
And when not so pleasant circumstances find their way to me, or when things don't always go as I planned, I use the contrast of what I wanted to happen as a backdrop for what I do want to happen in the future.
When I find myself feeling a negative emotion, rather than attach to it or deem the situation as good or bad, I say to myself, "Hmm, I really don't like the way that negative emotion feels. I would much rather feel appreciation, contentment or joy. I better let that negative feeling go, and find something to love and appreciate right now, even if that's just the skin on my body, or my ability to see, to walk or to taste or touch. I would much rather attach to the joy of some part of me than to attach myself to that which feels so dead, depressing and empty."
When things do happen I would have preferred not to happen, I do my best not to label or judge it, knowing that labeling anything or anyone as bad only flames the fires of depression, and negative thinking.
