(via email)
I remember being a very young child; overwhelmed with emotional sensitivities, confused by empathic awareness, and often, so distracted by the feelings of other people that I wasn’t ever sure where my experience began and others ended.
This led to one of my earliest memories of existential aloneness. I would isolate myself from the intensity of other people’s emotions, while internalizing their experience by thinking, “I can’t do anything right!” I thought this quite often because I believed how I felt in the presence of others was their opinion of me. Of course, the truth was, there was nothing I could do to change their experience since it was centered in their awareness of circumstance, while having nothing to do with the me who blamed himself for nearly everything in view.
If interpreted by a typical self-help narrative, the commitment, consistency, and intensity of insisting, “I can’t do anything right!”, should have sent my life into a tailspin of chaos, failure, and implosion. Conversely, I would spend many years thinking such a thought, while my life contradicted such a limiting view with a wellspring of success, recognition, and achievement.
It was as if my life was set along a course of unfoldment, in spite of how painfully I was determined to interpret it. Over time, I either outgrew thinking in such a self-defeating manner or simply forgot to keep the momentum going. In either case, my thinking became the last part of me to be informed of how incredibly fulfilling of a life I was blessed to receive.
As I entered the field of personal growth and began helping people heal in a radically heart-centered way, I would hear the common folklore: you better watch your thoughts, otherwise bad things are bound to happen. While this sounded more like an extension of Santa Clause’s naughty and nice list, it struck me as an absolute falsehood that many embraced.
Most likely, they innocently embraced such an idea from having no other reason to explain the unfolding mysteries of life. It seemed especially seductive when connecting external circumstances to one’s inner dialogue, as it gave people the impression of something to work towards controlling, in order to stack the deck of life more in their favor.
From an intuitive perspective, I knew everything happened as a way to move each person from one level of consciousness to the next. I could also see so clearly how a self-imposed necessity to watch thoughts, reframe them, or chase them away was merely what a person erroneously chooses to do with their time in-between each breakdown and breakthrough.
If someone perceived goodness entering their life, they would conclude: “I guess I worked on my thoughts more than I imagined.” If adversity was interpreted, they would equally suggest, “I guess there is just more in my subconscious I must be resisting or that I’m not evolved enough to address.”
This ignited a fury of passion in me. In noticing how many people had entered personal growth only to be further disempowered than liberated by such widely-believed principles, I was determined to discover a new way of empowerment; one that does not require exhausting micro-management, a lingering fear of personal instincts, or the vilification of a mind that works so tirelessly in conjunction with the heart and body to maintain the capacity of your physical vessel.
Strangely enough, you are more than capable of believing your thoughts negatively influence your reality simply by assumption. In doing so, you will connect pieces of evidence until some outcome has been traced back to a fleeting thought so you have a reason to blame yourself for how life unfolds.
Despite popular belief, life is not adversely affected by your thoughts. Simply because, what anyone labels as either good or bad differs from one subjective perception to the next. One person may lose their job and think, “See, that’s what you get for thinking so negatively about your boss.” Meanwhile, another person applauds their job loss as the renewed life direction they have been praying to receive. Because outcomes are as adverse or beneficial as the lens through which you see them, the notion that thoughts detract from the exquisite mystery of your existence is merely a superstition disguised as insight.
To be fair, I am writing these words for an audience of evolving self-aware beings. I am doing so to help you trust your instincts more often than you may secretly fear the nature of your own infinite power.
In truth, there are people in this world who take anything they hear in their mind at face value. For that level of evolution, it is most certainly an empowering practice to distinguish ‘inner voices’ from the choices of one’s highest integrity. If you heard a thought say, ‘Go punch your neighbor” and your fists already began balling up as you head towards their front door, by all means, please be aware of your thoughts and the power they have to negatively affect someone’s life.
Because those who are attracted to this depth of wisdom already naturally exist at a higher level of awareness, there is no thought you could conjure up that could make any degree of goodness vanish or force adversity to stay longer. It is simply a sophisticated way of using the framework of cause and effect to make you the one to blame for how things are.
Thoughts exist as waves of imagination coming and going within an ocean of consciousness. The more aware you become, the more you learn to utilize your imagination in empowering ways, instead of being overpowered by the ‘what if’s’ floating in your mind.
Besides, how can you blame yourself for thoughts you never even thought up. Did you say to yourself, “I think it’s time to feel more disempowered. What can I imagine or dwell upon that provides that type of painful experience? I know, let’s think this!” Of course you didn’t. It’s more likely you became aware of thoughts floating through the orbit of your mind and assumed you created it—since you are the one aware of it. That’s more an assumption than fact, but it’s so easy to believe when insisting there must something you’ve done or are doing to somehow block yourself.
Even when bringing up the incredible life’s work of Dr. Masaru Emoto, who demonstrated how the frequency of words affect the shape of water crystals, his work was more centered on the importance of having a positive intention than building a new case against the perceived evils of negative thoughts.
Thinking is a ‘for your consideration only’ process. In discovering the ones that offer the most expansive viewpoints and the deepest sense of relief, you can use such thoughts as words to write out or speak aloud to anchor your highest intention. This is done to provide the most expansive perspectives to help you see how each moment supports your evolution, no matter the judgements projected upon it.
This reminds me of a time I was waiting outside an airport terminal for the bus that takes you to the rental car station. About five feet in front of me stood a couple who appeared noticeably weary from an exhausting day of travel. I remember one partner turned to the other and said, “I hope the bus isn’t late again.” To which the other forcefully replied, “I told you to think positive!” How unfortunate to see anyone be disempowered, especially by someone they love. Instead of offering any degree of empathy for the day’s ordeals they both had endured, it became a moment of aggression somehow pretending to be empowering. I remember thinking, “That is such a heartbreaking example of how people treat each other when run by fear masquerading as higher forms of intelligence.”
To help you reclaim your power from any belief that thoughts negatively affect your life, please consider the following tips:
While thoughts cannot delay pleasure or make pain last longer, you are free to manufacture this perception of experience by believing it. Since it is your freedom of will to decide why anything comes or goes throughout your life, you equally have the chance to imagine how anything occurring unfolds for your evolutionary benefit.
While this might seem like ‘fanciful thinking’ or ‘bright siding’ from the perspective of your most self-defeating thoughts, the truth is, nothing occurring in the journey of time is due to a passing thought you’ve had. No matter how often they repeat, negative thoughts don’t stick around long enough to elicit any tangible power.
Because they vibrate at such a low level of consciousness, they are only capable of helping you confirm whatever you have decided to believe. If you have the power to believe in the negative power of thoughts, you equally possess the power to think otherwise. Why? Because it provides an awareness greater than judgement and the ability to explore your most empowered choices, instead of perpetually sinking in the quicksand of survival mode.
As you evolve, the ego needs to believe thoughts have a negative degree of power to give it something to manage, work on and defeat. Since the ego can only perceive through a lens of duality, it needs an enemy to track down and overcome to keep itself busy enough to believe it has some degree of control.
While you have choices that determine how you respond to the unfolding circumstances of life, it doesn’t mean you have the ability to control reality solely on your terms and conditions. Since life is what you make of the opportunities being given, you have the power to rise above perceptions of adversity depending upon how many empowered choices you are willing to make.
Because the ego judges empowered choices as a hardship or sacrifice of loss, it is more inclined to believe negative thoughts have power, in order to keep itself in constant avoidance of the courageous choices that leave it with nothing to collect, control or defend.
Besides, if your ego has woven together a spiritual persona using threads of belief that insist upon locating and extinguishing negative thoughts, who would you be, what would you think about, and what would you do with the majority of your time, if you were to see through such a facade?
You don’t need to control your mind in order to find peace within it. Instead, it’s more so a journey of learning how to lovingly relate to your mind, since you can only create fears out of the things you don’t fully understand.
Your mind might be noisy. Your imagination may even be overly-active. While there will come a time when mental noise subsides and the overactive use of imagination fades, it doesn’t occur by attempting to track your thoughts or reframe negative ones into more pleasant ideas.
It occurs by meeting your mind like a child begging for the loving attention it desperately needs, but doesn’t feel worthy enough to receive. This invites you to witness your thoughts with mindful compassion, instead of policing the thoughts that only capture attention for the love it seeks.
Since the way you engage inner work typically becomes how you communicate with others, if you spend a tremendous amount of time micro-managing your thoughts, you will either disempower others by correcting their words or constantly interrupt your own sharing with whatever you believe is the ‘right way to be’.
While spiritual people tend to think they are misunderstood or even judged for being aware of greater cosmic truths, they often fail to see how socially-awkward and difficult it is to engage with someone who values the correction of self and others over the engaged intimacy of interpersonal connection.
The less you have to track and manage in your own mind, the more powerful it becomes. The more powerful it becomes, the less time you may need to spend in mind. The less time you spend in mind, the more often the mind can be used to receive intuitive guidance instead of battling against the existence of thought. When the mind becomes the receiver of intuitive guidance, it creates more space for awareness to be rooted in the presence of your heart. From this space, there may be more room in conversations to honor the uniqueness of others than to imagine what anyone else must be reflecting to you.
While you are exploring a life where change is the only inevitable outcome, it occurs to move you from one level of consciousness to the next and not because of any combination of thoughts drifting through your mind.
When truth cannot be found in any form of superstition, you are stepping to the forefront of a more empowered and purpose-driven way of evolving. Perhaps you may come to realize, maybe it’s not your thoughts that are making you sick, but the belief that they can make you sick that suppresses the recognition of your naturally-expanded awareness.
All the while, your life will unfold in tangibly miraculous terms where you are free to draw limiting conclusions about the plot lines and characters of your life’s movie.
If that doesn’t sound like a life worth living, you can equally choose to watch from an interactive standpoint as each scene plays out a story of redemption throughout the bigger perspective of your hero’s journey.
All for love,
Matt