“Maybe the journey isn’t about becoming something or someone. Perhaps the journey is about unbecoming what no longer serves you so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.” ~ Unknown
I’ve had to break free from old beliefs. I’ve had to seek to understand why I am who I am. I’ve had to accept where I’ve been and I’ve had to take responsibility for my life to this point. It has been a beautiful storm.
What record are you playing today? Are you in victim mode where life is happening to you? Are you playing the self-destructive record of what if’s and if only?
Today you have the opportunity to change that record, to seek out who you are and play something that empowers you to stretch. Shift hurts, healing is hard, but shifts are necessary to heal and to get to a place of acceptance, grace, and love.
We can not stand in the same place, with the same mindset, playing the identical records and expect things to change around us. Your thoughts have so much power. Negativity, fear, and anxiety are byproducts of our natural fight or flight response. We cannot stop these emotions and feelings from happening, and I believe it is okay to feel them. The key is to recognize, feel through and then seek to know where they are coming from and heal that place of pain, so you are not haunted by them any longer. Being proactive is so much better than always being reactive.
Thoughts are not actions or consequences. ~ A study in the Journal of Clinical Psychology studied the effects of worrying on performing a task. People who reported that they worry 50% of the time or more showed a significant disruption in their ability to sort objects as the difficulty of the sorting task increased.
In a follow-up study, researchers found they were able to show the disruption was a result of increased levels of negative thoughts. When the brain is faced with complex tasks, negative thinking hurts your ability to process information and think clearly.
If the researchers are correct, thinking negatively about your problems not only doesn’t help solve anything, it actually makes it harder for you to think of a helpful solution. ~ powerofpositivity article
Many of the things we think will happen will actually never happen. Realizing this puts us in the position to accept that while we may have negative thoughts, we will not necessarily experience their negative outcomes. I am the queen of creating a negative scenario then feeling the emotions from those thoughts and then acting on those emotions. I am reacting as if those thoughts are my reality, but in actuality, I manifested the negativity with my thought pattern. Genuinely accepting thoughts cannot hurt us and feeling then releasing them frees us to understand our negative thoughts without worry or concern. We will all have negative thoughts from time to time. It’s how we cope with them, deal with them, and heal from them that matters.
Sometimes our coping mechanisms can hurt us. In an environment of “negative thoughts cannot happen,” we attempt to relieve the stress of negative thoughts, many people use short-term coping mechanisms such as alcohol or drug abuse, avoidance, overeating, or overspending. We also cope with positive affirmations, meditation, grateful statements, yoga and other forms of higher states of consciousness. While the positive methods are extraordinary in grounding ourselves and getting us in the right state of mind; we must allow ourselves to feel and heal. If not, we will continue to be triggered by past pain points. Which can intern continue our negative thought patterns. The ability to acknowledge and embrace negative thoughts is a positive coping mechanism that can help to avoid the negative emotional spirals, or I call it my slow climb spiral. AKA complete meltdown.
It isn’t horrible of you to have negative thoughts. We all do. You have the power to take control of the process. You can sit with and feel through and find yourself in a constant state of worry, or you can sit with feel through, heal then grow from and release. The choice is yours.
There’s nothing more painful than losing yourself. But there’s nothing more beautiful than finding yourself again. Keep going. This is a holy cause.
~ S.C. Lourie.
