Change is nature’s principle. Stagnancy isn’t. Days change, seasons change, landscapes transform, mutations occur naturally, nature changes to restore balance when needed. This principle of change applies to humans too. However, we have a tendency to block changes; often in stubbornness, in unknowingness and unwillingness.
Change isn’t bad, and it doesn’t have to be arduous. Thoughts are the source point from where all changes take place.
Thoughts
It is not difficult to work with thoughts. Thoughts are malleable; you can modify, tweak, energise, de-energise, transform, mend, even cancel a non-serving thought and replace it with an enabling one.
Example, ‘I can’t monitor my thoughts’. Enabling version: ‘Monitoring thoughts is easier than I expected.’ ‘I can do it’. ‘Actually, I monitor my thoughts successfully’. Some thoughts are positive, such as,’ What I think is my responsibility.’ Positive thoughts help to negotiate life with honesty, ease and grace. But non-helping thoughts need reflection.
Know that it is possible to suspend/eject a non- helpful thought and abstain from embodying it.
Example: “No one appreciates me,” is an im-balanced thought with the risk of getting adversely embodied when practised every day.
The body will listen and manifest this disease. This can be cancelled and replaced with, for example, ‘I choose to appreciate me’, ‘I matter to me’. ‘I acknowledge and appreciate the goodness that I am.” The core idea of working with positive thoughts is to find back your alignment and begin fresh.
When one thought ends, another begins. This process takes place so fast that a clogged mind feels it is having multiple thoughts at the same time. With slow and steady breathing and with awareness one can reduce the pace of thoughts and stabilise the mind.
Beliefs: Present and Future
Thoughts that are repeated over and over again become beliefs. Looping on a thought can be positive or not. Positive loops help ease living, non-positive thought-loops rub as limiting beliefs and cause lack of ease with life. Adverse beliefs can be un-looped. This is with the practice of opposite, that is, good-feeling thoughts.
One can ask, “But how? My reality is different. I can’t practice that my son loves me, because he doesn’t.” Even as one reflects on deeper reasons/root cause here, one can affirm, ‘I love my son anyway, ‘I follow the purity of my heart in loving him.’ ‘It is amazing that my love is reciprocated.’
While none of these positive affirmations may hold true in the present, understand, that this is a thought practice for the future which has not happened yet. And what hasn’t happened yet, holds all kinds of possibilities and potentialities. All you are doing is picking your choice of a possibility (of the multiple) and energising/imbuing/ charging it with positive focus. So, by giving thoughts a constructive direction, you are making a future possibility turn into reality, reinforcing alongside, with aligned actions. This is scripting a future and claiming it, through your thought-action. Future is constantly becoming the present.
Past
Can past be transformed too? Past is memories, which can be pleasant or not. While a past event can’t be changed, its outcome can be overwritten/ superimposed. This is especially helpful in cases where intensity of an experience has shaken one to the core and moving on is a challenge. Super-imposition of thought is a delicate process, but here’s a simple example: As a child, if I have the memory of falling and hurting in a football field, I can choose to rescript this memory by visiting the scenario mentally and changing the end result/outcome (falling and hurting) into; kicking a goal and dancing in jubilation.
We live in the past, present and future at the same time. One can utilise the present constructively for healing. Dwelling in the regret of the past or anxiety of the future is stagnancy.
