April Wellness: Making bad thoughts go away

Friday, April 29, 2011

Making bad thoughts go away

I have been thinking a particular damaging thought for many years. It has fairly tortured me and really, if anything, has gotten worse. I never really took the time to make it my responsibility to change it. In fact, I didn't even have the awareness that I could change it.

After a repeated unwanted outcome (read: failure), I realized that "The Negative Thought" was instrumental in sabotaging me. I decided that it HAD TO GO.

Here's the trick: how does one stop thinking something that has basically always been there? Especially when one starts to think it, and it just keeps going on and on and on?

I opened up a book by Paramanhansa Yogananda, whose work I follow, well... religiously. In it, he said, to stop a negative mental habit, one must:

A. think an opposite positive thought as soon as the negative thought rears its head
B. keep repeating the positive thought every time the negative thought comes out
C. remove oneself from the environment that causes that thought to be triggered.

I decided to try it. Here are the results:

Step A was easy. I came up with a positive opposite thought right away. Although be warned if you try it, your mind might start to argue with you. In my case it started thinking, "that's not exactly opposite. You can't start til you find the exact opposite." (That's just a lie. It just sees it's own DEATH. And it's scared.)

Step B was tiring. I realized I kept thinking that negative thought, oh, maybe twenty times a day, if not more. The cool thing was, I became much more aware of the emotional state I was in (angry and resentful) every time "The Thought" came into my head and I said the opposite thought.

Step C is a work in progress as the environment, in this case, is my inner environment. The more I meditate, the more calm I become, and the less triggered I get.

image by Geoff WhitewayThree things I learned:

1. A thought pattern is like a circuit- you have to put energy into it for it to live. So instead of putting energy into the negative circuit, I have redirected the energy into the positive circuit.

2. The thoughts in our heads are affirmations. Whether they are affirmations of a positive thing or a negative thing, that is TOTALLY UP TO US.

3. All indian spiritual traditions have a concept called ahimsa that is integral to their practice. Ahimsa, a sanskrit word, means "do no harm." That incudes yourself. Saying bad things about yourself, that's harmful. And if you want to be happy, and decrease your suffering- well, thoughts are a great place to start.

It's a simple thing, but not easy. After years of running the circuit of the negative thought, it doesn't take much for it to fire up... but I can tell you this: Already my mind is a much more peaceful place to be.