“Why do you keep focusing your attention on what you do not want?” This question was asked over and over again at the seminar I attended a few months ago on *The Law of Attraction by Ester and Jerry Hicks.
The Law of Attraction simply states that whatever you think about consistently you experience, so if you don’t like your life’s experiences then change your thinking. That is, if you keep focusing on what’s not working in your life you’ll never be able to create what it is you really want.
Sitting there in the audience watching person after person go up on stage and have this same question posed to them, I became acutely aware of many of the same repetitive and negative thought patterns within myself.
I left the seminar convinced that negative thinking is useless. Whether you believe in the Law of Attraction or not, repetitive negative thinking and haranguing about what is not working in your life, who did what to whom, what Mary should do about Bob etc…creates internal chaos which inevitably leads to external chaos.
It would be too much to ask of anyone to just go cold turkey (get it, cold turkey) on negative thinking, but in making the effort to catch ourselves in an internal diatribe and to take a few deep breaths instead will allow the Spirit within us to emerge and cast a light of reason and love on any given situation.
Try This: A wonderful mindfulness practice is to choose one person or a situation that you have negative thoughts and feelings about and write down one good thing about that person or that situation. Now here’s the trick, you have to find the one good thing that you really believe is true, or this practice will not work. So for example you may really detest your sister-in-law, and perhaps rightly so, but you make your list and decide that she really is a good mother. Now whenever you catch yourself thinking negatively about your-sister-in-law, stop, take a couple of deep breaths and say, “Well she is a wonderful mother.” Remember you’re not saying anything that isn’t true and you’ve stopped affirming what you don’t like about her. Done consistently you’ll start feeling better and more balanced. Why? Because the Spirit within you is a lover and underneath all of the reactive negative thinking You are a lover also.
Stop losing your vital precious energy to thoughts that are no longer serving the Spirit within you. Endeavor to bring your beautiful self into alignment with that Spirit, not by changing the world but by changing one negative thought at a time.
Happy Holidays!
Krista
Photo Credit: Johnson Wang