As I’ve mentioned before, one of my concerns around the current mental health initiative is that the words are now synonymous with poor mental health. But what is a positive term?
How do you feel about the idea of ‘total mental wellbeing’? I ask because the terms we choose to think in are the terms that define our emotional state.
I think therefore I am
Never a truer word spoken, but it goes way beyond the power of your thoughts right into your subconscious mind…or body as we call it. As I learned and have said before, but it’s worth repeating. Your mind programmes your cells via neuroreceptors to have emotional reactions, and what we think of as our subconscious mind is our body reacting to a thought with an appropriate pattern. My person is thinking about something scary, send immediate-panic-attack-programme! I’m not being flippant, it’s scientific fact.
Wow that’s one powerful tool for change
The magical point of all this is that your mind can completely retrain your cells in your body, Joe Dispenza calls it programming the body to a new mind. Deliberately choosing better, healthier, happier, more powerful thoughts so that your mind can train out all the old programming. When I say all, I mean back before you were born! There is evidence that babies in the womb and newborns can have accurate memories of what was happening around them at the time. You, yes YOU, are capable of reprogramming all that and making your mind your own. Finally!
Brace yourself for good – and accurate – news
It’s not that hard! I did it via one meditation programme of Joe Dispenza’s – Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself – I also bought the book that accompanied the programme. It’s a bit weird, you have to visualise the density of space that your body takes up in space, amongst other things, and I just could not. So I gave up, just kept listening while I daydreamed, and the next thing I know my consciousness is out in space and I’m seeing amazing things and having a WOW moment that I never expected. I was literally outside my own mind, all the internal kerfuffle that is me, floating happily, feeling safe, and counting stars. I stopped at lots!
In the month he builds the length of the two programmes gradually each week, part two is Water Rising (a tad easier to imagine a room full of water), and takes you through a process of identifying what you need to change then gives you an easy how. Believe it or not, just the word ‘change’. That’s it. Finally he gets you visualising the future you want and it’s a wonderful feeling.
I dipped in and out of the programme, never really did it properly, and yet I changed completely and people who’ve known me for years are telling me that I’ve never been so calm, centred, relaxed, and peaceful. They’re right. I have normal anxiety now rather than the acute anxiety, complicated by medical anxiety, that I had for over 35 years.
No laurels here
I never sit on my laurels in life, I have an insatiable appetite for new information for one thing, I’m also looking for more and more joy! On that journey I want to share a couple of techniques that might help you.
- Change might not be enough to interrupt a thought at first. Here’s my crazy interruption sentence: Stop, cancel, clear, get that garbage out of here! You can write your own, make sure it’s light-hearted and makes you giggle! Secretly I sometimes think it when people around me are creating stress, not in an unkind way, just to remind my mind not to take it on board.
- I’ve been doing a lot of work with my mentoring groups on the heart chakra (energy centre) and how learning to tune into it connects you to your spirit/soul. From that and listening to Joe talking about the ‘unifying field’ which is another term for the ‘quantum field’, the ether, the universe. I wrote this:
I remain in my heart – my soul fills it only with love – I feel only love – I am only love – there is only love – love is the most powerful emotion – I am powerful beyond measure – I am love.
Why Lovey Stuff?
“There are only two emotions in this world, love and fear.
All positive emotions come from love, all negative emotions come from fear.”
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
When I gave this some thought to this I realised that this was true, and of course anxiety manifests as a number of fears. I think we’d all agree that there’s nothing positive about any of that! We can clearly see then that if we move our minds to a positive emotion – love – we will retrain our bodies to send good emotions as often as is realistically possible. So love is pretty important don’t you think?
Gratitude Rocks
You’ve probably heard the idea of finding a really beautiful rock or crystal that will go in your pocket, and holding it and thinking about everything you love, then when you feel anxious you just hold that stone/crystal and mentally run that list of all those good things.
It’s a great idea, but that’s a tool for dealing with negativity. How do you respond to the idea that removing negativity – in this case in the form of anxiety – is altogether a better idea? I wish I’d known that was possible 35 years ago, because I can tell you without a shadow of doubt that I would have gone for eradication rather than management without a second thought.
Just a touch of realism
I used to find that when I thought of getting rid of anxiety the idea seemed impossible as there was so much bad stuff going on and so many bad things to think about – from the cold war (yes I’m that old) to illness, to my hated ‘career’, to my horrible relationship, and on and on…
The important thing to remember is that when you feel better you can deal with problems because you’ll have the energy and the clarity. Then only have fear and anxiety when any reasonable person would have it, when there are real issues: death, illness, redundancy, and so on. Apart from those times it is possible to seek joy, think joy, be joy, embrace happiness, and have fun – if you stay in the love mindset.
- I love my life!
- I love my family!
- I love my pets!
- I love my career!
- I love my body!
- I love my hair!
- I love my car!
- I love my motorbike
- I love the many moods of the sky!
- I love the moon!
- I love the sun!
- I love to hear children giggling!
- I love kittens, puppies, and rainbows!
- I love…I love…I love
- I love feeling good!
Once thinking like that becomes automatic, who you are, and your body is so well-trained that when something tricky happens it will send the programme ‘needs something wonderful to think about’. Tricky is of course anything that doesn’t materially affect the process in your life:
- Boss/partner/children in a strop
- Dog has eaten the bath mat
- Forgot the car MOT
- Burnt tea (I excel at that but charcoal is good for the digestion, right?)
- Washing machine has stopped working (Sunday’s fun)
- Husband hasn’t cleaned the filter that he insists is his responsibility since Methuselah was a toddler!
Anything that you can deal with even if it takes some thinking about and a bit of planning.
The message is
- Retrain that mind
- Interrupt the unsupportive thoughts
- Choose love and joy
- Separate real from can take action
- Visualise a better life
- Stay on track
- Kick anxiety’s butt!
- Embrace ‘total mental wellbeing’ (don’t forget that fun helps a lot!)
If you’d like to connect, maybe have a mentoring session or join one of my groups, email me at transform@debhawken.com. Here to help.
To your happiness.
Deb xx
Deb Hawken 