Whatever happened is not happening anymore so stop suffering because of it over and over again.
How can you stop that circle of suffering in life?
Decide NOW how you want to live the rest of your life. Make a clear vision of how you see yourself in your positive, kind future. Nourish this thought day after day until it has become an automatic thought whenever you think about yourself and your life. As every emotion is triggered by a thought, thinking about your life in this positive way, will automatically make you feel good about your life. That feeling will make it easier to deal with negative triggers.
Whenever something disturbing happens, pause for a moment. Here is where you have a choice about how you are going to react. Use this moment to decide how you are going to deal with the situation, choose how you think, consciously steer your thoughts about this outside factor. This will determine how you feel about it.
It’s not the situation that causes the emotion, it’s how you think about it that determines how you feel.
The same goes for things that have happened in the past and for things you think will happen in the future. The only moment we have is NOW, everything else is a thought*. And even with what is happening right now, there is always the possibility to choose how you interpret what you see and hear. Shift your thoughts to positive ones! We have over 60 000 thoughts each day, and 80% of them are negative thoughts! We create a negative reality and relive it over and over again! Stop this circle! People relive a negative, miserable life they never lived!!!! It’s only a creation of their mind. Their default modus of thinking is thinking negative thoughts. The good thing is, you can change this, you can create a default-modus of positive thinking. As the 71st verse of The Tao Te Ching teaches us**: ‘Have a happy mind. Get sick of being weakened by destructive thinking’. As Dr Dyer quotes master Sathaya Sai Baba in his essay on this 71st verse**: “Pain is a natural phenomenon, suffering is a choice.” This goes for all kinds of pain. I am not saying there is no pain, no, not at all. I am trying to explain that by changing how you look at it, by changing how you think about it, you can choose how much you suffer because of it. I know this is a very controversial assumption and a lot of people will not agree. But studying and reading about how the mind works, and listening to people who master their thoughts, to people who overcome seemingly unsurmountable situations, made me look at suffering from a very different point of view. They are great teachers as they are the living example that it IS possible to look differently at pain and suffering.
Design how you want your life to look like,
set your intention day after day,
create a circuitry in your mind of positive thinking
and manifest this future you envision for yourself.
What you focus on becomes the strongest thought, hence the strongest emotion. Be very clear about what thoughts you are feeding***, angry, resentful, guilty thoughts or your thoughts about love, happiness, compassion, gratitude. Writing daily in your gratitude journal helps you to focus on those positive thoughts. It may seem a very small contribution to you feeling good and content about your life, but try it. It only takes up a minute of your time each day, just 1 minute! Before you put your head down in the evening, take your pen and write in your journal what made you smile today. Even if you had a day in which you felt there was no room for positivity, even then, you have a lot to be grateful for. Write in your journal, even on those days, and say for instance: thank you for having a roof over my head, for having something to eat, for having woken up this morning, for not having to go to war, … that may seem farfetched but it just shows you that what you take for granted, may not be so for other people and so you have something to be grateful for. Once you start writing daily in your gratitude journal, you’ll soon notice that you do not have to write down those extreme examples. I never had to write, ‘thank you for not being shot today’, or ‘for having food today’, and that does not mean I am not grateful for those things, but I always have more than enough things to write down. The more you practice this, the easier you find things to be grateful for!
Does this mean you have to push your negative thoughts aside? No! Not at all, because then your energy gets stuck and that’ll make you ill and depressed. You let your thoughts come up, you recognize them for what they are, just thoughts. It’s not who you are. You choose to stay true to your intention, you choose to forgive the thought that came up and you circle back to the vision you have of your future life. You choose to focus on positivity without pushing back the negativity. You recognize it, you forgive it for showing up and you let it go as you make the decision time after time to think better. Marc and Angel Chernoff**** are teaching for over a decade the ‘Think better, Live better’ vision and with great success. They’ve helped thousands and thousands of people, including me, to turn their way of thinking around. I am so grateful for their teachings.
I invite you all to take some time to ‘listen’ to your thoughts, to how you talk, to what you say, and to try to stop your knee-jerk reactions. Pause before you react. Take a deep breath, know you have a choice, think about how you want your life to look like and make a decision. When you practice this over and over again, you will automatically take that moment before you react. The more you can react from a positive-thinking-default-modus, the happier you’ll feel, the more relaxed you’ll feel and the more the people around you will also refrain from lashing out. You can never control how other people think and how they will react, but not fueling their negativity helps in most of the situations to not spiral down into a vicious fight.
Ponder the thought that the past and the future only exists in how you think about it. It is not happening anymore, only NOW is real.
Know that YOU can steer your thoughts, hence YOU can steer your life.
Thank you all for reading me and for supporting me on Medium! If you want unlimited access to all of my articles and many other authors, you can become a Medium Member by clicking on this link https://lifecoachwomen.com/membership and you’ll be supporting me directly (and all the other authors indirectly). Many, many thanks to you all!!!
Katrien
*”Unsinkable: The Secret of Bouncing Back”, by Sonia Ricotti.
**”Change your Thoughts, Change your Life” by dr.Wayne. W.Dyer.
***”Which Thoughts Are You Feeding?” by Katrien Degraeve.
****”Think better, Live better” by Marc and Angel Chernoff.