Lost My Bearings

By Sarah Maria

 Have you ever spend endless hours in thought, pondering an important decision and felt a consistent pain in your stomach? Do you ever notice yourself having critical thoughts and feel a corresponding tightness in your chest? When you’ve been happy, excited, or thinking positive thoughts, have you noticed how your whole body felt relaxed?

The average person has between 12,000 and 50,000 thoughts per day. And these thoughts can have profound effects on our psycho-physiology.

Thousands of years ago, the Buddha pointed out that our thoughts determine our experience of the world. He was the original cognitive therapist, explaining that our beliefs had the power to enslave us or enlighten us. The ancient Indian medical system of Ayurveda also teaches that our biography helps create our biology.

Whatever we think, feel, and experience, helps to create our reality.

These ancient teachings have been continually confirmed through western medical science. Dr. Candace Pert, an internationally recognized psychopharmacologist and author of Molecules of Emotion, explains “The nueropeptides and receptors, the biochemicals of emotion, are the messengers carrying information to link the major systems of the body into one unit that we can call the body-mind. We can no longer think of the emotions as having less validity than the physical, material substance, but instead must see them as cellular signals that are involved in the process of translating information into physical reality, literally transforming mind into matter.”

Our thoughts and emotions can profoundly impact our health. Dr. Pert further writes “Because the molecules of emotion are involved in the process of a virus entering a cell, it seems logical to assume that the state of our emotions will affect whether or not we succumb to viral infections.” She goes on to explain that “. . . the chronic suppression of emotions results in a massive disturbance of the psychosomatic network.” Therefore, “The key is to express it and then let it go, so that it doesn’t fester or build, or escalate out of control.”

An amazing pictorial representation of how our thoughts create and influence our reality involves water — plain old water. Writer and researcher Masaru Emoto, who lives and works in Japan, decided to photograph the crystals formed when water freezes. Emoto found that crystal formation seems to reflect the words, music, or actions that water is exposed to as it freezes.

Emoto and his colleagues wrote different words on paper, and then taped them onto bottles of water. They then froze the water and observed the crystals that formed. When water was exposed to the words “thank you,” a beautiful hexagonal shape appeared.

Conversely, when the water was exposed to the words “you fool,” no crystals formed and the frozen water looked like a misshapen lump of ice.

Emoto’s photographs offer a pictorial representation for Dr. Pert’s findings. We are mostly water, and it seems not impossible that we can and do influence this water, and therefore our bodies, in either positive or negative ways. According to Emoto, “The vibration of good words has a positive effect on our world, whereas the vibration from negative words has the power to destroy.”

Sarah Maria is a body-image expert and personal empowerment coach who helps you love your body no matter how it looks.

Get Sarah Maria’s $27 e-book for FREE by clicking here: “5 Steps to Loving What You See in the Mirror”

Thoughts

thoughts

By Melani Ward

 There’s an old story that goes something like this.

There was a man who had been imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. He was determined to get out so he attempts to dig his way to freedom with a spoon. (Think ancient Shawshank Redemption).

Anyway, he digs day and night and after years of bone-wearying struggle, his hands all calloused and bloody, he finally realizes his efforts are worthless and he gives up. With a face full of tears and constriction in his throat as he imagines living out his days in prison, he leans back on the door of his cell, only to discover it was unlocked all along.

I swear I still get chills whenever I hear that story.

Okay so maybe there never was a guy who tried to dig out of prison with a spoon but the point is clear - the prison that you imagine constrains you doesn’t really exist.

You see the only thing that creates a feeling of imprisonment is our own minds. Our minds are capable of enormous flights of fancy but here’s the truth: the one who tries with everything in their power to escape the prison is actually the prison itself.

Why does this topic matter today?

Well it seems very timely considering where everyone’s minds seem to be taking them these days. I hear clients, friends and family changing their language and changing their thinking based on what they hear in the news or read in the papers on a daily basis.

More than ever I hear “I can’t do this because….”. “What if I do this or that and such and such happens?” “I have to get out of this situation or I’m going to…”

Those are phrases that create prisons.

The reality is that we cannot have an idea unless we also have the capacity to realize it present at the same time.

That’s true freedom.

The only limitations we put on ourselves or on our life come from within. They come from the thoughts we have and the stories we tell ourselves about the thoughts we’re having. But when you really become aware of what your mind is doing, while you are still going to have certain thoughts that create some unpleasant emotions, the difference is that now you are not going to believe the story your mind generates to accompany the sensations you’re having to be you or to be true.

Most people operate at an unconscious level as though their thoughts choose them…as though they “can’t help how they think” but this is actually not true. Thoughts may pop into your head that aren’t that “great” according to you but YOU get to decide what you will do with that thought, just as you get to decide how you will react to everything you experience in your life. Remember, you aren’t the thinker.

Your thoughts, and more importantly the stories you tell yourself about them, have the ability to impose profound limitations as well as infinite freedom.

Which do you choose?

I’ll leave you with this quick poem from Rumi, the Persian mystic poet.

I have lived on the lip

of insanity, wanting to know reasons,

knocking on a door. It opens.

I’ve been knocking from the inside!

What freedom can you open yourself up to today?

Find out what storyteller might be keeping you stuck at http://www.changingyourstoryblog.com. Melani Ward is a multi-passionate entrepreneur: numerologist, marketer, lifestyle coach, writer, and athlete! She helps women entrepreneurs attract ideal clients and a lot of money doing work they LOVE.

Thoughts

blog