Heaven or hell? 3 ways to use the power of your mind

Do you use the power of your mind to create heaven or hell?  Do you use your imagination to visualise things going well or to write your own disaster movies? Who is really directing your own movie, you or your subconscious mind?

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
John Milton, Paradise Lost

Many people can live in the prison of their own mind even when the door is wide open. We have all been there. You may have had a run in with a colleague at work first thing in the morning. Driving home you are still going over the incident in your mind effectively driving yourself around the bend!

We know that we have 70,000 thoughts a day and a large chunk of those are negative. However, you have control over those thoughts, but unless you are present and in the moment, your mind will be on auto pilot. If you aren’t aware of how you think – the subconscious mind will be running the show and that’s the last thing you want. If you want to get to Buenos Aires, you have to follow the signs because otherwise you subconscious mind will lead you to Coventry.

You thoughts are like magnets and they are all lining up. If you start on a negative spiral of thinking because something hasn’t gone your way, then you will quickly find hundreds of other thoughts to match that lined up. Before you know it, you are on a one way ticket to depressionville.

When you start to become aware of your thoughts – you can stem the flow. Meditation and mindfulness are wonderful at calming down the mind and narrowing your focus of attention. Another way of bringing yourself into the moment is gratitude thinking. Taking 5 minutes on a morning to think of 3 things you feel grateful for is a fantastic way to start your day feeling positive. It’s also very powerful when you take a few moments to write down what you are grateful for. When you write you are more focused on what you are thinking so again it allows you to bring your attention to the positive aspects in your life. When we do this we are able to see things differently. When you see things differently you bring in a new perspective.

Unfortunately our mind doesn’t have a filter system to it only feeds back to us what we ‘see’. However what we see doesn’t always mean it’s a true picture of what is going on. In the ‘7 habits of highly effective people’ Steven Covey writes about being on the subway car in New York. It was a quiet and people were sat with the news paper or just listening to music.  When the subway came into a station a man came on with his children. The children were loud and grabbing things and throwing them about. The atmosphere in the subway car changed immediately. Eventually Steven said something to the man, who appeared oblivious to what was going, and suggested he should do something to control his children. The man looked at him as if he had just awakened. He replied that yes maybe he should do something, but they had just come from the hospital where his wife had died an hour earlier and he didn’t know how to handle the situation. In an instant, Stevens perception was changed and he started to offer compassion and help.

By creating a new perception we offer the mind an alternative. We break the black and white thinking. When we do this, we change the plasticity of the brain. Imagine the brain as a lump of plasticine with interconnected lines of communication running through it, also known as neural pathways. When you mould the plasticine by changing the way you think, it can never go back to it’s original form.

A lot of negative thinking comes from beliefs because beliefs are just thoughts you keep thinking. So if you believe ‘nothing ever works out for me’ and every time you have an experience that ‘confirms that’ then you find you start to think ‘I don’t know why I bothered; nothing ever works out for me; it’s always working out for her over there’!. You can create new neural pathways to support new ways of thinking – change the belief to ‘things are always working out for me’. Even changing a belief to ‘I don’t know how this is going to work out, but I know I can handle it’ offers a more flexible thought to allow you to bring in a more positive perspective. EFT is a fantastic way to get to the root of core beliefs and change them.

Misuse of the imagination is one of the biggest things I see with my clients – we can create the outcome of an event before it’s even happened! My clients often start off telling me if they do this, then they won’t be disappointed. My response is always ‘how’s that working out for you?’. They often smile because they know it’s not and they have worked themselves up into a tizz for no reason most of the time. Start using your imagination to imagine things going well!  Your mind doesn’t know the different between what is real and what is imagined so you can utilise the power of the mind to imagine a scenario working well for you. The more you do this the more the Law of Attraction will work in your favour as over time with practice, you will come to expect the situation to go well.

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world.  ALBERT EINSTEIN, The Evolution of Physics

Use the power of your mind…..

1.  Become aware of your thoughts.  Be more present by using meditation, mindfulness or gratitude thinking to bring your focus of attention to the now.  Remember your power is always in your NOW!

2.  Bring in a new perspective.  Use gratitude thinking to help you see what going well in your life.  No matter what you are going through there will always be others far worse off in the world.

3.  Utilise your imagination.  Practice imagining things going well for you.  Start directing your own movie, creating your own lines of what you say, how you behave and what you feel like.

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