You can literally move a mountain with your efforts, but if your mind still can’t find peace or happiness when you sit down to rest then it is all wasted effort. If you can tap into the power of intentional thinking you start living your life instead of life living you. This is because how you think about your life creates how you feel, and how you feel creates like-minded actions, and those actions create a reality that ALWAYS mirrors your original thoughts.
This law of the universe explains miserable thin people, happy fat people, happy paupers, and miserable billionaires. It explains how some folks can find peace with a devastating health diagnosis.
How we feel is not dictated by anything outside ourselves, only by what we choose to think about those circumstances. The power of intentional thought is the key the universe and the way to manifest anything in this life that you desire.
thinking intentionally is mind control
If you’d like to feel better about any situation in your life, practice by first becoming aware of the thoughts you think about your situation. Are you telling yourself a story that makes you feel peaceful and happy, or miserable and anxious? Do enough observing and you’ll start to be able to identify what thoughts are thinking about that situation are responsible for making you feel like shit. Becoming aware of your thinking patterns is step one.
Step two is to think about how you’d rather feel about your situation. Perhaps more peaceful or calm, more loving, or more focused? Great! Now that you have the end feeling in mind, you can reverse engineer your way up to the thought level and consciously choose to think thoughts that will lead to the feeling you desire moving forward.
now that you’ve identified how you want to feel about a situation and have chosen thoughts ahead of time you can just let life happen. When you find yourself falling into the unconscious/negative thought interrupt your thought process by replacing your thoughts with the intentional ones that better serve you.
an example
I’ll give you an example one of those small but incredibly annoying problems. My kids always forget to turn the lights off in their bathroom. I must turn them off 4-5 times a day, each time nagging them for forgetting to turn off the lights. Over time this became a huge problem for me because all I kept thinking was,
“Don’t they care about what I say? They never listen to me. Don’t they respect what is important to me?
That is very justified and logical thinking. However justified and logical though, I was often frustrated and getting more and more annoyed over time that this persisted. Once I became aware of my thoughts I looked at them and analyzed them.
Do my kids care what I say?
I think they do, so maybe that thought isn’t entirely true.
Do my kids ‘never listen?’
No, that’s not true, either. They often listen when I ask them to do something but for some reason, they haven’t internalized the habit of turning off the lights, no matter how much I nag.
Do my kids respect what I say?
Yes, they do. But they don’t and probably won’t ever connect turning off the lights with respecting me as a mother. I’m being silly.
Ok, so it was clear that my thoughts about the lights weren’t even truthful, never mind useful, or serving me or my kids in any way. So I was happy to get rid of them. Now I have to replace these thoughts with other thoughts that will make me feel more peaceful and less annoyed. So I hired an electrician to install motion sensing light switches that turn off in less than 5 minutes, which means I never have to feel like I have to turn off the lights anymore because they forgot. Now when I see the lights on all I think is, The
The lights are on, but I don’t have to worry about it because they will shut off my themselves.
coach yourself
Start by asking yourself how can I think about this situation that will make me feel the way I want to feel? Write those thoughts down so that you have compiled an actual list of more positive replacement thoughts that you can choose to think that make you feel better.
If you’re having a hard time interrupting your monkey mind to watch your thinking or come up with some new thoughts, it can help tremendously to take the time to meditate ten minutes a day to give those thoughts a place to be heard, and then release them to make room for something new.
Contemplate what is without attaching a story to it, and watch that circumstance lose its negative hold over you. Know that at any given moment you are just a moment away from dropping the old struggle, dropping the old story, and choosing new thoughts that serve you by making you feel the way you want to feel about your life.
Isn’t that cool? You’re just like Dorothy from Kansas because you’ve just learned how to click your heels together to get what you want from your life as it is. Like Dorothy, you’ve had the power all along. The ruby slippers are your conscious mind and it’s incredible ability to manifest everything in your life that you’ve ever wanted just by changing your thoughts about what is.
