Stop Thinking and Start Living

Just like breathing thinking is also an unconscious action and our conscious thoughts and then there are unconscious thoughts which are constantly happening every second of the day. We could either be speaking to someone we could be reading something we could be watching something we could be tracking something on social media but all of that content is going into our subconscious and is resulting in some thought. Now the problem arises when we understand that every feeling that you have, every emotion you have happens because of the thought that you were thinking. Let’s prove this; for a moment if I ask each and every one of you to be angry or sad or jealous right now you can’t unless you have an angry a sad or a jealous thought. Every thought creates your emotion and you’re feeling and most of us notice, so it becomes extremely important to monitor the countless thoughts that are going through our mind while we think, every second of the day. But is that possible. Absolutely not like breathing we forget that we’re breathing because it takes over unconsciously and it keeps us alive, but when we actually focus on breathing we realize without breathing without oxygen; the vital life force there is no life yet it happens unconsciously every second of the day keeping us healthy keeping us alive. Likewise your thinking; we need to understand that unhappiness can never happen without an unhappy thought, anger can never happen without an angry thought, feelings of jealousy, feelings of lust, you know feelings of laziness lot and all the seven deadly sins can never happen unless we have that kind of thought.

It’s very easy for us to read books and people tell us the entire time think positive. It’s a good thing to have positive thoughts, but it is not practical in any sense to go on thinking positively and when we come across someone who’s going through depression or feeling sad or worried about something, telling them to think positive is just scratching the surface, it’s not a solution that’s going to really help the problem. Even the happiest people have negative thoughts all the time. If you climbed into the mind of a happy person you won’t just find happy thoughts and happy experiences and happy memories you will find that like any other human being they also have negative thoughts, they also have stress, they also have bad moments in their life. But we’ve observed these people choose to spend more time in happy thoughts, positive experiences, living life, losing themselves in every moment by living life by diverting their mind to something that they like doing or something that they should do so that there is no place for the negative thought to continue growing in their mind. So you just can’t think positive thoughts all the time.

What about the negative thoughts, how do we handle that, how do we handle negativity in our life. It’s very simple. Firstly accept that negativity is real. About four-and-a-half years ago I was in London walking down Piccadilly, i reached oxford circus and there was this african-american man speaking on the mic to the public, people were stopping by some of them were listening, some of them were just walking on but there were a couple of words that caught my attention, I listened to what he had to say and then post his talk I invited him for a coffee. So we sat down in this coffee shop and we just got talking because it was something I liked in what he was saying about his vision of life and his vision of sin and his vision of suffering and his vision of positive and negative. So we got to talking and he got to know that my wife was expecting in the next seven to eight months and this is what he told me, he said Luke when your child is born from the moment your child is born in the first two years of his or her life observe very carefully what your child demonstrates. Your child will demonstrate anger your child will demonstrate jealousy your child will demonstrate lust, love, innocence, creativity, greed, laziness all of that and I said how’s that possible because as we grow as human beings we learn these things along the way. He said no they just become more pronounced but every human being is born with all the seven deadly sins and every negative emotion and if you can accept that then you don’t get into the mode of trying to push those behaviours away or punish those behaviours, you learn to accept them because when you accept them you learn to tame them and when you tame them it results in the behaviour that you choose when you have that negative expression every single time, and believe me ever since my girl was born I saw each and every one of these negative emotions. Now I was not offended as a parent I didn’t feel bad as a father that oh my child shows anger, shows jealousy shows all of these feelings. Because we’re all born with it and as human beings today and our pursuit to be good all the time, to try to be good.

So when we have a feeling of jealousy we criticize ourselves in our mind, we tell our minds that we are bad people, how could we have that thought, how could we have thoughts of anger how can we have thoughts of lust or feelings of lust or greed or slot it’s because each and every one of us are born with those qualities are born with those emotions and the sooner we accept them then we change our attitude and perspective towards that emotion. What’s wrong with greed unless we let it go out of control, what’s wrong with jealousy unless we let it go out of control? What’s wrong with lust unless we let it go out of control, what’s wrong with anger, slot any of these things; we all have them but if we keep thinking we are these good people and we should be these good people and pushing it and pushing it and pushing it away it depresses us because it will come up again. It makes us lead these fake lives and put on this fake mask trying to be something that we’re not to the public and all of that acting and overacting drains us every single day of energy which could be utilized to keep us healthy and keep us happy.

So it is ok to have a negative thought but when you know that a negative thought results in the negative feeling or a negative emotion why would you want to keep giving that negative thought more power, more attention. So when you have a negative thought you have the power at that time to stop dwelling in it stop giving it energy stop giving it attention to grow and at that point if you take a positive thought and you dwell in it you only feel happier you feel more excited it makes you feel warm you think of a happy memory you want more of it so you give that happy memory more attention and more energy it grows and you start feeling happier and you want to create more those memories but if you start giving that negative thought more energy more attention, for example you’re not losing weight that’s a negative emotion it leads you to feel negatively about yourself but you keep giving it attention it’s going to grow bigger and bigger and bigger and then that results in you making wrong decisions that controls your behaviour, there’s desperation, there’s the willingness to pop any pills, that anyone promise you that will help you lose weight vice versa and relationships you keep giving a negative thought, constant energy and attention that only grows and then you have less space in your mind for positivity.

So what you can do is never try to get rid of your negative emotions. Try to give it less attention by focusing more on something positive that’s happening in your life. Each and every one of us no matter what we’re going through has something positive in our life that has happened now is happening will happen or is already a memory. So when we’re in a negative situation with a negative thought at that point there are so many things you can do. Call up someone who makes you happy. Speak to someone who motivates you. Speak to someone who inspires you or think of those thoughts that make you feel good about yourself. So all you’re doing is diverting energy and attention from the negative to the positive. You’re not trying to get this rid of the negative, you’re trying to enhance and make more of the positives that you have in your life and that takes over and reduces the energy spent on negativity because any problem that you have right now you keep thinking about it it’s only going to grow into a larger and larger thought which means if your thoughts create your emotions and your feelings you are creating larger and larger more negative emotions and more negative feelings.

Every time you keep analysing your life you are bound to find fault with every aspect of your life. So what you should start doing is living life. Spend more time with the things that make you happy, people that make you happy immerse yourself in living and start detaching from analysing everything that’s happening in your life. Who said what who said this how you should be who you should be; stop overanalysing because you will constantly find fault. I don’t know a single person whose reach their weight loss goal and said that oh I’m happy now, then there’s something else would have lost weight now I’d like to tone my arms or tone my butt or tone my shoulders. Every thought you have creates your life experience.

So stop trying to push the negative out of your life, accept it. Accept that we have a dark side and we have a bright side. Accept it, there’s no shame in having a dark side unless it’s uncontrollable and you’re allowing it to harm people and harm yourself because each and every human being has every quality good and bad. Now it’s up to you and your inner awareness and your inner balance that helps you tame it and helps you manage it better but if you can spend a whole life trying to prove to the world that you’re good you’ll only be draining yourself on the inside and getting more and more depressed.