EVERYTHING BEGINS WITH A THOUGHT
February 5, 2009
My all-time favorite yoga teacher, Judith Lasater, talks often about how thoughts come first, followed by your words, which eventually determines your actions (how you live your life). So her advice has always been to watch your thoughts. Even if you can’t stop your thoughts, if you just start noticing them, you create a small space in which you can choose~ Do I want to keep thinking this thought or not? She compared it to the difference between obsessing and noticing you’re obsessing. If you are obsessing, you can’t stop it. But if you notice that you are obsessing, you have a choice to stop doing it. Can you see how, in the trickle-down theory ,this can help you command your life in an immeasurable way?
I truly believe your thoughts rule your world. After all, beliefs are just thoughts you keep thinking over and over.
That’s why you need to be diligent about what you think. It tends to become what you believe.
Most people I’ve encountered in my decades of gym experience think about what they don’t want or what they can’t do. “How I can I get rid of my (microscopic)muffin top?” (BTW, muffin top is the new love handles) or “I hate my (size 6)thighs!” or the ever present “I can’t stand myself at this weight!(129lbs). They focus on the negative, and guess what? They are likely to spend a big part of their day running the constant mental loop of thoughts that fill them with anxiety rather than contentment. Whatever you think about, your world eventually becomes.
Do you know who said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge”? This was said by one of the
greatest minds in human history. Albert Einstein knew a thing or two about imagination. I also like to think that he never even noticed his hair and people’s opinions about it. His gift to think beyond
convention and to question authority and the conclusions of what previous scientists thought, gave our world some of it’s most mind-blowing,scientific theories and discoveries of our time. Even if you are not as smart as Albert Einstein, imagination is one of the world’s greatest forces.
The most dynamic aspect of imagination is the ability to form mental images of what does not yet exist. For a middle-aged woman who has been overweight since childhood and has always been told she’ll always be overweight because it’s in her family’s gene pool or because she’s big-boned has an incredible task to change her thinking to imagining herself in a thinner body.
This is where you have to use what I call creative imagination. This that takes us a
step further than just forming mental images. Creative imagination (thoughts out of the box) create action—it causes things to change, to come into existence.
When we are creatively imagining something, we are actually causing it to come into our life. It’s the old “Power of Postive Thinking” or “The Magic of Thinking Big.”
Our thoughts are like magnets, literally drawing to us that which we
think about with passion or emotion.
In order to get what you want, you have to stop those negative thoughts and
allow yourself to dream and not only that, you need to do it on a recurring, steady basis.
This will require that you suspend those old beliefs (otherwise known as suspension of disbelief )and allow your mind to go to new and improved places, thinking about what you want to happen in
your own reality, even if it initially seems outrageous. If you think about those wanted changes with enough
feeling and belief, you begin to manifest them in your own life.
So starting with your next negative body thought, notice it and pick a new, improved thought to replace it. If “I’ll never lose weight, this is just the way I am.” crosses your mind, try thinking this, “I am a good person and deserve to have the body I want.” or “I trust that my body can achieve and maintain my ideal weight and I know I can do it. It’s happening right now!” Then think it again and again and again. Soon your thoughts will form a mental path, your words will flow down this path and then your actions will be a river flowing forth towards what you never, before now, let yourself believe.
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