“Do not allow negative thoughts to roam free, unregulated and unmanaged.  Take ownership of them and start to practice managing your thoughts so that they can work for you rather than against you,” unknown.  Control of the mind is truly one of the most difficult things to master.  Our thought patterns become set based on how we feel.  We associate how we feel with the thought and soon we train ourselves that our thoughts must be how we feel.  I’m paraphrasing Joe Dispenza where he talks about changing how we feel through managing our thoughts.  We can’t let our bodies dictate our thoughts.  That isn’t to say we ignore our bodies and what they tell us, but we need to understand the power we have to shift the feelings in our body.  So many of those feelings are temporary and they only become permanent because we continue to wire our thoughts that way.  The same is said for our thoughts.  We respond with the same patterns and soon we are thinking the same thing in similar situations or we are repeating the same situation over and over again.  We have so much more say than we are trained to think we do.    

Managing thoughts begins with recognition and awareness.  I know certain events from earlier in my relationship with my husband cemented responses I still have to this day.  I didn’t realize how impactful it was and I didn’t realize how much I repeated it.  Honestly it expanded even to simple things: expectations on dishes, laundry, and caring for the house.  For example, my husband gets home significantly earlier than I do so my expectation was helping a bit around the house (not on a daily basis, but not having to be told what needs doing).  I’d find myself thinking the same resentful thoughts every day when I’d get home and see that the things that needed doing weren’t getting done.  I had to stop and ask myself why those things even bothered me in the first place.  Does it really matter if the dishes are in the sink an extra evening? Doing so freed up space in my mind–Granted I still get irritated because any help is appreciated, so it’s not just because I have this expectation that isn’t fulfilled. 

I started asking where else I allow thoughts to run free like that.  While driving.  While at work.  While waiting in the drop off line at my son’s school.  When interacting with friends and family.  When interacting with people at the grocery store.  The more I worked through the list it was clear how often I was thinking negative thoughts—and more importantly, how often they were automatic.  I’d spent so much time with these thoughts they were the track my brain followed.  And I wondered why I had felt negative and exhausted for so long.  The world wasn’t working the way my brain thought it should, the way I had been taught to expect it to work, and all of those things created stress for me (now I see it wasn’t real stress) and that turned into negative thoughts.  This was how powerful unregulated thoughts are in the body.  Not only do we think them before we can stop them, we feel them, and whenever we are in similar situations, we are triggered to feel the same way again.  Gaining control of our thoughts helps us gain control over our lives.  When we can put aside expectation and accept what is, we can limit the neural permanency we create through beliefs and thoughts that are likely not even originating from us.  If we find ourselves in the same situation repeatedly, start asking where our thought patterns come from and why we feel the need to continue to think that way.  Asking the question opens the door to an entire new way of thinking, one that feels infinitely more open, aligned, and authentic. It all begins with the mind.