I know what I’m about to say is in every self help book out there...but there may be a reason for that.

I spent a too long portion of my life (hating) this or that or them. The more things I hated, the more things I found to hate. It was an ever increasing mass of angering triggers.

Once I made up my mind to begin trying to FIX my brain, I stumbled into the quantum not long before that woman whose name I can never recall, released her geniusly marketed book, “The Secret”. I still get the urge to kick myself for not starting with metaphysical genre books instead of fiction...but I ain’t done livin’ yet so... Anyway.

I researched theories on what our thoughts actually are. There is obviously energy transfer involved. That is measurable and firm science fact. The question is “why?”. Why would we need to produce a rather significant amount of energy just to create a random idea completely devoid of any nervous or skeletal/muscular system messages to move or assume a needed function? The energy spent is as high or even higher than some fight or flight messages. There had to be a reason why strong, triggered emotional responses produced such huge spikes in energy transfer. Could it be we were unconsciously sending signals to (something) that existed “out THERE somewhere” that was singularly designed to respond to these messages?

This intrigued me. I decided to test this with some good old binary style experiments and log the results. I started with broad concepts such as strong opposing thoughts like hate versus love. For a 24 hour period I would think about things I hated. Just let my ego run wild with inner dialogue of everything that pissed me off. I tried to maintain an emotional cloak of hate and anger which was easy for me to do back then. After that 24 hours, I would try my best to stay as neutral as possible, logging everything that happened to me and around me for the next 72 hours. I’d follow this with a break of 48 hours for a “return to baseline norms” or as close to that state as a yet undiagnosed BP mind could get. Next, I switched it around to love and made the conscious effort to keep my thoughts as love centered as possible for the same chunk of time, followed by the recording of data, then back to baseline.

I was shocked at the results. For the 72 hours after a concentrated effort to maintain a singular emotional pattern, everything from physical energy levels to how people responded to me or even what songs came up on the radio, reflected or even mirrored my emotional cues. It was so striking I remember thinking I had somehow misread what I’d recorded and considered starting over because this was just too intense with almost no extraneous data. But...I kept going and the same pattern kept repeating. I started to get increasingly specific- thinking about things like chocolate for 24 hours, recording how many events and references occurred around me relating to chocolate there were in the three days following the thought “broadcast”. I always got the same type of results. I remember feeling like I was in the process of discovering something akin to a universal cure to everything, lol.

Anyway...this propelled me to slowly start to train my mind to be as positive as possible when I was able to control it. Not long after this I met my husband, gained the strength to walk into a psychiatric clinic and not turn around, running out like my hair was on fire, and...submit my first manuscript thus changing my life in ways I can never find accurate words to describe. All from just shifting my thoughts.

So...all that verbiage to say this. Try it. Follow those parameters and journal what happens. Get as specific as you want. It actually becomes fun. I still do it just to get a kick out of how it never (doesn’t) work if you really put effort into it. Start with low impact things like colors or animals. Think about blue things and keep up with everything from overhead conversations to what advertisements you see. There is, what I call the “pink elephant” effect where because you think of a thing, the more you notice that thing around you; but, other people, radio stations, adverts and other things you should logically not have any influence over are not affected by this effect. It becomes a positively centered reinforcement after awhile. The more you do it, the better it works. Where it was once second nature for me to automatically go straight to a hate filled, angering place when stimulated by things happening around me; now, my gut response nearly always leans towards the positive.

Life is not about what happens to you. It’s about how you respond to what happens around you.

Ok, off the podium I go...carry on and, Happy Holidays... I mean that sincerely.