Your thoughts are powerful beyond belief.
If you choose to start thinking about how your spouse or boss didn’t do this or that, didn’t notice how hard you worked on a project or left something for you to clean up… If you allow those thoughts, if you don’t quickly replace them with something positive, it doesn’t take very long for a deep reservoir of resentment to build up. Those bad feelings, the events you’ve chosen to focus on, to enshrine in your memories become a toxic ticking time bomb, ready to explode.
You can choose to direct your thoughts.
I assure you that the world is full of positive things that you can choose to dwell upon. It might take a bit of practice because we may have dysfunctional thought habits to break, ones that do not serve us as well as they might. Many of us have deep, ingrained programing that tells us our job is to look for danger and protect ourselves or find broken things and fix them. While there certainly is a need for both of these, most of us 1) WAY over do it and 2) would benefit from doing so with a more cheerful, helpful attitude!
Embrace Positivity
Choose to think about the wonderful things your spouse does, the good things they do, the ways in which your life is enriched by their presence. If you think you’ve nothing to be grateful for, conduct the thought experiment of mentally subtracting things from your life, starting with your health, your loved ones, your job etc. Your list of things to appreciate will grow quickly. And if you truly come to believe you need to make changes in your life, then do so in as constructive a manner as possible instead of indulging in self sabotaging, negative thinking and resentment building!
Change Your Mind, Change Your Life
Start focusing your mental energy on what you DO want, quickly and firmly releasing all thoughts of what you don’t want. Negative thoughts may or may not be true (much of what we call “facts” contain a high degree of interpretation and reflect our world view and fears) but that doesn’t mean they are helpful or relevant; and they are certainly not where you want to go so don’t send your thoughts or energy there. The past should be a place of reference, not of residence!
Closing Quotes
“I will release all thoughts that hurt. I will no longer hurt myself today.” – A Course in Miracles
“Thoughts held in mind, attract in kind. What you focus on, expands. Look where you want to go.”
“My peaceful thoughts create my peaceful world. My joy attracts the joy of others to me. My happiness is contagious and draws other happy, positive, can-do people into my life.” -NSC
“Smile and the whole world smiles with you.”
As always, I share what I most want/need to learn. – Nathan S. Collier