The internal voice…
What does your internal voice sound like? Mine is usually calm, mostly organised. But every now and then she is a complete bitch! She whispers negative or harmful thoughts into my ear that despite my telling myself that its not true or real, they still seem to worm their way in. Making me feel useless, worthless, questioning my abilities in most things and diminishing my goals. We all have an internal voice – what is yours telling you now?
These thoughts, if left unchecked can have a harmful affect on your mental health. They take you away from what is reality and you actually live the experience of that negative thought. Did you know that your mind can’t tell the difference between an actual experience and a fictional one? That’s why you can be sitting in your home and BANG for some reason you start thinking about what it might be like to get into a car accident, your heart rate increases. Then you imagine losing your loved ones in the car with you and before you know it you are living that grief, tears running down your face.
The Yoga Sutra offers a little advice for combating negative thoughts…simply put it says don’t have them! It’s sounds like an easy statement to say but it’s definitely a hard one to live by. BUT the practice of switching out the negative for a positive can have a huge benefit to the way you deal with damaging thoughts. It will feel massively fake at first but that positive framework will eventually become your default setting. So, the next time you hear your inner voice tell you something upsetting. Or fly off into a made up scenario that just doesn’t serve you. Stop it! Say the word stop really loud in your head (or out loud) and take a breath. Then tell yourself, its not real, it hasn’t happened. Then flip that thought over to the opposite positive version. Like most things, this takes a lot of practice. But once you start to draw attention to it. It will get easier to notice you’re doing it. Being able to recognise and put the breaks on those harmful thoughts before they even have a chance to take off, stopping them before you start to feel the effects of them. It takes practice, everyday, so why not start today?
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