A new year is also a time of new beginnings. We set goals for the new year getting ourselves back to doing what we really want to do and being who we really want to be. So what are your personal goals for the year? Do you have a desire to change something in your life in order to be happier, more content, and more at peace? If you do, let me exclaim from personal experience that the only way to permanently change yourself is by looking inside. So many of us begin each new year with the goal of losing weight, getting more fit, or eating better. These are great goals but we often go about accomplishing them in the wrong way. Three months down the road we give up because we are not seeing the results we want or it's just too hard. Soon after that we start gaining the weight back and reverting to old habits. So how do we change it for good? How do we create a new lifestyle without feeling such intense resistance to change?
The answer to all of these questions is to look inside. Permanent change and lasting happiness comes from the inside out.
I had the opportunity of speaking at a women's conference a couple weekends ago sharing what I have taught on this blog, but in a very concise, basic way. A sweet woman commented to me that I should put my presentation up on my blog. I thought that was a fantastic idea. I have used this blog to dive into each of the different concepts and truths of healing which of course I feel is needed, but I would like to take this post to bring us back to the basics and refocus us on what really needs to happen if we want to have positive, permanent change and happiness in our lives. For those of you who have been reading my blog, consider this post as a reminder and a refresher of HOW to be on the path of true healing. And to all of you, my friends, at the beginning of this new year, let's get back to basics - back to the essential, core truths that allow us to permanently heal in order to have the peace and happiness we are searching for.
The title for my presentation was:
I love that title because it is so true! How many times have we felt we had to be superwoman in our lives in order to get everything done that was expected of us and how many times did we feel like it was impossible? Well it is impossible because Wonder Woman isn't real! We need to be asking ourselves a different question. Instead of how can I be superwoman, the question needs to be what expectations and pressures am I placing ON MYSELF that make me feel like I am not good enough or that I can't do it all. We need to simplify our lives AND simplify our minds.
At this point in my presentation, I told my story. If you've been reading my blog, you know my story. If you haven't read my first post entitled "My Story" please go read that before reading on here. Basically, I put a ton of pressure on myself to be perfect because I believed that I had to be perfect in order to be loved and accepted. And who doesn't want to be loved and accepted? It's a basic need we all have. However, I went about trying to satiate this need in the wrong way and that wrong way drove me into a 22 year long eating disorder filled with depression and despair. I tried so many things during those 22 years to escape my addiction and the constant self-sabotage I inflicted upon myself, but none of those things brought me the freedom, peace and happiness I was looking for. At the age of 37, I was led to a mentor who taught me that nothing outside of myself was going to give me that peace and happiness. The only way to fix me was for me to fix me - to go inside, face the darkness and the demons that held me in bondage then let them go. These next two quotes are some of my favorites because they are two of the things I had to recognize in order to start the process of true healing.
So are you ready? Do you acknowledge these things? As soon as you are ready to accept your role in your own peace and happiness, then you are ready for this path of true healing.
The truths I learned that allowed me to heal were very basic, but very powerful.
Truth #1:
This is absolutely critical which is why it is #1. Let me ask you a question. Do our thoughts define who we are? In many of my presentations, I have gotten both yes and no answers. And they are both right. Let me explain. I love this following quote:
This is truth! We are not our thoughts because our thoughts come from everywhere. They come from Satan and God, but also from friends, family, the media and the world. Just because a thought comes into our head does not make it true about us. So how do we reconcile the truth that we are not our thoughts with this following scripture:
When a thought comes into our mind, we immediately have to make a choice either to accept it is true about us or dismiss it. When we accept a thought to be true about us, it becomes something we believe in our hearts. This scripture says "in his heart". It doesn't say "as he thinketh in his mind" or just "as he thinketh". That phrase "in his heart" is extremely important to understand. We are not our thoughts, but we are the thoughts we choose to accept and believe in our hearts to be true about us. Another amazing quote:
I love that last phrase that we will be "what we consistently allow to occupy the stage of our minds." It is a choice. It is our choice. Here's another one of my favorite quotes about our thoughts:
We control who we become through our thoughts. So how does this happen? How do the thoughts we choose to believe become who we are? This illustration shows the process:
A thought leads to a feeling which leads to an action which leads to a result which leads back to a thought. If I wake up and look in the mirror and I have the thought not only come to my mind, but which I also believe of "I am so ugly", what am I going to feel? Probably ugly. Probably a bit depressed and discouraged. Well, what will my action then be? I'll use an example from my own life because I definitely believed I was ugly. I would then act ugly, being impatient with my kids and rude to my husband. So what would my result be? I pushed the people away from me that I wanted to be loved and accepted by the most. Why would they want to be around me if I was irritable, snippy, and mean? Then of course more thoughts started to rise of "Nobody loves me" or "Nobody wants to be around me". And this cycle just continued as I spiraled down to my pit of depression and despair. That spiral looks like this:
Obviously it can also happen in the opposite direction. With a positive thought, we spiral up to joy, enlightenment, freedom and love. The nature of our thoughts drives the direction of our spiral. Negative thoughts lead us down to depression, grief, and despair. But the beautiful thing is that we have the power to stop that from happening. We have the power to spiral up in a positive direction, but we have to choose to do the work in order to make it happen.
So to sum it up:
Why will we perish? Well, because if we don't watch our thoughts, negative thoughts will have free rein and soon we will find ourselves spiraling down and down to that pit of depression and despair where Satan takes hold of our souls. I know it sounds very doomsday-ish but it is true. Satan is real and he is waging an all out war. We have to watch our thoughts or Satan wins.
It really is up to us. The only way Satan gets control is if we let him. How can we defeat him if we are unaware of how he's attacking us? One of the things that has occurred to me lately is that it is quite obvious how Satan is attacking us on the outside. With all the different issues that are out there in the world, we can see how Satan and his minions are trying to degrade and corrupt all virtue, morality or standards that exist in the world. The war he is waging on us through the media and the internet can be easily seen. But the war he is waging in our minds is not so easily seen. We can be fairly oblivious to the thoughts that Satan plants in our minds that cause us to then feel and act negatively. It is up to us to be aware and only then can we win this war being waged in the privacy of our own minds.
Truth #2:
I love that quote! Because we live in this mortal, fallen world, we will always have negative influences coming at us. Many of those influences we may not have power to stop, but we absolutely have the power to choose what we do with those influences and what thoughts we will allow to take up permanent residence in our minds.
This following diagram shows a typical person who is fairly balanced with positive and negative. But being balanced is not necessarily ideal. When asked how life is, this person would respond, "Oh life is fine. It's ok. Not super great, but not terrible either." I promise you life can be better than just ok.
This next diagram shows the negative influences that are continually coming at us.
Logically, if we are constantly letting more and more negative come in, then something is going to happen to that +/- line. It rises because we are being filled with more negative.
At this point, the +/- line has risen to this person's shoulders. Her arms have dropped a little with that increase of the negative burden within her. She might say "I feel like the weight of the world is on my shoulders" or "I feel so burdened with life." This signifies that her negative level is at her shoulders.
If the negative continues to flow in, her negative level will continue to rise. Now it's at her eyes or her forehead. She might say "I can't even see straight" or "I'm losing my mind". Her arms have continued to fall.
And now she has gotten to the dangerous point where her negative level has completely engulfed her. At this point she may say, "I'm completely overwhelmed that I can't function" or "I'm drowning". Her arms have no life or energy. They are completely down by her sides because life is too heavy. This is also the point where some may consider suicide. They are completely filled to capacity with negative and they don't see a way out.
At this point, one of three things happens. I love analogies so here are three analogies, all having to do with water, that can help us understand what happens when we are drowning in the negative.
Obviously, this is a dam. What has to be built into a dam in order to keep the water pressure from building up to a point where the dam would rupture and burst? There's an outlet right? If you look down at the bottom right of the dam you can see the small outlet that is constantly letting water flow out to keep the water pressure from becoming too great. Do you see the connection? We have to have an outlet! We have to constantly release the negative that comes at us or we will get to a bursting point. I have been there. Because I let negative pressure continue to build inside of me, I would lose it. I would rupture and burst. The negative had to be released somehow and because I didn't do it myself through a healthy outlet, it came out in bursts of anger and rage. Not a point we want to get to. We need an outlet.
Analogy #2 - This is a picture of the Dead Sea. I've had the opportunity to visit the Dead Sea twice in my life, most recently in February of 2012 with my husband and my parents. As you can see, it's a beautiful lake. The water is so blue and calm. But I think you know enough about the Dead Sea to know that it is extremely salty and that no living thing can survive in its waters. Go read my post "Letting Go" to learn of some interesting facts about the Dead Sea. Here is a close up of the shore:
The salt in the water has completely covered everything touching it. So why is the Dead Sea dead? Because it has no outlet. The Jordan River flows into it, but no river flows out. Everything that comes into the Dead Sea sits stagnant and gets more acidic and more toxic. So can you see the parallel? Another thing that can happen to us when we are drowning in the negative is that we die inside. We become apathetic, depressed and have no energy or desire to do anything, even to live. We need a way for the negative to flow back out instead of sitting stagnant within us disabling any positive emotion or energy from having the chance to thrive and grow. We need an outlet.
This final analogy has to do with an experiment done by a gentleman named Masaru Emoto. He took bottles of water and spoke to the bottles using positive and negative words. He also played positive and negative music to the bottles or just taped positive or negative words onto the bottles. He then froze the water bottles after they had been influenced by either positive or negative energy. Finally, he took microscopic images of the frozen water crystals to see if water reacted to positive and negative influences. What he discovered was amazing! Take a look at this following slide:
Amazing right?! Whether words were spoken, sung, or written, water physically changed at a basic cellular level in reaction to the positive or negative energy it was influenced by. My friends, this world is over 70% water. Our bodies are over 70% water. If we are allowing negative influences to fill our minds and hearts, then we are damaging our body at a cellular level. I have a very strong belief that our bodies and spirits are one. If we are hurting one, then we will hurt the other. Our negative thoughts about ourselves or our world are affecting us physically whether we think they are or not. So the other outcome from being filled with negative? The negative is then released as sickness, malfunction, disease, pain, weight gain, etc. within our bodies. Now I know that some illnesses just happen. I am not saying that there is nothing to be said for genetics and heredity, but I am saying there is a huge correlation between how healthy our mind is and how healthy our body is. We need an outlet for the negative because if we don't release it, it can come out adversely affecting the health and wellness of our physical bodies.
So in order to prevent one of these three outcomes from happening, we need to let the negative go. These next slides show what happens when we use an outlet (represented by the green arrows) to release the negative pressure building up inside of us.
The negative level starts to lower thus making room for the positive. Arms lift a little.
A little more.
A little more.
We gain more and more positive until we are filled to overflowing and our arms are raised up high because we feel full of life, energy, joy and peace. It is possible my friends! I testify it is because I am living it! That doesn't mean I don't have my moments. Satan will never stop trying to tear me down and there will still be times that he succeeds, but it is up to me how long I let him keep me down. Because I now know how to deal with those moments, by using my tools and letting go of the negative, I can cycle through those difficult times in as little as 7 minutes. Now that is a big deal to me because I used to spend months down in that pit of despair. I believed I was doomed to a life of depression and sadness, never permanently pulling out of it, never feeling lasting joy and peace. But I was wrong. Because I was willing to do the work, I enabled myself to feel that joy and peace I so desperately yearned for. It takes work. It requires our constant commitment to being aware of our thoughts and being willing to face the negative no matter how hard or painful it may be. It is not an easy path, but it is worth every effort, every heartbreak, every tear, and every ounce of strength and focus we can muster. Just because Satan gets us down doesn't mean we have to stay there. There is a way out and it's up to us to choose that way, to walk that path and work to make peace and happiness become a reality in our own lives.
Now I wanted to point out one more thing about that last slide. Notice what happens to the arrows of the negative influences coming at us - they bounce right off. Because we are so filled with the positive, the negative has a much harder time getting in. Now like I just said, the negative will still get in every once in awhile. We are human and that's going to be part of our human experience until the day we die. We need to expect that to happen. However, we can live in this positive place the majority of the time. Those arrows of negativity can bounce off of us the majority of the time if we are filled with positive by using our outlets to let go of the negative. Now just as a reminder, this same concept happens in reverse too. When we are filled with negative, it's the positive arrows that bounce off of us and have a harder time getting in. Think about it in your own life. Can you remember a time where someone paid you a compliment about how nice you looked and your reply was, "Oh no! I look terrible today! I'm having a total bad hair day! I didn't have enough time to get my makeup done the way I should have. I'm breaking out all over and I really hate this outfit. If only I had more time and money I would dress as cute as you do." Remember my quote at the very beginning, "Until you make peace with who you are, you'll never be content with what you have." We make peace with who we are by letting go of the negative, by constantly being aware of what's going on in our mind and using our outlets to get rid of the lies and the untruths that Satan is trying to get us to believe.
This scripture sums it up:
What this scripture tells me is that it is our natural condition in this fallen world to be affected by mortal feelings of hatred, jealousy, anger, etc. Feelings are just feelings. Those feelings are part of our earthly experience. But Satan plants thoughts into our heads of judgement, shame, and guilt for having those feelings. We hear the thoughts, "I am so terrible for feeling this way. I am so bad. How could I think and feel such a thing?" And we believe them. Then our belief takes us down that negative spiral I talked about earlier. We have to guard our thoughts. As this scripture says, we have to yield "to the enticings of the Holy Spirit." Well, what does the Holy Spirit entice us with? TRUTH! We have to yield to truth! And then put off the natural man, which I believe can also be phrased as letting go of our negative, natural man feelings and thoughts. We need to let go. We need to use our outlets if we want to escape Satan's chains that pull us down into sorrow and misery. Remember, Satan wants all of us to be miserable like himself . . . and he will try every trick to get us there. But we were born with the power to defeat him. We just have to recognize that and access that power. Being aware of him in our heads and letting go of his deceptions and lies is how we do it . . . plus a couple of other things that I will get into in my next post.
One more analogy about this truth of letting go.
Those strings keep her attached to the negative baggage of the past. Those strings keep her tied down and hold her back from progressing. Well, she is the only one that holds the scissors. She is the only one that has the power to clip those strings. And if she chooses to clip those strings . . .
I am not going to go into detail here about the tools that I used to let go and clip those strings. Please refer to my blog post entitled "Tool 1 & Tool 2" if you would like to learn about the tools I used to let go. They changed my life! In essence, the tools I talk about are a physical way for me to work the Atonement of Jesus Christ in my own life. Now you know how I feel about God. You know I believe that Christ suffered in Gethsemane and on the cross so that I could repent, change and become whole again. The Atonement is not just for gross crimes and sins. The Atonement is there for each one of us to access and it is there to help us change and overcome anything and everything in our lives that we want to change. It is simply the means through which we can change. The tools I use are a way to use the Atonement. I invite you to try them. I know there are so many other wonderful tools out there that can help us. There's music, prayer, meditation, any form of exercise or sports, laughter, scripture study, church attendance, temple attendance, etc. And I still use all of those too. But I personally needed a physical tool of letting go that I could immediately access to get my thoughts out of my head and onto paper so I could then get rid of them. So experiment. Discover what works for you and what doesn't. However, please be aware. You don't want any tool or outlet to turn into an escape as opposed to a means of letting go. Any outlet, whether it's "healthy" or not, can become an addiction or an escape from the negative instead of a way to face it and let it go. If you find yourself feeling like you HAVE to do something, then what may have been a healthy outlet has now moved into the realm of addiction. We lose our power of choice with addiction. I am going to talk about addiction in a couple of posts so stay tuned.
Because this is getting long I am going to stop here and bring you the second half of my presentation in my next post. I hope you have gained a greater understanding for the need we have to be aware of our thoughts and let go of the negative. It really is crucial and essential to our joy, peace and contentment in life. I challenge you to take the time today to let go of some negative that is in your life. Again, refer to my post "Tool 1 & Tool 2" to read about the tools for letting go. I testify that these tools work! It has been proven again to me recently in the life of a sweet 18 year old young woman that I mentor. Two weeks ago I met with her and I challenged her to use the tools to let go of some of the negative in her life. I met with her again today. Over the past two weeks, she used the Write and Burn tool several times and has been writing her negative thoughts in her Little Black Book. She jumped right in and worked the tools. Today she was no longer crying because of sadness and discouragement. She was crying because of joy. She had let go of so much negative making room for the positive that negative was no longer spilling out of her eyes, but positive. She said she had never cried before from feeling so happy, but today she did. It is truth my friends and it will work for anyone who is willing to do the work. Do the work and reap the rewards of joy, peace, and contentment!
be.YOU.tiful!!!
