DAY6 OF 100DAYS SELF-REINVENTION SERIES - Life is a Roller Coaster of Thoughts

‘‘Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it”. ?Viktor E. Frankl

The other day, in a resiliency retreat training session where my wife and I were students in London, a lady who had come to the training from Israel screamed at the facilitator, saying, “All I have learned in the last two days is that we experience life from our thoughts and not from the external environment, so what else?” I could see the obvious frustration in her eyes. This is not the first time I will witness such an expression of anger. In 2015, I was in a similar training in New Jersey, USA, where two ladies expressed similar frustration. If you have read the previous chapters and you have similar frustrations, I want to slow down the speed at which we are going a little bit. My first desire is that you really understand what we mean when we say that we experience life from the inside and not from the outside. If you do, the implications cover the length and breadth of everything about your life.

In my own life, shortly after my first understanding of what this new paradigm is all about in 2014, I expected all the psychological problems I have had with unwelcomed thoughts to just cease. When this did not happen, I traveled for more intense training. I asked one of the facilitators in the New Jersey training, Dr Keith Blevens, why I have not been able to stop unwanted thoughts. He smiled and simply replied, “When we found out about gravity, did we try to stop it?” I could not exactly get where he was going, but he went further to explain that the purpose of this understanding isn't to stop negative or unwelcome thoughts; when you understand how life works, you are less frightened by life. Once we understood gravity, we stopped asking why objects dropped to the ground.

I remember reading about Michael Neil and how after attending a positive thinking training course, he still could not steady his thoughts or eliminate negative thinking. Another effort at taking a 3-day course on NLP left him nearly depressed until he stumbled into the inside-out understanding of how we experience life. Today, Michael Neil is one of the leading teachers of the inside-out understanding of life and has written three books on the subject – A) – The Inside Out Revolution, B) Creating the Impossible, and C) The Space Within. I wholeheartedly recommend all three books to those who wish to really explore the inside-out understanding of life and how our moment-by-moment experience of life is created. I have been privileged to sit under Michael Neil in a training session hosted by the Three Principles UK, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the inside-out understanding of life.?

What I and others who are students of this understanding have learned is that you cannot control your thoughts all the time. Thoughts come unannounced, whether you are rich or poor or black or white. Scientists say we think over 60000 thoughts per day. If I were to ask you to write down the last 12 thoughts you had before or while reading this book, I bet that you cannot remember them. Your mind is like the clear blue sky above, with birds hovering in it and having fun. What distinguishes those with this understanding from those who do not have this understanding is that those who do not have this understanding are terrified when they think negative thoughts.

99% of people who are in psychiatric hospitals will be out of the hospital once they understand this paradigm. Just as the thoughts come, they will go. Just let the birds fly, don't try to catch them. Once you try to catch them, you will get screwed. A very insightful book on this subject is the book DO NOTHING by Damian Mark Smyth. I first read this book in 2014. It is an amazing book. There is nothing to do when negative thoughts bump into your mind. Just recognize them and go on to do what you planned to do for the day. I did not say resist them; when you resist them, you legitimize them. Just go do what you need to do.

Talking about negative thoughts that just come into your thinking, the late Dr. Kenneth E Hagin says he cannot do anything about it, but he will not give them power, or, in his words, “he will not let the birds build a nest over his head.” No teaching will stop you from having occasional, unplanned negative thoughts come into your mind, but once you know that these thoughts are not you and have no life of themselves to harm you (unless you permit them), you will go on to live your life. Unless you are dead, you will have a roller coaster experience of thoughts but don't give them life. Recognize thought for what it is and go do what you set out to do – you will find the thoughts disappear just as they came. The error that most people make is that they sit down and begin to ponder these negative thoughts, and as they do, they begin to experience their thinking.

Matthew 6: 31. Therefore, take no thought, saying, what shall we eat? or what shall we drink? or, wherewithal shall we be clothed? What was Jesus saying here? The thought “What shall we eat or drink or be clothed?” will come, but do not take it. How do you take it? You take it by saying it. In saying it, you give it life. But if you recognize the thought as not yours and go about your day, the thought will disappear just as it came.

?Let me say here that Thoughts and Thinking are two separate experiences. They are not the same. When people fall into the error of dwelling on the thoughts that flow into their minds, they fall into an error that many people are suffering from today – they go see a psychiatrist. If the psychiatrist is one who does not know how the experience of life is formed, he/she will give them a LABEL. Once the psychiatrist gives you a LABEL, you are hooked!

Let's say the psychiatrist tells you that you are clinically depressed; you go home and start thinking about depression, doing all the Google searches on what depression means, and beginning to do a mental construct of a depressed person. You swim in it. You go about telling everyone you see that you are depressed. Once you start thinking about the depressive thoughts and the label put on you, you will immediately start feeling the thought. Remember that 100% of our feelings come from our thinking, not any event on the outside. The Psychiatrist, Dr Bill Pettit, talks about a controlled experiment where the sample children were asked to think three negative thoughts they have had in the past that frightened them. As soon as they started thinking the thoughts, they disrupted the biochemical regulation in their brains within three minutes of the thinking.

Today there are so many people doing training on Mental Health who are consigning people to mental illness – people who are perfectly sane but end up insane after wearing a label from a psychiatrist or counselor. To quote Dr Bill Pettit, “I am ashamed to say that many mental health practitioners today are actually mental illness practitioners”

Dr Bill Pettit goes on to recommend Stanford University Professor Robert Sapolsky's book “Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers” to show the role that thoughts play in medical depression.