Detoxing Your Thoughts

One of today’s biggest pushes is to detoxify your body. We see ads all the time detox wrap this, ozone treatment that, blend this, stand on these things or inhale this stuff. All of it providing us options to alleviate the toxins we take on from air, food, drink, etc. Our hope is that by doing this we will live longer, feel better and be able to accomplish more.  The poisons we take in drain our vitality and denigrate our health. On top of the product push is the exercise portion. All you have to do is open Facebook, Instagram, or get on Google and you are likely bombarded with gyms, home gyms, yoga poses, boot camps and cross fitters. We live in an amazing time! So many options and abilities to remain or get healthy. But there’s a most important aspect of ourselves that we tend to ignore—the health and vigor of our minds. We need to detox our minds regularly as well. Detox from what you might ask?  To start with, from the false and limited thinking that disrupts our lives and our relationships. These are some of the toxins of the mind that we all possess. 

Over the course of our life we all cling to a few primary beliefs about ourselves. These beliefs shape the way we know ourselves and how we think. They are the lens, or filter through which we view everything creating our worldview. From these beliefs and our personal experiences, we become addicted to certain recurring thoughts that write the script of our life. We call these our “Old Story”. Unfortunately, these ‘Old Stories’ are often self-limiting, self-slandering or simply just wrong-minded, and prevent us from experiencing life’s best. Habitual limited thoughts confine us to being a character in our own script, rather than being the author of our life adventure. Think of these limiting old stories as mental and psychological straitjackets. We need to ask ourselves what the core theme of our thoughts shows us. These old thoughts or stories may sound a lot like “I’m not good at”, “I’m not smart enough”, “I always make the wrong choices”, or “People don’t respect me.” 

The Broken Record

For those of you not old enough to remember records, Google it. For the rest of us I am sure we can recall listening to a scratched album and how the needle would get stuck in the groove of the record. The same sound or lyrics would keep repeating. In that groove, the arm couldn’t find its way into the next groove. This is exactly what happens with our thoughts. They tend to keep reiterating the same messages, time and again. When they do, they summon old memories and old feelings and circumvent our ability to see or make change.

The constant replay of old thoughts and feelings deter us from being present. We simply replicating the past, thus creating more of the same. This is such a wasteful way to live our lives as we move from moment to moment, wanting for change, but not understanding how to get there. The continuous repetition of old thoughts and feelings literally robs us of any new experience. Dr Joe Dispenza teaches extensively on this in his book Breaking The Habit of Being You. As well, this mental masturbation deprives us of bringing new possibilities into our lives. In these broken record grooves fear reigns supreme. A Mind or Mental Detox assists in freeing us from being captured in the negative groove.

Do you have your thoughts or do your thoughts HAVE you?

I have been looking at this issue for the better part of 12 years now and have developed a few methods to help people detox their minds from toxic repetitious old stories. I personally had to do an enormous amount of work in this area over the years. I had toxified my thoughts so badly that at one point I lived in a completely false reality. Now, I am thinking and feeling much better but I am not immune to new toxins in my mental operating framework so I need to regularly purge. The process I use helps us to shine a light on the habitual thoughts that trick us into false realities. Learning to observe thought, rather than attaching to and becoming the thought, is where our change process begins. When we are able to view or ‘see’ our thought, we are actually thinking! This is where we access our inner wisdom and connect to our infinite self in a much more deep and meaningful way. 

The hard part about disengaging a thought is due to its automatic nature. We have preprogrammed these and repeated them so frequently that we don’t even realize they are running in the background. It’s much like a virus working behind the scene in a computer. Without antivirus ware you won’t detect it until the computer crashes. In a similar fashion before we have an opportunity to take notice of the thought, we’ve already become the thought. We can learn to train our mind to become more alert though, and slow down the process, so that we may see the thought more clearly. It’s almost like seeing it coming in slow motion, as if you were a watching sports replay. When we learn to see the thought buzzing for our attention, we can step aside and tell ourselves to shut up.

The Matrix Effect

Ok, now for a movie moment in this blog. Remember in the Matrix Triligoy how Keanu Reeve’s character learns how to slow things down to the level where we can fully anticipate what’s going to happen and even dodge bullets. That’s a theatrical version of what I want to discuss now. So red pill or blue pill? Ok let’s go for an analogy, let’s look at baseball. Let’s metaphorically equate thought with being the actual baseball. Becoming aware of the thought is like anticipating the where the ball will cross the plate when you are batting. You see the pitcher’s positioning, footwork and arm position of the ball as it advances toward you. By the time he/she throws the ball and it approaches the plate, you’re fully engaged and anticipating its arrival. You’d hardly wait until the ball was inches from you before you began to react. Your reaction starts while he/she is still pitching. Anticipation and awareness are fundamental in baseball or any sport for that matter. And so, we train ourselves in this awareness and time slows in a relative sense as we come into this zone of awareness, #ZOA.

The very same thing can be accomplished with thought as we learn to see it in advance of becoming it. In the nanosecond before we merge with our next thought we exist in a pure state of infinite potential. The possibilities are infinite. We don’t need to be confined by our life history anymore and we can break free to create the life we choose. But we need to learn to think differently. Detoxing our mind is totally achievable once you set your intention to do so.

Below you will find a free downloadable exercise to assist you in driving new awareness around your thoughts, feelings and even actions. Happy hunting. 

Free Thought Detox ExerciseDownload

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