A man is but the product of his thoughts - what he thinks, he becomes.
Mahatma Gandhi
Watch your thoughts, they become words.
Watch your words, they become actions.
Watch your actions, they become habits.
Watch your habits, they become your character.
Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.
Thoughts are things. They are powerful. They are preemptive. The very thoughts running through your mind can help to manifest the life of your dreams, or draw you closer to your greatest fears. But most people don’t realize the inherent power of their thoughts. We go about our lives steeped in one mindset or another, without the clear realization that whatever it is we think about or focus on consistently, we move towards.
"Our happiness depends on the habit of mind we cultivate.” - Norman Vincent Peale
How you navigate through life and how you feel largely depends on your thoughts. Your thoughts determine how you feel, your decisions and your actions – every part of your life that you can control. Your thoughts are one of the most powerful tools you will ever have in changing your life.
Whether or not you believe that statement is rather subjective. The truth of the matter is that we are the product of our thoughts. Think, and you shall become. It’s part of the manifestation of our destiny. But not everyone holds to this credo. Not everyone believes in the fervent power of their thoughts. They brush it off while dwelling on the past or fearing the future, not quite understanding that the very things that they are thinking about, they are inching closer towards.
There will always be events and circumstances in your life that you cannot control. But if you learn to control your thoughts, your mood and behavior no longer depend on circumstances but on you. When you regain control over your thoughts, you regain control over your feelings and actions. Your thoughts shape your reality more than anything else. Therefore, not having control over your thoughts equals not having control over your life.
Through practicing Mindfulness you will become more aware of your thoughts and regain control over them. By practicing kind and non-judgmental thinking, you are preventing the activation of the unsafe brain and you are regaining control over your feelings and behavior. This will put you back in control and allow you to reshape your life in any way that you want.
At the very fundamental level, thoughts are purely energy. They move across the synapses in our brains, jumping from one neuron to another, moving from one cluster to the next in lightning-fast speed. It’s a near-instantaneous process. If you think about moving your hand, as you think it, it happens. There’s no lag there. You’re not waiting for some CPU to crunch directives. The mind is the most powerful computer in the world at the moment.
That energy moving across the synapses of your neurons, has potent potential to revolutionize your life. A single thought can spark a flurry of activity. In a moment we can decide and commit to something, anything, that will move us in one path or the next towards our hopes and dreams. Those same thoughts can also fester and marinate in our minds, infecting every emotion and behavior until it manifests itself into reality.
Yes, there’s no denying the power of your thoughts. There’s no hiding from something that’s so real and exact that it can either be harnessed for good, or leveraged for extreme bad. But what are thoughts exactly? How do they work? Is everything in our lives right now the product of our thoughts? Have we truly manifested whatever reality we might be experiencing at this moment in time?
The human mind is still something that perplexes us. While we have an abundance of information on how it works, we haven’t quite grasped all of its nuisances and complexities. Just how is it that we’re experiencing reality? How does consciousness work? How are we in this body right now and experiencing these things? If you stop for a moment to think about it, the thoughts will daunt you. It’s an overwhelming fact, something that we can’t quite wrap our heads around.
To add to that equation, as humans, our bodies are made up of 99.9999% empty space. The atoms in our bodies, at their most finite scales, are simply empty space, held together by electrical charges. On a quantum level, things get even stranger. Those atoms can actually appear in two places at the same time, which is called quantum superposition. Matter exists in a variety of forms and states due to complex quantum wave functions. So, what we’re experiencing and feeling isn’t quite 100% real, so to speak.
I know it all sounds very strange. And we don’t need to understand how it all works or get into an in-depth discussion about quantum physics to be able to understand that reality is merely a projection of our thoughts on a finite scale. But we do need to be able to leverage it. Since everything is held together by electrical energies, and our thoughts are pure energy, it’s easy to see how thoughts, on their most fundamental scale, can permeate everything. On the macro scale, it’s harder to appreciate. But think smaller. Think nano-level and beyond.
However, another problem that arises is that the human mind is a computer that’s been pre-conditioned. It has some software that’s installed at birth in the form of our DNA, but after that, every new experience is another memory logged that might create a variety of functions. As we grow older, those functions turn into habits. But at the very basal level, everything is created by our thoughts and how we perceive things.
If you decide to really achieve something in your life - you will. It´s all a matter of how you think about yourself and what you think you are capable of. The power of thought is incredible.
Most people want something more in life. They want to do more and be more. They say: "I wish I could do that", but then immediately this wish is followed by the words "But I can't."
This is not true. Anyone can achieve their goals and dreams. Anyone can be or do more. History is filled with people who made the so-called impossible possible. How? By tapping into the source of all power - the world within. The power of thought. The way you think and feel will dictate your reality through the Universal Laws. If you say to yourself: "I can´t" - then this will be the reality you´ll experience. If, on the other hand, you say: "I can" it´s a whole different ball-game. Whatever you give your energy to (what you focus on - your intention) will always manifest in the physical world. You are UNIQUE and no-one can think and feel like you if you tap into your passion and uniqueness. When you do you tap into a power that speeds up the manifestation process.
We all have the capability to think in a positive matter if we really want to, but way too often we resort to negative thinking. We tell ourselves we´re are not good enough. We´re not able to do this or that.
Unfortunately, many of us grew up with limiting beliefs. We´ve been told we can't do a certain task or that we can't pursue a certain profession or that we can´t be whatever we want. We have been shaped and influenced by negative statements and sayings from our parents and guardians, kids in school, friends, society etc. This "shaping" ends up as limiting beliefs stuck in our subconscious mind. The way you perceive and interpret yourself is a result of the belief system you adopted while growing up. It could be a belief that you´re not good enough or that you´ll never amount to anything or that you´ll never do well in sports or that you´ll never succeed in relationships and so on.
Back in 1960 Maxwell Maltz wrote the book Psycho-Cybernetics where he talks about the self-image we form growing up:
We all carry with us a mental blueprint or picture of ourselves. It has been built up from our own beliefs about ourselves. But most of these beliefs about ourselves have unconsciously been formed from our past experience, our successes and failures, our humiliations, our triumphs, and the way other people have related to us, especially in early childhood.
From all these we mentally construct a "self" (or a picture of a self). Once an idea or a belief about ourselves goes into this picture it becomes "true" as far as we personally are concerned. We do not question its validity, but proceed to act upon it just as if it were true.
Our built-in beliefs are powerful. They are powerful in the sense that they dictate our ability to reach our goals, but in fact they are nothing more than specific neural patterns in your brain. They are thoughts that are so ingrained they have become automatic.
They are not there because they are "the truth", they have simply been handed down from generation to generation. They are there because someone "put them" there.
This is not about faith or religion - it´s about your beliefs - your habits of thought, opinion and attitude about the world around you, and especially your beliefs about you, about your life and your prospects for financial fulfillments.
You can work wonders with the power of thought. Through the instrumentality of thought, you acquire creative power.
We have been created to live our life in freedom, health and wealth. If our life doesn’t look like that, it means we block ourselves by our thoughts. Our thoughts are very powerful instruments we use to either create happiness and wealth, or sickness and poverty.
If your life doesn’t look like what you’re dreaming of, it means you have thoughts which go against you. Your thoughts create your life. If you want to change your life, change first your thoughts.
FEAR
Did you know that the human mind processes anywhere between 50,000 to upwards of 70,000 thoughts in any given day? Obviously, not all of those thoughts are conscious. And, not all of those thoughts are unique. Many of the thoughts are repeated and replayed in our subconscious minds. They stem from our deepest and most darkest fears. These are the what-if scenarios that we can’t seem to escape no matter what we do.
Fear-based thought is one of the most prevalent thoughts that pervade our minds. On the other end of that spectrum are thoughts that are founded on the purity of love, honesty and forgiveness. Yet, not enough of our thoughts are love-based thoughts. Much of them are fear based. The problem with living in a fear-based mindset, is that those fears have a tendency for transmuting themselves into reality.
When you live in fear, not only does it tax you mentally, but also emotionally, spiritually, and of course, physically. Mentally speaking, you spend much of your time dwelling on the what-ifs, and thinking about all those doomsday scenarios. Much of our fear-based thoughts revolve around our finances and relationships, but also extend into our careers, health and other areas of our lives.
Clearly, spending much of your time living in fear also does a number on your emotions. Thoughts produce emotions. Any thought based on fear is going to produce a set of resultant emotions that will develop a foundation for stress and anxiety. When your emotions are taxed, it weighs heavily on your spirit, but also produces stress hormones that negatively affect your physiology. It suppresses your digestive and reproductive systems along with reducing your immune system into shambles.
The power of our fear-based thoughts are abundantly clear. They can ruin us. They can make us head for the ropes and run for the trenches. It’s a terrible state-of-mind to have to live in a constant mindset of fear, but countless people from around the globe can’t help but live in that very state. However, if you’re serious about achieving your goals or accomplishing anything notable in life, you have to extricate yourself from a mindset of fear.
As difficult as it might feel, we have to gravitate towards love. Fear (and also hate) take a great deal of energy, whereas love is effortless and empowering. The sooner you move from a fear-based mentality to a love-based mentality, the sooner you’ll feel that cathartic cleansing that comes along with pure and unconditional love. It’s not a gullible state to live in. That’s simply the inherent power of thought at play on a constant basis in our minds.
SCIENCE
In the movie What The Bleep Do We Know!? Dr. Joe Dispenza talks about how our brain works. He talks about the tiny nerve cells in the brain called neurons and how they have tiny branches reaching out to other neurons forming neuron-networks.
Each place where they connect is integrated into a thought or a memory. He goes on to say that the brain does not know the difference between what it sees in its environment and what it remembers because the same neuron-networks are firing - triggered. This mean that we can break or make a habit simply by repeating something over and over again in our mind, or by actually doing it. If we want to learn something new and create a new habit the brain will cause the creation of a new network reinforcing the habit.
The first time you tried to ride a bike you probably failed to make it. Why? because the neuron network was being established. You were creating it and be trying over and over again the connections in the network gets stronger and stronger and all of a sudden you ride the bike without thinking about it. You do it automatically. You have created a habit.
"You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence is not an event - it is a habit" - Aristotle
When you're gifted with the power of thought
It is a wonderful thing in a way,
But it can also create problems
If your thoughts tend to go astray.
The power of thought brings things to light
That we tend to postpone
But now folks with the power of thoughts
Have today become quite known
So if you posses the power of thought
And don't know how to use it
Consult others who have the same quality,
But very seldom abuse it.
For the Lord gave us the power of thought
To do with as we choose
So hang on to it, always,
It is one power you don't want to lose!
Norman Van Horne
