What is on your mind, that is to say, what you focus on, is what will shape and justify your experience of yourself, of others, and of life.
More people are becoming increasingly aware that how and what they think creates their experience. However, for many who are in great emotional pain the connection might not be so apparent. For those with a personality disorder, or other form of mental illness, it can be much more difficult to make the connection between patterns of thought and their correlation to experience.
Suffering is really more about a lack of insight and a lack of awareness than it is about your actual circumstance.
It is said that whether one is in emotional pain or not, suffering is optional. This is true because it is what is on your mind that creates so much of the suffering you experience. What you focus on will expand. Attitude is everything.
If you think in negative and patterned ways that leave you expecting the worst from yourself, from others, or in life generally, you will no doubt find that you have ample evidence to support your negativity. This will increase your suffering and often increase isolation and anger as well as shame.
The thing to realize here, however, is that your negative experience isn’t coming from others or life itself but rather that it is coming from your perception of events and circumstance. Negativity is a mindset. When your mind is preoccupied or even obsessed with negative, angry, or fear-based thoughts you will have a story that you tell yourself that will justify the lens that you are choosing to see experience your life through.
It is from this truth that the importance of taking personal responsibility cannot be overstated. Turning suffering into manageable pain cannot happen until one first accepts responsibility for everything in his or her life. There can be no exceptions. Each one of us is responsible for the choices that we make in reaction to or in contemplation of the events and circumstance that we must cope with at any given time in our lives as adults.
Have you thought about how you think lately? Have you attempted to get in touch with your observer self? Have you ever sat back and really just witnessed the ways that you think or talk to others or react, generally, or when stressed, specifically?
In order to gain more insight, awareness, and understanding about your experience getting in touch with what you are actually thinking, focused on, and how what’s on your mind is shaping your attitude is the place to start to find your way to the kind of change you need and/or may want to create in your life.
You cannot change that which you do not acknowledge. What’s on your mind will perpetuate your experience until such time as you begin to examine your thoughts – thoughts that are the foundation of attitude and experience.
© A.J. Mahari – April 17, 2008 – All rights reserved.
