The Thought Diet

I was having a conversation with a long time friend today who was having a small “problem” with a friend of hers and something important came up that I thought was worth sharing. She was having what she thought of as a problem and was talking about all the facts that surrounded the situation – those facts that she believed were at the core of why she was frustrated. What we first talked about was that her furstration was not her friends fault. It was nothing more than an indicator that a preference was born out of the situation and she is keeping herself from that new preference by focusing on things in the same manner she has always – that is, in regard to her friend.

One thing that was pretty significant was acknowledging that by having an expectation of how things were going to work out with her friend she added to the potential perpetuation of how things were to continue to unfold. By talking about what was she was anchoring in what was and further demonstrating who her friend has always been.

The other thing that was significant was the idea that her current situation with her friend has caused her to want something else. We talked about what that might be and why should would want that experience. What we talked about next was really great. What she really wanted to experience was not a certain set of circumstances but rather, a way to feel. She wanted what she wanted because she wanted to feel a certain way and she is using this situation as her excuse to feel bad and she could find a better way of looking at this sitaution until she felt the way she wants, which would be using this same situation as her excuse to feel good. In that process she would have created a potential solution to a problem that would have taken her friendship beyond where it was before. So by using the preference as her point of focus to get connected, she created something new in her experience.

All in all, she wanted what she wanted to experience a feeling. We all just use things in our physical experience as our point of focus to either get connected or to keep ourselves disconnected.

The same goes for your body. If you don’t like where you are and you keep your focus on where you are, you are doing nothing but keeping yourself disconnected from the solution. You think your body is causing you to feel bad and if your body would change you would feel good. So, in this case, you would be using your body as your excuse to feel bad. In the same case, you could also use your body as your excuse to find a solution, which you would have to get connected to do so. So in getting connected and finding a solution so you could experience the feeling that having a new body would provide you, you ultimately got the good feeling place first. It all comes down to enjoying the ride and using what you want as your reason to get connected. But, if you want to take a shortcut, think about what you want and why you want it (for the feeling it would provide you) and practice being there. The best and quickest way to do that is to find something in your life that you already feel that way about and use that as your practice to getting into that state. From that state, you might even find a way to close the gap between where you are with your body and where you want to be.

After making the last post about contrast being a good thing I received some comments from friends about the idea that contrast is the only thing that creates desire. I would like to say that I do believe being in high state of connection, like love or joy, can create a desire as well.

I think the difference between the desire created from contrast and the desire created in joy or love is the desire created from contrast is often for something new and the desire created from a state of connection is the expansion of what you are experiencing. One is creating anew potential and the other is expanding on the new potential.

To take this one step further, when you are in a negative place you have a desire for a new experience but you only want that new experience for the feeling you think having this new experience will provide you once you are there. So you really want what you want (desire) for the feeling, which is usually love or joy (or something similar). So the true desire is for a feeling of connection. We just use the physical stuff as our point of focus and our excuse to be connected or disconnected.

So, I would say that when you are in a negative state your desire to feel good is stronger then when you are in a connected place, which your desire may turn to one of wanting to stay connected and even expand on what it is you are experiencing. Wanting more of a good thing is a desire as well. Lastly, I would also say that being in a conected state is usually being in an allowing state where more creativity and expanded thought can happen. This itself can get the juices flowing for more, which is in itself a desire.

Just know that the important thing to remember here is that the seemingly bad stuff in life helps us to expand with new desires that may not have happened had we not had the contrast (the “bad stuff”). From the bad we desire to feel good and the best way to get to experiencing your new desire is to get yourself into the connected, good feeling place where you will be a match to seeing and fully recognizing your desire. From there, use that desire to feel good to continue to expand on what it.

I was workign with a client today and I had him practicing tuning into the physical sensation of emotion. He would focus on something that brought him joy and he would feel what he described as a euphoric feeling in his chest. But when I had him turn his attention toward his body he immediately felt the difference in the sensations in his body. He went from feeling good (euphoric) to feeling something negative in his abdomen.

After talking about it, he could see how his focus on his belly, which was his focus when he turned his attention to his body, would be a physical representation of what he felt internally. And since he had become desensitized to the physical sensation of his emotions (which were in place to grab his attention so he would do something about it) he can see how he developed a bigger indicator to get his attention about his negative focus.

With that, it was easy for us to see that his belly was nothing more than a reflection of how he has been feeling about his body as well as a reflection as to how he has felt about other negative things in his life since it is in his abdomen that he feels most negative emotion. Had he not gotten to the point where his belly had him asking for an improvement, he may have never started to clean up his emotional state about his body or about things in his life. And who knows what the next indicator would have been – that is, if he did not learn to use his body as a replacement indicator of his emotions. It could have beeb a lot worse.

And the great thing about all this is that having this thing he did not want (his belly) has helped him to determine how much his health and physical body are important for his well being. Not to mention the lesson he got from connecting his physical health with his mental health. From the negative comes the positive.

Last week there were three days in a row when I worked with a client where the conversation about the “bad” stuff in life came up and they wanted to know how to eliminate this bad stuff from happening. What I shared with all of them is what took me years to finally understand – and that is that the bad stuff, the contrast, in life is good for you. Without the contrast we would not launch desires. It is from the contrast that a desire for an improvement is born. From the problem comes a solution – and we humans LOVE solutions. You can’t help but determine something new for yourself in the moment of something you dislike.

This is how you naturally expand as a human being – this is one the biggest ways we become more. Where most people get all screwy is when they keep their attention on the problem. You can’t find a solution to a problem by dwelling on the problem. The more you focus on the problem by talking about it, thinking about it, and so on, you invite the problem either to stay in your experience or you invite more problems like it into your experience. What is lost in this point of focus is the expansion that is possible. If you never make peace with the problem, you never move toward the solution and the problem becomes a potential wasted experience.

If you think about it, most of things you cherish and appreciate in your life now were probably solutions to previous problems. Where you live, what you drive, your current relationship, etc., were probably, at one point or another, things you reached for as an improvement from a previous undersired situation or problem. Those problems gave way to a desire that had a solution.

So the same goes with your body and your health. If you see your body and/or your health as a problem right now, know that you have created a desire for an improvement, which has caused you to expand as a human being (you now want more than what you wanted yesterday). Your current problem will remain as a problem, however, if you don’t make peace with where you are and start to turn your attention to what it is you now prefer – turn your attention to your improvement, your solution.

You can also think of your current problems, and you attention to them, as the “asking” part of a problem/solution equation. The other part of this equation is the receiving part. If you feel negative emotion in regard to a subject then you are in the process of asking for an improvement (asking for a solution to your problem). The only way to be in a receiving mode for the solution/improvement would be to stop asking and that is done by making peace with where you are – to find a way to have neutral feelings about your subject. One way to do this (to make peace with where you are) is to acknowledge that you have been focusing on your problem in a negative way, thus asking for a solution but not allowing it to come. Your current body and health situation may very well be a reflection of where your focus has been.

I often get asked “what does emotion have to do with changing my body, isn’t it just about hard work and being committed?” Well, to some degree it is but I don’t think it has to be that hard of work if we tend to the things that go into success.

I think we are so engrained from an early age that anything worth having you have to fight and claw your way to get it. You have to earn it by doing all this stuff you don’t really want to do. Heck, this is the American Way, isn’t it? Well, after working with clients for the past 13 years I’ve come to realize that hard work alone doesn’t always guarantee results. And if they do, they often don’t stay. The reality is, most people who work out don’t ever really get to their goals. Either the work that they had to do was too much or the results were coming too slow and they became discouraged or they got injured and had to quit. And there is always the chance that they lost it but couldn’t keep up the hard work that got them there and they gain it back eventually.

The reality is, there are many things that can work against our hard work when it comes to the way we think. From a chemical standpoint, any negative focus someone has on their body, food or the actions they take to change their body will release chemicals that will work against the results they want form their body. Not to mention, there are neurological and energetic ramifications from negative thinking as well. But sticking to the chemical aspect…whenever you have a focus on something that you deemed as undesired you have negative emotions. Those negative emotions trigger a chemical cascade in your body as a result from stress. These chemicals, like cortisol, when triggered in abundance, have a negative effect on the cells of your body. Those cells are also taking information from those chemicals as to how to behave. When you think “fat and ugly,” your cells hear and behave “fat and ugly.”

So, every time you look at your body and criticize it or even just when you think about how much you don’t like your body, you release negative chemicals and your cells respond accordingly. It helps to know that your brain doesn’t know the difference between what’s outside of you and what was created through thought – what’s imagined. All it knows is that you have something negative going on and your body has to respond in a defensive manner and it does so with a protective mechanism to defend the bad things happening – even if they are just things you perceive to be bad.

The same chemical reactions happen when you feel bad about the food you are eating or the exercises you choose to do that you don’t like. It should also be said that sometimes we often choose exercises that are way beyond what the tolerance of the body or joints can handle at the time and that creates more stress. Stress is stress. When your body is stressed it does not perform at levels that would allow your body to work in a way to give you the body you want – or at least to get the results you had intended from the activities you chose to change your body.

Another way to think about this is if you are constantly bombarding your system with negative thoughts, thus bombarding your system with negative chemicals, then you are putting your energy system in what can be considered an energy deficit. This deficit is what you are trying to compensate for by doing exercise – the exercise being something of a positive energy. If you are working against yourself by thinking negative thoughts, imagine how much activity you would have to do to overcome this deficit.

The problem with this energy deficit thing is that it is not always that simple. There are many things that can make the physical exertion work against us just like negative thoughts do and combine the negative results. Choosing to exercise because you don’t like your body is one example that would create a stressful environment where adding more stress (physical stress of exercise) could work against you. Choosing to do exercises you don’t like is another example of creating stress that would work against you. In this case, it’s not just the physical stress of doing something but it is combined with the emotional stress of doing something you don’t like, which neurologically reduces the efficiency of the body, thus causing more stress. Combine that with why you chose to do something you don’t like (because you don’t like your body) and you can see how exercise alone isn’t enough to change your body and with enough negative things going on you could actually regress to a unhealthier and heavier body. We’ve actually seen this happen. We’ve had clients gain weight by doing too much exercise and being too stressed emotional and mechanically.

So what does one do knowing this information? The first step is to make peace with where your current body is. Try to find some way of accepting where you are. Since most people didn’t know that thinking negatively about their body, or anything else for that matter, can cause their body to gain weight and be unhealthy, then you can chalk your current bodily condition up to one of ignorance. Your body is the result of the thoughts and stresses you have absorbed over time and not knowing you had a choice in the matter, you can forgive yourself for being where you are.

Also know that feeling negative emotion is your indicator that your perspective is not working for you. Emotions, like other receptors in our body, serve as indicators to tell help guide you. Emotions are always in response to thoughts about what you are observing. Meaning, emotions are always in direct response to HOW you are observing something, not WHAT you are observing – you cause your emotions, not the outside world. And it’s much easier to change your thoughts than it is to change something in the physical environment.

It also helps to understand that every time we have something we don’t like, we automatically create a preference for something new. Without having the contrast of something negative, we would not have the important things in our life to strive for. With that, you might be thankful for the current situation you are in because your desire for a healthier and leaner body wouldn’t be where it is if you did not have the contrast you have now.

And for every negative, there has to be a positive. If you continue looking at and judging where you are the same way you always have, you will continue to experience the negative end of the equation. Make peace with where you are and turn your sights on the desire that was launched from your previously negative experience. You created this preference by the living of your life. If you don’t move towards what you prefer, you will feel the discord and life won’t be as fun as you intended it to be when you came forth into this life.