I woke up early Friday, at 4:47 a.m. in fact, thinking about this. About how so many people are missing out because they have a weird, tangly, sandpaper view of the simple belief that our thoughts are actual power sources.
You guys. Indulge me. Let’s back away from pop-culture fads and failures and just chat. I promise to not pass the collection plate or tell you what clothes to wear.
I want you to consider (or reconsider) that our thoughts are silent, renewable, orchestratable, abundant sources of power and energy. Or maybe, that they are conduits for the powers that can flow through us. Everything that exists or happens begins with thoughts and intentions. And thoughts literally alter the Universe.
I believe this fact as strongly as I believe that watermelon and tortilla chips are what I will request as my last meal if given the chance.
But seriously. Positive thinking has a funky reputation, maybe because it sounds like all wooden-beads-and-excessive-patchouli. Or maybe because we are barely a generation away from those folks who died with rolls of quarters in their pockets and hopes of spaceship ascension to paradise.
I get it. And I’m sorry to mock other religions, no matter how bizarre and dangerous they obviously are. I also get that most thinking adults do not want to be associated with fringe belief systems right now. It’s crazy times, and all.
But this stuff is so easy and good. It risks nothing. It’s nature, after all.
With regard to matters of faith and philosophy, I see that most people in my life fall into one of three camps:
- Traditional Christian values, with the known wide array of dogmatic expressions (Oklahoma = Bible Belt)
- Sternly scientific and logical, with a results-and-reason-based work ethic (action-based morals, largely)
- Atheist or agnostic (just eff it all man)
That’s all cool. Truly. More power to each of us to explore, discover, and articulate the things we believe to be true.
What I am offering for your consideration does not challenge any of that. Pinky promise.
Because all of us have thoughts. We are thinkers by nature. We can’t even help thinking. Some people think so much they need help to slow it down and numb out a little. And (this is my solid belief) those thoughts are all wildly powerful signals to the Universe, whether the thinker of those thoughts realizes it or not. Every human being, regardless of both religious constraints and life circumstances, has an unlimited wealth of power stored in his or her mind.
So why not harness it? Why not at least try?
Okay. Right now as we chat, two things are happening in my brain, and maybe in yours too:
On one side, the old school Christian voice is whining excitedly and sucking her front teeth at me, prissing, “Now little girl, that sure smacks of humanism! Sounds like someone’s a Rainbow Brite doll away from the mark of the beast!”
(Did you imagine Dana Carvey just now, wearing a wig and a polyester skirt suit? Me too.)
Meanwhile, a sexier but less enthusiastic voice is purring from the other side of my skull, just oozing unhappiness: “Yeah, sounds nice, but that’s BS and you know it. If your thoughts are so powerful then why do you have so many real problems?”
(That voice for me belongs to Angelina Jolie. Infinitely beautiful and seductive but dried up on the inside, miserable, cruel, constantly seeking what she cannot find. Who was it for you?)
I really do get it. Both the disbelief, the indifference, and the mild repulsion to “positive thinking” as even an ingredient for faith.
(Sorry, I do not possess internal dialogue for atheism and not know how to assign that one a voice. If you do, please share!)
The place of faith where I have landed is less like a mix the three camps and more of a completely separate level or reality that actually connects them all. This is complementary, not competitive.
Your thoughts can serve as a beautiful support net that strengthens, illuminates, and girds up your existing system of faith. In fact, it kinda should. I have found that if my inner thought patterns contradict what I am seeking in prayer, if I am wringing my hands with worry as I pray, imagining the worst, then my prayers don’t get answered the way I say I want them to be. Does that make sense? Thankfully, the exact opposite is also true.
I have a handful of personal stories to share that are pretty good mile-markers in my own little evolution of belief. I will work on some blog posts to tell those stories, but for now…
Please join me on a brief vacation from worry. Treat it like a fun experiment, if you like that kind of thing. Just get really still and honest with yourself about the things you want in life (not the things you don’t want, that’s key) and, the rest is pretty simple… Start thinking about them. But do it more vividly and with more dogged positive energy than ever before.
Start thinking about them. But do it more vividly and with more dogged positive energy than ever before. Drum it up from deep inside yourself!
Continue working on your goals and living your daily life and being accountable for your actions, always. And maintain your prayer life, whatever that means to you. Thinking strong, constructive, loving thoughts is a nourishment to all of those efforts.
Let your mind fall easily and happily on the details of your heart’s desires, like it’s playtime in your heart and brain. In your free moments, while you’re exercising, if you’re in the shower and the warm water loosens your mind. Try falling asleep thinking about what you want for the future; it’s much more fun than privately scanning an unaccomplished to-do list, and I bet you’ll sleep more soundly.
This is meant to be lots of fun and hopefully spark some discussion. The expectation is not that suddenly all of your dreams will come true and all of your problems will evaporate. The expectation is that you will get a spark of control over the positive energy buried in your mind. Also, though, I happen to know that the thoughts you choose (during this experiment and anytime) are like seeds that will germinate and can manifest at any time in the future. I just don’t want to convince you of too much at once, haha : )
Maybe you will feel emotionally better day by day or begin to sense more possibility and gratitude in your life, if you are usually worn down by the limits and the negatives. Maybe you will detect an opportunity for healing in a broken relationship or solve some practical problems. Maybe something truly uncanny will happen as a result of your focused thinking (this is how it happened for me) and you will be like, WHOA.
I’ll be checking back in about this. I am so excited for you. And thank you for indulging me today!
If you want to read a few past posts about this, here ya go:
Heading out now to see some friends and enjoy another hot and humid summer evening in Oklahoma. We’ll be looking for that technicolor sunset again.
Think well.
XOXOXO
Great blog post! I already feel positivity brewing. Maybe my mommy skills will sharpen and I can get those yucky vibes in my head down to an extreme minimum!
Love!
Thank you so much, both for reading and for chiming in!! I am confident your already excellent mommy skills will sharpen. no doubt. And I know you have the power to replace yucky vibes with radiant ones. Wasn’t the eclipse amazing for this?? xoxo
I have a hard time with this one. I’m ruminating on it. It has taken me a long time to let go of the idea that my thoughts DO have power – I’ve had anxiety all my life and part of the OCD compulsive thinking, for me, was, if I don’t worry enough about x bad thing (my plane crashing, for example), it will happen. That my act of worrying saved myself and the world. It led to a lot of worrying, obviously, because there’s a lot that an anxious person can imagine going wrong! I understand you’re talking about envisioning GOOD things happening, but it feels a hair’s breadth from my other, more destructive tendency. But I am intrigued by the practice of visualizing yourself achieving goals and helping to believe something into being – but I think that has more to do with how positive thoughts can drive positive action.
I really feel exactly where you’re coming from, because I spent years there. And it’s hardly my place to say you’re wrong; I just know that this thought pattern not only caused me a lot of unnecessary pain and stress, it also seemed to bring a handful of awful worries to fruition. (Thankfully not so much as the GODO things that eventually started happening! That, I think I owe to grace, pure and simple.)
I used to have this idea (instinct?) that by thinking about a terrible possibility, I was somehow preventing it from happening, or at least I was preparing myself for its eventuality. I think deep inside my heart I knew that attention counts for something, I just had it backward.
And there are schools of thought that say, for sure, predicting trouble (troubleshooting) is healthy and wise. I just know I have a vivid and active imagination and took it too far. Maybe OCD is similar, I don’t know?
So yes– it is a fine line, and it’s up to each of us to decide whether “positive thinking” etc is the right path to take. At the end of the day actions matter a great deal, I suppose. I am just so happy to see that imagination plays a big part too.
I wish you ALL the very best!! Thank you a ton for reading and sharing your thoughts. I love to hear what my friends think!! xoxo
The atheist voice is always exclusively male, and it comes from right above my head, like ti’s trying to talk down at me.
By now you saw Suzanne’s idea that the atheist voice is Samuel Jackson? SO GOOD. hahaha
I can see that there are things in my life that I have wanted and have received with little effort, or with efforts that were supported by a sort of wave, as I picture it, shoring me up and pushing me forward, a wave of things I couldn’t have controlled. Some time after moving to Santa Fe I was shocked to find a Pinterest board I’d made years ago with image after image of New Mexico, called “All My Other Lives”, that I’d forgotten about in the mean time, and yet here I was in New Mexico. I had always been interested in working in film but never thought it would happen–and then here we were in NM with a film industry booming and I threw myself at it to break into it, and then a couple coincidences occurred to just usher me into it. Or with my Paris trip–I made a solemn vow to myself that I would go, and asked the universe if I would, and then that day I saw the car with the license plate that said “Oui” and I knew I would go–and four years later I did, without any actual effort on my part, it just materialized. But I do struggle with this concept when I think about people in very terrible circumstances, living in absolute poverty in Mexico, say, or in war in Syria and the Congo. It seems cruel to tell them to believe their way out of it. You know? That’s where I always hit the road bump. And I’ve definitely had things I’ve tried to manifest with visualization and meditation and affirmations that were like LOL NOPE. But I will continue to contemplate, as always. Xoxo.