Have you ever heard yourself say “you’ve hurt me” or something similar, because some friend or loved one’s words have cut you to the quick? 

Or maybe you keep your reactions and feelings bottled up and to yourself but inside you are feeling like crap?  That would be me, and that’s why I was so intrigued and inspired by James Borg’s book, Mind Power.  Its power packed with simple truths that I think are invaluable.

It seems fairly endemic when I look around my friends and family that we are all so quick to blame others for making us feel bad, yet the remarkable and wonderful truth is that we cannot be made to feel anything by another person that we do not choose to.  The crux of it is that your thoughts are responsible for your emotions and it is not possible to feel an emotion that has not been stimulated by a thought.  For example if I say to you – try and feel guilty – it’s impossible to do without first having a thought that can stimulate that response.  However if I say remember a time when… for example, you had a few too many glasses of bubbly and had to go home early from your best friend’s 50th birthday, you may find it easy to feel guilty.  Or was that just me!
Thoughts are not things that happen to you, you create your own thoughts and if you want to test this then watch yourself thinking and decide on a new and different thought.  Go on and try it…

For the most part we don’t do this because we are unaware of the thousands of thoughts that trip through our head daily, although we are wholly aware of the consequent emotions that follow as so often they are negative.  There is no one harder on you than you.  Our minds are not alert to the thoughts that whizz through our heads like angry mosquitos, because they pass through so quickly we don’t even register them, we only feel the sting as our emotions kick in and we go straight from “you said that, and it made me feel stupid”, or angry or sad or embarrassed etc.   We run numerous negative “mini movies” in our head enacting out scene upon scene of what was said and what meaning we can derive from it, and the more attention you give it the worse it makes you feel.

If you want to take back some control over your thoughts then reading this and acknowledging that your thoughts are your response-ability has already helped you to make a start.  And remember the following:

• You create your own thoughts
• Thinking is not something that happens to you, it’s something that you actually do
• You can only have one thought at a time
• It’s only a thought, it can’t hurt you
• You can’t prevent it coming into your head but you can recognise and stop it
• If we are unable to change other people, or your particular life situation, then remember that your thinking is within your control

If you would like to learn more I recommend James Borg’s book, Mind Power: Change your thinking, change your life* available from Amazon

*Affiliate link