For most of us, the modern world brings with it a high level of stress and anxiety. From rushing around ticking off an endless to do list, being exposed to daily negative news, and living in a society that no longer has strong community bonds - we experience tension in the mind and body. We are hard-wired to look for danger. This is our brain attempting to protect us. In doing so, we live lives filled with worries and negative thinking. Without the bear or tiger to run from, our minds turn in on themselves.
Nicole Bowman is a psychic, medium, and intuitive artist. She shares that loving ourselves first is the most important step to healing the world. Our hearts, minds, and homes are the foundation of the world we live. How we speak to ourselves internally affects our world view, which influences the world around us.
In Alison Ledgerwood’s TED Talk, ‘A Simple Trick to Improve Positive Thinking’, she states that our perception of the world is often negative and changing how we communicate can create a more positive outlook on life. Failures stick in our minds longer than successes because our minds get stuck in the negative. Once we frame looking at a situation from a loss view, it sticks. Our view of the world tends to sway toward the negative. We have to work harder to see the positive. It takes effort, but we can train our minds to do this better.
Gratitude journaling can boost our wellbeing and improve our health. We can rehearse good news and share it with other people. Talking about good experiences improves our ability to think about positive things in our lives. We can help our communities to focus on the upside by being kind, compassionate, and saying loving words. We can retrain our minds if we put some effort into it.
One powerful way to shift from negative to positive thinking is affirmations. An affirmation is a sentence we tell ourselves daily to invite that positive thing into our lives. It can be as simple as ‘I am love’ or ‘I am worthy.’ The whole idea is to boost our confidence and energy levels by the things we say and think about our lives. This practice helps us to look at our jobs, relationships, environments and inner worlds – and become aware of what we want to change. The first step is accepting where we are right now and then trusting that change is possible.
We can introduce an affirmation practice into our lives for our wellbeing toolbox. We can start by choosing one thing we want to invite into our life. Keep it simple. Say it daily and breathe it in as you say it, speaking in the present tense. Be patient and imagine yourself being and feeling all of it. Own how you feel now, accept where you are at, and know that a more positive life is possible. Writing down our affirmations helps. An affirmation practice clarifies what we desire and where we want to go in life. Our thoughts and words have tremendous power, and we have the ability to create a more beautiful world through what we say each day.
Words by Madelaine Couch
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