A couple attends a banquet. She sits next to an old friend with common interests. The conversation is lovely and the food is good. He sits next to a stranger who brings a prickly, negative cast to the conversation. The food is tasteless and overcooked. The food was the same, but the conversation altered the perceptions.Practice:
It is that way in our minds too. We have thousands of thoughts in a day. Some we let slip by without acknowledgement, like strangers passing on a busy street. Others, we talk to. Maybe we feed them from our plate. The thoughts we engage in conversation determine our emotions and our future tendency to think and feel in a particular way.
If the conversation in our head is overly critical and negative, we will not enjoy our experience, no matter what it is. It is easy to see how this happens. You can demonstrate the effect of your thoughts on feelings just by thinking a certain way for a few moments and noticing how you feel different. Perhaps you reflect on some grievance you have against someone. You may begin to feel angry. If on the other hand, you think about things you are grateful for or about the kindness others have done you, your feeling state will likely lighten and feel more pleasant.
The caveat here is that your mileage may vary based on your previous thinking habits. If you habitually converse with your angry thoughts, you will certainly get to feel the anger that comes with thoughts of grievance. You might have more trouble feeling the pleasure that comes with grateful thoughts.
When we engage thoughts of a certain emotional cast, we facilitate having that type of thought in the future along with the emotions that go with it. If we want to get better at a physical skill, we practice it over and over. Through repetition, the new skill becomes natural and automatic. What we may forget is that the same principle applies to our mental actions. The thoughts we practice become the ones that become automatic. We can be poisoning our future emotions by laying down and strengthening neural pathways for our negative thoughts just by engaging them in conversation today.
From time to time during the day, observe the conversations you have in your head. You will catch yourself in an inner dialogue. Step back from it, like you are overhearing a conversation between two other people. Notice the tenor of the self-talk. Disregard the rightness or wrongness of the content of your thought. Just notice the emotional flavor of it. Is this where you want to go? You may be justified in having an angry conversation in your mind, but do you really want to be angry? Do you want to foster angry thoughts in the future. You have the power to end the conversation if you want to. Perhaps you change the subject. Maybe, for a few moments you just stop talking to yourself and notice your surroundings or tune into the sensations of your body. Take a breath. Remind yourself to let go. Take another breath.
© 2010 Tom Barrett