Here is my buddy Tom’s reply to one of my blogs:

“I used to have to stop and think to get myself centered and able to accept “What Is”.

Now it’s almost automatic. When something happens and I feel like responding negatively, I say to myself, “ I don’t want to respond to that”, and the feeling passes and I feel better!”

Now there’s a man who knows how to dismiss a bad thought.

The average person will have about 50,000 thoughts enter and leave their mind per day.

We have the ability to disregard many thoughts that are meaningless. It’s good we can do this, otherwise we would go crazy with too much mental activity to handle.

But sometimes when we are upset and traumatized, we hold onto negative thoughts as though that would help the situation. Instead we remain miserable.

“What’s the process of controlling thoughts?”

“You have very little control over which thoughts enter your mind to BEGIN with.

Your POWER over your thinking begins AFTER the formation of a thought.

Then you have the CHOICE of continuing to think about it OR let it drift away.”

“What’s the spanner in the works then?”

“It’s our faulty judgement of what is good or bad that gets us into trouble.

We tend to hang onto bad thoughts and analyse them as if they were very important.”

“What happens when we take a negative thought seriously?”

“We start to experience the effects of that thought and to feel all the bad emotions tied to it.”

“I’ve been down that road and it makes me sick!”

“Fortunately, as we learn to disregard negative thoughts we begin to feel better.”

“So, when I dismiss a negative thought and go on to something else I will be free from the negative effects of those thoughts.”

“That’s right. Many of us will TORTURE ourselves with our own distorted thinking.

And the absurd thing is that we are doing it to ourselves!

You are the thinker who is thinking negative thoughts!”

“So, the power to stop negative thinking is in my hands.”

“Yes, it is.  We discover how wonderful it is to feel better again. And the good news is that it gets easier with practice.”

“Keep learning and practicing, that will be my motto.”

“Another recommendation is to stay in your WISE SELF. Some people tend to react emotionally to everything.”

THREE WAYS OF THINKING:

The Emotional Self—people who think from this perspective, their emotions control their behaviour. This is NOT in your best interest.

The Reasoning Self—people here think things through before they act and they discount their emotions. In this state it means you’re using logical thinking.

The Wise Self—acting from your Wise Self is finding a balance between your emotional and reasoning selves and figuring out what’s in your best interest in the long term.

When you’re using your Wise Self you’re choosing how to act rather than just reacting.

You can always tell you’re in your emotional self when the emotions are intense and you feel caught up in them.

When you’re in your Wise Self, you still feel the emotions but you don’t feel controlled by them.

Instead, you feel a sense of calm and a feeling of being in control, even though the emotions are still present.

You’re never too old to learn and practice dismissing negative thoughts.