Discipline is required in everything we do. Whether it may be our diet, our discipline to stick to a schedule, our discipline to exercise but what I have found is the most difficult to control is the discipline to have the right thoughts. By that I don’t mean we need to control & monitor every thought that come into our head but if we could give our thoughts an overall direction, I think our lives could be a lot simpler & better.
It’s very east to slip into negative thoughts with things going wrong in the course of the day or unexpected things occurring which we had not anticipated. A day with bad thoughts is pretty much a day gone bad.
Why is it that it’s so much easier to correct others while it’s so much tougher for us to correct ourselves? It seems a lot easier to identify why others have the wrong kind of thinking but it’s equally tougher for us to identify the wrong thoughts within us.
In order for us to understand our thought better, I have mentioned below the following pointers.
- Treat your thoughts like money in the bank
Just the way you would think before using money you have in the bank, start thinking before you use your thoughts. If we can start to become aware of what we are thinking & we have the understanding that we are actually spending our thoughts, we will start to think differently & become more specific about where we spend it.
Even though it’s not practically possible to control our thoughts all the time, just having the awareness about our thoughts being treated like currency, will go a long way in helping us. Every wrong or so called negative thought is like us burning a currency note whereas every progressive thought can be treated like an investment we have made which will give us a positive return
If we can take our thoughts to this level of understanding, I’m sure a lot of things in our lives would fall into place. It reminds me of the quote by Buddha
“Correct your mind & the rest will fall into place”
- Using your thoughts is like using physical muscles
Just the way we have a finite amount of strength in our body, we have a limited resource on our mind at a given point of time. If we exhaust ourselves with negative thoughts we feel like all our energy has been sucked away. So taking the same analogy above, treat your thoughts like physical muscles thinking that every positive thought will add to your energy & every negative thought will take away your energy.
If your physical capacity is to run 2 miles at one go, you obviously can’t run another 2 miles after your first run. Similarly, if we have exhausted our metal muscles by dwelling on the bad stuff, we won’t have energy to use it to create the good stuff.
Thinking about the good stuff would be more like increasing your physical Stamina so you can push yourself beyond the 2 mile limit the next time.
If we land up using the limited resource in a counterproductive way, it will leave us with no energy to move ahead in a progressive manner as all our thoughts would have created the wrong momentum within our minds.
- Observing how are thoughts make us feel
It’s not hard figure out what you are feeling. If we feel tightness in our body & face, short on breath, we have thought the wrong thoughts. If there is a feeling of release in our body, a certain calmness, we have invested in the right thoughts.
The only way we can preserve & increase this limited budget is by adding the right kind of thoughts to it. The thoughts that keep our focus on the solution rather than the problem. The thoughts that invest in strengthening our faith rather than increasing our worry.
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