The Power of Positive Thought

By Michael Auliar

Thinking positively can change your life! It sounds phony, but it is true! How we think, how we feel, the ways we approach problems all feed into the outcome. Your brain learns through experience. When your thoughts, feelings, and approaches to problems are geared towards positivity the outcome will overwhelmingly be positivity as well.

 

Thinking positively does not cost you a monthly membership, or a subscription price. It does involve regular practice. You will have to sacrifice old ways of thinking. You will have to let go of some closed doors and hidden sorrows. But the financial cost to you is nothing and the reward is great.

 

You may be wondering, how does one go about cultivating a positive lifestyle? In this compendium, we'll examine the roles of your emotions and mindset in your positive outcomes. There are simple shifts you can make in your attitude towards failure, utilizing gratitude, compassion, and cultivating resilience in your everyday life. Positive actions take all of this learning from the theoretical into the practical moments that will truly enrich your life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Auliar
• Release date: Apr 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201508654

Book preview

Chapter 1:

Your Emotions

People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong. Why not try to see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom? ~Thich Nhat Hanh

What Are Emotions?

Emotions are electrical signals that are processed in your brain. Many of these messages come from elsewhere in your body to your brain. It has been shown that your body sends four messages to your brain for everyone that the brain sends back. Words describing emotions are the terms we use to help decode those messages. They could be as simple as pain or as complicated as shame.

Ultimately, emotions are electrical impulses from your body’s vast nervous system to your brain. These messages help you navigate through the world. You need to know what your body, therefore your emotions are telling you. When you know this you can change negative habits into positive ones.

The messages we are most familiar with come from the five main senses: sight, hearing, feeling, smell, and taste. Some of the messages travel faster than a direct message (DM). Picture your quick reaction to touching a hot pot on the stove. Before you can even say, Ouch! The oven is on so this pot is hot, your body has sent a message to your brain regarding the temperature and your body has sent a message back telling you to move away. Other emotions travel to your conscious mind with the speed of a polite email. When you get a chance, can you eat something? Thanks, so much! Your stomach. You get the message but may not react right away.

Then there are the difficult emotions. Often these are the ones you don’t want to deal with. You have ignored their DMs. You put their emails unread into the trash folder. You don’t answer when they phone. They wind up writing you a snail mail letter like a reject from a Jane Austin novel.

"My Dearest Corporeal Body,

It has been many moons since we last spoke. I am hoping we can find time to converse on a subject close to my heart. It is my sincerest wish that we are of one mind regarding this matter. If action is not taken soon we may perish.

Sincerely yours, Childhood Dreams."

You got the message, but you have no idea what it means, so you ignore it. These emotional messages may be confusing, but they want to be heard. Sometimes they will piggyback on other signals that are getting through. They will rewrite neural pathways in confusing ways.

Maybe you got picked on at school and your body didn’t know what to do with the fear. You ignored it. But that message still wants to be heard. It amplifies the actual cramping feeling in your stomach. You get this message and do something about the pain in your stomach. The next time you feel the fear of being picked on, your stomach hurts. If you continue to ignore the messages your body sends it will shift again. Soon the thought of going to school makes your stomach hurt. There is no direct biological reason why an organ used for eating would cramp up at the thought of traveling to a place of learning. It is not logical, but you are getting the message loud and clear.

Decoding these messages, particularly if they have been altered from the original, is not easy. Since the emotion itself does not last very long, the best time to decode the signal is right away. We tend to ignore our emotions and decoding them gets harder over time. There are several easier steps you can take to figure out what your own body is trying to tell you. Some of these steps involve naming them, accepting them, feeling them, and letting them go.

So let’s begin...

Name Them

Putting names to feelings can be easy; happy, sad, mad, tired. Many children’s books focus on naming feelings. Yet as we grow older it becomes harder to tell what those feelings are. When was the last time you slowed down to think about your mood and put a name to the feeling?

It seems that everything about this modern society is all about more information as fast as possible. We look for faster download speeds so we can stream more news and sports while we search for even more and more data. We are out of the habit of going slow and taking a complete inventory of our surroundings, never mind our feelings.

Naming an emotion is the first step to making sense of it.

Do you find it hard to figure out what you are feeling? Are you feeling so many things all at once that you can’t differentiate them all? This is normal. Feelings travel in packs. You can have more than one feeling at a time. Again, it is normal. Some of this internal confusion can be blamed on your vagus nerve.

The vagus nerve is the nerve at the base of your skull that stretches down through your neck and into your abdomen. It fires when your body senses something that you need to pay attention to. It could be a fearful signal or an excited one. Either way, it is the same nerve firing. If you don’t pause to bring awareness to the feeling and to see what it is trying to tell you, your subconscious brain will just file it with the last similar feeling. If you have been stressed out a lot lately, then that whiff of excitement you just felt will be filled with stress. You won’t even know why it is making you stressed. Your brain has enmeshed the two different causes of the same physical bodily reaction. When you slow down to actually feel your feelings, then the correct connections will be made in your brain.

It is also very helpful to remember that everyone has trouble figuring out what they are feeling sometimes. It is not like you were the only one in class without an instruction booklet. Most of us are making this life up as we go along. You are not the only one struggling with naming your feelings. It is normal when it takes you longer to figure some things out than other people— they aren’t living inside your