Are you toxic to yourself?
02 Apr 2011 Comments Off
I was. I learned to think toxic thoughts that hurt me from an early age. I was raised in an atmosphere of fear and scarcity where things would always go wrong, money ran through my mom’s fingers like water AND relationships were thought of as negative unsatisfying and disappointing.
My grandmother committed suicide when she was 50 and sick with emphysema. Her husband had died of a heart attack at the age of 50 as well, only 3 years before because he was so stressed and angry. Nana did not know how to move on from that and create a life for herself without him. My mom tells endless stories of her mother her father, and her grandmother arguing at the dinner table and generally being unhappy all the time.
Cancel all of that! I am breaking this pattern for the next generation!
These wonderful women who raised me were brought up with mistaken ideas about life that did not serve them well. Today my mom lives in Taos and writes beautiful music. She still worries all the time about money, disaster, rape and murder. She has never had a long-term relationship and has always been very poor financially. but despite all of this she has built a pretty good life for herself. She has a community of friends and acquaintances who put up with her crusty attitude because she is so creative and interesting.
Her mother never approved of her and tried to stop her from composing music as a child and would yell at her to “stop that twaddling and get back to her lessons. My mom knows nothing about law of attraction or positive thinking and clings to her negative system with a vengeance. Yet she is an inspiration to me in that she has always been true to her desire to be a composer even though she was not encouraged by her family or friends as a young woman coming of age in the 1950′s. She was the one who gave me a “creativity ethic”.
We are taught to disapprove of ourselves so our lives become a downward spiral of unhappiness. You can change this by taking hold of your thoughts and changing them to ones you would rather be thinking. I recently picked up the Louise Hay classic You Can Heal Your Life. I had forgotten how wonderful this book is and I had forgotten to use some of the simple concepts. She has a very open style and attitude. She gives you many wonderful ideas for shaking lose the old patterns but mentions all the other resources and modalities there are for creating change in your life.
Another great resource is the Happiness Make Over. by Amyee Coget you can get the home study version at her site. Having a happy fulfilling existence is a matter of retraining. We learned how to attract misery and stress by thinking the same thoughts over and over. We can see how this negative thinking works by looking at the society that surrounds us. Learn to think new thoughts, which cause new feelings which cause new actions and new outcomes to take place in your life.
And finally a great resource for changing beliefs and making happiness a priority is option.org and the work of Barry Neil Kaufman. His Books; Happiness is a Choice and To Love is to be Happy With, are still ground breaking even though they were written in the 80′s. The site has video, audio and at least 2 courses per month in their Sheffield MA location. They also have a system of “Power Dialogues” that you can do in person or over the phone. These are some of the most powerful happiness experts I know of.