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Health & Fitness

What are You Thinking About?

When you are confronted with a negative thought, you have the option of either ignoring it or inviting it in and analyzing it, meditating on it, and allowing it to rent space in your mind.

T he average person has about fifty thousand thoughts a day, and for many, these thoughts are mainly pessimistic and negative.  When you are confronted with a negative thought, you have the option of either ignoring it or inviting it in and analyzing it, meditating on it, and allowing it to rent space in your mind. 

I once heard a teacher use the term "renting too much space in our minds out to problems."  The teacher talked about a man who had bought an apartment complex and rented out 90 percent of the apartments to drug addicts, prostitutes, and gang members, and 10 percent of the complex to law-abiding citizens who actually paid their rent.  Well, after a few months, the 90 percent had run off the other 10 percent.  Then the drug addicts, prostitutes, and gang members took up the whole complex, and no one was paying rent. 

A similar thing happens in our minds when we start pondering, mulling over, and worrying about problems over which we have no control.  We end up renting too much space in our minds to these problems, and they eventually take over most of our thoughts.  In other words, we dwell on the problem,  not the answer. 

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Instead of renting so much space to our problems, we have to learn how to turn the channel of our minds from the worry channel to the joy channel, the appreciation channel, the laughter channel and start focusing on the things that are good in our lives.  When we focus too much on a problem, it only makes the problem stronger and takes root in the ground of our mind.  

When you do the latter, you begin to speak out the problem with your mouth, and it becomes a word.  You ponder it more, and it becomes and action.  You then analyze and meditate on it more, and it becomes a habit, and unfortunately for the majority of people, most of their problems are simply negative thoughts that have become habits.  In turn, these habits become very difficult to break. Live life on purpose

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