Have you ever tried keeping track of how many times a day you have a negative thought? Or keeping track how many times a day you go to the kitchen and open the fridge when it’s actually not a meal time? Or keeping track of how many times a day you find yourself wishing for the time to go by so that __________ can finally happen?
All of those moments – each time you do one of the above activities or have those thoughts – you strengthen a habit and you strengthen a neural pathway in your pre-frontal cortex sector of your brain. I’m assuming that none of this surprises you and that you possibly already knew it all.
So you also know that if you start working out at a gym, you will develop muscles that were nearly non-existent prior to starting, and were certainly quite flaccid as opposed to how strong they become in time and with some effort.
It’s no different when you want to develop a ‘pick-me-up’ muscle. Each time you catch yourself going down the road of negative thoughts, each time you find yourself seeking comfort for some relatively undefined not good feeling by finding something to eat, each time you wish your life away by not living in the present moment, are all times at which you can be developing the ‘pick-me-up’ muscle simply by choosing to change. You can choose to change your thoughts:
- click here for a number of previous posts about dealing with thoughts
- read Get a Grip on Your Thoughts & Get a Grip on Your Life!
- have a look at some posts about mindfulness to help you remain present.
For much more information about your thoughts, feelings, choice, freedom and about living a conscious life, have a look at my book Rewiring the Soul: Finding the Possible Self
Click here to download the first chapter.
A Review (From Amazon):
“The masterwork of a profoundly gifted healer of the soul. Dazzling, challenging, wondrously useful.” Peggy Rubin, Director, Center for Sacred Theatre, Ashland, Oregon; author: To Be and How To Be, Transforming Your Life Through Sacred Theatre
Excerpt from an Interview:
Who is the book written for? Rewiring the Soul is written for anybody who suffers and I guess that means just about all of us! It is written for anybody who has not yet experienced enduring happiness and inner well-being; anybody who is reaching for inner peace; anybody whose life is not as they would wish it to be.
What can a reader expect to gain by reading this book? What makes it different from most other transformational or self-help books out there? So many wonderful teachers tell us about working on our spiritual selves. So many other wonderful teachers show us how to work on our psycho-emotional selves. But very few actually integrate the two. And Rewiring the Soul is my response to that challenge. Rewiring the Soul brings together the need to take your daily life in hand with the need to put your spiritual life in order as well. By daily life I mean your personal life, your professional life, the way you do or do not love yourself and all that such an attitude entails: conscious awareness, healthy boundaries, meaning in your life, recognizing you always have a choice, and taking responsibility for all your choices, etc., and by spiritual life I mean the inner connection to your eternal self.
If you have learned how to meditate, or do yoga, or whatever it is that you do, have you also learned how to observe yourself in the middle of an argument with your rebellious teenage son or your angry partner and hence choose to react differently because you have learned to love yourself enough to do so? If you have learned how to communicate more effectively with your children, spouse, friends, colleagues or employees, have you also learned how to be mindful and connect to yourself in meaningful ways to achieve that spiritual balance in your life?
While Rewiring the Soul is about so much more than that, those previous examples give an idea of what my book is about and how it does so in such a way that our psychological and spiritual selves nurture each other.
In a nutshell: neither the spiritual nor the psychological or emotional dimensions of your life will work if you neglect:
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your inner connection to the eternal self while you seek happiness in the outer world
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your happiness in the outer world while you seek the connection to the inner eternal self
It was Goethe who said “If everyone will sweep in front of their own door, soon the entire world will be clean“. In Rewiring the Soul ‘sweeping in front of your own door’ means bringing yourself to the utmost point of inner and outer growth, creating progress in body, mind, and soul. This literally means that you have already begun to change the world because of how you are changing yourself.
Are there many exercises in the book? Not at all. This book does not mean hard work, or spending a lot of time doing specific things. It simply means that as you read – if you so desire – you begin to incorporate small changes into your daily life. And so it begins. And the quality of your life changes…
How did you come to write this book? For years the essential content of Rewiring the Soul was like a small, recurring voice in my head; it was always there, and simply would not leave me alone. I had dozens of excuses for not writing it: I was working on my Ph.D. in psychology, I was teaching at a state university, I had three sons, later I was occupied with moving back to Spain, I was setting up my private practice, I had a monthly newsletter to write in English and Spanish, I had a weekly one-hour radio show to broadcast, I had a daily blog post to write, I facilitated numerous workshops and gave frequent speeches, and apart from all of this busy activity and work, sometimes I even had a life. In short, I told myself the book would simply have to wait. But just as a splinter under your skin eventually needs to be seen to, I ultimately realized that the only way I was going to be able to honor the more and more loudly clamoring voice in my head – and heart – was to sit down and write the book.
And you know, that goes to meaning. We all need meaning in our lives, and although I had many things that gave much significance to my life already, the inner urging and excitement I felt each time I thought about Rewiring the Soul compelled me to write the book. Rumi puts it beautifully: “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy“.