Motivation
Every moment of your life you have the choice to either think positive thoughts or to think negatively. If you want to be a master of yourself and be in a loving place towards yourself and others it is much easier if you can control your thoughts.
Unbalanced emotions often create negative ego-based thoughts. My yoga workshop on August 30th, 2014 “Yoga, Self-Love and Personal Power” goes deeper into how to keep balance (beside a powerful yoga flow and a wonderful relaxing and restorative session afterwards).
The following chapters give you some pictural thought representations and some practices of how to change your thoughts.
Thought Representations
Authors differ between thought vibrations and thought forms:
“As we have seen, a thought gives rise to a set of vibrations in the matter of the mental body. Under this impulse the mental body throws off a vibrating portion of itself shaped by the nature of the vibrations, much in the way that fine particles laid on a disc are thrown into a form when the disc is made to vibrate to a musical note.” – Arthur E. Powell in “The Mental Body”
Thoughts can have different effects: Thoughts, that you think with no special emotional charge, like planning your day, dissolve again. Thoughts that are charged energetically high can have a profound impact on yourself and on others. Read more about this e.g. in C. W. Leadbeater’s book: “Thought Forms”.
In the following paragraphs I give you different pictures and demonstrations of how different thought vibrations and forms could look like. You will find different authors and some of them are scientific and others rather intuitive. I hope you enjoy these pictures even if you might find some of them not scientific.
The Effect of Thoughts on your Body
Mrs. Dr. Ghooi wrote a couple of books about yoga and health. She has an academic medicine career, backed up with yoga. Here two figures from her book “Spirituality and Health”. They show the impact of negative and positive thought impulses on the body.
The work of Dr. Masaru Emoto
Dr. Masaru Emoto photographed water crystals after he exposed water to different words and put it in the freezer. Here you see four pictures from his work, you find more on his homepage.
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- Thank you
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- Love and Gratitude
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- Eternal
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- Evil
Thought Forms and their Nature
The following pictures are taken from C. W. Leadbeater’s book “Thought Forms”. He says, that they were drawn clairvoyantly. The book explains in detail which laws govern the formation of thought forms and their effects. The quality of a thought form determines its color (different colors have different meanings). The nature of the form its form and its definiteness determines the clearness of the outline. Here are some of his pictures from the book:
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- Vague Pure Affection, from C. W. Leadbeater: “Thought Forms”
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- Vague Selfish Affection, from C. W. Leadbeater: “Thought Forms”
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- Definite Affection, from C. W. Leadbeater: “Thought Forms”
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- Radiating Affection, from C. W. Leadbeater: “Thought Forms”
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- Vague Religious Feeling, from C. W. Leadbeater: “Thought Forms”
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- Upward Rush of Devotion, from C. W. Leadbeater: “Thought Forms”
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- Response to Devotion, from C. W. Leadbeater: “Thought Forms”
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- Self-Renunciation, from C. W. Leadbeater: “Thought Forms”
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- Angry Jealousy, from C. W. Leadbeater: “Thought Forms”
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- Watchful Jealousy, from C. W. Leadbeater: “Thought Forms”
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- Explosive Anger, from C. W. Leadbeater: “Thought Forms”
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- Sustained Anger, from C. W. Leadbeater: “Thought Forms”
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- The Logos pervading all, from C. W. Leadbeater: “Thought Forms”
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- The Logos as manifested in Man, from C. W. Leadbeater: “Thought Forms”
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- Intellectual Conception of the Cosmic Order, from C. W. Leadbeater: “Thought Forms”
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- Sympathy and Love for all, from C. W. Leadbeater: “Thought Forms”
Practices to shift your Thoughts
There are so many practices to shift your thoughts. This article states my favorite ones. They work with the three layers of the mind: the high mind, the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. All these techniques are working on all three levels. They are interlaced even though you find them divided into the following chapters.
The High Mind
Practices for the high mind is anything which addresses God/the Source/the Creator or your high self. God or the Creator for me is the formless and the form. Your High Self is a part of the whole. Edgar Cayce said: “Why worry when you can pray? He [God] is the Whole, you are a part. Coordinate your abilities with the Whole.”
A simple and highly effective practice to shift your perspective fast is by Sir Isaac Tigrett. He gave in various speeches a wonderful prayer, that he received from the spiritual teacher, Sri Sathya Sai Baba:
“Dear God, please think through me, please feel through me, please speak through me, please act through me, please breathe through me, and please love through me.” – Sir Isaac Tigrett
The thought comes first. Based on the thought you feel something or an emotion comes up for you. Your thoughts and feelings determine how you speak and act. This prayer already shifts your thoughts instantly to thoughts based on love. If you pay attention to your breath and make it steady and calm, your brain waves will adjust to your breath and calm down, too. “Please love through me” is so sweet, I find. You can also think of this statement as an invitation to infuse all your actions with love.
Devotional singing (bhakti) is another practice to address your high mind and God. You are working with positive affirmations, surrender everything and often there comes a feeling of bliss while chanting. All this is very powerful and has a calming effect on your whole system. As Mrs. Ghooi stated in her diagram, bhakti is also pranayama: when you sing, you are having a long exhale, which soothes the nervous system.
Meditation: There are many ways of how to meditate. If you take meditating as an observer for example, you practice to become aware of your thoughts without judging them or suppressing them. This is like a thought-detox. Thoughts and emotions, which are suppressed start their own life in your subconscious. Becoming aware of them consciously and releasing them is a great way of gaining control over your thoughts.
The Conscious Mind
Practices for your conscious mind are things you do consciously in order to change your thoughts from negative to positive. For example, your could simply distract yourself, work with body awareness, affirmations or deny consciously certain thoughts in your thinking. If you deny a thought you ignore it. By turning your attention and energy upon something else, you pull away your energy from this particular thought form and put it consciously into a another, into a positive one.
I found a great way of dealing with negative thoughts is to release them . Your could state out loud: “I release all fear of …”. The course of miracles says, that the basis of the universe is love. If you release fear (and your words and thoughts are powerful, when you make such a statement), love remains. You only have to state out loud a releasing statement once. If there is a high emotional charge on your sentence you will feel it and you might want to repeat it. A wonderful book which describes the releasing technique is “Designing your Heart’s Desire” by Sharon Cameron. Her main releasing statements are: “I release my belief, perception and judgment that …”, “I release all fear …”, “I release all need or desire …” and “I release all unwillingness to …”. When you make a positive statement notice all the negative thoughts that come up and write them down. This is your resistance from your subconscious towards the positive. By releasing consciously these negative statements you work at the same time with your subconscious.
Other techniques to change your thoughts are for example: changing perspective (ask the right questions like “What am I going to learn from this situation?”) or gratitude. You can also do certain breathing techniques (pranayama) to turn your attention inwards. If you are doing a couple of rounds of Kapalabhati probably you will need to direct your attention towards your practice and concentrate on that.
Self-inquiry and take action: Examine your thoughts and see if some of them give you a real indication that you should change something in your life. Even if you might not be able change a situation in one big step taking baby steps over a long period of time is highly effective and satisfying.
The Subconscious Mind
The subconscious mind has a couple of functions, e.g. automatic body functions or protecting us from harmful situations. The problem is, that sometimes the programs of our subconscious are not appropriate anymore to protect us. But as a situation in the past was never healed it just runs its same old mechanism. One example: It could be that you fell down from a tree when you were little and the subconscious remembers these kinds of trees as a source of huge stress in your life. It “protects” you by keeping you away from them with the means of an allergy.
To work with the subconscious mind you can use a variety of methods: the methods from Malcolm Southwood that I learned in my healing education, and that I am also using for myself and with my clients, who come for a session, the visualizations and methods from Phyllis Krystal as well as some other methods. The key here is, that you release the harmful situation from your past or a false belief (a belief is just an often repeated thought with no judgment if the thought is “right” or “wrong”) and replace it with a new one.
Conclusion
“Sow in the field of your heart the seeds of good thoughts, charged with humility; irrigate it with the waters of Love; protect the growing crop with the pesticide called Courage; feed the crop with the fertiliser Concentration; then, the ‘bhakthi’ (devotional) plants will yield the harvest of jnaana, the eternal wisdom, that You are He, and when that revelation comes, you become He, for, you were always He, though you did not know it so far.” – Sathya Sai Baba, SSS, Vol. VII, Chap. 8