Detoxing the mind is much like detoxing the body, the process dismantles, releases, and purges the things that prevent us from being in our highest integrity. Toxic thoughts consume us with negative feelings that ultimately evolve into negative actions. Releasing the detrimental thought patterns allows us to affirm, wholesome, and life-giving thoughts, conversely, the same actions follow.
A major component of thought detoxification is to say what we feel when we feel it, and not allow it to create deep anger and resentment. Generally, our psycho-babble consists of things we wished we had said or done at a former time, and because we didn’t, the scenario continues to play itself out over and over in our heads, like a broken record. The longer it plays the more negative our thoughts become, trapping us in a never-ending time loop.
For instance, if we regret not having apologized to someone 20 years ago for whatever reason, we will continue to feel regretful 20 years later, the only solution is to apologize now. However, it may be 20 years later, doing so, will free us from painful and distracting memory of having not done so.
Constantly reliving unpleasant memories, ultimately becomes nothing more than a nonproductive, self-defeating bad habit, that produces disease states. A habit is a physical groove in the brain, the more we act on it, the deeper the groove becomes and the harder the pattern to break. The only way to break a habit is to resolve or replace it, with generally its opposite. The challenge is to remember to do the opposite before your mind enters the usual, robotic response. Detoxing the mind requires extreme perseverance because the mind goes on automatic pilot unconsciously when triggered by something, generally unbeknownst to us, begins to ramble unresolved emotional traumas before we realize it.
The quality of our lives is not merely determined by what we consciously say, it is determined by the conversations we have playing in our subconscious mind. What we whisper to ourselves in the deepest places of our subconsciousness is what rules our lives. Generally, when the mind roams it is playing out some adverse scenario whether real or imagined, if we are to gain control of our lives we must first control the monologue in our subconscious mind. If we say we want to change our eating habits we must first identify, and then neutralize the conversation in our head that tells us, we either cannot do it, or we do not need to do it.
Action is thought in motion, therefore we can always trace our thoughts back through actions, what we do the most, is the result, of what we tell ourselves the most. Changing our thoughts cannot be approached from the typical “New Year’s resolution” child-like mindset, which is nothing more than an impulsive empty wish. Changing requires extreme focus, because every second, we must REMEMBER that we have decided to do something different, and the “remembering” establishes the new groove – the new habit and changes lives.
