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7 Best Ways to Clear Your Mind From Negative Thoughts

stop-negativityMore often than not, Negative Thinking is a matter of habit. If you let thoughts linger in your mind, they will stay there unless, of course, you take action and get rid of them.

You might be tempted to use brute force on those thoughts. Don’t.

It doesn’t work that way. Pushing them out or using force often backfires on you.

You reinforce what you pay attention to. When you resist negative thoughts, you actually reinforce them. Then they become stronger. It’s a vicious circle.

The more you try to avoid them, the more you think about them.

Obviously, you should do something different. Devise a different strategy.

Below I will suggest several strategies how to get rid of your negative thoughts.

Change your posture

There’s an intimate link between your body and your mind.

Monitor your body language for a moment. Chances are, if you are in a state of negative thinking, your body will reflect that.

What’s your body language telling you? Are you slumped, as opposed to standing tall? Do you have a closed posture?

What is your facial expression?

If the answer to these questions is yes, you will be prone to negative thinking, even if you are not at the moment.

The solution here is to change your bad body language. Let your body express your confidence. Stand up straight. Smile more often.

Once you change your body posture, you will notice a change in your mental state. You will feel much better. The negative thinking will be less dominant or it may disappear entirely.

Science confirms that. In an article published in the Biofeedback journal, Professor Erik Peper found that just by choosing to alter your body posture to an upright position, you can improve energy levels and mood in general.

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So, just a simple change of posture might do the job with your negative thinking.

Talk to someone

It’s never a good idea to keep these negativities to yourself. It helps if you talk to someone. If nothing else, it makes you formulate your concerns and dilemmas much better.

Who you decide to talk to is not unimportant. Choose a good and considerate friend, who you know for sure won’t judge you.

When you decide to share your thoughts with someone, you will be able to see your emotional issues much better and put things into perspective.

If needed, you can then deal with the causes of the problem much better.

It is also important how you talk to someone. In a recent interview, Andrew Newberg explains the need to minimize negativity that goes on in conversations. For example, people should try to make three positive comments for every negative statement in their conversation.

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Calm your mind in meditation

You don’t need a long meditation session. Just a couple of minutes of your time.

Just to calm your mind.

Throughout the day we often let our mind run like a crazy horse. When you combine this with negative thinking, everything just gets more difficult.

So, sit down for a moment. Close your eyes. Do nothing. Just be present. Don’t try to stop your thoughts. Whatever happens, just be present.

It’s a kind of rebooting.

After a minute or two, you will feel much better. It often takes that little to slow down and stop rushing.

If you have more time, you can even thy some free guided meditations from UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center.

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Change your perspective

Negative thoughts can be the result of wrong perspective. Can you identify your point of view on the cause of concern?

Is the problem really so big as you imagine it? Is it a real problem or not?

Let’s take an example. Suppose you are thinking: “These problems are so difficult, I’m in a great trouble.” Instead, you could change your thinking to this: “Right now I face challenges, I’m working on them and trying to find a solution.”

Both statements reflect the same truth.

In the first you are negative. In the second you have a positive outlook.

Always try to find the positive in every situation. This shift in perspective could mean a great deal to your mental patterns.

Set aside some creative time

Being creative is a fantastic mood changer.

Especially if you are affected with negativity.

So, instead of obsessing with negative thinking, decide you are going to spend some time creatively.

It could be any form of art: writing, drawing, painting… Or even cooking, as long as you are creative in it.

The negative mental patterns disappear under the light of creativity. Use it. It works.

Creative work also enables you to explore your inner emotions. It can be a sort of self-therapy. It also leads to emotional discharging and brings about elevated mood.

Go for a walk

I know. This is trivial. But it helps.

So, take a walk, alone or with a friend. Ideally, it should be a walk in a forest, or at least in a park.

The idea here is that, sometimes, your thoughts are a result of your surroundings. You receive (positive or negative) thoughts from the people around you.

If they are filled with negativity, I bet you will be in a negative mood too.

So, if you change the environment, you may start to lose that negativity.

Wood is the best environment to transform your negative patterns. Science is clear about the health benefits of spending some time in a wood.

Even a park can help, or any cultural event or artistic performance that’s uplifting and fills you with joy.

Make it your habit to distance yourself from any negativity that surrounds you in your day to day life.

You can combine walking with searching for good things. Stacey Kennelly reports about a study in which the participants were instructed to consciously search for good things while in a walk. They were feeling happier than the people who were instructed to look for bad thing.

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Cultivate gratitude

Gratitude seems to be a magical cure for everything.

Seriously.

If you have never tried cultivating gratitude, now is the best time to do that.

Why? Because it works so well on dissipating your negative thoughts.

The famous spiritual growth guru Tony Robbins talks about 10 power emotions, or 10 emotional seeds you should plant in your soul right now. Can you guess which one is at the top of the list?

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We often tend to forget all the good stuff in our life. In the midst of our busy days, we simply have no time to focus on the positive. Not to mention the negativity we are constantly being bombarded by the media.

Now, you absolutely have to train your brain to start cultivating gratitude. For all the good things in your life.

There’s always something you can be grateful about.

Do you have a roof over your head? Are you grateful about it? Do you know how many people are homeless?

If you are homeless, are you healthy? Are you grateful about it? Do you know how many people are not healthy?

You get the point here? Make a list of things, no matter how small, that you are grateful about.

And, never, never take anything for granted. Often the wonderful things are right in front of your eyes, but you fail to see them.

Learn to appreciate the positive things in your life. They are already there for you and you should be enormously grateful for them.

Infographic

Check our the summary of this post in the infographic below and click here if you want to download it for free.

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The Miraculous Power of Focus

Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it.~Greg Anderson

There is a tremendous power in your ability to focus.

In this post I would like to explain how powerful the use of your own ability to focus can be, give you a couple of tips how to improve in this area, and show you a simple practical exercise with a ton of useful benefits.

If you can learn to focus the right way, your life will be transformed as if by magic.

Because…

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Your Reality is Determined by Your Focus.

Think about the title of this chapter for a moment. Can you see how true it is? Our experiences teach us that.

For example, you wake up in the morning and start thinking how miserable your day is going to be. Chances are your day will be exactly as you imagined it.

But if you focus on the fact that your life is a wonderful gift worth enjoying, chances are your day will be great.

Or if you let your focus jump here and there, from one task to another, chances are you will have an unproductive, albeit busy day.

I have understood one important thing for my life. Whenever I focus on just one task at a time and manage to lose myself in it, my day not only becomes productive, but very enjoyable too.

Likewise, when I focus on how tired I am and when I direct all my attention on, for example, watching TV, the result is countless hours of fruitless TV-watching done.

But if I focus on being fit and healthy, I become fit and healthy through healthy food and activity.

I know that now some people probably shake their heads in disagreement, but trust me, even though this whole story might seem simplistic, it’s totally true.

Meet the miraculous power of focus.

So, how can you use focus to enhance various aspects of your life? You can use the tips given below. Toward the end of this post I will also present a simple practical exercise for enhancing your ability to focus.

Focus on Your Goal

Focus is, without a doubt, the most important factor that will determine whether or not you will achieve your goal.

It is NOT willpower that determines your success. It is NOT self discipline. It is NOT how rewarding your goal is. It is NOT motivation.

It is focus. As simple as that.

The same holds true if you want to create a new habit.

It is how efficiently you can maintain your focus that determines your success rate.

If you can’t keep your focus on the goal you want to achieve or habit you want to build, there’s little chance of success. Unless your goal is an easy one that would’ve happened anyway without too much trouble.

End-Goals vs Means-Goals

It is also worth mentioning that you should be careful while selecting your goals.

Vishen Lakhiani has defined so clearly the concept and importance of going after “end goals“, rather than “means goals“. If you are new to this, check our his website, or his bestseller book “The Code of the Extraordinary MInd“.

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Now we are going to consider several great ways of keeping focus in your life: focusing on the now, on the things you are doing, and on the positive aspects of your life.

Focus on the Now

This is a subject thoroughly covered in the spiritual and self-growth literature. Like these tips from .

living-present

But, being present in the moment so important that I have to mention it here.

Focusing on the “here and now” can bring you so much good, that you simply cannot afford not to be doing it. Check out this slow pace meditation to learn how to enter the here and now more easily.

It can help you enjoy your life more, reduce stress, and improve your productivity.

Living in the now, as opposed to living in the past (“Why did you do that thing to me?”) or future (“The meeting this afternoon is going to be very boring.”) is a hard thing to do. It takes a lot of practice. But it is worthwhile.

Focus on What You are Doing

There are certain task we like so much, that when we do them, the entire world around us disappears. Have you ever experienced this?

When this happens, you are so involved in what you are doing, you lose track of time.

Another way to define this state of consciousness is to use the increasingly popular term “Flow State“. It turns out, being in a flow is a vital ingredient to happiness.

The state of flow, or being “in the zone”, is a state of peak performance. ~daringtolivefully

There is a profound satisfaction when you are absorbed in whatever work you are doing, as opposed to being in a passively boring state.

The million dollar question is how to get into a state of flow?

As anything truly valuable, it takes practice.

But the first thing is to find something you love to do. Something you are truly passionate about.

Find out what you love to do. Leave the usual distractions aside, TV, facebook, twitter, checking emails, … all those things are plain opposite to flow.

The next step after you get rid of all distractions is to focus on the task at hand. This is where things get difficult before they get easy (flow state). Eliminating distractions is another topic entirely. I don’t want to get into it right now. But, you have to maintain your focus for some time, and if you can do that you have won half the battle.

Love Melli takes this further with four simple steps for entering the ‘Flow State’ any time.

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Focus on the Positive

You have a simple choice in life. To focus on the positive or to focus on the negative.

Always choose the first one.

I’ve learned early in my life to focus on the positive. When I was really young, it came to me like the most natural thing. I don’t think I’ve read that somewhere. I just knew that it was the right thing to do.

Quickly I learned to dismiss my negative thoughts or to create positive thoughts instead of them.

The sad reality is that your negative thoughts have the tendency to grow and overwhelm your consciousness. You have to catch them early enough while you still have control over them.

has some great tips how to focus on the positive when the negativity is too embedded, and you need some help to uproot it.

focus-on-the-positive

Cultivate positive thoughts even if there are no negative thoughts in your mind. Learn this skill, as it is so important.

For example, create a habit of thinking how great you feel. Think about all the good things in your life. If you just make a small effort, you can find so many great things in your life you can feel great about.

You can also learn the transformative power of gratitude.

Learn to see the positive sides in any situation. No matter how grave it may be, there has to be something positive about it.

The end result is happiness, as you always focus on the positive.

Why is Focus so Important?

Focusing on just one thing at a time is very important. That is, until you finish the task. For example, let’s say you want to paint the outside of your house. You start off with a complete focus. The first couple of days you start by preparing the paint and paint one of the walls. While your focus is on the task, you make great progress.

But, halfway through the job, you decide that your house needs decluttering, and you shift your focus. You start to move boxes, and fill bags with junk. You no longer paint your house, because your focus is elsewhere.

You may even decide to jump back and fort between decluttering and painting, but then, chances are you will not be efficient in either task.

If you maintained your focus on the painting all the way till the end, you would have a nice painted house. Then you would be able to devote your attention to something else, like for example to declutter your house.

This is just an example why it is important to focus on one goal at a time. I’m sure you can find many others from your personal experience.

Multiple goals widen your focus, and you’ll have less chances to complete any of them. It is still possible, but your diffuse focus make it more difficult.The same is true with multitasking.

As reported by dailymail, study confirm that multitasking may be doing you more harm than good and may impact cognitive performance:

multitasking-and-focus.

Many of us will have problem maintaining focus even with one goal in mind. It is therefore very important to find a way to keep yourself on track. Here are some tips that I use:

  • I try to read online about my goal as much as I can. The other people’s experiences often mean a lot to me and bring me insight and inspiration.
  • I post easy to spot little reminders everywhere through my home.
  • I try to tell to my friends and family about my goals so they can remind me of it.
  • I dedicate a time every day to work on my goal.
  • I perform daily concentration exercise to enhance my ability to focus (see below)

For more tips check for example Celestine Chua’s post where she writes about 9 tips to stay focused on your goals.

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Concentration Exercise for Better Focus

Here is a simple practical method how to improve your ability to focus. It may bring you a lot additional benefits too.

Method:

  • Sit in a chair in front of a white wall. Find a dark spot on the wall at the height of your eyes. You can also use a black point on a white paper for this. Close your eyes and relax for a couple of minutes.
  • Open your eyes and start looking at the spot without blinking.
  • You body should be absolutely still. If you have to blink, do that, but before blinking, silently say to yourself :”I am going to blink”.
  • When you are done, close your eyes and observe the reflection of the spot on the inner screen of your mind for a couple of minutes.
  • At first, you won’t be able to practice for too long. Start with half a minute and slowly increase the time until you reach 5 minutes.

Benefits:
This exercise improves your ability to focus. As an additional benefit, it improves willpower, intuition, vision, memory and strengthens the eyes.

Outlook

If you’ve made it so far, I hope you liked this post. If you can spare an additional couple of minutes, please let us know how you manage to maintain focus in your life in the comments section below. Here is a beautiful and inspiring quote instead of a conclusion:

Successful people maintain a positive focus in life no matter what is going on around them. They stay focused on their past successes rather than their past failures, and on the next action steps they need to take to get them closer to the fulfillment of their goals rather than all the other distractions that life presents to them. ~Jack Canfield

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How to Achieve Enlightenment Through Meditation

“We need enlightenment, not just individually but collectively, to save the planet. We need to awaken ourselves. We need to practice mindfulness if we want to have a future, if we want to save ourselves and the planet.”~Thich Nhat Hanh

enlightenment-meditation-1Enlightenment through meditation? Is it possible? Yes!

Is it easy? No!

My lifelong mission has been to help as many people as I can to learn how to improve their life.

In particular, I’ve been teaching various meditation techniques, pranayamas, concentration, visualization and imagination methods, and invocation of higher Divine powers.

I’ve always been trying to help my students any way I can. Very often, they just need a little bit of encouragement, for example, to learn how set realistic goals in their spiritual life. But at the same time, I was always encouraging them to strive for the greatest goal of all…

Enlightenment… direct realization of the truth

Direct experience is the keyword here. Find out more about the importance of having direct experience in the Daniel Seeker’s book “The Door of Direct Experience”.

Why is achieving enlightenment so important?

Because, if you aim too low in your spiritual goals, you won’t get too far. I always advise my students to aim as high as possible. And the highest goal one can possibly set in one’s life is enlightenment.

There’s no higher goal than that. Period.

Enlightenment can be achieved in a number of different ways. I even believe, there are people who are enlightened naturally.

Meditation is just one of the tools for attaining enlightenment.

Of course, meditation has a number of other benefits, but if you ask me what’s the primary purpose of meditation is, without a doubt it’s achieving enlightenment.

Enlightenment has different levels and there are different types. For example, Nirvana could be considered one form of permanent enlightenment.

But here we won’t get too far discussing the levels of enlightenment. There’s no point discussing them. Because it might only satisfy your intellectual curiosity, but it won’t help you move forward even a little bit.

In addition, there’s no way to convey this ultimate experience by words, sound, images, or in any other way.

People ask me from time to time if you have to have a spiritual teacher or a guru to accomplish enlightenment. No you don’t. It might be easier to have someone to guide along the way, but in no way that’s a must.

That said, let’s see why a spiritual teacher is important:

  • In fact, enlightenment comes more as a Divine mercy, than as a result of your efforts. Your guru can help you receive Divine mercy more easily.
  • The other point is that your spiritual teacher can help you get rid of your ego. It’s very difficult to do that on your own. Because you don’t see your ego. Other people do, quite easily. Without breaking your ego, there’s no enlightenment. No way. The farthest you can go is getting spiritual insights, but not enlightenment.

If you are a beginner in meditation, you have to start somewhere. Here is a simple meditation instruction to get you going.

You can use this meditation every single day, and if you think it’s necessary you may even meditate several times a day. This technique is great to relax after a stressed day at work, whenever you are under pressure, or you find yourself in a frustrating situation.

  • Place a candle some 30 cm away and light it up. It should be leveled with your eyes.
  • Gaze at the flame (the blue part ideally) for 5 minutes. Try not to blink too much while gazing.

That’s it. It’s simple, but effective. In time, your body will be more and more in peace, and your mind will follow too.

After a while, when you have mastered this or other simple meditations types, you’ll want to move on. Here are some instructions and a description what awaits you on the more advanced levels:

  • Find a quiet room where you can be alone for a while. It is important not to be disturbed you something like 40 minutes.
  • Start by performing a pranayama exercise – which is another name for rhythmic breathing. There are many different ways you can breathe rhythmically. For example you can choose to breathe in for the count of 2, hold your breath for the count of 8, and breathe out for the count of 4. Repeat this cycle 10 times. Pranayama is a great exercise for accumulation of universal energy. The technical term is prana – vitalizing energy that will recharge your body, giving you new spiritual power. Check this post to get an idea about the different pranayama types.
  • Your pranayama should be followed by the practice of pratyahara. Pratyahara means to withdraw the senses from the outside world. Close your eyes and be conscious for several minutes. Do absolutely nothing. Observe. Observe the sensations in the body, hear the sounds around you, be conscious of the thoughts you have. But don’t interfere. Stay neutral. The final goal of this part is to achieve a state of being conscious without any thoughts. But it will take a lot of time until you manage to do so. Check this link for a complete guide on what pratyahara is and how to practice it.
  • If you do your pratyahara the right way, your senses will be turned inside, which will increase your awareness a great deal more. You will be in a position to reach the inner part of your Self – God in you. You would be able to feel the warm energy in your heart, feel the flame of love present there. That’s the energy of Divine love.
  • The next level is deep meditation. It’s where you become aware of the harmony of your heart, mind, and body. You feel devotion, you are able to contact the source of inspiration, and to open the possibility to achieve enlightenment.
  • The last part is the most difficult. You have to go through a wall, and there are no doors. Divine love is your real nature. When your consciousness perceives itself, it becomes pure. You get the full meaning of the words I AM, I ENDURE, I EXIST.

When meditation happens, what you feel and taste is love. Divine love. In this harmonious state you can BE in the state of Oneness with the Universe.

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When you learn to be quite, when you’ve abandoned any aspirations of any kind, you can say that you are free, without limitations. Only if your mind has become unoccupied, you will experience the indescribable magnificence of the moment of enlightenment.

You will feel your connection with the endless pool of power, with the source of unlimited inspiration and knowledge.

So yes. Work every day on your spiritual development. Have positive thoughts. Cultivate peace and serenity in your everyday life.

Develop love for your spiritual practice. Develop love for your meditation.

Devote your efforts to God. Everyone can succeed. You just have to overcome your personal obstacles.

Different people have different obstacles. And with them, your spiritual teacher can help.

You don’t have to wait for him or her: when you are ready, your spiritual teacher will come.

Infographic

Here is a simple infographic that condenses the main practical points in this article.

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References

Photo 1 credit:  Gwen’s River City Images

Photo 2 credit: Ian Burt

Filed under: Blog Posts, Meditation & Mindfulness