The Viable Alternative

Back in the 2000s, I was a huge proponent of positive thinking, and I bought scores of books all for the purpose to cultivate positive thoughts so I can be a successful person who lived an extraordinary life.

However, after about six years on my path of self improvement, I wasn’t any better at being a positive thinker than when I first started. I logically knew that it was good to think positive because positive thinking improved your overall well being by making you happier, it helped cause good things to happen in your life, and it had positive effects on those around you.

Despite all this, I couldn’t seem to think positively for too long. Sooner or later “something” seemed to throw me off, and when I was thrown off the wagon, it seemed so hard to get back on. It seemed like I would have a short cycle of positive thinking, followed by a much longer cycle of negative, destructive thinking that would wipe out the foundation that was built by my short stint of positive thinking.

I would sometimes get into these cycles of negative thinking for days on end. I felt trapped in these cycles, and I would wonder to myself why if I knew how beneficial positive thinking was to be for me if I did it consistently, why couldn’t I just control my thoughts to think positive on a consistent basis? It made no sense why I would want to get it together but I couldn’t. It was as if something was blocking me from thinking positive, but logically it didn’t compute because after all, if positive thinking was supposed to be good for me, shouldn’t it have been something I should have no problem choosing over negative thinking?

The cold, hard, pathetic fact was that six years into being a self improvement junkie, my attempts at positive thinking did completely nothing for me. I still had as pathetic a self esteem as I did when I first started my path of self improvement, my dating life was a complete joke, and I was more broke than when I had started.

Moreover, because I was all up in my head constantly trying to figure out how to be positive with my thoughts, I was thoroughly stiff and stifled around people, especially women, I constantly second guessed myself, and I gave off this nervous energy that in turn made people feel unsettled around me.

Now, though those were some dark times, things did eventually get better, BUT it really wasn’t until last year, 2013, one hugely DIFFICULT year in my life, when I was able to FINALLY figure out why I had so many problems trying to consistently think positive.

You see, in 2013, I was desperately looking for breakthroughs in my life, so I started fasting. I did a 12 hour fast for 10 days in a row where I only drank water during that time period, I then moved up to a 24 hour fast a few weeks later, and then after that I did one or two three day fasts, and finally, I did a seven day fast where I did only water for the first three days, then after the three days would allow myself juices after 6 pm.

The result of this was that it slowed down my thought processes and made me much more intensely aware of what was going on in my inner world. I started to see all the “hidden” thoughts that I previously wasn’t aware of that held me back, but most importantly, a magnifying glass was put under the inner world of my emotions, and I was shown how much of a major influence they had as to how I think.

Why I had problems with consistent positive thinking was because I only saw my thoughts as a major factor as to how I felt and thought. Since I felt that everything was produced by thought alone, thoughts were the only things that mattered and feelings weren’t important and were to be ignored and pushed aside.

I know that that’s what some women would say is a typical “guy” thing to say.

In any case, our brains are wired by neural pathways and networks in certain ways where thoughts produce a particular feeling, such that when we think about a certain time in our childhoods, for some people happy feelings are triggered that correspond to the memories they have if their brains happen to be wired that way. Others have sad feelings that correspond to such thoughts.

In the same token, thoughts can also produce other thoughts that vary from person to person. For instance, we may again think about a certain childhood experience, and then immediately what comes to mind is a certain childhood friend we haven’t heard from in years. Again, it’s how the brain is wired.

What didn’t occur to me was that feelings can also produce thoughts. Feelings of happiness that are triggered within may produce subsequent thoughts about a person, place or thing that you associate with that feeling.

Many of us aren’t aware that though we think thoughts in our heads, the mind doesn’t only encompass the head, but our entire bodies. We may think thoughts in our heads, but we store our emotions in our bodies. We also feel with our bodies. Think about when we get nervous our palms get sweaty, our breathing gets shallow, and our skin gets flushed. Or think about when people get stressed out, they tend to have lower back pain or knots in their stomach.

Moreover, any environmental stimuli such as a noise, or a smell, or someone saying something to you can trigger a certain emotion, which then sends a message to the brain, which then in turn triggers a particular thought depending on the way the brain is wired in the individual.

Because I totally disowned my feelings and the role they played in influencing thoughts, I lived in my head, and was thus totally unaware of the numerous emotions, many of them negative, stored in the rest of my body, which constantly blindsided me. It was like being in a dark room where punches are being thrown at you left and right, but since you can’t see the direction from where the punches are coming, you’re not able to properly defend yourself.

I, and many other people were totally unaware of the effects that feelings have on our thoughts.

If you truly want to maintain a healthy state of being, not only do we have to take control of our thinking and how we respond to our thinking, but we also have to be aware of our emotions and take control of how we respond to them with our thoughts.

This realization has gone a long way in helping me take control of the wellness of my whole being because I’m now careful not only of my thoughts, but also how I respond to my emotions. I make sure that when I’m feeling some type of emotions that’s construed as being negative by my brain, that I don’t go down a negative road of thinking, which unchecked, can produce more negative emotions and start a vicious cycle. I nip any potential vicious cycle in the bud by changing how I respond to my emotions.

By doing this, we can conquer The Illusion on the inside of us, which keeps us trapped in fixed ways of being where we’re completely asleep, reacting to an endless cycle of thoughts and emotions ad nauseum and not being who we really are.

Through the pillar of self-realization, The Viable Alternative is to become aware to the endless pattern of thoughts and emotions you cycle through, so you can break it and connect to the unique core of who you are who has something unique to express and fulfill on this Earth.

Hope this helps.

Ike Love