Do you think it’s delu­sion­al to be­lieve that your thoughts en­cap­su­late or are re­spon­si­ble for your en­tire well­be­ing?

Danielle Da Silva

My an­swer to that is an un­equiv­o­cal “NO”. Be­fore I go on, let me put up my dis­claimer, while I am not an ex­pert, I con­sid­er my­self a “re­search jumbie”. Over the vi­cis­si­tudes of life I had no choice but to im­merse my­self in re­search in or­der to un­der­stand my­self and my en­vi­ron­ment; af­ter all, aware­ness and con­scious­ness walk hand in hand.

Pre­vi­ous­ly, when you had no aware­ness of your thoughts, many neg­a­tive be­liefs went un­chal­lenged. Take the time to chal­lenge your in­ter­pre­ta­tion of var­i­ous be­lief sys­tems. Ask your­self whether your CORE be­liefs are help­ful or ra­tio­nal; dis­card the be­liefs that do not pos­i­tive­ly in­flu­ence your life such as those that say to you: “I can’t do any­thing right” or “I don’t think I can have a nice physique”. Such be­liefs do not serve your life. So what do you do?

Search your­self in or­der to iden­ti­fy the rea­sons be­hind such be­liefs and sup­ple­ment them with thoughts that can en­gen­der a change in those be­liefs such as “I need to work hard­er”, “I need to change my eat­ing habits” or “I need to de­vel­op bet­ter time man­age­ment skills”. By chal­leng­ing and re­fram­ing be­liefs, you can en­sure that your cur­rent be­lief sys­tem is head­ing in a pos­i­tive di­rec­tion.

Tun­ing in­to your thoughts and their un­der­ly­ing be­liefs is pret­ty much like a mus­cle, the more you use it, the more it grows. Writ­ing down your thoughts dai­ly isn’t the eas­i­est thing to com­mit to how­ev­er it cre­ates a pat­tern and once you dump out these thoughts, re­view them and sin­gle out the ones you think dri­ve your core be­liefs and be­hav­iours. Let me say this from per­son­al ex­pe­ri­ence, if you need to form your own be­lief, you would need to bring con­scious­ness to those that al­ready guide your life. You can au­dit your cur­rent be­lief sys­tem by train­ing your­self to pay close at­ten­tion to the re­la­tion­ship be­tween your thoughts and your ac­tions/be­hav­iours. In oth­er words, get out of your own way.

Be­liefs are the prin­ci­ples that dri­ve your ac­tions in life and help you to make sense of the world around you. For the most part, your ear­ly be­liefs were in­flu­enced by the peo­ple around you, name­ly your par­ents. How­ev­er, as you grow old­er, your ex­pe­ri­ences as well as those of your friends, spir­i­tu­al lead­ers, school teach­ers and even the me­dia, be­gin to heav­i­ly in­flu­ence your be­lief sys­tem. If you want to de­vel­op your own be­lief, you must first do some in­tro­spec­tion so that you can be­come aware of the pre-ex­ist­ing be­liefs and de­cide if they are de­struc­tive, then ex­plore dif­fer­ent be­lief sys­tems so that you won’t self sab­o­tage.

Here’s an­oth­er in­dis­pens­able ba­sic truth you must know and un­der­stand about heal­ing, it’s nev­er God’s will for any­one to be sick; we eat foods that were nev­er de­signed for hu­man con­sump­tion and ex­pect to pray our sick­ness away. This is a mad scene.

The mind, heart and body can im­prove with reg­u­lar med­i­ta­tion. Most of us aren’t raised to sit and say “Om” but med­i­ta­tion has gained mil­lions of con­verts, help­ing them ease chron­ic pains, anx­i­ety, stress, im­prove heart health, boost mood and im­mu­ni­ty as well as con­trol all the vi­tal process­es of your body.

Just re­mem­ber do not al­low the things you can­not con­trol to con­trol you. What say you?