Five Steps Towards Transformation
Step 3: “Burning” negative thoughts
Our thoughts influence what we say, what we do and our
destiny. It is easy to get use to have negative thoughts and live with them,
without noticing their existence. No matter we can learn through the consequences
of these negative thoughts, however, we should know we can select different thoughts,
the ones that give a positive impulse to our life. What is really important is
to know that there is a choice; we choose the quality of our thoughts, so the consequences
of them too.
My mother’s experiences taught me the difference between pain
and suffering, and how our thoughts affect us. She passed away 3 years ago. Her
father died when she was a baby; she never met him. And when she was 13 years
old she had a dramatic experience by losing her mom too; it was painful. So at a
young age she had to live with a brother. Along her life, after this tragic event,
she was feeling that she was a victim. And with continuous conscious and unconscious
negative thoughts she maintained a constant emotion of suffering. Every one of
us faces difficult events that cause pain in our life. But suffering is happening
because the memory of this painful feeling is maintained, creating and emotion
of suffering. Pain cannot be avoided, but suffering is a personal election. We
cannot decide not having pain, but we can decide to take away from us the suffering.
We suffer when we keep permanent negative thoughts, in our conscious, unconscious
and subconscious mind. We have already talked about them in Step 2, and how to
observe these thoughts, and reaching the state of self-awareness.
My mother in her last years suffered a mental disease that caused
her to go back in time. At one moment she behaved like an 83 years old woman, a
few months later she looked like a 25 years old woman, then like a teenager,
then like a very young girl, and finally, like a baby holding her fur doll when
she was dying. I noticed the precise time when she went through the age of 13
again; one day she was suffering like a victim, but the next day she was a very
happy young girl. She went back in her mind to age of 13 years, before the
dramatic experience of losing her mom. She passed away in the state of a happy and
peaceful baby.
Imagine that keeping thoughts in our mind is like having a
recorded film movie with all the memories. We have a movie that we watch it
again and again. We record events and we see them back, sometimes because we
want, other times unconsciously. It is good to have thoughts and memories, it
is better to select the good ones, and get rid of the ones that can cause us
suffering. So, how can we discard a negative though? We have already presented a
method of handling them in Step 2, by changing their intensity (turning them
black and white, looking at them in a distant monitor, etc.). We can also burn
them.
Burning negative thoughts is a very efficient way to
transform our mind. For this we need to create with our imagination a burning device.
It could be a fireplace, an oven. Or like the one I use, a sophisticated and
advanced technological device that absorb negative thought and burn them. Just
find your burning device and change it when you need it. How does it work? When
a negative thought is present in your mind, like and image, a feeling, or a
sound, just imagine how you put this thought in your burning device, and how it
is consumed and transformed in a higher level energy. For example if you remember a scene that
creates a nasty feeling inside you, do not reject this image or memory in your
mind. If it is very painful reduce its intensity (by turning it in black and white
or blurrier or smaller). Then, imagine this image or scene is visible in a
screen that you fold and put inside your burning device. See how it is burned
and consumed. Every time it returns, do the same. By doing this exercise, this negative
scene in your inner mental movie will be discarded.
In some cases, when the memory of a negative though comes
with a strong emotion, we must do something different. And emotion is like a
feeling but it creates a reaction in our body. You feel an uncomfortable
sensation in a specific part of your body or in an extended area of it;
sometimes in most of your body. In this case, change in your burning device the
fire by a strong light or energy, white, blue, pink or violet, and imagine that
you get inside it. So if you feel this negative emotion do not reject it, just
observe it, find where in your body you feel it. Breathe and then close your
eyes and imagine you getting inside your burning device, now with light rather than
fire. Let this light to clean your emotion. Alternatively to your burning
device, you can use a cleaning device in your mind. In my case I use a water
fall, where every drop of water emits light. When I get below this water stream
I feel this brilliant water cleaning me.
If you realize that you can control your mind, rather than
letting your mind to controlling you, you will modify your memories. Having negative
or positive memories in our mind is our personal election. Observe your
thought, transform them or burn them to create an inner transformation.
In the next step we will talk about having positive
visualizations.