I recently heard a speech given by the inspiring hypnotherapist Marissa Peer, where she described our job as humans very simply:
"Your job is to create better pictures and words."
Let me back up just a little bit to give you some understanding as to why she says this is our job. The human mind uses three rules that are very important to learn and remember:
Your mind is working to accomplish your thoughts. Your thoughts are your blueprint that your mind sets into action.
(This happens in the Reticular Activation System (RAS) of the brain, for those of you who are curious.)
The way you feel about everything comes down to the pictures you make and the words you say in your thoughts.
Your mind hates what is unfamiliar and loves what is familiar. Familiarity once kept you alive and safe.
The above is your mind's job. So YOUR job in response to how your mind works is to:
Think better thoughts.
Make better pictures and tell yourself better words.
Make good things familiar and positive thoughts familiar.
Extremely simple to understand. Harder to enact.
We have all experienced the phenomenon of, perhaps, thinking about a type of car or a word that stood out to us and grabbed our attention and then all of a sudden, like magic, we see that car everywhere or hear that word all around us!
This is because our RAS is constantly scanning our environment for what we want to see or hear. We tell our mind what to pay attention to with the pictures we vision in our minds or the words that we say to ourselves.
Often times, we call this synchronicity. Why?
Our mind comes into synch with our environment and our perception of it.
What if we just started thinking better thoughts?
"That sounds too Pollyanna, Jen."
I hear you. I do. I thought the same thing.
Do you remember at the beginning of Peter Pan when he is teaching the children how to fly?
"You just think lovely, wonderful thoughts and they lift you up in the air", he tells them. This is echoed in another Disney movie, Mary Poppins, when she takes Jane and Michael to visit her Uncle Albert and he is floating on the ceiling from laughter.
While we may not get to experience this same flight of fancy, it still remains a picture of a truth which is: your thoughts affect your body and emotions. Your thoughts tell your mind what to create as an experience for you that day.
Everything boils down to perception. To many, the sounds of sirens trigger feelings of warning or danger. To the person who the emergency vehicle is coming to rescue or help, sirens may be a welcome sound of relief.
It is all perception.
How can we paint better pictures with our mind today? Tell ourselves better stories? Use better words?
Warmly, Jennifer Ferrante, CHt.
Ferrante Family Wellness
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