Dr. Weeks’ Comment: I want to share with you today, as a medical doctor, what I consider to be the most exciting and valuable information that any medical doctor can share with any patient at any time: correct thinking – the practice of CorThot™. I hope the power and simplicity of this path to insight is helpful for you and your loved ones. To be clear: Corthot™ is the best way to complement and enhance any well-being practices regardless of the health challenges.
Now, who am I? Well, I’m a medical doctor who 40 years ago was caring for patients before completing a residency in neurology and psychiatry, and I’ve been particularly interested over the years in enhancing people’s immune function. Initially, I worked with folks with chronic degenerative illnesses like multiple sclerosis and other neurological catastrophes, and enhanced their immune system to help them redirect their biochemistry and rewire their neurological system. We had a lot of success with using fundamental principles, which included things like optimizing diet and nutrition, and my practice has always been to help get people off of medications, or at the least, minimize their dependence on medications. Although I’m a medical doctor, my medical colleagues consider me something of a heretic or a rebel, because as most viewers understand, when you’re a medical doctor your primary service is to prescribe drugs. Well, there are better options, in my opinion, than to simply prescribing drugs, because drugs work by blocking or poisoning biochemical reaction and thus simply suppressing symptoms rather than correcting imbalances. The problem of the patient is never a deficiency of a synthetic, patented, expensive drug. So while it is reasonable to utilize medications short term to offer symptomatic relief while we discover the root cause of an illness in order to correct the responsible pathological imbalances, the drugs should not be prescribed long-term. They are not the optimal solution. They are a stop-gap band-aid. That’s been my heretical work: helping cancer patients using the principles of corrective onco-immunology (the enhancement of the immune system in cancer patients) as well as detoxifying and replenishing the struggling biochemistry of people with chronic neuro-degenerative illnesses like multiple sclerosis and Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS), Parkinson’s disease and dementias like Alzheimer’s disease. But we don’t address only the biochemical imbalances, we also share insights into the critically important role of thought.
Today, the most important concept that I want to share with you is a concept you already know. I’ll just remind you of what you’ve known all along, which is that our thoughts create our reality. That is the essence of CorThot™. Every major religion teaches this, and yet somehow we forget, and we think erroneously “She made me angry.” Or “My boss made me afraid.” or “My job is stressful” or “He made me sad”. We have all these emotional responses to our world, however, we don’t understand that we’re creating those emotional feelings. The other people are not responsible for our feelings. We are. The way that we respond to what other people do or to anything the world presents to us is what generates the negative feeling. our challenge is to become more responsible – to respond better -in our thinking. I consider this life that we’re living to be an inside-out existence, meaning we create the reality of what we experience. So the take-home message which I want you to consider today is that your thoughts create your feelings, and therefore your thoughts create your suffering or your bliss. Again, this knowledge is nothing new to you. However, your thinking might need to become more skillful. (Note: I’m not urging you to try and become smarter- just more skillful in your thinking). When we’re stuck in a bad emotional experience, we tend to get disoriented. My patients thrive when they understand what I’m reminding you of today. I hope this knowledge about CorThot™ will become an insight for you – part of your cognitive experience.
So let me give this reminder, about the critically important role of thought, a little perspective. When I arrived in Thailand a week ago, what did I look for? I looked for the information booth at the airport where some nice person would tell me how to change money, how to get a taxi cab, how to say “hello” and “thank you”. In every country, at the airports, upon arrival, we can find these information booths. But when you and I were born, we didn’t have an information booth that said, “Hey, welcome to Earth. You’re a spiritual being having an earthly existence, but while you’re visiting this earth, you should know a few things.” And here’s what that user’s manual to life on Earth for human beings should say. It should say, Lesson #1: out there is existence, and things exist and you exist, but you only perceive them because of your sensory system. So we get perceptions, and right now, you and I are getting probably a thousand or maybe ten thousand perceptions at this very moment. We’re feeling the chair, we’re feeling the breeze, we’re feeling temperature, we’re hearing things. All those perceptions come to us and wash over us. It’s as if we’re in a big river of consciousness, we call it the stream of consciousness, and there’s billions of molecules of water going past us, and we pay attention to what we want from those perceptions. So, I hope you’re understanding me: we pay attention to certain perceptions, and what we pay attention to becomes part of our immediate reality. There’s an infinite amount of things out there that we perceive every instant of the day, but only the tiny percent of that is what we conceive. Only what we pay attention to, comes into existence. Only the tiny percent of what we perceive becomes reality in our world. For example, you might be perceiving (sensing) 10 things right now (a pang of hunger, sore left knee, back of your neck tension, your partner’s scowl, your itching scalp, the cool temperature, noticing it is a cloudy day out there, what time it is, feeling fatigue, the sound of the air conditioner)… but only your partner’s scowl manifests as reality. That reality was birthed by your thought selection – what you paid attention to, in this example the scowl. You created your reality and now, by choice, you are consumed with worry about your partner and the scowl. What we perceive, but don’t notice, or what we don’t pay attention to simply doesn’t exist for us. Those things are not real and don’t generate feelings. What we pay attention to- what we think about (i.e. our thoughts) creates our feelings and our feelings create much of our biochemistry.
Now, here’s where people get confused, and this is a really exciting thing to remind people about. Once we have a perception, most of us then experience an emotion. Something happens, we notice it, and the next thing we’re actually aware of is an emotional response: run away, run towards, be afraid, be excited. And what I want to remind you about is that between the perception and the emotional response to the perception is always a thought. We conceive what we perceive, and then, based on our thought (not the perception) we have an experience which is positive or negative or neutral. As thinking beings, we are primarily habitual and what’s exciting is that despite having typically a habitual thought about a perception, it is important to acknowledge is that we’re not limited to habit. We can have a new thought to a frequent perception.
For example, if I kick you in the shin right now, assuming we’ve known each other for a little while as friends, you would perceive the pain but what you feel is dependent more on your thought than the kick. Stay with me here. You could feel anger, surprise, fear, any negative response from being attacked or you could feel something else: curiosity or compassion or concern for me acting so inconsistently with our friendship. But before you felt the negative feeling, you had a thought, which was that I mean you harm, and so you must be attentive and be careful and defend yourself or retreat. But please understand, you could have the thought, knowing me, “Ah, Dr. Weeks must be confused. How can I help him not hurt other people?” And you would barely feel the pain because you’d be thinking, “My friend Dr. Weeks is confused. He would never kick me in the shins to do me harm.” Or you could be curious: “Is this a game?” And all of a sudden you’re thinking about other possibilities, and so your feeling is not one of being attacked, it’s one of being challenged or engaged.
Another way to think about that dynamic is many of my patients would come to me and say they have stress: “My life is too stressful, I have too much anxiety, I’m scared of what’s going to happen.” And what I try to help them understand is, quite simply, there’s really no such thing as stress. No one feels stress. What we all feel is the biochemical result of adrenaline. We have a feeling of something making us aroused or on edge and how we respond to that adrenaline is determined by our thoughts. All feelings derive from thoughts about sensation. Every sensation we pay attention to thought creates a feeling, and when we bear that in mind as our own insight, we can begin to manage out reality.
When my youngest daughter graduated from high school, she said, “I want to jump out of an airplane with you.” She was finally the legal age to do so. She’d wanted to do it earlier, but I said no, and so not, to reward her patience and courage, I agreed to jump out of an airplane with her- with some conditions. So what was involved in that agreement? Well, no surprise, we agreed to each have a functioning parachute. Imagine two people jumping out of an airplane, one with a parachute that works, one with no parachute. They both have the identical experience of adrenaline. When I jumped out of that airplane and looked at the earth rushing towards me as I’m free-falling, I had tremendous adrenaline, but my thought was, “I have a good parachute and I know what I’m doing and I will land safely and this will be a great memory.” And so all that adrenaline was transformed into a fabulous experience. I would never describe the experience as “stressful” but rather as exhilarating. But if I jump out of the airplane with no parachute, my thought would be, “This is gonna kill me,” and the same adrenaline which otherwise felt exhilarating, would probably kill me before I hit the ground. Similar experience, adrenalin rush, but different thoughts. The thought is, over here with a parachute, this is fun; without the parachute, this is lethal.
When people come to me with serious illnesses, life-threatening illnesses, I take the time to remind them of what they already know, which is that their thoughts will become the most important intervention in their healing, not something just peripheral, but really the most important piece.
For example, if someone is attacked and stabbed in the back with a knife at night in the alley of the street in NYC (the perception), and he has the thought, “This is horrible, I’m gonna die from this, no one’s gonna hear me, there’s no hope,” I would suggest his entire immune system, his life-support system, starts to shut down, because it’s been given the instruction there’s no hope, so it begins the process of giving up and dying. Now, the same situation can happen to this person with a knife in his back, and he can say, “That’s terribly painful, I’m terribly afraid, but I know I will survive, because there are millions of people in NYC and someone will find me and I know they’ll take me to a good hospital and the good doctors will save my life.” And just that different thought, given the same experience (perception), makes the most important difference. You still have to get the knife out of the back. I’m not saying all suffering derives only from thought. I’m saying that you control a great part of how you respond to any illness or traumatic accident by how you think about it. In English we have these two words, illness and disease. Have you considered the distinction between these two things? Well, illness is the diagnosis but the word “disease’ is the degree of “dis-ease’ you have given the situation. So the first gentleman had tremendous dis-ease with the knife in his back, and the second had less dis-ease and suffered less from the same illness: knife in the back.
And that’s another truth, is that suffering is under our control. Pain may not be, but our spin on it, “This pain will pass, then I’ll be healthy,” versus “This pain will be the death of me,” our spin on it, our thought process, creates an entirely different experience. So anyone reading these words needs to understand that I’m not teaching you anything new. I’m just sharing with you what you already know, and which, if you hear these words not as an intellectual lecture but as an invitation to try out your own ability to think and to discover the role of thinking in your life, you’ll suffer less. What I have discovered is that the natural state of all human beings, the default if you will, is one of enlightenment, buoyancy and levity. By design, we are naturally optimistic. Pessimism is not natural, but rather is a learned suboptimal state of mind.
I have patients who have the diagnosis of depression, and they’re typically very tired. I say to them, “Of course you’re tired. It takes tremendous energy to be depressed.” The natural state is to be optimistic and carefree. It’s our thoughts – often habitual thoughts -which make us stressed or depressed. In the case of depression, our habitual negative thoughts, enhance the suffering more than biochemical imbalances. Now, many of the doctors looking at this might say, “No, no, no, depression is a chemical imbalance, it’s a deficiency of serotonin, and psychosis and schizophrenia, that’s an imbalance in the dopamine receptors, and panic attacks are from too much adrenaline.” And the answer is, not entirely. Those chemicals contribute, but they only manifest as the disease if we don’t manage our thoughts and state of mind. For the depressed patient, changing the thought of “I can’t.” to “I would appreciate some help.” can make the biggest difference. So I disagree with my doctor colleagues who prescribed antidepressants like candy. This is why I’m a medical heretic.
The best way to treat depression is not with chemicals alone. Please also appreciate the importance of lifestyle interventions, diet, nutrition, exercise, but most importantly, helping people understand that they can’t afford the indulgence of a paying attention to negative thoughts. I had one depressed patient who kept saying, “My mother is at fault.” He was about 60 years old and he kept saying, “My mother did this.” And I said, “Well, tell me about this.” “Yes, but my mother did that.” And he says, “If it weren’t for my mother doing this…” and remember, he’s 60 years old and his mother died years ago. And I said to him, “I have met the Buddha.” And he said, “What do you mean?” I said, “You are the Buddha.” And he says, “What do you mean?” And I said, “The Buddha is somebody who could hold one thought in his mind despite all distractions, and you have that skill. No matter what happens in your life, you blame your mother. You are like the Buddha. You hold one habitual thought so strongly that you can’t live in the moment.” So helping him realize the role of thought and developing the discipline to dismiss suboptimal thoughts became the most significant intervention in his depression. Tody he no longer needs antidepressant medications.
That’s just one example of how thinking can make a situation worse or make it better, because our feelings, which is the only realm in which we suffer, are created by our thoughts. I mentioned earlier that many of us think “My partner makes me sad.” or “My marriage is too stressful.” Your partner and your marriage are perceived by you, but how we experience it is entirely dependent upon our thoughts.
Now, about that life manual which should’ve been presented to you upon arrival on earth. It would teach us that there are things out there which exist, but we only can really experience them through our perceptions, and the spin we put on our perceptions is the role of thought. In in particular, how we navigate our thoughts. Imagine if I were not to fly home from Thailand, but rather sail home in a nice boat. I would need three things to sail home. I’d need a boat which is seaworthy. I’d also need a compass or a chart so I could navigate. Lastly, I’d need some weather to propel the sailboat towards its goal. Now, regarding weather, I’d want to have not just big winds (all storms and all lightning), but maybe some easy days of gentle sailing because I like the variety of weather. Metaphorically, when we are considering the weather, we’re talking about the realm of the emotions: like the weather, our emotions change, because our thinking changes. Now, no matter which way the wind blows, no matter how we feel, you strive to stay true to a course that you’ve charted. The rudder and the compass and the map are analogous to our thinking because just thinking can manage emotions, the Rutter encompass in map can optimize our response to the weather. And lastly, we need a seaworthy boat: metaphorically, our body. So in the same sense as a sailor needs these three things, the boat, the compass and chart, and the weather, we as human beings need our human body, and we need our thinking to make sense of our perceptions in order to create our reality.
Cancer patients have a particular challenge because their thinking is a matter of life and death. This is the importance of the scientific field called psychoneuroimmunology. Our thoughts create our feelings and our feelings change our biochemistry. Our immune system is particularly vulnerable to negative thoughts. Tragically, the first thing that happens when a person is diagnosed with cancer is an experience of fear. Our culture is terrified of cancer. Fear is a contagious feeling and itself is immunosuppressive. As a culture, we’re taught by the pharmaceutical industries to be afraid. And dependent: you need this drug, you need this intervention. To make things worse, when someone gets cancer, the Big C, the ultimate C, they are often told their prognosis by a man in white or a woman in white, subliminally experienced as a priest. When the doctor tells them their life expectancy, things can really get bad. Sometimes the doctor might say “You have six months to live.” I consider that pronouncement, coming as it does from a trusted person of authority, to be criminal. I consider that behavior to be assault with a deadly weapon, because the patient might have some hope and some optimism, and that oncologist has no business crushing. Far better for the patient’s prognosis would it be where the doctor to say something like: “my dear patient, I don’t know you personally or your spiritual world or your resources or how much your beloved and supported by your family, but I have to tell you that generally speaking, in most cases that I’ve experienced, people who present with the same situation that you’re presenting often have no more than six months to live. Please understand that that’s not a prognosis because you are an individual and you are in the position to optimize your response to this Cancer. However, it would be a responsible for me not to share what I considered to be the severity of your illness based on my comparing you to the others that I’ve treated. Now, what can we do about optimizing your thinking and your lifestyle choices, including how to optimize your response to my treatment protocol.” That would be a far more accurate prognosis. Unfortunately, doctors only know what they’re trained in and of course, oncologist are not trained in lifestyle factors, including nutrition and CorThot™. To the contrary, often the message is: “Don’t pay attention to nutrition, it’s irrelevant. Don’t worry about vitamins and yoga and don’t think about meditation. You just need surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy.” Remember, doctors only know what they are trained to know. In my experience, most oncologist are doing the best they can and are well intended.
I like to remind my cancer patients that we’re all taught as children that it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game; it’s not only the quantity of life which is important. The quality of one’s life is also very important. The best way to enhance the quality of life is through managing your thoughts using the principles of CorThot™. The old saying is if your glasses half empty poured into a smaller glass so you’ll feel more appreciation.
Since I described it as assault with a deadly weapon, i.e. the weapon being a white coat and the authority of the medical profession, this is a topic worth revisiting. Medicine would be enhanced if the oncologist understood that the human being with a newly diagnosed cancer will thrive or not depending upon their thoughts. So instead of saying, “You have six months to live so get your affairs in order.” the doctor could say, “You have a diagnosis which in many cases result in people living no more than six months, but I don’t know who you are in your essential being. I don’t know your resources. I don’t know whether you’re loved or whether you’re at peace with the world. I don’t know how powerful you can be optimizing your immune system. I don’t know how well you are at managing your thoughts. So I’m simply going to offer you my best advice respecting that this is a journey that you must take and I encourage you to consider my recommendations and to consult your inner wisdom. You must consider how you want to think about this challenge.” And you and I know that in any given illness, it’s maybe nine out of ten patients who die of this cancer. Well, what about the tenth patient? Why did that person not die? That’s who we should be studying. I expect we would discover the difference between life and death for them is how they manage their thought process. Of course this includes prayer as well as meditation and a sense of appreciation and optimism.
And in my experience, when nine out of ten patients die of a cancer, the one who didn’t die had healthy thinking. That person had a purpose in life, felt enthusiastic about life, had meaning, and knew that living or dying wasn’t the most important thing; it was how they lived and died. So that person was less afraid. That person was at peace, because that person’s thinking was elegant and they understood that as you think, so you create your reality. So whether it’s your health or perhaps your career, where you’re upset with your boss or you’re frustrated in your job, you can manage your thoughts to optimize your outcome. You canchoose to think about things in an unproductive way (often habitual) which will just exacerbate the problem, or you can be curious and say, “I wonder how I can approach this differently.”
I like to remind people that life can be very much like a movie. When we go to a movie, we understand it’s just a movie, and if there’s some violence or some scary scenes, most of us, when the movie ends, despite have some lingering tingling or some excitement (some adrenaline), as we go home we realize that was just fantasy: just a movie and not a reality in our life. I would like you to understand that you can be the director of their own life, as if you were the movie director, and you can observe the screenplay of your life – moment by moment- and make changes in the script – like a director would. Imagine having the insight to say: “At this part of the life (at this part of the movie scene), typically I would do this: I would throw a tantrum. I would be angry. I would cry. I would complain. I would sulk. But as the director of my life, of my own movie, instead I will choose to think a different thought and changed the script of the movie and a surprising and exciting way.” Do you remember when I kicked you in the shin and you chose to think: “I wonder why Brad did that,” rather than, “that hurts. I’m being attacked and I must defend myself.” That is quite elegant directing of your own movie in real time to optimize your enjoyment of your life.
So, as the director of your own life, here’s the challenge. And to understand this, you must have insight. You must experience this reality of your thoughts. This is not a concept which can persuade. It has to be your own insight. Managing your thoughts is a skill which you need to develop. It’s like a muscle that needs to be strengthened. It can’t be something you just read about. It has to be something you try out for yourself in your own life. The challenge is, the next time you have a negative feeling, rather than indulge yourself by allowing the feeling to persist, put on your detective hat and say, “What was the thought the generated that feeling?” Now, most of the time, 99 times out of 100, it’ll be a habitual thought, but you as the director of your life can say, “You know, I thought this, and that’s why I’ve been in the funk for the last 20 minutes. That’s why I’ve been depressed and feeling down and feeling that life is difficult. It all developed because my thought was not a functional or optimal thought. It wasn’t good for me. Bad directing! I can do better than that. I mean, there’s much better thoughts to think about that perception.” And at that point, when you put on your detective hat and you find the thought that created the negative feeling, now you have an option to replay that part of the movie and say, “What’s a better thought that I can have?” And you’ll come up with a new thought. In fact, that’s the wonderful thing about human beings as thinking beings. We’re all always in this river of consciousness and we’ll never run out of thoughts. We can simply dismiss the first 10 habitual and negative ones so that we can enjoy a new beneficial thought, and lo and behold, this new thought creates a new and improved reality.
Many people wonder whether this is simply cognitive therapy or behavioral therapy. It is quite different. Behavioral therapy or cognitive therapy helped us manage the unfortunate emotions and try to train them differently. It’s an intervention after the fact. It is symptomatic rather than addressing the root cause. It’s trying to improve the negative feelings rather than learning to cease generating negative feelings. CorThot™ is insight-based. As long as you understand that you are by nature a thinking being, and that, before any feeling arises from an experience (perception), it is incumbent upon you as a thinking being to direct your movie by spinning the thought either negatively or positively. Then, once you understand that, anytime you find yourself in a bad feeling, where we all find ourselves at times – I find myself there frequently- we can take the power out of that negative emotion, because I know it’s just arbitrary. It’s just the consequence of a negative and unhelpful thought.
So this is part of the universal human experience. We’re all thinking beings, and I wish that everyone in kindergarten would be taught this user’s manual of life: that there are things that exist, but you have no experience of them unless you think about them. Furthermore, we never stop thinking and our thinking constantly creates our reality. This is a wonderful exercise to practice: remember or reach for something which is a negative feeling, or something which makes you afraid, or some challenge that you can’t master, and try to understand, like the director of the film of your life, what are the thoughts that got you to that negative outcome. Usually they’re habitual, which is kind of too bad, because we missed the chance really to be conscious. Habitual thoughts can be automatic and in a certain sense in detectable. That’s why you need to put on your detective hat notice the negative feeling and discover the thought that generated it. The muscle you need to develop as the director of the movie of your life is to not think thoughts which are not helpful but rather open yourself up to discovering new thoughts.
In the practice of corrective medicine and psychiatry, detoxification is job #1. Why do I say that? Well imagine we decide to hike up a mountain together and you have a choice: #1, I could put an additional hundred pounds of boulders in your backpack or, #2, I could give you a super-duper energy drink, which will help you make the climb. Who in the right mind would take the energy drink and allow the boulders to remain in the backpack? The logical thing is to get rid of the junk before optimizing your nutrition. It’s the same with your thoughts. Therefore, don’t worry about finding the best positive thought. Start by dismissing any negative thoughts. That his job #1. You’ll be surprised what graceful thoughts arise in the absence of paying attention to negative thoughts. Again, your default human state is optimism and levity. Your brain naturally finds solutions and optimize your thought process. It is a learned, dysfunctional deterioration of thought, which was also an habitual negative responses to stimuli.
The best example for how to dismiss the thought is this. Imagine you and I were on a camping trip someplace where the rivers were clean, and I asked you to go down to the river and get a bucket of water because we want to make tea. I’ll start the fire, and you go down to the river with a teapot to fill. Now picture this: you’re just about to dip your bucket in the water when what do you see? You see a bunch of cow poop floating down the river. So here’s your challenge: you’re supposed to go down to the river and get some water, but it’s polluted with cow poop. Well, what do you do? Well, you’ll probably wait a minute. You look upstream, the cows are finishing their business, they’re leaving, and you know in a minute or two you’ll get clean water coming past you, and that’s what you dip your bucket into. Why in the world would you dip your bucket into water full of cow poop? And yet, if we think of that river as our stream of consciousness, we often go to that stream of consciousness and take terribly polluted often habitual thoughts and think them to our detriment. Quite simply, it’s up to us to simply say, “Nope, not that thought. I will not pay attention to that.” You don’t have to come up with a clever, better thought. That’s the magic: the better and healthier thoughts will come to you if you just dismiss the thoughts you don’t want. You trade up when you dismiss sub optimal dysfunctional thoughts. This improves your state of mind, enhances your inner peace and optimize your immune function because you’re being selective about what thoughts you think. You’re optimizing your potential when you become more selective about what you pay attention to.
Now, all professional athletes understand this. If I were a professional basketball player and I need to shoot a foul throw so that we would win the game, and I had the thought, “I’m will miss this shot,” all athletes are trained to move away from the line, bounce the ball a bit to clear your mind, visualize a successful foul throw, and only shoot the throw when your mind is clear and your thinking is that you will make the shot. It would be ludicrous to shoot the ball when you think you will miss the shot. And in the same sense, every aspect of our life is created by our thinking, and some of our thinking is “I will miss the shot.” Why would we tolerate that thought with the game on the line? Why would we indulge ourselves in a negative thought with the predictably suboptimal outcome?
So if people reading these words have an illness or a challenge, certainly decide upon meaningful strategies. It’s not all about thought. It’s just mostly about thought. If you have cancer, pay attention to diet, eat organic, pay attention to oxygenating your body through breath work, yoga and exercise, meditation and prayer. But if that’s all you do, and you allow your thoughts to work against you, then it’s really all for naught. Even as a medical doctor trained in the prescribing of medications, I would say that the most important remedy I can give someone is to remind them that they’re thinking beings, and everything that they experience is under their control. They can direct their own screenplay of their life. They have the opportunity to spin any perception using their thoughts into a positive or negative response. Just.
So to summarize: we all face challenges, and if we’re not aware that by nature our thoughts unceasingly creates our feelings, then we’re buffeted about in a storm, and we’re full of blame and fear and a sense of failure. According to psychoneuroimmunology practices, our immune system becomes apathetic. We suffer but here’s the key inside, our suffering is due to our thought selection. I want to remind you that our native state of mind is that of well-being. It’s that of optimism and buoyancy, and it takes a lot of effort, a lot of bad thinking, what precisely, a lot of bad habitual thinking to be dis-eased. So, my wish for everyone reading these words is that each of you become not just the star of your own happily ever after film, but to assume the role of director also. Learn to notice when “stinking thinking” arises and you are going off the track of health and optimal well-being. Don’t take your feelings seriously until you remember that you created them. Develop the habit of putting on your detective hat and identifying the dysfunctional thought -often habitual- which created the negative feeling. Then take a breath, forgive yourself, and receive the grace inherent in our thinking process. A better thought, a thought more congruent with your values, will enter your consciousness if you’re patient and open to this blessing.
This is my opinion and of course, you’re entitled to a second opinion. In that vein, please consider:
“I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” Psalm 139:14
and
“For as he thinks in his heart, so is he.”
Proverbs 23:7
View this from 2017 to help you manage your thoughts and your state of mind