You wake-up to a day full of promise. Everything is going well when, on your second cup of coffee, you are suddenly assaulted by a negative thought.
If you let it continue to play, it’s going to bring down the rest of your day. In fact, if you don’t deal with it quickly, you set a precedence: now it feels welcome to drop in on you anytime. It may even take up permanent residency in the back of your mind and amplify your preexisting fears and insecurities.
It’s toxic to you, but what can you do? It seems to have a will of its own. No matter how hard you try, you can’t vanquish it from your mind. It just continues to play on.
It’s at times like these, you need to implement a good strategy, one designed to kick your negative thought to the curb. Below is just such a strategy. It consists of four steps that will empower you to overcome the most stubborn negative thought and decrease its frequency to shows up.
Step One: Don’t Justify a Negative Thought.
It’s important to catch a negative thought quickly before it hijacks your mind. The thing about some negative thoughts is that we actually like thinking them. We like to feel sorry for ourselves when we think we’ve been wronged. We like to assume the moral high ground and pass judgments on others. Passing judgment on others is like cotton candy to our egos.
Luckily, liking a negative thought will not prevent you from getting rid of it. Justifying a negative thought, however, will. The minute you start justifying a negative thought, you are stuck with it, including all its negative effects.
So the first step you must take in ditching a negative thought is to acknowledge that it is unjustifiable. It serves no good; it solves no problem. It is toxic pollution for which you are 100% responsible, regardless of the circumstances that triggered it.
Action Needed: Label a negative thought as useless and toxic the minute it pops into your head. Don’t blame it on the actions or behaviors of others. Accept full responsibility for it.
Step Two: Motivate Yourself to Let Go of a Negative Thought.
A negative thought can be a persistent creature. You have to be highly motivated to let it go in order to summon the effort required to do so. But most folks aren’t that motivated because they don’t recognize the consequences of their negative thoughts. They simply give into them, and without even realizing it, they become a prisoner of them.
When we become a prisoner of our negative thoughts, we operate at a low vibrational frequency. The solutions and blessings we seek are slow to come at such a low frequency. We are also more vulnerable to the chaos of those around us because our frequency is in closer range of theirs.
Ultimately, it is not the chaotic behavior of others that drags us down, but our negative thoughts about their chaotic behavior that does. Recognizing this can provide the motivation we need to let go of a negative thought about a person. Think of it as shock therapy: when you know that there is a painful consequence for hanging onto a negative thought, you are less likely to do so.
So step two in ridding yourself of a negative thought is to focus on the cost of holding onto it. Imagine a scale of your vibrational frequency, along with the type of reality each frequency produces. Think of your current position on the scale along with its coordinating reality. Imagine the negative thought you are having as forcing you down the scale to a denser reality, where life is harder and support is scarce.
Action Needed: Consider every negative thought in terms of a cost to your vibrational frequency.
Step Three: Replace a Negative Thought with a High Frequency Thought.
Even when we are motivated to drop a negative thought, we don’t always have the muscle to do it. A negative thought is sometimes stronger than the willpower we have available to us to let it go.
Not a problem. Buddhists have a saying for just such a situation: Hammer out a rotten peg with a new peg. You probably guessed that the rotten peg in this metaphor is the negative thought and the new peg is the higher frequency thought. But what about the hammer? If you guessed attention, you would be correct. You have to focus your attention on a high frequency thought long enough for it to drive out the negative thought.
I would like to take a moment to point out that not all happy thoughts are high frequency thoughts. For instance, thoughts about winning the lottery may make you happy, but they have a lustful quality to them which keeps you stuck in the low vibrational frequency of your ego. At that frequency, a negative thought will soon return.
Therefore, step three requires not only that you replace a negative thought but that you do so with one that is guaranteed to raise your frequency. Happy thoughts are great if they arise from a feeling of gratitude. You can also focus on enlightened thoughts such as those that help you to imagine a higher state of being. Ultimately, the thought you choose needs to excite you if it is going to hold your attention. It is worth taking the time to figure out what types of thoughts would do that.
Action Needed: Choose a high frequency thought that has a strong appeal to you. Focus your attention on it for as long as it takes to drive out a negative thought.
Step Four: Prevent Negative Thoughts from Arising in the First Place.
They say that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, so don’t wait for a negative thought to assault you to raise your vibrational frequency. Work on raising it now, and you will see a big decrease from one year to the next in the number of negative thoughts that you have.
Below are three practices I highly recommend for raising your frequency and keeping it up. If you employ even one of them, it will transform your perceptions and elevate your thinking.
- Become aware of your thoughts throughout the day. Doing so will draw you into a deeper state of consciousness, which will in turn raise your frequency. An alternate practice is to become aware of your facial expressions throughout the day, which has the effect of making you aware of your thoughts with considerably less effort.
- Pray and/or meditate every day. I don’t doubt you get tired of hearing you should pray and meditate, but the truth is you will be hard pressed to find another activity that can transform your thinking the way that they can. In doing either, you step out of the dense layers of your ego and automatically enter into a higher frequency. Do either consistently, and that higher frequency becomes your natural state.
- Use self-talk to reprogram your mind. Your mind is like an unruly child: it needs guidance to set it in the right direction. When you talk to yourself out loud, you assume command of your mind. You get to enforce the thoughts that will lift you up and override the ones that will drag you down.
Action Needed: Employ one or more of the above practices to raise your frequency and keep it up.
There you have it, four steps for freeing yourself of a negative thought. I think you will be amazed at the power they have to transform your thinking. And when your inner world is relatively free of negativity, then your outer world will be relatively free of it as well.
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