How can I balance myself when I am affected by everything? Part 1

When you feel that you are reacting to everything, your body and mind have become confusingly entangled. You have created a tension loop where your body and mind give each other negative signals.

Your body feels tense because you are verbally repeating your fears to yourself. The body responds to your thoughts by generating physical tension. And then, when your mind senses the tension building in the body, your mind generates even more negative self-talk. That makes your body even more tense. And so the loop continues…

Don’t blame yourself — this is a moment of empowerment, where you take charge of a tension loop that is of your own making.

You may think that the emotions and thoughts that you so strongly feel are the only natural responses that you can have to the situations in your world. This is the limited thinking that keeps you stuck in the tension trap.

Freeing yourself from the tension requires recognizing that you created your own emotionally unbalanced pattern. Why is it empowering to recognize this? Because if you created the situation, then you can choose a more balanced response to your experiences.

First, really understand how you became trapped in the tension loop.

The trap was caused by your own endlessly repeated, verbal descriptions of your world — your self-talk. You generated your own dramatic descriptions of your self and your situation. And when your body felt tense in response to your words, you became even more enmeshed in your problems.

But, you may protest, the problems really did happen. Yes, they did indeed, but this is not a denial of the events that occurred. In fact, your basic descriptions of the events that have occurred could be accurate.

However, your verbal interpretations of these events are needlessly dramatic, and this is where you have some control of the situation. You can explore using neutral descriptions of situations, rather than heightened dramatic terms and emotionally charged interpretations of reality. You can choose your words, because you are speaking and thinking them. They are yours to shape as you consciously choose.

When you examine your choices of verbal descriptions, and shift the dramatic words and scenarios into more neutral descriptions, then your body and mind can begin to achieve balance. This neutral atmosphere creates more space for your deeper spiritual wisdom to manifest. This creates a new healthy pattern where the body and mind are in deeper harmony.

Here are examples of dramatic language, changed into neutral language. The first example is dramatic, the second is neutral:

1. I lost my job, and this is terrible.

1. I lost my job, and I am looking for a new job.

2. He left me, and I can’t stand it.

2. He left me, and I am still a good person.

3. They were rude to me, and it’s terrible when that happens.

3. They behaved childishly, and I choose to be around people who are more supportive.

Now you can explore neutral self-talk for yourself. Take any situation that you are reacting to. Write down the way that you have been describing it.

Are you starting to recognize the blame, the judgmental tone, and the dramatic descriptions in what you wrote? Compare what you have written to the examples above. Now take a breath, and explore rewriting your description. Here are some things to check for:

1. Shift strong judgments about other people into neutral terms. Shift from blame to neutral descriptions of events.

2. Shift helpless descriptions of you into empowered descriptions. Emphasize your true abilities and your deeper potential, so that you support your moving forward in a healthy way.

3. Shift negative assessments about the world. Aim yourself towards the people in the world who do believe in you, and who are supportive of you.

Now read what you rewrote. And discover how you are breathing, and how you feel in your body. You are beginning to get a sense of how you can balance yourself, even when you seem to be affected by everything.

Congratulations — you are rediscovering your ability to choose your states of consciousness, even amidst everything that is happening.

In part two of this article, we explore deep centering meditations that further support you in learning to balance yourself.

Many Blessings,

Joel Bruce Wallach

Founder, Cosmic Living – spiritual instruction – tele-classes and home-study mp3’s