Shift the Focus (Part 1)

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”—Wayne Dyer

I thought I’d do a series of posts on the power of thoughts beginning with a couple of short excerpts from my book Your Spacious Self: Clear Your Clutter and Discover Who You Are. Enjoy!

Where the Mind Goes, Energy Flows

The mind is like a toddler with a short attention span who goes after anything interesting and reachable. After a few minutes, he’s bored and goes on to the next thing. Without his parents’ constant attention, a toddler will go after stuff that isn’t exactly in his highest interest—the kitchen knife, ongoing traffic, the Drano under the bathroom sink. Similarly, without the quality of mindfulness, our thoughts can easily turn to negative images, doom and gloom predictions, judgments, gossip, endless chatter…

It’s easy to “go there” when the trails that weave through our inner landscape are as well worn with fear as they are. Judging others and not taking responsibility can feel really good. Gossip is a culturally supported activity. Playing victim can lead to huge payoffs of attention from others in the short run. Fear is a slippery slope of self-fulfilling prophecies. Let the toddler mind go the way of fear and crawling back to neutral is a major hike.

Living and clearing consciously means pulling the toddler back every time he goes off on another one of his many excursions. Be it a tailspin of worry or self-doubt, our job is to reel in the strings and re-send them in a new, more positive direction.

Again and again and again.

In this chapter we will see how this super-elastic thing we call the mind can be a powerful vehicle for our purposes in clearing clutter. Like a toddler, the mind is actually relatively easy to re-direct if we’re willing to mind it and not confuse it with mixed messages. The “kid” might throw some tantrums, but with practice and patience, he’s capable of blazing new trails that are infinitely more joyous, uncomplicated, and clear.

–Excerpted from Your Spacious Self: Clear Your Clutter and Discover Who You Are, by Stephanie Bennett Vogt. pp. 59-60.