The Art of Feeling
Wonderful
and Getting
Anything from Life
By Ali Sina
2006/11/05
This article is about feeling wonderful. I wrote it for a dear friend who
thinks she suffers from emotional regulation disorder (ERD) also known as
borderline personality disorder (BPD) but it can really benefit everyone.
Anyone who wants to learn the secret of how to be happy and how to succeed
in life will benefit from it.
First,
what is a personality disorder? A personality disorder is basically a set
of traits that combine to negatively affect your life. A great number of
people suffer from one form or another disorder, (or a number of them)
which hinders their success and happiness in life, impeding them to reach
their full potential. The fact is that no one has to suffer from any
disorder because the cure is so easily available. It's already within you.
Feeling wonderful is an art. In this article I will tell you the
techniques so you can master it on your own. Unlike other arts you can learn it at any age. Of course, the
younger you are, the easier it becomes. Do
not undervalue what you read because I give it to you for free. Some people charge
hundreds of dollar to tell you just this in a seminar. Read it, take it to
heart, and you will become empowered to transform your life. What you find
here are old and proven wisdoms that have helped countless souls. Here you
will find the secret of virtually all successful people. They can help you
too.
BPD “is
a common disorder,” says psychiatrist Dr. Richard J. Corelli, an
affiliate Staff at Stanford
University
Medical
Center, “with estimates running as
high as 10-14% of the general population. The frequency in women is two to
three times greater than men.”
“A person
with a borderline personality disorder” says Corelli,
“often experiences a repetitive pattern of disorganization and
instability in self-image, mood, behavior and close personal
relationships. This can cause significant distress or impairment in
friendships and work. A person with this disorder can often be bright and
intelligent, and appear warm, friendly and competent. They sometimes can
maintain this appearance for a number of years until their defense
structure crumbles, usually around a stressful situation like the breakup
of a romantic relationship or the death of a parent.”
“The relationships of people suffering from BP with others are
intense but stormy and unstable with marked shifts of feelings and
difficulties in maintaining intimate, close connections. The person may
manipulate others and often has difficulty with trusting others. There is
also emotional instability with marked and frequent shifts to an empty
lonely depression or to irritability and anxiety. There may be
unpredictable and impulsive behavior which might include excessive
spending, promiscuity, gambling, drug or alcohol abuse, shoplifting,
overeating or physically self-damaging actions such as suicide gestures.
The person may show inappropriate and intense anger or rage with temper
tantrums, constant brooding and resentment, feelings of deprivation, and a
loss of control or fear of loss of control over angry feelings. There are
also identity disturbances with confusion and uncertainty about
self-identity, sexuality, life goals and values, career choices,
friendships. There is a deep-seated feeling that one is flawed, defective,
damaged or bad in some way, with a tendency to go to extremes in thinking,
feeling or behavior. Under extreme stress or in severe cases there can be
brief psychotic episodes with loss of contact with reality or bizarre
behavior or symptoms. Even in less severe instances, there is often
significant disruption of relationships and work performance. The
depression which accompanies this disorder can cause much suffering and
can lead to serious suicide attempts.”
No Labels
Does this
mean that only 10-14% of the population has such traits? Are the rest of
us okay all the time? Are we all happy and in control of our moods every
day of our life? Obviously that is not the case. We all have habits and
traits that we would rather get rid of. So what is the difference between
a person who is “normal” and one who is affected by a personality
disorder? The difference is in degree.
I may have a
couple of extra kilos that I would like to get rid of, but I do not see or
call myself fat. Sometimes I do get rid of my extra weight and then, I
become carefree and it comes back. Should I call myself “fat” as soon
as I put on a couple of extra kilos? Exactly how many extra kilos one has
to put on so we could safely call him “fat” – five kilos, ten kilos,
twenty kilos, forty kilos? Who decides at what exact weight, an average
person becomes a fat person?
The truth is
that there is no such thing as a “fat person”. There are just people
with extra weights. Some may weigh more than others. It is wrong,
therefore, to label people or ourselves, as fat.
This is not
just a question of semantics but a shift in paradigm. It is the question
of how we see ourselves and this makes a world of difference. Words are
powerful. They are extremely powerful. They can make us succeed, be happy
and feel great, and they can also make us feel depressed, miserable and
fail.
Weighing more
than necessary is a symptom of eating disorder. We can change our eating
habits and add more exercise to our lifestyle and the extra fat will melt
away. Losing weight is not a mystery. It is an exact science. It is the
question of the number of calories that you put in your body and the number
of calories that you burn. If you consume more calories than what you
burn, you gain weigh. You lose it when you do the reverse. It’s as
simple as that.
Personality
disorders are no different. If you suffer from any form of personality
disorder, the first thing you should do is to stop labeling yourself with
that disorder and then stop seeing yourself as a victim. You must accept
the responsibility and realize that you are here because of the choices
that you made in the past. If you have emotional imbalance, it’s because
you have thought yourself into that mood. Just as an overweight person
gains weight by wrong eating;
if you feel depressed, anxious and have mood problems, it is because of
your wrong thinking.
What about Genes?
Can some
people be more predisposed to certain disorders than others? This
hypothesis has been postulated. I am not interested to discuss whether
disorders of all kind, personality,
eating
or sexual
are genetically determined or not. Let us agree that genetics have a role
to play. So what? Let us say obesity is a genetic predisposition. Children
of overweight parents often turn to be overweight. Does this mean that
they are doomed to be overweight? Of course not! Weight follows a
mathematical equation. You eat more calories than you burn, you gain
weight. If you eat less calories and burn more you lose weight. This is
physics. The law does not change from one person to another. Your
predisposition and genes have nothing to do with it. A piece of cheesecake
generates exactly the same amount of calories in everyone irrespective of
their genetic makeup and metabolism. Now,
a muscular and active person will burn the calories faster than a
person who is not muscular and leads a sedentary life. What this means is
that this person should be even more vigilant about what he or she eats.
Diabetes is
a genetically inherited disease. This does not
mean that the children of diabetic patients are destined to become
diabetics? They can use this knowledge to be extra vigilant about what
they eat and can lead a full healthy life without ever suffering from this
disease.
Your genes
may determine your traits, and traits may drive you to choose certain
habits. You may have inherited traits that make you want to eat more. Your
body may not tell you when you are full and you keep eating more than what
you need. It is still the extra food that makes you fat. If you stop after
eating just the sufficient amount of food you will never gain fat. It
might be harder for you to control your appetite but it is something you
can do. If you make exercise a habit, you burn more fat. Also you can be wise about what you eat. Certain foods are better
than others. Being wise in what you eat can make it easy to control your appetite,
remain healthy and fit. Some food do not send the signal that you are full
to your brain in time and you eat a lot before realizing you are full. (I
notice I can eat a lot of white rice, pasta and bread before realizing I
am full, so I eliminated them from my diet. My breakfast consists of oat, oat bran, wheat
germ, wheat bran and flax seeds, topped with yogurt and dressed with
berries or grapes. At lunch I chop/dice 10-15 different fresh (not cooked)
vegetables with doufu, (tofu) dressed with vinegar and olive oil and eat
as much as I want. This
takes away all my craving and I am in my best shape. As for dinner, I can
often skip it or have a few nuts, almonds, pecans, walnuts, etc. Occasionally,
I have a little fish with a small baked/microwaved potato. No pasta, no
bread, no white rice, very little cheese! Desert?... Hmm!... I enjoy my food so much that I
can't think of anything better. A couple of dates with tea makes my meal a
feast.
I eat as much as I want, I am never hungry and I am full of energy. Feeling healthy
makes me feel better inside too. Mens sana in corpore sano.)
Likewise, you may also have inherited traits that negatively
affect your life, like pessimistic and self deprecating thinking that have
become your habits. These bad habits affect your life in a negative way
and make you feel depressed, anxious, nervous or angry. Even though you
may be more prone to these moods, it does not mean that you cannot stop
and change them. Thoughts evoke emotions and affect the moods. Just as anyone is in control of
what to eat, we are also in control of our thoughts. As you must be wise
about what to eat, you must also be wise about what to think. Thoughts
are food of the mind. Take good care of your mind by feeding it uplifting,
healthy and positive thoughts. Every junk food that you ingest
affects your health. Likewise every negative and junk thought impairs your
mind. Mental health is also an exact science. You put garbage in, you get
garbage out.
The good news is that thoughts are the only things
that are absolutely in your control. If you are put in jail, you have no
control over what to eat. Sometimes you may live in a country where you may
not find the right food to eat. However, you are in control of your
thoughts no matter what happens to you or where you live. No one can
control your thoughts but you. It costs you nothing to think happy and
positive thoughts. So why feed your mind with negative thoughts that make
you feel miserable, lower your self esteem, cause personality or other
forms of disorders and impede you from reaching your full potential?
The other day I was talking with my mom on the phone
and she complained that she is becoming forgetful. I told her she should
exercise her mind, like solve crosswords, puzzles, etc. She said, she
spends most of her time doing house chores that are routine work and she
knows that it is not good for her. I said this is like someone hitting
herself with a stick on the head and complaining that it hurts. If you know
something is not good for you, why do it? This is the problem with most
people. We often know some of our habits hurt us and yet we continue doing
them.
You can stop being depressed,
anxious, nervous or angry at any time you choose. If not, then why an angry
person, who seems to be totally out of control, suddenly starts smiling
and acting cool when someone important, in front of whom he wants to keep
up the appearance, walks into the room? It is because despite his
apparent total lack of control, he knows very well, when it is not
convenient to be angry. People, who claim to be swayed by their emotions,
know the limit.
They stop when they
sense danger. Why suicidal people give up that thought when they think
about their children? They are not fool or crazy. They only act that way
because this is for them a way to get attention. The truth is that we are
in full control of our emotions at all times.
Habits Can Change
The good news
is that we can change our habits. We are in control of our habits. How habits
are formed? Habits are formed through repetition. If you do something
enough, eventually it becomes a habit. If you want to change a habit,
do something different and repeat it so much until it becomes a habit.
Thoughts
produce emotions. Positive emotions can bring us happiness, success,
wealth, love and anything we are capable of dreaming, while negative
emotions can destroy us completely and obliterate our true potential in
life!
The challenge
is to make positive thinking a habit, so it can create in us positive
emotions. Feeling wonderfully starts with thinking positively.
Body’s Own Drugstore
Some may
object and say that most personality disorders are treated with medication
and this proves that they are biological.
Medication is
needed when the disorder become too sever. This is true even in the case
of overeating. If you are too obese, doctors may decide to operate you
because your life could be in danger. This does not prove that the obese had
no control over the amount of food that he or she consumes and that obesity is
an unavoidable disease. Likewise, when you have debilitated your brain to
the extent that it no longer does what it is supposed to do, you may need
drugs to feel better. But let us find out why some
people feel good and others feel bad in the first place.
One function of the brain is to make us feel good.
The brain does this by releasing certain feel good chemicals called
endogenous opioids.
An experiment that studied chemical activity in the brains of human
volunteers, while they experienced sustained pain, showed that the brain
produces its own natural painkiller.
Researchers from the
University
of
Michigan Health System
and School
of
Dentistry
induced sustained pain in the volunteers and simultaneously monitored the
activity in their brain with brain scan. The study found that the onset
and slow increase of jaw muscle pain over 20 minutes caused a surge in the
release of the chemicals. It also found that the flood of those chemicals
coincided with a reduction in the amount of pain and pain-related emotions
the volunteers said they felt.
This is an amazing discovery. What it shows is that the brain is
capable of producing the chemicals that make us feel good. “This result gives us new appreciation for the power of our brain's
own anti-pain system, and shows how brain chemistry regulates sensory and
emotional experiences,” says lead author Dr. Jon-Kar Zubieta,
Opioids also play a role in feelings of pleasure and reward, and in
responses to stressful situations. This is exactly how drugs, both the
drugs of abuse and synthetic pain medications, affect the brain.
This means
that all we have to do to feel great, is to trigger our brain to release
the wonderful feel good chemicals. You can also use drugs or medications
to get the same effect. The problem with these exogenous painkillers is
that they impair the brain and reduce its capacity to produce its own
natural endogenous opioids.
The Greatest Miracle of All
What can make
the brain release these chemicals that make us feel good? How can we open
the door to this pharmacy and grab what make us feel wonderful?
For centuries, physicians had known the power of
placebo. They made their patients swallow sugar pills or injected in them
distilled water and the symptoms disappeared. How can that be possible?
How can a disease go into remission after injecting water into the veins
or ingesting a dummy pill with no medicinal effect? The answer is in
thinking. Interestingly, when both the
patient and the physician believe in the power of the medicine, it works
even better than when only the patient thinks the medication is
real. Skrabanek and
McCormick, in Follies and Fallacies in Medicine write: “The physician's
belief in the treatment and the patient's faith in the physician exert a
mutually reinforcing effect; the result is a powerful remedy that is
almost guaranteed to produce an improvement and sometimes a cure.”
How does the brain perform this stunt?
Does this mean that it is all in our head? Can we feel better and even
cure ourselves if we simply believe that we are getting better?
The answer is yes. Believing that we are getting
better triggers the brain to release the endogenous opioids and these are
the chemicals that the body uses to heal and to feel better. Isn’t that
amazing? The cure to all our ailments is in our head and the key to that
is in thinking positively.
What can be easier than that?
A placebo (Latin for "I shall please") is
fake medicine. It is only a sugarcoated starch pill and yet it has
curative power. Placebos have been curing people for thousands of years.
Most of the medications used by our ancestors are found to have had no
medicinal power. Yet they worked because people believed in them. Now we
make fun of snake oil, unicorn horn powder and dragon bones, but if they
did not have any effect, why would people keep buying them for so many
centuries? Even fake surgery worked because of its dramatic and strong
placebo effect. The shaman would pretend cutting open the body of the
patient with his bare hands, dipping his hand into his abdomen and
extracting something that looked like black clot, (which was of course chicken liver that he had
hidden somewhere prior to the operation) while the patient was fully
awake. Then the cut would heal miraculously and the patient walked out of
the operation room feeling great and in many instances cured. This is also
true in faith healing. In an overly charged atmosphere, the believers are
mesmerized by a charismatic preacher who convinces them that they are
cured, and they throw away their canes and start dancing on the stage
relieved from their pains. These are not staged shows or paid actors. What
is happening is real. These are genuine people who actually get better or
cured and start walking even if they could not do it for years. Yes, there
is a miracle happening. But the miracle is happening in the human brain.
It’s the power of autosuggestion that makes the miracle happen. What you
have between your ears is the greatest miracle that this universe has
produced. YOU are the miracle!
In 1944 a surgeon named J. Bruce Moseley was asked to
perform fake surgery on a group of his patients. At first reluctant, but eventually he was persuaded
to do it in the name of science to find out the mind-body connection.
Patients were wheeled into an operating room at the
Houston
Veterans
Affairs
Medical
Center, draped, examined and anesthetized. Moseley would stab the patients'
knees with a scalpel – to make it feel and look real, there had to be
incisions and later, scars – but that was it. No surgery was performed.
And yet, all patients recovered and reported feeling no pain in their knee
months after the fake operation.
“That operating-room fakery should exert a therapeutic effect on a
patient is a remarkable notion,” Writes The New York Times. “And yet
it may be that the symbolic armature of surgery – the shedding of blood,
the cultural prestige of surgeons, even the scars that call to mind a
dramatic act of healing – is itself a powerful force in recovery. It may
be that ‘placebo surgery’ isn't such an oxymoron after all.”
Irving Kirsch, a psychologist at the University
of
Connecticut
has shown that the effectiveness of clinically prescribed antidepressants
such as Prozac is mostly placebo effect. He conducted a test on 2,318
patients who had been randomly assigned to either antidepressant
medication or placebo in 19 double-blind clinical trials. He observed that
the inactive placebos produced improvement that was 75% of the effect of
the active drug.
“The critical factor,”
says Kirsch “is our beliefs about
what's going to happen to us. You don't have to rely on drugs to see
profound transformation.”
Doctors in
one study successfully eliminated warts by painting them with a brightly
colored, inert dye and promising patients the warts would be gone when the
color wore off. In a study of asthmatics, researchers found that they
could produce dilation of the airways by simply telling people they were
inhaling a bronchiodilator, even when they weren't. Patients suffering
pain after wisdom-tooth extraction got just as much relief from a fake
application of ultrasound as from a real one, so long as both patient and
therapist thought the machine was on. Fifty-two percent of the colitis
patients treated with placebo in 11 different trials reported feeling
better – and 50 percent of the inflamed intestines actually looked
better when assessed with a sigmoidoscope.
*
The power of autosuggestion can also be used in a
negative way with devastating results. In July, 1989, in a summer camp in
Florida, 150 children were served a prepackaged lunch. One girl complained that
her sandwich did not taste right. She felt nauseated and after coming back
from the restroom reported to have thrown up. Others began to complain
that their stomachs hurt too and that the sandwiches really did taste
funny. The supervisor, taking the side of the caution, announced that the
food maybe poisoned and that they should not eat it. Now that their
suspicion was confirmed by the authority of an adult, the children really
felt bad. A number of them described having headaches, tingling in their
hands and feet, and abdominal cramping.
Between 2 to 40 minutes after eating, 63 (42%) of the
children age 4-14 felt sick. More than 25 of them had vomited. The attack
rate did not differ by age, but was greater for girls 7 to 3. Ambulances
were called and all the children were sent to three different local
hospitals.
However, clinical evaluation was normal for all. Over 3,000 similar
prepackaged meals from the same caterer were served in the same area of
Florida
that day. No other person outside this group reported any similar
symptoms. Unopened meal samples tested but no bacteria or pesticides were
detected. Food processing and storage techniques had been faultless.
This episode shows the amazing power of human mind. It proves that we
can cure ourselves or make ourselves sick merely by thinking. It also
shows that perhaps girls are more suggestible than boys. On the bright side, this means women are more apt for self
transformation. The above is an example of mass sociogenic illness (MSI)
and a live testimony to the amazing power of human brain.
Why
America
is No. 1?
America
is the greatest nation of the world. Whether you like it or not, this is a
fact. This did not happen by accident. This is the result of a
long-standing American tradition of self-help, and concentrating on overt
and positive rather than covert and negative feelings. “This
tradition,” writes the site of The
National Library of Medicine “had consistently focused attention on
proactive ways people could become more positive and optimistic about
life, master their moods, and fix their physical ills without taking
medications. People could align their thoughts and constructively adjust
their attitudes. Because mind and body were assumed to be closely
interconnected…it was taken for granted that harmonizing one's emotions
in a positive way would, unquestionably, improve one's physical
well-being.”
“This American self-help tradition first developed in
New England
, where it was tied in with a variety of philosophical and religious
currents. It spread quickly to
other parts of the country, as evidenced by Julia Anderson Root's Healing
Power of the Mind (first published in
San Francisco
in 1884) and Albert Vernon's Correspondence Course of Instruction in
Psychiatrism.”
“Medically-trained Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James
took an active and supportive interest in what he called ‘The Religion
of Healthy-Mindedness’ which, he reported in 1902, ‘has recently
poured over America and seems to be gathering force every day.’
James claimed that ‘mind-cure
gives to some of us serenity, moral poise, and happiness, and prevents
certain forms of disease as well as science does, or even better in a
certain class of persons.’”
Self-Help books gave the people a sense of empowerment. They tapped
into the unlimited resources of their brain and they reached out for
success. “John Kearsley Mitchell's Self Help for Nervous Women and
Charles Fremont Winbigler's How to Heal and Help One's Self are just two
examples of the literally hundreds of books, manuals, and magazines that
were published in the early decades. Emile Coué's technique of
‘autosuggestion,’ according to which patients affirmed to their own
image in a mirror that ‘Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better,’ was
just another, mildly hypnotic self-healing ritual which became a national
fad in the early 1920s.
The creation of Alcoholics
Anonymous in the thirties as a network of self-help groups drew from these
same sources.
By the 1940s the self-help
movement took on an increasingly secular, more psychological and less
religious tone.
Dale Carnegie's How to Stop
Worrying and Start Living, Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of
Positive Thinking, and Thomas Harris's I'm OK---You're OK were
later representatives of the genre, as was the "Laughter is the Best
Medicine" feature in Reader's Digest. The emphasis on the
positive role of upbeat emotions has been continued recently in Norman
Cousins's many books and articles, even though Cousins rested his
self-help advice more heavily on medical authority than did most of his
predecessors.
Success and failure, health and sickness, joy and depression, riches
and poverty, are all in your head. It is how you look at things. Do you
see the glass half empty or half full? That is all there is to it. This is
the key to your success or happiness.
Mingle with Positive People
Both negative and positive thinking are contagious. That is why you
should surround yourself with people who are positive and upbeat, and shun,
as much as possible, those who are not and are resistant to change. If negative people don’t
want to lift a finger to improve, they will certainly pull you down. They
have made their choice; let them suffer the consequence of their choice.
They cling to you and want you to be their weeping shoulder. All they can
do is pity themselves and all they want you to do is to agree with them.
Try to help them but if they do not want your help, leave them because
they will drag you down to the pit of miseries that they have put
themselves in. You can’t help those who don’t want to be helped. You
can’t and must not love anyone more than they love themselves.
After the defeat in
Vietnam, then after Carter made
America
look weak by letting the Islamists take over
Iran, and after his failure to rescue the Embassy personnel who had been taken
hostage in that country, the Americans were feeling low. At this time,
came along a positive thinker named Ronald Reagan who audaciously
proclaimed “America
is No. 1”. His enthusiasm was contagious. He made everyone confident and
feel good about their
country again. His optimism enkindled others, who strove to improve their
lives and the entire nation rose from the ashes to one of the most
glorious eras of its existence. Meanwhile, people of other countries laughed
and dismissed Reagan as a cowboy. A few years later, when America
became the undisputed superpower of the world, it was the turn of the
Americans to laugh. Communism fell on its own, but it would be
shortsighted to overlook the fact that the success of the American freedom
exposed further, the failure of its communist rival, the
Soviet Union,
and precipitated its demise.
Yes, enthusiasm and positive thinking are contagious, just as
negativity and pessimism are. If you have faith
in what you do and you are enkindled, not only you inspire others, you also
attract other positive and successful people. Success breeds more success.
The Force is Blind
The universe does not recognize good or bad. It recognizes force. All
forces produce result. If you strike with a hammer, you generate a lot of
concentrated force on a small area. This force could be used to hammer a nail and build a house (good use of force) or to smash your finger or
someone else’s head (bad use of force). People who are failure, unhappy
and depressed use the same energy that those who are successful use. The
difference is that they use it in a destructive way. It does not take more
energy to become successful. All it takes is to direct your energy in
positive thoughts.
Of course there are also those who just keep hammering on nothing. They
spend the same energy but produce nothing. Life goes by and nothing is achieved.
They have no goals and no plans. They come to this world confused and go
even more confused. Their lives is spent killing time, until there is no
more time left to kill and it's time to go.
A life that has no goal, is a life with no achievements. A life with no
achievements, is a life with no satisfaction. A life with no
satisfaction, is not worth living.
Each Person is Unique
The key to our success and happiness is in our head. The cure to our
mental sanity is in our own brain. We were all given potentials to succeed
at birth. Of course, we are not created all equal. Each person has a
different potential. Nonetheless, we all can succeed in our own potential.
You may not have the same talent that Mozart had, but you have other
talents that he did not have. The challenge is to find your own
talents and develop them.
All vehicles are not made equal. A sedan cannot go where a
4-wheel-drive vehicle can go and neither one of them can carry as much
load as a truck does. This does not mean one is superior to others. It
means they are made for different purposes. We humans are also made
differently. So it is foolish to compare ourselves to others. Each one of
us is unique. We must find our own potential and succeed in our own
capacity.
What happens when you compare yourself with others? You either find
yourself better or worse. This will lead you to feel either superior,
which inflates your ego leading to narcissistic personality disorder or
makes you feel inferior, leading to low self esteem, borderline
personality and a host of other personality disorders. In any case you are
the loser. Instead of comparing yourself with others, try to make your
today better than your yesterday and your tomorrow better than your today.
The only person you should compete against is yourself because you are
unique. Understanding this truth is the foundation of good self esteem.
You become comfortable with yourself and content of who you are. All
tensions will disappear because there is only you and your unlimited
potentials.
What if a person is handicapped,
like being blind, deaf or paraplegic? Aren't these true impediments to
their success? No! Nothing is an impediment. Helen Keller, became
deaf and blind at infancy. Despite that she helped to set up the American
foundation for the blind and toured the world giving public speeches
through her interprets communicating with touch alone. She inspired millions
of people.
Steven Hawkins is paraplegic. He has battled against
the disabling effects of motor-neurone disease that has condemned him to
wheelchair and unable to speak. Despite that, he has pursued his scientific work with
the aid of computer technology and has become the greatest scientific mind
alive, occupying the seat once occupied by Newton. Helen Keller, Steven Hawkins and many
other physically handicapped people have proven that the only debilitating
handicap is what we impose on ourselves.
Owning the
Responsibility
To keep a car going smoothly and for a long time you
need to take care of it. What will happen if you neglect changing the
engine oil regularly or don’t maintain the car properly? It deteriorates
and soon it will stop working. Then you have a defective car. Then you cry
victim claiming your car does not run properly and that you need
understanding and compassion. That is nonsense. You don’t need
compassion. You are responsible for what you did to your car and only you
must pay the consequences.
Our body, which includes our brain, is our vehicle to
carry us during our life. If we fail to nurture it properly it breaks
down. If you eat junk food and don’t exercise, you end up having high
cholesterol and poor health. If you suffer as the result you have no one
to blame but yourself. When you were mindlessly munching on that garbage
food, you should have thought of these days.
The same is true about how to take care of your
mental health. If you feed your mind with negative and destructive
thoughts, it will eventually break down. Then you will have symptoms of
all sorts of mental and personality disorders. Borderline personality
disorder is the direct result of low self esteem. More women than men are
affected by this disorder. Often, but not always, it is caused by
prolonged sexual abuse at childhood. It is not the abuse itself that
causes the problem. It is the feeling of shame associated with it that
causes it. However, one does not have to be sexually abused to develop low
self esteem. Being harshly criticized, yelled at, or beaten, being
ignored, ridiculed or teased, being expected to be "perfect" all
the time and/or experiencing failures in sports or school can also result
in low self esteem. Children do not have enough rational capacity to
interpret these abuses and they instead blame themselves. But there is no
excuse for one to continue in that trait when they grow up. Then it
becomes their responsibility to build their self esteem through rational
thinking, autosuggestion and repetition.
Unlike a car, our body and mind renew themselves
constantly. You can replace the damaged parts in your body and mind with
healthy parts. How? By thinking positively!
You can improve your health, both mental and
physical, and you can improve your life simply by thinking positively.
“What you focus upon expands,” says Dr. Asoka
Selvarajah. “There is ample evidence that the universe responds directly
to thought. Thoughts are real, and they directly create the reality you
choose to live in. In short…What you focus upon expands. If you
concentrate your mind on the negative, you will get more of it. Some
people are stuck in the mistakes and regrets of the past. Guilt and regret
hold them down. As a result, they are trapped by the past and become
incapable of facing the future with a fresh attitude. They bring past
mistakes into the present and then into the future.”
What you focus upon expands.This is a good mantra to repeat so you can take control of your
thoughts and not let them control you.
Mastering the
Art of Feeling Wonderful
Take control of your thoughts and you have taken
control of your destiny. How to replace negative thoughts with positive
ones? Through repetition! Repletion, like drops of water on stone will
eventually reshape your thoughts and one day you will wake up to find
yourself full of hope, joy and happiness.
These are the attitudes that you need to succeed in life and have
everything you want.
Hope is the greatest treasure we humans have. Dante,
in his epic journey, passes
through the Gate of Hell, on which is inscribed “Lasciate ogne
speranza, voi ch'intrate.” “Abandon
all hope, ye who enter here.” This is the most accurate
description of hell. Hell is where there is no hope.
The problem with those who succumb to negative
thoughts and eventually suffer from low self esteem that could result in
various forms of disorders is that they lose hope. This is the greatest
tragedy, because then they stop seeking improvement. They give up and
resign to their self imposed fate, erroneously believing to be less than
others and not have what it takes to succeed. Thus the dire future that they envision
becomes a self-fulfilled prophecy.
What they focus upon expands.
Psychologists Kruger and Dunning say: “Not only do
[the incompetent] reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate
choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.”
Feeling wonderful is an art. This is an art that
should be learned at childhood. Sometimes people fail to learn it. There
could be many reasons that may cause that failure, but the main reason is
that they have made wrong choices. Of course circumstances influence us
and make it easier for us to make certain choices, but the bottom line is
that we make those choices. We are responsible for the choices that we
make and where we go in life is determined by us.
They can put you in jail and fetters, take away all
your freedoms, but one thing no one can take away from you is your freedom
of thoughts. So stop blaming the world and the circumstances and take
responsibility for your life. If you are suffering today, if you are
unhappy and depressed, or if you have been diagnosed with any form of
personality disorder, you are the one to be blamed. You made wrong
choices.
However, the past does not determine the future. At any
moment, you can change your thinking and start harboring happy, positive
an uplifting thoughts. Human brain is the greatest miracle of the universe
and you are in full control of yours. This is an awesome power in your
hands. Don’t let it go to waste. Use it properly and reap the benefits.
Change your thoughts, replace the negative thoughts with healthy, positive
ones and watch the miracle happen. Every thought counts. Every positive
thought empowers you more and every negative and self deprecating thought
debilitates you further. You can change your life by changing your
thoughts. And remember: mountains will move aside
to make way for one who is determined.
Sexual disorders: homosexuality, pedophilia,
exhibitionism, voyeurism, bestiality, bisexuality, coprophilia,
frotteurism, fetishism, transvestic fetishism,
gender identity disorder, klismaphilia, necrophilia, masochism,
sadism, telephone scatologia, transgenderism, transsexual,
transvestite, urophilia.
Peter Skrabanek and James McCormick, Follies and Fallacies in
Medicine, p. 13.
Justin Kruger, assistant professor of psychology at the University of
Illinois, and David Dunning, professor of psychology at Cornell
University, on people who do things badly but think they do them well,
New York Times, Jan. 18.
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