How Can Meditation Help in Overcoming Negative Thoughts?

Anxious?  Striving to seek balance? Well, we don’t have to enumerate the methods we’re all straining to deal with an extraordinary year. Unseen and personal, thoughts may have a profound impact on your life’s trajectory. According to studies from the University of Southern California’s Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, you have up to 70,000 thoughts every day—positive and negative, compassionate, and hurtful—that you encounter any one day. Both hope and solitude may be experienced via the power of your thoughts. Either you’re capable of great things or you’re so powerless you’ll never amount to anything as a result of what others tell you about your abilities.

Your body’s response to your ideas has a significant impact on the potency of your thinking. The hormones your body secretes in response to thoughts like “I’m competent” or “I’m powerless” affect your whole neurological system. For instance, your body secretes cortisol to make you ready to fight or leave when you fear you are being endangered (say, your house is being broken into). In this case, your body releases the chemicals oxytocin and serotonin, which make you feel safe and secure. In other words, it makes sense that if you can train your mind to focus on the good instead of the negative, your body will empower you to feel more in tune with the environment around you and more at ease. Shifting your beliefs may seem easy, but it requires a great deal of willpower, focus, and fortitude to achieve lasting results.

Meditation, like wilderness training, equips you for dealing with your ideas, just like it does for dealing with a mountain lion. As you learn to examine before reacting, it might help you confront your thoughts and remain composed when they’re strong and possibly unpleasant. Maryland Mindfulness corporate workshops are certainly the best way for beginners to learn meditation. Mindfulness enables you to recognize each idea as a message with information on how to react in a manner that helps you feel in tune with yourself and the environment around you by working with your breath and sitting with your thoughts and emotions.

You may practice loving-kindness and empathy by expressing it to yourself when you find yourself thinking, “I’m unlovable.” As soon as you start listening to and responding to the messages your thoughts are trying to tell you, negative ideas will begin to fade away since they have fulfilled their function. One of the best ways to keep yourself from being mired in a swamp of negative thoughts is a technique called Welcoming Opposing Thoughts. Positive and negative pictures and recollections may all serve as messengers guiding you to a place of unwavering tranquility inside.

Accepting Opposing Thoughts: A Meditative Exercise

Remember that every idea is accompanied by a bodily reaction. “I’m broken” or “I’m OK as I am” has an effect on how you feel in your body. Your heart either beats faster or slower. Your stomach contracts or relaxes depending on your emotional state. You’re either depressed and drained, or you’re upbeat and energized. In the Welcoming Opposites Ideas meditation practice, you are encouraged to pay attention to the sensations connected with every thought, allowing you to consider a wider range of alternatives. In meditation or in your daily life, you may utilize this technique whenever you find yourself in a negative thought cycle. Consider how a certain idea, picture, or memory affects your mind and body throughout the following exercise.

While keeping your eyes lightly open or closed and your body attuned to the noises and sensations surrounding you, allow yourself to be fully present with the environment and the sounds that it has to offer.

Try to pinpoint a specific belief you hold about yourself, such as “I’m not good enough,” “I should have done things differently,” “I’m damaged,” or “I’m helpless.” Taking this concept as your entire reality, how and where do you feel in your body? Is it in your stomach, heart, or lungs? In what state of mind do you now find yourself?

Graciously accept the polar opposite notion. There is a shift from “I’m not enough” to “I’m OK as is,” As an alternative to “I wish I had done this differently,” the phrase “I’m always doing the best I can.” The phrase “I’m broken” is transformed into the phrase “I’m whole.” In other words, “I’m helpless” is transformed into “I’m competent.” Confirm that this opposing idea is the only reality that exists in your mind. Where and how is your body do you sense it? Is it in your stomach, heart, or lungs? In what state of mind do you now find yourself?

You should take your time and experience each of the two opposing forces one after the other, paying attention to the effects on your body and mind as you go. Think about it: You cannot confirm the opposites with your thinking mind. Instead, let whatever occurs happen by feeling and experiencing conflicting ideas and the effect they have on your body simultaneously.) Imaginative insights may be gained by holding polarities in your mind at once. Then, as a consequence of this exercise, contemplate the goals and acts you intend to create in your everyday life.