Religious or Spiritual?

"There is a difference between wishing for a thing and being ready to receive it.  No one is ready for a thing until he believes he can acquire it.  The state of mind must be BELIEF, not mere hope or wish."

-- Napoleon Hill

Are you having difficulty wrapping your head around how to actually implement the concepts of positive thinking in your daily life?  Let's review the previous topics we have discussed so far about how to approach positive thinking.

1. We know that it begins with a positive attitude; one that says, "Can do."
2. We know that "putting our mind to it" requires confidence or faith that you "can do".
3. We know that it takes a certain determination, a "burning desire" to achieve what you want.
4. We know that posture not only affects our attitude, but indirectly our own confidence level.
5. We also know that the way we speak and think about things has a direct impact on our relationships, our health and many other things.  The way we speak reflects our attitude and hence our ability to think with a positive frame of mind.
6. We have mentioned the mind's connection to the subconscious and in turn the mysterious connection of the subconscious mind to a higher power.

In theory, thinking positively is easy.  In practice, obtaining the desired result seems difficult.  So what's the trouble?  Why doesn't it seem to work?   

Here is what usually happens.  A person will say, "Yeah, those are clever quotes and poems and stuff, but it takes too much effort."  Here are obvious reasons for failure: "It's too much like praying, and I am not really very religious." Or, "I just haven't got the time for all that". 

More often a person will have a favorable reaction to the concepts of positive thinking and have the greatest intentions.  They may actually give it a try but get a little lost in their thoughts or begin thinking about something else.  Some actually start, but in the back of their mind is that lingering doubt or the lack of confidence needed to kick start that old subconscious. 

As to being hard, believe me when I tell you that once you have experienced your first success at obtaining a result you wished for or the solution to a problem you were struggling with just came to you out of nowhere, you will grin and think, "That was easy."  Any effort you expend at all has the potential for producing great results.

The quotes and poems come from years, even centuries, of people from all different backgrounds who have had such success attracting good things into their lives that they take the time to write about it in a way that we will remember.  We all can use reminders of peoples' positive beliefs and successes at a time when we are having trouble focusing our own thoughts or even struggling with our own beliefs.

Time is often an issue, but it's also true that when something is important to us we can usually find the time if the motivation is strong enough.  It's not impossible to be alone with your thoughts as you are winding down for the night, but there is a tendency to fall asleep.  You could bypass one of those TV shows or stop working long enough to devote 15 minutes to help yourself.  

Number 6 ranks high in the list of things holding people back from applying positive thinking to fulfilling a need.  There is a very fine line between positive thinking, meditation, and prayer.  I have read several books on the subject of self-help and have noticed that the older ones tend to be centered around God, faith and prayer where more modern ones seem to make reference to a "higher power" and avoid mentioning "God".  This may be because younger writers fear they will lose their readership if they mention God specifically.  And the mention of God ignores a huge population of people who are not believers in God but who are non-the-less very spiritual and/or believe in or worship another deity. 

Here is what thesaurus.com has as synonyms for God.

• Part of Speech: noun
• Definition: Supernatural being worshipped by people
• Synonyms: Absolute Being, All Knowing, All Powerful, Allah, Almighty, Creator, Divine Being, Father, God , Holy Spirit, Infinite Spirit, Jah, Jehovah, King of Kings, Lord, Maker, Yahweh, daemon, deity, demigod, demon, divinity, holiness, idol, master, numen, omnipotent, power, prime mover, providence, soul, spirit, totem, tutelary, universal life force, world spirit

I hope you find an inoffensive reference in the list. Just know that by referring to a higher power I am talking about an always-present and limitless power outside ourselves that is a complete mystery to most of us.  Since it is not actually your mind that moves the mountain, there certainly is an external power that is responsible.  It turns out that understanding the nature of that power is not important to obtaining results. What IS essential is having the belief that you can.

Puppy Love

Puppies are nature's remedy for feeling unloved, plus numerous other ailments of life.

--Richard Allan Palm

I am a little late posting this because my planned topic took a little twist yesterday with a trip to the vets.

I had wanted to review some of the approaches to actually thinking positively; or to put it another way: attempt to provide an answer to what exactly one does to think positively. One of the things I had mentioned was that to my way of thinking there is a very fine line between positive thinking, meditation, and prayer. Some may say they are one and the same thing, but one distinction is that prayer usually refers to speaking to some one or some thing outside oneself.  To me the word prayer does not necessarily imply worship but does suggest a belief in the existence of an external "higher power" or "infinite intelligence".

Bear with me while I explain the events that took my thinking in this other direction.  My wife and I own two rescue dogs which came into our lives two years ago this coming June.  They were part of an abandoned litter found under a house porch.  Our daughter and we agreed to take the entire litter of five and the love that these dogs have brought to our families has been nothing short of remarkable. The love of their human guardians is expected or at least hoped for as part of pet ownership, but the love and affection they demonstrate toward each other is truly astounding.

Denny, the male of the sister/brother pair that came to us, was discovered to have a serious heart murmur during his first visit to a veterinarian.  (Murmur refers to an abnormal sound as the heart beats usually heard only with the aid of a stethoscope.)  I can hear the typical whooshing sound with my ear to his chest.  His murmur was rated a 6 out of 6 on "loudness" level.  He was not expected to live.  Denny and I spend a few minutes almost every day with him looking into my eyes and me, with hands on each side of his chest, telling him that his heart is beating too hard and asking him to relax and slow things down a little.  This does me a lot of good, and I will leave it at that. 

I decided to change vets this spring for a number of reasons unrelated to Denny's murmur.  The new vet rated Denny's murmur a 5 out of 6 which is a subjective rating, of course, except for one factor in this case.  A rating of 6 indicates that the murmur can be heard "outside the chest" meaning it is audible in a perfectly quiet room without a stethoscope. Denny's murmur is not that loud.

Yesterday Denny's sister, Abby, went for her checkup and the new doctor discovered that she now has a murmur.  I heard it myself with the stethoscope.  It is much less severe than Denny's, but a real downer nonetheless.  Let me mention that this condition is not painful to the animal, and if anything happens at all, they usually just collapse while running across the yard.

To the next step -

I found myself wondering if animals think.  Clearly they have the ability to reason as the following behavior I witnessed recently indicates.  Another dog and its owner were walking along the road in the front of the house (west-facing) going in a southerly direction.  Our pups were blocked by a fence and just stood and barked until the intruding pair got out of site at which point they glanced at each other and simultaneously turned on their heels, ran to the rear of the house around the back where the other dog came into sight again, and they resumed their barking.  This certainly demonstrates an ability to predict and communicate to each other.  This example is probably more instinct than thinking, but how do animals think anyway?  Certainly not in words.

To the final step -

I wondered if it is possible to have positive thoughts for animals the way one might have positive thoughts for other humans.  That is when I realized that what I was really thinking about was prayer.  It put things in a brand new perspective for me.  We frequently pray for friends and family members in times of adversity.  Perhaps by putting it in the context of having positive thoughts about your own issues but substituting the other person's name everywhere you would have thought "I" would be a good approach.  Just reverse the way you have been thinking about it.

"[insert name] is getting healthier every minute.  He/she loves life and is so happy to be a part of his/her family.  He/she has wonderful friends who care about him/her and they are using their combined power of positive thinking to bring continued happiness and good health to [name].  Thank you so much."

See how this works for you, and I will be back next week.

Making the Life You Want to Live

“Fear less, hope more; Eat less, chew more; Whine less, breathe more; Talk less, say more; Love more, and all good things will be yours.”

-- Swedish Proverb

The Holstee Manifesto
I came across this in an email from Brain Pickings Weekly and thought it was worth sharing on the blog.  At the Holstee site they say that between twitter, tumblr and the whole wide blogosphere, the Holstee Manifesto Poster pictured below has been viewed over 50,000,000 times. 

Here is a link with a little background on how Holstee got started.  It definitely is a lesson in positive thinking manifesting in a "can do" attitude.

Happy Easter

Earth’s saddest day and gladdest day were just three days apart

-- Susan Coolidge

This particular post coincides with the Easter holiday during which Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Christians believe, according to Biblical scripture, that Jesus was raised from the dead three days after being crucified.  The crucifixion itself is always commemorated on Good Friday, 3 days before Easter Sunday. 

In my view, whether or not you believe that Jesus paid the penalty for the sins of mankind so that all who believe in Him might have eternal life, you have to agree that Jesus stands as one of the consummate positive thinkers.  I am not referring to someone who always looks on the bright side.  If you have been following this blog you know that positive thinking refers to actively using one's mind to achieve what one strongly desires.

The Bible shows us by example that words play a very large part in our life. Thinking as well as speaking positively can bring about healing, prosperity, joy and love. Words can bless a person or they can curse a person. Words can heal or make you sick. The essence of this concept is that how you speak about yourself and others has a direct bearing on what the mind creates as a reality. Words that ridicule, torment, harass and tear down a person will only create resentment, desire for revenge and more ugliness in return - never a good result. Thoughts that are always fearful and bitter can never remove fear and worry.

Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993) was a champion of positive thinking and wrote several self-improvement books.  He applied Christianity to everyday problems and said, "through prayer you ... make use of the great factor within yourself, the deep subconscious mind ... [which Jesus called] the kingdom of God within you ... Positive thinking is just another term for faith." Peale also wrote, "Your unconscious mind ... [has a] power that turns wishes into realities when the wishes are strong enough."   

In his book Think and Grow Rich Napoleon Hill wrote: "Through some strange and powerful principle of 'mental chemistry' which she has never divulged, Nature wraps up the impulse of strong desire, that something, which recognizes no such word as impossible, and accepts no such reality as failure."