Following on from my previous post (‘Happiness’), some ways of thinking have been ingrained in us since childhood and will be related to events or things we have believed since then. This sort of thinking can be difficult to shift, especially if it has affected us at an emotional, heart level. This is why I love to coach in a way that reaches your heart and not just your mind! You can change your brain by changing your thoughts and by changing your imaginations and your perceptions of past events. Imagination is a language of the heart, so this is heart level change as well as in the mind.
Whatever you think most about will grow. Science has shown that it takes 21 days of thinking about something to create a long-term memory. It also takes 21 days of repeated ‘new’ thinking to break down that memory. That means that even if negative thinking has been there for 50 years or more, it still only takes approximately 42 days to transform it. This is good news! It does require patience and discipline, but it means that even years of negativity which may have affected so much else in your life can be reversed in 2 months!
I see this change of thinking/focus something like the following analogy. If a path is walked down every day it becomes clear and easy to use. If, however, another path is followed instead, the first path will eventually become overgrown and even impassable and the new path becomes clear and easily usable in its place.
In the healing journey, then, your choices of thoughts are very important. When you receive a new healthy picture of past events to replace an old picture and heal your heart, this new picture needs to be your repeated focus for full healing to take place. The neuroscientist Caroline Leaf states ‘whatever you fix your gaze on grows within you. Whatever grows within you, you become.’