Ten ways you can think yourself out of feeling low!

Haven’t you ever thought that, all your moods are created by your thoughts or cognitions? You feel the way you do right now because of the thoughts you have at this moment. When you feel depressed and low, its because your thoughts are dominated by a “pervasive negativity”. The whole world looks shadowed in gloom. “What’s worse – you’ll come to believe that tings really are a bad as you imagine hem to be”. Negative thoughts nearly always contain gross distortions. “Twisted thinking is the exclusive cause of nearly all your suffering”. The following list will help you to become aware of how you are fooling yourself when you feel upset, low or depressed.

1. All or nothing thinking – You see everything in black & white – like a straight “A” student who gets one “B” then thinks, he or she is a total failure. It “will set you up for discrediting yourself endlessly. Whatever you do will never measure up”

2. Overgeneralization – You expect uniform bad luck because of one bad experience. “A shy guy asks a girl for a date. When she declined, he says to himself “I’m never gong to get a date. I’ll be lonely & miserable all my life”

3. Mental filter – You seize a negative fragment of a situation & dwell on it. It’s like wearing a special lens that filters out everything positive. “You soon conclude that everything is negative”

4. Automatic discounting – One instance of this is the way we often brush aside a compliment. “He’s just being nice” That’s a destructive distortion, usually a depressive hypothesis is dominating your thinking, some version of “I’m second rate”

5. Jumping to conclusions – Two examples are “Mind reading” & the “Fortune Teller Error”. In the firs you assume that others look down on you without checking the validity of your assumption. In the second, you look into the future & only disaster.

6. Magnification & minimization – This is called the “binocular trick” because you are either blowing things up, or shrinking them, out of proportion. You look at your imperfections through binoculars & magnify them. But when you think about your strengths, you look through the other end of the binoculars & shrink everything!

7. Emotional reasoning - “I feel guilty: therefore I must have done something bad” is a prime example. Your emotions seem to be evidence for the thought. It rarely occurs to depressed person to challenge this pattern of distorted reasoning.

8. Should statements – “I should not do this” & “I must do that” are examples of the kind of thinking that makes you feel guilty, rather than motivating you to do something.

9. Labeling and mislabeling – If the stock you invested in goes down, you might think, “I’m a failure” instead of “I made a mistake”. Such self labeling is irrational. Yourself cannot be equated with anyone thing you do.

10. Personalization – You think: whatever happens, whatever others do. It’s my fault. “You suffer from a paralyzing sense of bogus guilt”. What another person does is ultimately his or her responsibility – not yours.

Understanding your RHYTHM for inner peace

Those who think deeply (including me of course) have referred to inner
peace in several different ways.

“…..like muffled drums beating…….”

“…………your personnel inner rhythm…”

“…..your own private space…………..”

“………seeking your soul……….”

It is this personnel space, which offers us and our lives stability, composure and the desire to carry on. To exceed this is to stir inner frenzy. To fall behind this pace within you is to cause erosion of personnel happiness.

You can neither speed it put or slow the pace of our inner drums beating. It is your own muffled drum, your own rhythm, your own private space.

Do you think conducting your life to this built in pace is a limitation?

Not unless stability is a limitation. Not unless poise and calm are limitations. And they are not.

In a world which rocks us about – sometimes gently, sometimes harshly- we would be at the mercy of relentless, unpredictable and disastrously varying forces, if we do not accept them calmly, knowing that we could proceed “in fortune and misfortune, pride and shame, winning and loosing, at our own inherent pace, like the ticking of a clock, which is always tick tock, even if hell is loose around it!

Thus our lives maintain stability. It is this marching through life, like the ticking of the clock, unhurried and undisturbed, to the muffled beat of our inner self, in keeping with our inner rhythm, which enables us to keep on track, however the chances may press against us.

To achieve this inner stability, to march against the horrids of life, with steadiness it is require that we accept the existence of an inner rhythm which sets our own pace. By living at the rate of our own rhythm, we find inner peace. It is a condition diligently sought.

The million dollar question comes next, How to seek it? How to find it? This s much like asking how to find God! In fact, the two are interrelated – because for both the questions the answer lies with you, my friend.

From the largest things to the smallest things in the UNIVERSE there s a repeated motion – a rhythm, a pace. To recognize and accept this concept is to accept the fact that YOU ARE A PART AND PARCEL OF UNIVERSE – and you, yourself has this inherent pace. Awareness of its existence is a prerequisite of finding it. It is not so obvious as the pace of your breathing or heartbeat, although these physical symptoms, together with your degree of tension, stress and strain, all are indicators of whether or not you are living in rhythm with your inner pace.

Just as a motor, the moving parts if not being synchronized properly will lead to its doom, due to continuing shocks of excessive vibration –likewise, you will also be acing a certain doom if you do not live your life at the inner pace which produces inner calm.

And that is the test. If you do not normally maintain an inner calm, it is a warning that you are not – physically, mentally or spiritually – living in rhythm with your inner pace!

Only YOU can make the necessary adjustments In your life! But when you have made them you will them know what I am talking about, you will know that the “……… peace that passeth understanding……..”