Today was an odd day. My planned appointments cancelled and the one’s I tried to schedule didn’t work. I normally take a personal/administrative day on Fridays, but when the housekeeper is here, I sometimes plan meetings, exercise or run errands outside my office. But today I didn’t feel like it. I felt awkwardly adrift.
I had started by awakening to a feeling of dislocation before I ever left the house. I had originally wanted to get a few things done, but my mind and heart weren’t in it. I thought of a few things that wouldn’t require too much energy output and still I felt oddly immobile. I felt moody and confused. I wondered what was going on and asked myself this. I’d felt fine just yesterday.
The process of Positive Thinking Way eliminates stuck patterns of behavior and emotions. One of the first steps is to notice what you are making things mean. I noticed my first reaction was to try to fill the space by doing something and not simply feel the emptiness. Second, I noticed I was uncomfortable without having clear directions or a natural inclination to want to do something. Third, I felt sad, because I was connecting to a feeling of emptiness and making it mean that something was wrong.
I fortunately remembered to ask myself two questions from this work: 1. What am I making this mean?
I immediately recognized that I had added positive value to having clear direction and a negative value to being aimless (even though I knew it was temporary). I believed it said something negative about me. Such as, “I’m purposeless and that’s not okay.” I knew that wasn’t true, yet some small part of me believed it in that moment.
Next I immediately asked myself: 2. What else might it mean? In asking this question I was able to instantly generate several possible alternate questions. That is, instead of “I’m purposeless and that’s not okay.” It became, “Today, my purpose is simply to be.” Another one I made up was, “I’m neither with or without purpose, I simply have an open schedule day.” Another one I came up with was, “Having an open day in one’s schedule is a sign of a highly organized person.” And so on.
As I did this re-interpreting, my tension surrounding the void in my schedule dissipated and I simply chose something relaxing to do and enjoyed the day.
Certainly long-term, severe stucknesses in behavior and emotions may require psychological attention, but I’m talking about the periodic dissociations we all have. If we don’t recognize the meaning we subscribe to our thoughts and feelings and let them run us, they can render us immobile for much longer periods of time.
The Positive Thinking Way process, (not just these two questions), can help you quickly and effectively reorder your thinking and feelings permanently, as it did me, to much greater success and freedom.
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