Gifts of Sobriety - Freedom

My very first inklings of a new freedom were upon awakening, knowing it was 6 am and not 6 pm.  Opening my eyes without my head pounding and my mouth parched.   Feelings of happiness and not of shame and guilt of what took place in the previous hours. At days end, lying my head on the pillow with a smile and a full heart with one more day of sobriety.

Today I am free from the obsessive drinking and obsessive thinking of drinking.

Acceptance and surrender signal the beginning of freedom and happiness.  Once I arrived at this place, my healing began.

Transformed Thinking #7

Your Thoughts Create Your Moods

Thoughts can create emotions of happiness, joy, positivity and love. Thoughts can also create the counter opposite, anger, bitterness, depression and negativity. In every moment of every day you have the opportunity to extinct stinking thinking! What will you choose and create today?

Transformed Thinking #6

Open Minded

Practicing acceptance of other’s opinions and ideas brings about an open mind. It allows us to receive wonderful people and opens up our world to experience the blessings they can bring into our lives. An abundance of opportunities will cross our paths when we practice this kind of thinking.

Know it all mindset leaves no space for anyone to be in our life. They have nothing to offer and nothing to give. You already know it all and you make sure they know it.

Transformed Thinking #5

I Quit Playing the Self Blame Game

Freeing our selves from useless guilt and self judgement of self blame is true transformed thinking.

No more wasting precious time blaming myself for events which I’ve had no control. Specifically other people’s perceptions of those events.

Evaluate, I like to zealously inspect, where am I placing blame and whether or not it is appropriate. Refuse to take responsibility or blame for someone else’s free will choices. Don’t own what does not belong to you.

Transformed Thinking #4

“Manifesting Through Your Words”

Do you magnify your negative emotional state of well-being by talking about it repetitively with others?

Every time you repeat a story that involves a negative emotion it reinforces the experience that your body has from it.

Catch yourself when you are talking with others, are you seeking for agreement/validation about how bad a situation is? Or are you truly trying to find a resolution for the experience?

Be mindful of what you are manifesting by reliving the negative.

What kind of seeds are you planting if the narrative is negative?

Transformed Thinking #3

Accept the Positive

A healthy mind hears both good and bad and focuses on the positive.

Sure, negative things happen to everyone. It doesn’t mean that we have to except all circumstances as negative. Especially watch how you enforce compliments and positivity by responding in a negative
way.

It’s always easy to respond to a compliment with a negative. For example, someone gives you a compliment on your outfit. You respond with: “oh this old thing”. Next time just say “thank you!”

Transformed Thinking #2

Letting Go!

What if we got real honest with ourselves and practiced releasing things we could never control to begin with?

What if we released our need to know what happens next?

Freedom is not easy when all we know is busy and bondage, but what if we shattered the patterns and set ourselves free from our thinking?

Release what we thought we needed, loosen our grips, unlearn what’s not serving us, let go of the old and focus on a new way of thinking and living.

Let’s create a new balance in this new season.

Transformed Thinking #1

There is Gray!

Not everything needs to be perfect. Its beautiful here in this space where there are shades of gray. We can choose to see the world in gray. My father challenged to me 13 years ago and said, “Nicole, look for the gray.”

A healthy person has the ability to see the full spectrum of color and variations. If the rigidity of your thinking is at the high-end of perfectionism, perhaps you are missing out on a large portion of beauty in this life.

Much of life takes place in the gray areas. Most experiences in life are not all good or all bad, but somewhere in between.

Build a practice of seeing different shades and see how your thoughts become transformed.

Identifying "'Stinkin Thinkin'" #10

Personalization and Blame

Personalization comes when you hold yourself personally responsible for an event that isn’t entirely under your control.  When a women received a note that her child was having difficulty in school, she told herself, “This shows what a bad mother I am,” instead of trying to pinpoint the cause of the problem so that she could be helpful to her child.  When another women’s husband beat her, she told herself, “If only I was a better cook, he wouldn’t beat me.”  Personalization leads to guilt, shame and feelings of inadequacy. 

Some people do the opposite.  They blame other people or their circumstances for their problems, and they overlook ways they might be contributing to the problem: “The reason my marriage is terrible is because my spouse is totally unreasonable.”  Blame usually doesn’t work very well because other people will resent being scapegoated and they will just toss the blame right back in your lap.  It’s like the game of hot potato – no one wants to get stuck with it.

Blame can be a way to escape.  Blame will get you out of taking responsibility.  The problem is it gives the keys to your freedom to who ever you blame for the situation and now you are enslaved to the very thing that you were trying to escape from.  Now you’re enslaved to bitterness, because you escaped through blame. Hmm…bitterness is a whole other discussion.

Identifying "‘Stinkin Thinkin’" #9

Labeling

Labeling is an extreme form of all-or-nothing thinking.  Instead of saying “I made a mistake,” you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.”  You may also label yourself “a fool” or “a failure” or  “a jerk.”  Labeling is quite irrational because you are not the same as what you do.  Human beings exist, but “fools”, “losers” and “jerks” do not.  These labels are just useless abstractions that lead to anger, anxiety, frustration and low self-esteem.

You may also label others.  When someone does something that rubs you the wrong way, you may tell  yourself: “He’s an S.O.B.”  Then you feel that the problem is with that person’s “character” or “essence” instead of with their thinking or behavior.  You see them as totally bad. This makes you feel hostile and hopeless about improving things and leaves very little room for constructive communication.

In this uncertain time, let’s focus on constructive communication.