Words can bring strength and gladness or fear and dread. We
need to be mindful of the words that come into our Nefesh (Soul). We need to
examine them to see if they are true about us or not. Do the words that are
said by others have the sound of truth and bring us to a place of encouragement
or do their words have the feeling of dread and darkness? Do the words we say
about ourselves bring us closer to the light of truth, or do they drag us down
into the darkness of despair?
Try to remember a time in your life when someone said
something positive about you and how great you felt. Did the time and place
immediately jump to the front of your mind? Did you suddenly feel the rush of
exhilaration at the memory? If so, congratulations you are doing quite well and
need to keep in touch with those positive uplifting people, but if you are
having trouble remembering a time in your life when someone really encouraged
you, be at peace and know that there are a lot of us in that situation. So what
can we say about this dilemma? We can say I will be the one to give myself the
positive affirmation I want to hear. What? That sounds awfully self-centered
doesn’t it? In the extreme, any self talk can become a source for self centered
thoughts, but if we are careful and keep in mind that we can only change
ourselves and not others we can begin to shape our thoughts into a positive
stream of great mental behavior.
What I found myself doing was trying to figure out what I
wanted to hear and then how I wanted to feel. The first thing I wanted to hear
was that I’m a great artist, so I began to say out loud, “I’m a great artist”.
Now with that kind of statement I wanted to make sure that I at least had some
talent or ability so I decided to show my work to a few people I could trust to
be honest about my work. They all agreed that I was a good artist and one of
them even said my art was great! Right then I realized that the positive self
talk combined with the decision to timidly reach out and show my art to some
one resulted in gaining the words I wanted to hear. I was able to shine the
light of truth into my Nefesh.
Now that experience was wonderful but I also realized that I
still had to work on my belief system and learn how to mentally defend myself
against the doubters and the dream stealers. How tragic it is that there will
always be negative and abusive people in the world. So we need to always be
building our positive internal word arsenal so that when the deceit peddlers
come against us we are ready to say no to their bill of lies.
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