The Only Mind You Can Positively Change is Your Mind
Why not focus on positively changing your mind for the better?
Spending any time at all browsing social media can be infuriating. Any encounter with news sources – legitimate or not – can be disheartening and depressing.
Between the ongoing fight with the COVID-19 pandemic, seriously disruptive and destructive politics, entitled people being awful, and various other world events – it’s easy to lose sight of our own lives.
No matter what side you fall on in any given discussion – the desire to change minds is strong. “They” want you to think more how they think – and vice versa.
No matter if it’s all about an unsupportable opinion or scientific fact – nobody can change anyone else’s mind.
I share a lot of the blogs I do with the notion of waking people up. I desire to help people become more empowered and do more for themselves. That’s why I am regularly sharing practices for mindfulness, conscious reality creation, finding and/or creating positivity, and overall self-awareness.
I can share all I want. But I can’t persuade, push, force, or otherwise make anyone change their mind.
Yet because so much of the narrative in the collective consciousness aims at changing hearts and minds – that’s where much of our attention tends to go.
The truth is – the only mind you can positively change is your mind. So why not focus on changing your minds for the better?
Room for improvement
One of the best things about being alive – to me – is that there is always room for growth and improvement.
For all the things I know, experiences I have had, people I’ve interacted with – there are exponentially more for me to discover. Numerous fantastical topics of science, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and more have lessons I can learn. I may have been to 43/50 states and Canada and Mexico – but there are nations across oceans I’ve yet experienced. And there are always new people to meet.
I believe that so long as we are open to learning we’re open to growing. There is always room for improvement.
For example – I am grateful that I am healthy overall. However, there is room for improvement, so I am working to get healthier, get into better physical shape, and take better care of my one-and-only body.
Another example – in the nearly 11 years I’ve been practicing my Pathwalking philosophy, it’s constantly evolving. Looking back at some of my oldest explorations, I can see how things have been added, changed, and what experiences influenced that.
One of the main reasons that there is always room for improvement is change. Change is the one and only constant in the entire Universe, after all.
Change is always happening – like it or not. Sometimes it’s abrupt and disruptive – while other times it’s glacially slow and hardly noticeable. But it’s a constant, and the only Universal one.
We change. I know that I am not who I was – in numerous ways – only 10 years ago. Hell, I’m not who I was just 5 years ago. Truthfully, even in the last few months, I’ve changed. But that’s good.
However, one thing that’s very slow to change is the mind.
You alone control and can positively change your mind
I believe that everyone, at least once, has figured out just who, what, where, how, why, and when they are. At that moment, they were perfectly in sync with their mind. Serendipity.
Some people stick with this, check in regularly, and thus more readily adapt to change. But many don’t. And in time, their mind is in one place – but they are in another.
How does that happen? The answer is that since those people are living less consciously, their subconscious minds are doing most of the heavy lifting.
What does that mean? It means that rather than be in touch with themselves – here and now, in the present – they have lost touch with themselves. Thus, their subconscious mind has been doing the work, driving their life – and as such, brought them to this time and place.
If that has not aligned with who, what, why, how, when, and where you desire to be – you alone are empowered to change your mind.
To do that, you need to become aware of your conscious mind, here and now. That is how mindfulness is practiced.
To gain that conscious awareness, all you need to do is get to know what you are thinking, what and how you are feeling, why you do a given action, and the intent behind it. That makes you consciously aware.
With conscious awareness, you gain knowledge of your mindset/headspace/psyche self. With that, you can now see all aspects of your subconscious self.
It is in your subconscious where your values, beliefs, and habits live. Often, to change your mind you need to change your values, beliefs, and habits.
To positively change your own mind is both easy and not
When you come to realize that your subconscious has been doing much of the driving, you’ll likely see that you’ve been living via rote and routine. While you may not be in love with how those play out, they are comfortable.
This is where the ego comes into play. The ego is the space between your conscious and subconscious mind. It’s who you project yourself out to the world, but also, to some degree, who you believe you are. But your ego is a construct made of your conscious and subconscious mind.
What that means is all the things you attach to the two most powerful words – I AM – are your ego.
Your habits, beliefs, and values motivate you. Meanwhile, your conscious mind takes in all sensory input, as well as knowledge of your thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions. Your ego, however, blends these together to report to you who you believe that you are.
Conscious awareness – mindfulness – makes you literally more aware of your mindset/headspace/psyche self. That awareness will show you if you are who, what, where, why, and how you desire to be – or not.
If not – changing your mind begins with actively practicing mindfulness. That empowers you to alter your subconscious values, habits, and beliefs to actively change your mind.
Easy, yes. But also hard because it requires effort you’ve likely never given much energy to before.
This is where positivity comes in.
Positivity makes change easier
Scrolling through social media will inevitably lead you to dark, distressing, disturbing pictures and places of our world. I think this is an inadvertent reflection of our fear-based society.
When you get caught up in that, it will make you feel bad, sad, depressed, hopeless, and otherwise negative. That lowers your energy, your vibrational frequency, and makes change extra challenging.
And yes – bad things happen outside our control. Nobody wants to get dumped, fired, injured, or have other unwanted and negative experiences. But they do and will happen.
However, when they do – after the initial, visceral reaction to them – you have all the power to find and/or create positivity. Maybe you got fired – but now you can get a better job. Perhaps you got dumped – but now you can find a better relationship. Sure, your car got totaled – but now you can replace it with something newer and more to your liking.
This is not some Pollyanna attitude. It’s finding the good and positivity to move past the negativity. Positivity is a builder and generator of change.
That’s why change is much easier with positivity.
I am grateful for my health. Gratitude is pure positivity. Because I am grateful for what I already have – I can more easily find and/or create even better because of that positivity.
The only mind you can change is your own. But that is so empowering that it’s worthwhile – and you are worthy and deserving of it.
Acting to positively change your mind isn’t hard
It begins with mindfulness of our thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions.
Knowing that change is the only universal constant, we can use mindfulness to actively work with that and gain access to our conscious mind, subconscious mind, and ego. When we choose to make use of mindfulness, we gain control over not just our mind, but our heart and soul – and that ultimately empowers us.
When you are empowered, your mindfulness increases, you become more aware overall, and that gets reflected and spreads to other people. This creates a feedback loop of awareness and positivity – a feedback loop everyone can take part in.
Then, together, we build more positive feelings and discover further reasons to feel positivity and gratitude. That becomes the impetus to improve our lives for the better, help overcome the overwhelming negativity of any current situation, and generate even more positivity and gratitude.
An attitude of gratitude is an attitude of pure positivity. That positivity can generate even greater positive energies – and that is ultimately empowering for all.
Everyone is worthy and deserving of all the good we desire.
This is the four hundred and eighth entry of my Positivity series. It is my hope these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.
Please visit here to explore all of my published works – both fiction and non-fiction.
Please take a moment to sign up for my newsletter. Fill in the info and click the submit button to the right and receive a free eBook.
Follow me here!
