|
|
Home
and Family
Think Positive
by Rosally Saltsman
After years of working on purifying my speech, I've decided to
concentrate on purifying my thoughts. This occurred to me when
I wasn't feeling well, actually, physically, after having lost
my temper, patience and aforementioned pure speech and I began
to feel like my resistance was low. Not wanting to have to
become bedridden, I decided to keep my resistance high by not
sinking into negative thinking which would certainly make me
feel worse.
I decided to banish all negative thoughts as they surfaced for
the next few days. It was then that I became aware how much
time I spend having imagined disagreements and fights,
(mis)judging, worrying, condemning and feeling resentful. Each
time a thought like that popped into my head, I had to shift
mental gears and get it out of there before my antibodies
attacked it and brought on a fever.
You might think I'm exaggerating, but negative thoughts really
do make us sick, poison our environment and our relationships
with other people and set us up for failure. This is not news.
But what was news to me was how much of this I was doing so
naturally, so routinely, that I wasn't even paying attention.
What's even worse is that most of it is for naught.
Many of our worries turn out to be unfounded, our imagined
fights don't materialize, often the people we're really
judging are ourselves. Condemning and resenting other people
only makes us ill, not only spiritually but literally, and
sends out bad vibes and negative energy which fill the air
with a palpable tension. Not that reviewing a difficult
conversation and working it through or contemplating a problem
that needs to be solved is bad, but I was amazed at how much
non-constructive negative thinking I was doing.
And there I am again being negative. It's a tough habit to
break, especially since I'm the only one who's aware of it. Or
am I? Other people pick up on our negativity and if we're
going around scowling, we might be tipping off others as to
what's in our mind exactly.
Not only, I discovered, is purifying my thoughts healthy and
conducive to a feeling of well being but negative thoughts are
what lurk behind loshon hora. One can't talk loshon
hora if one is going around feeling like Nochum Ish
Gamzu.
Think about it.
|
