Sacred Life Sunday: Magnificent Brain

Frankly, I always thought the whole notion of "positive thinking" was a load of crap.

How's that for plopping it on the table?

Sometimes I think positivity is pushed in this culture like some kind of magic tonic, that it will cure everything. It's confused with "upbeat". The two are entirely different. Being positive also does not mean "cheerful". In that respect, the whole concept has become conflated and the importance of it has been lost in the onslaught of fluff. Being positive is an overall way of life. It's not just smiling a lot and expressing cheery thoughts.

Lately, it almost seems as this message is being pounded into my head. Thoughts are things.

Dealing with my housemate's negativity has been a real challenge. Every day, it's all about her hardships and separation from others. Any mind that concentrates on hardships and differences between self and others for too long becomes only the hardships and separations it fantasizes. In the end there is nothing left but the hardships and separations ~ a good life stolen by self from self. And that is where she is now.

That was one object lesson. It's been sort of a spiritual version of "this is your brain on drugs".

I was listening to PBS and Dr. Daniel Amen who wrote "Have A Magnificent Mind At Any Age". His "12 Prescriptions for an Improved Brain" emphasized this: Concentrate on the things you love about your life more than the things you don't.

He showed some supporting documentation. There were pictures of brains. Brains when we're negative. Brains when we're positive. There was a significant difference between the two.

There are physical consequences as well as quality-of-life consequences to allowing ourselves the laziness of being negative. Dr Amen's brain scans proved that. It puts it in the venue of science rather than some blah-blah "be positive" tripe that leads a lot of people to dismiss it out of hand.

What that has brought me to is a mindfulness about how often I allow myself to complain, to awfulize, to worry and to look at worse case scenarios. Without realizing it, when we do that, we change our brain patterns that lead to these physical as well as mental consequences. In so many ways, it's just as dangerous as smoking, eating poorly or not getting any exercise.

Something to chew on.


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