“Rather than fighting with ego you can work together for the same goal. Teach ego that it is an equal energy. You can say to ego, ‘While I am doing this, I would like you to support in this other way.’ This gives your ego permission to show you the parts of yourself that you have repressed out of self-judgment.”
-Red Feather
 
Have you ever found yourself caught in a looping circle of negative thoughts even when things are going well? It can be really painful, and all the more so because it doesn’t have to happen that way. Unfortunately, or fortunately for the lesson of it, it did happen to me, just the other day.

It was a magical day. I went with some of my dear soul family to a wetlands wildlife refuge. We discovered to our delight, a huge migration, hundreds of thousands of Snow Geese, as well as Trumpeter Swans, Canadian Geese, Mallards and Bald Eagles. It was a delight to my birder eyes, and pure magic for my soul. The day was filled with lovely discoveries and messages from Spirit throughout.

The lesson for me, however, was my growing awareness of how at odd moments during the day, and even afterwards, my thoughts circled around negative perceptions of small events that took place, like a dog worrying a bone. Instead of staying focused upon the magic that surrounded me, my thoughts zoomed in on some perceived annoyance or jealousy or fear and gnawed at it.

Really? Why would I want to do that?

It’s all about ego of course. Like a nervous and overly energetic dog our egos need a job to do. If we don’t assign our egos something positive to do, they will revert to old habits. So, our egos need to be taught how to support us.

It is not that our egos are consciously being negative, in fact just the opposite. Our egos are trying to protect us by searching out what is wrong or hurtful and fixing it. The ego is not programmed to look for the good stuff. The ego is programmed like a watch dog, to look for the bad stuff, the stuff that might hurt us. That worked well for survival in the past when we had to be on the look out for predators and life-threatening situations. In our lives today that more often looks like watching out for emotionally threatening situations.

So, here I was having a lovely day with friends and my ego was on alert, looking for the bad stuff, looking for anything that might be emotionally threatening. And of course, my ego usually finds something scary to worry over.

The egos way of ‘fixing’ things is to worry and fret and go over and over various negative scenarios and generally get us worked up into an emotional lather. Then we take some sort of fear-based action or just withdraw into a negative funk. It’s no fun. It certainly doesn’t feel good. But the ego doesn’t care about fun, the ego cares about survival. In this case, emotional survival.

The ego is programmed for fight, flight or freeze, the physical survival responses. When it comes to emotional survival however, these responses may be less than optimal, and keep us circling around in a loop of negativity.

Unless we can catch ourselves and redirect, reprogramming our egos with a positive response.

I caught myself repeating a negative loop, a loop I have repeated many times in many ways, in the past. It was old, familiar and painful territory.

I asked for support and guidance from my Spiritual Support Team as I became aware of what I was doing. I asked for guidance because at that moment I didn’t have a solution. I was just aware that I didn’t want to continue on with the negative thought loop of worry, running negative scenarios, going over various negative scripts in my head, and all the other egoic approaches that result in increasing emotional pain.

I asked for guidance and was delighted by the unexpected thought that I was really lucky. I was really lucky to have these dear friends and family. I felt the fullness of the love that we share, our history and our bond. I felt that overflow of love as echoed in the abundance of life that surrounded us in the wetlands, the water, the marsh, the thousands upon thousands of geese and swans coming together in floating, honking, trumpeting, feathered rafts of bird community.

It was an inspiring, loving answer to my prayer for support, and it turned me right around. After that my thoughts focused upon the beauty of the sunset on the drive home, the fun and humor of those riding in the back seat, my gratitude to my friend driving us, making this trip possible.

That night as I lay in bed, tired and ready for sleep, I could feel my thoughts edging back toward negativity. Like unwelcome visitors knocking on the door in my mind, I knew if I opened the door I’d be circling around once more.

Closing my eyes, I saw a beautiful visual of thousands of geese rising up into the air. I focused upon that visual, and other visual memories of the beauty in the wetlands, choosing not to open the door to the loop of negative thoughts. I fell asleep easily, feeling contented.

Have you ever felt yourself caught up in a negative thought loop like this? Running scenarios and mental scripts and visualizations in an attempt to ‘fix’ whatever the ego perceives as threatening, falling down the rabbit hole of negativity?

Yup, it happens to most of us. Today’s Spiritual Toolbox has some suggestions for what you can do about it.

“Overwhelm is an illusion that states: ‘I am not capable. I cannot handle all this. It is too much. I am doing this all alone.”
-Shoshona Ortalia Rogers from Goddess: 7 Rings of the Heart

We’ve just returned from a week in New England visiting with family and friends and a week driving back and forth. Our days were busy, fitting in everyone we wanted to see. It was wonderful and exhausting.

Getting back home, though tired, I swung full tilt into Weight Watchers and creating a new way of eating. Learning how to use my new FitBit, (which is at this moment buzzing my wrist because I haven’t taken enough steps in the past hour!) Preparing to co-teach a Goddess class. Taking an on-line writing and publishing course. Writing and editing fiction and non-fiction. Planning for our upcoming holiday and birthday parties. And last, but certainly not least, grandparenting, parenting and spousing (is that a word?). I swung myself right into overwhelm.

Overwhelm is a state of mind. It really has nothing to do with what and how much you are doing.

There are many who can handle a daily schedule that is packed from morning to night and beyond with equanimity. There are those whose flexibility makes it possible for them to easily go with the flow. And there are those who get overwhelmed by any change in their daily routine. I probably fall somewhere in the middle depending upon the day.

Overwhelm has everything to do with what and how you are thinking and feeling about what you are doing.

I experience overwhelm when I perceive a task as bigger than it actually is. This happens particularly when I have a number of different projects and responsibilities that I am juggling at once. They gather together, increasing exponentially, and loom over me, mountainous and huge.

I feel confused. I don’t know where to start, and so I don’t. I am stuck. I feel like there is not enough time to accomplish what I must.  I feel alone, as if there is no where to turn for support.

The specter of resistance then rears its head. My ego-self digs in her heels and pulls in the opposite direction from where I want to go for fear that what I do or create will not be perfect. Sigh…

Overwhelm is not fun.

So, what do we do when the illusion of overwhelm, does its thing and overwhelms us?

1. Understand that the feeling of overwhelm is an illusion. It is a misperception. You have the power to look at things differently.

2. Know that you are not alone. Your Spiritual Support Team is interested in and involved with every little bit of your life. They’ve got your back. You can hand that fear in your gut, which is at the base of the perception of overwhelm, over to your Team. They will take care of it. Today’s Spiritual Toolbox is a visualization guiding you through doing this.

3. Focus and Organize. Break each task down into, small, incremental steps. Then, take one step at a time. As you do so you reduce that looming mountain of overwhelm into manageable, orderly, small piles of pebbles. These you can deal with, one at a time.

4. Express gratitude for each small step that you take. Gratitude shifts your energy, lifting you into alignment with your Higher Self. That’s a nice place to be.

Are you willing to give it a try? Me too!

“…happiness is the result of love coming out of you…”
Don Miguel Ruiz, Mastery of Love, A Toltec Wisdom Book

​A forty-something, tired-looking woman (who looks nothing like a younger version of me) stares at her daughter with dismay.
 “You are not going out of this house dressed like that!”

Her daughter slams the front door she had just opened, turns and looks at her mother, eyes narrowed, and disgust distorting the outline of her mouth. She runs upstairs to her room, screaming,    
“I hate you!”

If you were me, uh .. I mean this mother, how might you choose to feel in this situation?

For the sake of argument let’s pretend that you have forgotten you have a choice about how you want to feel and that you respond with a knee-jerk reaction. Your feelings are hurt. You feel anger and fear. You are trying to protect your daughter. Who knows what teen-aged boys might assume if they saw her parading around in that 6 inch skirt and tight, low cut, cropped t-shirt?

When your daughter comes back downstairs wearing an 8 inch skirt and a tight, low-cut, uncropped t-shirt, and looking at you as if you were condemning her to death, your hurt, anger and fear for her causes you to overreact.

“Get back up to your room, young lady! You are grounded! No phone, no mall, nothing, till you can learn how to dress properly!”

And so, it repeats, in many homes, in many variations, with many different teenaged daughters and sons.

This is an old road, traveled by many an irate parent of a teenager.

You may not have teenagers. You may not be a parent. Your life may not look anything like this. The learned behavior patterns of this scene may not be one of your patterns, but most likely you will have others.

We all have our individual behavior patterns, based on fear and built in response to family patterns as we were growing up.

Our hypothetical mother had a choice of how to respond to her daughter, though she may not have been aware of it at the time. (In fact, I can say for sure that she wasn’t. She knee-jerked much of her way through motherhood, sigh…)

We are constantly confronted with situations in which we choose how we will respond. The choice is not always conscious, but it is always a choice. Many of us forget this.

We are trained from infancy to perceive the world around us as our parents, family and society perceived the world, a process known as acculturation. It is the way we learn how to be in the world.

During the process of acculturation, we learn about how our world works and where we fit into it. As infants and children, we swallow whole the view of our world from those around us. Later, as adults we may question this view, but the foundation is laid.

We learn to make the choices about how we feel without conscious thought, based upon what those around us have taught us. We learn knee-jerk responses to certain kinds of experiences. 

We learn that we need certain things or events to happen in order for us to respond lovingly and feel happy. If those things do not happen, or other things happen instead, we respond with fear and we feel unhappy.

It doesn’t feel like a choice for us. It feels like our happiness depends on events outside of ourselves.

This is an unhappy way to live, because we give up our power to choose. We forget that we have the power to choose a loving response, to choose to feel happy. We believe that our happiness lives outside ourselves, when in fact just the opposite is true.

How do we choose to feel happy? We have these learned patterns that tell us when we can feel happy and when we have to feel unhappy. How do we unlearn these patterns and start over?

How do we give ourselves back the power to choose? We retrain our automatic responses through attention, time and practice.

Learning anything new requires attention, time and practice. My granddaughter will repeat a new skill over and over, day after day, until she has mastered it. Whether it is riding her bike without training wheels, drawing a human figure, or hanging upside down on the monkey bars, she is driven to practice again and again, until one day she has it. Then she will lose interest and move on to something new.

Our brains are hard-wired to learn this way. When mastering a desired new skill, we feel a driving need to practice. We are creating new pathways in our brains that allow us to master new skills.

In time, the pathways in the brain associated with any particular bit of learning become like well-traveled roads.

What happens when we want to relearn these responses? We have to stop using the old roads and build new roads in their place.

Relearning requires the repeated practice that any new learning requires. It also requires paying attention and catching ourselves before we start down an old response road, then reorienting ourselves to the new response road we are building.

When you choose to relearn old behavior patterns be patient with yourself.

You are rebuilding the learned pathways in your brain. You are learning to choose a love-based response over a fear-based response.

Relearning takes attention, time and practice.

Chances are there will be times when you suddenly find yourself on the old roads, responding in a knee-jerk negative fashion to familiar stimuli. You will have by-passed all the detour signs and gone barreling down the old road. That’s OK. Wherever you find yourself you can choose to reorient and keep rebuilding.

It’s worth it, because our choice of response, whether we respond from fear or from love, determines how we feel about any situation.

When we choose to respond from love we choose to feel happy.

Don Miguel Ruiz, in his book Mastery of Love, explains that we are only happy when we are expressing love.

A feeling of happiness is a side effect, a beneficial result of expressing love into the world. When we choose the loving response, we feel happy.

Give yourself the power to choose love.

“Everything is always working out for me.”
- Abraham-Hicks    
 
Awhile back my husband left early in the morning to drive to a convention several states away.  I knew he’d be gone for six days. In the past when I’ve said goodbye to him and found myself alone in the early morning dark, I’ve sunk into feelings of loneliness and abandonment. Not because it was true but because old childhood tapes would play in my head.

This time I chose to experience it differently.

I put my thoughts and feelings on hold as I tidied up the kitchen from breakfast focusing my attention on what was immediately in front of me. I put in a load of laundry and made myself a cup of tea. The sun came up and I took my tea outside to sit on the patio and watch the backyard awaken.

Negative thoughts arose and I chose to focus my attention on my immediate environment. I paid attention to my breath moving in and out. I watched the light in the leaves and felt the fresh, cool morning air. I noticed the birds at the feeder and heard their morning songs.  

Even as I did so I could feel the old anxieties and fears just beneath the surface. I knew what was there. I’d experienced it all before and now it lurked, a darkness pressing against the door of my awareness. This time I chose not to give it any attention, nor did I allow it to come to the fore. I didn’t even try to fix it as I’ve done before. Instead I paid attention to what I sensed all around me.

It felt like I was faking it, and any minute the reality of negativity would take over, but it didn’t. In fact, just the opposite happened. In a little while my thoughts turned to what I’d like to do during the day, what would feel good to do.
I made a mental plan and decided to start by making myself a delicious soup to eat throughout the day. It felt nourishing and supportive.

I then took the dog for a long walk and thoroughly enjoyed the cool woods and sunshine. When I felt worry thoughts start I reminded myself of my favorite Abraham-Hicks quote and thought, I don’t have to worry about this because, “Everything is always working out for me.”

As I walked on I heard a repeated bird call from the trees. Over and over it sounded like the bird was saying, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thanks!” It became my mantra as I walked.

Afterward, I got home and ate nurturing soup and took a nap.
​
When I awoke, once again I felt the aloneness pressing at the door of my thoughts and again I chose to focus elsewhere. Instead, I returned to the kitchen and tried out a new recipe, a healthy version of blondies made with white beans. They were surprisingly good. Then I replaced our broken mailbox which had been waiting for repair, and ordered a planter to go around the base of the mailbox post.

Throughout the day several friends called with invitations and connection. My daughter called for support with something that was bothering her, and my husband called just checking in, letting me know he was thinking of me. The calls felt connecting and supportive.

I realized that as I chose to support myself with where I focused my attention, and in the thoughts I chose to think, the Universe responded and supported me. I chose to feel connection. I chose to feel support. I chose to nurture myself.  The Universe reflected that right back to me. 

You will have your own ways of loving and nurturing yourself. You know what feels good to you. Begin with your inner home, your thoughts.
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​Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash