How yoga and mindfulness can help put a stop to negative thought patterns.
How to bring the gift of peace to our busy minds.
Ways to help our teenagers and children control their negative thought patterns.
Recent studies have revealed that the average human has over 6,000 thoughts in a single day. With such information, it is important to remember that we are not defined by our thoughts.
Yoga and mindfulness can help us to distance ourselves from our negative thought habits.
Dr Bruce Lipton, is an international leader when it comes to bridging science and spirit. He is a stem cell biologist and bestselling author of, ‘The Biology of belief’.
In a podcast with Dr Rangan Chatterjee, Lipton claims that thoughts are split into 2 camps. The conscious mind is your problem solving and thinking out your wishes and desires. Then the subconscious mind is programmed with pre-existing patterns and behaviours. This is generally the programming we downloaded from birth to 7 years of age, which is likely to be when we picked up many of our negative thought habits.
However, the good news is that we can almost re-programme our minds and therefore manifest what we want in our lives. Lipton advocates that we can instil new habits by repeating positive messages to ourselves. For example,
‘I am brave/compassionate/strong”.
So how does yoga come into this?
Yoga can help as when a negative thought keeps running like a record. By consciously thinking ‘Stop’ and simply doing something else, we actively help to stop this negative thought pattern.
Let’s practise…
Close your eyes and imagine one of your negative thought patterns that may falsely inform you that you are not enough. Imagine taking the record off and say your name. For example,
‘(name) you are kind and brave’.
Then take some deep breaths in through your nose for 3, hold for 3 and then out of your mouth for around 6.
Next think of some empowering yoga moves to flow together for a variation of a sun salutation. For this you can look online for a demonstration, whilst you wait for my yoga videos!
To conclude, if we all try to empower our children by giving them tips on how we manage our negative, or unhelpful, thought patterns; then this is surely one of the best gifts we can give them this year!
