May 11, 2014

A New Kind of Spring Cleaning: Tossing Out Negative Beliefs

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about spring cleaning. Even though these past couple of weeks have felt like a wild, lack of ozone layer produced summer here in San Francisco -- it is still technically Spring time.

Every Spring, when the days are long, the flowers are out, and there's that wonderful breeze picking things up and setting them down in new places, I always go into cleaning mode. Digging through drawers that have gone unopened for months, file cabinets get ravaged and cleared out, that little do-hickie thing that I was holding on to "just in case" gets chucked.

Today, I came across this great little pic ...


... and I thought, "Heck yeah! That's exactly what needs to be done!"

I imagined a "thought junk drawer" that I could open up, tip over a trashcan, and all of those negative ideas and beliefs that drag us down end up exactly where they belong -- in the trash!

I know, having been through the long haul of recovery, how hard it can be sometimes to not feel overwhelmed by negative thoughts. In fact, I think I used to be a hoarder of negative thoughts -- can you relate? 

Our minds are extremely powerful except when cluttered by all sorts of junk like "I'm no good", "No one will ever love me", "It's my fault", "I can't trust anyone." 

So, today, I want to encourage you to do some spring cleaning of a new kind. Open up that junk drawer in your mind, imagine a trashcan (maybe a very large trashcan depending on how long you've been hoarding negative beliefs about yourself), and just dump it all out!!

Whenever a new negative thought pops up, imagine sending it straight to the trash heap (I also like to make sound effects to go along with the image - like crumpling paper and tossing it).

Happy Spring Cleaning!

2 comments:

  1. Great idea! Those negative thoughts can be like a steam roller and overtake all of you. Like piles of paper accumulate, I like the idea of filing them in the trash one by one. Then using your imagery, burning the trash pile or burying it.

    ReplyDelete

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