Getting Back on My Diet After Falling Off

A few weeks ago I wrote about my new diet — giving up my addiction to thinking and choosing to live in the now. That was my intention then — it still is now.
But a funny thing often happens – well it’s not funny it feels horrible – when you set an intention to become free of a pattern that has been inside you and running the show for most of your life. Having a life and agenda of its own, it starts screaming – loudly — when threatened. If you’ve ever read Eckhart Tolle’s, The Power of Now, you know he calls it the pain body. Well, I sure can tell you it’s a real pain! 

This is what I’ve been experiencing the last couple of weeks. Yes, I know this is what happens you induce change. Yet it always seems to catch me unaware, and for a brief time I forget of the truth of who I am. The thoughts and stories my unhealed, thinking mind came up with about me were beyond judging – they were condemning. I felt like my level of consciousness was sliding downhill at breakneck speed.

You’d think by now I would instantly recognize this when it happens. Many times, when doing inner healing work, whatever was buried inside has come to the surface and gotten close-up in my face. The thoughts are always ugly, and until I wake up to what’s going on it feels real.

Why am I sharing the pain of my momentary stumbling and amnesia experience with you? Because I think you are probably like me, and have also had these moments – or days or weeks – when you wondered what in the world hit you.

So what do you do? How do you curb this insanity? Here’s what I am doing:

• Feel the feelings. As much as I want to avoid them, I know my life can’t change until the energy of the feeling accompanying the thought is released. This release creates a vacuum and space for truth to be present. If I’m hearing that I am worthless, I drop into consciously feeling worthless. If there is fear I feel the fear. It’s really not scary – it actually brings relief.

• Don’t believe everything you think! I remind myself, “Mardi, you don’t have to believe these thoughts appearing in your mind. Remember, thinking is always about the past or fear of the future. It is never about what is happening now.”

• Find the thinker. Who is this thinker, anyway? There is nothing divine about these thoughts so I know they aren’t coming from God. It definitely isn’t me in present time. She is always a me from the past who made up a belief about herself, and has been collecting evidence ever since to attempt to prove it is true. Having a conversation with her about truth and lies is powerfully good.

This seems to get me back into a state of mental sanity and feeling ever so much better. There is so much more I could say about all of this – in fact I already did.  It’s all in  my book, “Who’s Pulling My Strings?” If you haven’t yet read it, I recommend it — I find it even helps me to re-read it when I find that once again I am in a state of forgetting what is truth.

This living in the present moment takes steadfast diligence and staying conscious. The energy of the world around us is constantly bombarding us with past history and future fears and hopes – but never the present. Maybe our lives are meant to be lived as simply as remembering this and having the courage to walk a different path.