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Choose Your Thoughts, Choose Your Life, by Della Temple

(Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal.)

Taming your inner critic and getting to the core of who you truly are, not whom others think you should be, is a process. It's a process of intentionally choosing your thoughts instead of allowing your inner critic to choose for you. Much like peeling away the layers of an onion, this process of discovering who you truly are takes patience, self-nurturing, and fortitude. But it is possible—and once you find your true essence and live by your own internal wisdom, life is truly delicious!

However, you can't change something until you understand what it is you want to change. The first step then is to bring your awareness to your current story of how you see yourself operating in the world. Start to listen to your inner dialog. Write out some of your worst inner critic statements. Keep a journal of your dominating thoughts. Bring your beliefs of how you view yourself up from the basement of your subconscious and into the light of your awareness. Remember the words spoken to you in judgment or the expectation handed down from your parents. Journaling the story may help to bring all the pieces into focus.

The second step is intent. Do you want to get rid of the energetic imprint of these old beliefs? Sometimes you do, and sometimes you don't. Often people are tied to their stories because the victim energy feeds their sense of self. If that's where you are, then that's where you are. No judgment, just awareness.

And if by chance you are ready to be something different, intend it to be so. Awareness then intent; that's the process of becoming a conscious creator. As you choose to create new dominating thoughts, you start moving out the energy that's keeping you stuck.

Grounding to the Earth
One of the easiest ways to remove the old beliefs from our space is through a grounding cord. One end of this hollow energy tube attaches to your body and the other end attaches to the center of the earth. The gravitational pull of the earth sucks the energy attached to your old belief from your space, making room for more of your life force. You can attach this grounding cord every morning during meditation, and it will stay in place all day.

As I've done this, day after day, year after year, I've found that my inner critic's voice has diminished. I won't say it's all gone, but it is less bothersome. Now I can tune into my own thoughts about what's best for me. I've changed my dominating thoughts to those of self-worth, compassion and non-judgment.

Exercise: Releasing Your Old Story

1. Sit in Meditation with your feet flat on the floor, and your eyes closed. Take a couple of deep breaths and visualize a wide, hollow tube of energy connected to your hips. This tube falls below your feet, through the floor, and continues down to the center of the planet. Feel this cord anchoring into the core of the earth. This hollow energy cable serves as a vacuum cleaner sucking the energetic baggage right out of your aura and returning it to Mother Earth, where it will be recycled and returned to its original essence.
2. Imagine energy, the thoughts and feelings of others, the shoulds and expectations of the world, drop right out of your body and fall down the grounding cord. Let it all go. Give your body permission to release all that stress, all that foreign energy. You don't need to store it in your body. Release it all.
3. This grounding cord stays in place the entire day, continually vacuuming up all the gunk in your aura and returning it to the earth. Take a couple of deep breaths, open your eyes, get up and walk around. Imagine your grounding cord still in place. It moves when you do, allowing you complete mobility. Anytime during the day that you begin to feel weighed down by your old beliefs and thoughts of unworthiness, imagine this grounding cord removing those toxic thoughts and feelings from your energy field. Feel the rush as all that foreign energy leaves your aura and moves back to the earth.

As you remove the shoulds and expectations of others from your energy field, you empty out. And, as you know, nature abhors a vacuum. So instead of filling right back in with more of the same nasty inner critic energy, you can consciously "fill up" with energies more in alignment with your new dominating thoughts. As you consciously choose to align yourself with energies that feel good to you, there's less room for your old stories to reside.

Calling Back Our Life Force
One of the best ways of bringing new energies into your body and aura is to use a tool called Golden Sun.

The Golden Sun has two functions; one is to call back our life force so that we can function at our full potential. The other is to offer us a way to replace the foreign energy leaving our body via the grounding cord with energies that are more in alignment with who we truly are. When we fill in with energies such as peace, love, and self-acceptance, we dilute the power of the lower vibrational energies (fear, anger, resentment), offering us one more way to tame our inner critic.

The grounding cord and the golden sun are what I call "foundational tools." I use them every day to help me remove the thoughts and feelings of other people from my body and aura.

Exercise: Filling In With A Golden Sun

1. Sit quietly with your feet on the floor, and your eyes closed. Take a couple of deep breaths. Imagine a gigantic Golden Sun, about three times the size of your body, above your head. See the sun filled with golden light. Now place a giant magnet in this sun, and ask the magnet to call back your scattered energy from past events, and from time spent at your job or with family and friends. Feel all that energy zoom back into the Golden Sun.
2. Imagine that energy being cleansed and restored to the frequency that's just right for your body. This is your life force energy.
3. Next, fill this Golden Sun with relaxation, peace, abundance, self-validation, or whatever quality would most benefit you at this moment. See those qualities permeate the sun, vibrating at a frequency that's just right for your body.
4. Now imagine reaching up and popping the Golden Sun. Let the deflated sun's beneficial qualities flow into your aura and fill in every cell and membrane of your body.
5. Feel yourself refreshed and enveloped in a cocoon of energies that are just right for you today. The world around you can be full of chaos and turmoil, but when you're filled with your own energy, you can be relaxed, free from stress and turmoil.
6. Sit in this wonderfully peaceful space of relaxation and fullness for a moment or two. When you're ready, open your eyes and notice how you feel. Your body may be vibrating a little bit faster, or you may feel a bit more focused or present.

When you are "full of yourself," filled to the brim with your unique life force energy, there's less room in your aura for mind chatter. It's free, it's easy, and it's oh so comforting.

And finally, if the old story tries to reattach, just remember that you are in control. You've turned the page, and you're becoming something more. Tell those old dominating thoughts, "Oh, I remember you. You're that story that's trying to keep me small. I've outgrown you, and I am something different now, so please go away." Send those thoughts down your grounding cord and then fill in with the Golden Sun full of energy in alignment with your new dominating thoughts. Be in control. Be the master of your universe.

Choose your thoughts—choose your life.

Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal. Copyright Llewellyn Worldwide, 2015. All rights reserved.

I am a Cancer, birth date 7-18-70, and back in May I started a relationship with a younger woman. Her birth date is 2-8-86. We started a friendship and then things got serious. We had closeness and intimacy. For months I tried to help her with her feelings for her ex-boyfriend. I fell in love with her. I did everything but buy a house for her, and then she started other relationships with other guys and called them friends. I finally found out the extent of those relationships. She got back recently with her ex, and now I am left with all these feelings and dreams that we started. I am both in love and depressed about it. Why did she push me so hard to get married, have sex, and plan a future with me, only to throw herself on other guys and finally go back to her ex? She tells her ex that we were just friends, but both of our families know we were dating. In fact, my mom thought we were going to get married. I think she is in denial. I still love her, but she hurt me so bad. I don't know what to do. Help! I want to know if there was anything that I haven't seen that I should know. She lies to everyone to get her way with them. I just wanted to love her as any real man loves a woman. I hope you can give me some guidance. Thanks.

- Bryan

Dreamchaser:

First, thank you for sharing this painful experience with us.

Now let's get down to what is happening here. The main lesson in this whole situation for you, Bryan, is for you to listen to your gut/ instincts/ inner voice - whatever word you want to choose.

Throughout this entire relationship, your gut was tweaking. You always "felt" that something was amiss, but because you loved her, you chose to ignore that nagging. We always know in our guts when something is not going to work out, or something is up. In retrospect we ALWAYS look back and say, "I knew it."

You absolutely must listen to your gut, even when it disagrees with what you think you want. Actually, it's especially important to listen then! The expression, "hindsight is 20/20" is popular for a good reason. We can look back and clearly see how things worked out for the best, even when we struggled against change at the time it was happening. Someday, in hindsight, you too will see how things worked out for the best here.

You have to not only understand but also accept that everything happens just as it is supposed to. She could not handle the practical details of the life you two were making together. She is the type of person who has to have drama happening all the time. For example, when things got settled and easy between you, she went to find new "friends."

She was very crafty in using that term. For your benefit, every other man in her life was a friend. For their benefit, you were a friend. She can have lots of friends taking care of her needs, and she doesn't have to work very hard to get by, nor does she have to make an actual commitment.

You want a commitment, and you are ready to commit to someone who will meet you halfway. If she had stayed with you, you would have stayed with her because you love her. By doing so, however, you would have kept yourself from the woman who is going to give you what you REALLY want and need, not what you THINK you want and need.

This is when life gets really tough. As human beings, we want love. We think we find someone that we want to love and we do whatever it takes to make that love work, even when it is not supposed to. However, as spiritual beings, we have this "knowledge" inside of us of what LOVE is supposed to be. So far you have not found that. You have proven you can love unconditionally, so it won't be long before the love you have to offer will be returned in kind.

In the mean time, please look inside of yourself and try to find out why you have this need to "fix" or "help" women. Is it perhaps so that you will become indispensable, and she will never want to leave you? Answer that question, and you'll move to a higher experience in love.

I wish for you the love you so desire.

*****

Astrea:

You poor thing! You got involved with a CHILD who APPEARED to be adult, when she was really running from one thing to another, trying to decide how she could be the happiest. At her young age, consideration for you was probably the LAST thing on her mind.

I'm so sorry you chose to let yourself be hurt by this youngster. I'm sure she didn't do any of the things that hurt you so much on PURPOSE; she just didn't know any better.

I see that she had a good time with you, and was momentarily grateful for the distraction you gave her from the other boyfriend, but ultimately, she was too immature to be with you, so she went back to that other person, who is more like her. Children have limits that are NATURALLY set by their ages and maturity levels, and it's easier for her to be with him.

Young girls are often about what is EASIEST for them. Your presence demanded that she behave in a mature fashion, and she just couldn't keep it up.

You say she was open to all your plans for the future. In the moment those plans were made, of course she was. Unfortunately, with kids her age, out of sight is out of mind, and as soon as you turned your back for a minute, she was off on some other teenage tangent. She couldn't focus on the future like you can.

The lying seems to be part of her personality, though if you asked her why she does that, she probably wouldn't know what you were talking about. She loved you as much as it was possible for her to love anyone. That is the way young girls who have never had to be responsible for their lives behave. Ten years from now, she might be ready to settle down with a nice guy like you, but she has too much growing up to do now.

You see, she thought you two were the SAME. She hasn't had enough life experience to realize that men your age who want to be in a committed relationship are SERIOUS about their marriage plans. She thought the two of you were just TALKING and having a good time, creating some kind of fairy tale "happily ever after" as she's seen on TV and in the movies. She had no idea your feelings for her ran any deeper than hers for you.

Perhaps the age difference should have tipped you off from the beginning. I do understand how easy it is to get caught up with people when we think we've found true love. However, expecting any eighteen-year-old person to be able to think clearly about her future is a stretch. Girls her age are still trying to decide what they are going to be when they grow up.

She's not in denial, because there is nothing for her to deny. You were fun until her other boyfriend came back, and as hurtful as that may sound to you, it's the truth.

Move on with your own life, and find someone you can TRUST with your heart. This time, try someone closer to your own age!