Today we are talking about your Emotional Tool, Mindfulness and Mental – Emotional Time Travel and how it can help you throughout your day.
There are varying definitions for mindfulness but they all boil down to your ability to be fully present in any given moment. This allows you to be in a state of conscious awareness about yourself and your environment without your thoughts being directed from your past or pulled to your future. So practicing mindfulness means moment-by-moment you maintain awareness of your thoughts, feeling, and environment through a gentle and nourishing lens.
Activating mindfulness as an Emotional Tool can help you quiet the internal and external chaos that can pull you into a state of suffering, or a negative path of thinking.
Mental-emotional time travel, when used in tandem with mindfulness, can help you create the experiences in your day-to-day life that you want. Understanding the benefits and limitations of mental – emotional time travel is also very important and can also help you deepen your mindfulness practice. Let me explain.
You are the writer, director, and main character living your story into existence. You are also the only person who has the power to witness your story as a whole. You are also the only one who gets to determine where your mind goes and what you focus your attention on in that story.
Now let’s think of your story as a movie. Your mind is a powerful component to creating your story. You have the ability to be mindful just like we talked about. When you are in a state of conscious awareness and present in the moment it’s as if you have your mind set to “play” on the movie. You are fully in the moment as the details of your life play out.
Now here is where the time travel comes into play. You can “rewind” allowing your mind to travel back in time to parts of your story you have already experienced. You can also “fast forward” allowing your mind to travel into the future to scenarios that haven’t happened yet. There are positives and negatives to allowing your mind to both rewinding and fast forwarding within your story. Let’s look a just a few examples to help you understand what I am talking about.
Rewinding The Positives and Negatives:
- Positive – Allows you to find positive cellular memories to help you come out of challenging moments.
- Positive – Helps you build a practice of gratitude.
- Positive – Can help you illustrate and understand where your limiting beliefs were established so that you can find your way back to your essential truth.
- Negative – Can reestablish negative patterns of thinking from experiences you survived.
- Negative – Allows for bulling language to feel real and validated in the present moment.
- Negative – Can create an echo of regret and grief that alters how you feel today.
Fast Forwarding The Positives and Negatives:
- Positive – Helps you set intentions.
- Positive – Allows for daydreaming and vision creation.
- Positive – Can allow you to feel the positive sensations of what you are want to create before you actually create it, helping it to be ushered into your story.
- Negative – Can lead to catastrophizing and projecting the worst possible outcome.
- Negative – Creates space for doubt and uncertainty to rule over your present experience.
- Negative – Can establish an echo of fear that feeds into anxiety altering how you in a moment where there is nothing to fear.
Now you can see how rewinding and fast forwarding can have a powerful impact on your present moment. Knowing that your mind has the ability to travel over the timeline of your story allows you to have agency over where your mind goes. But that means you have to awake and dialed into being witness of your thoughts rather then just letting them run on autopilot.
When left on autopilot it can feel like your mind is jerking you around within your story. It rewinds and fast forwards according to your negative bias because it is trying to keep you safe. But you have the power over your mind not the other way around.
Metacognition is your ability to witness, be aware, and understand your thoughts. This allows you to take your mind off of autopilot and redirect it. If you can witness your thoughts and decipher where they are coming from on the timeline of your story, then you have the power of choice. You can choose the positive or negative of wherever you are on the timeline of your story and you can always choose the mindfulness of the present moment.
Now the good news is that neuroplasticity works in your favor, allowing your experiences and actions to change your neural pathways. This means an action you take today can help make a positive change in your wellbeing tomorrow. Repeating these positive actions strengthens those neural pathways and helps build your mental fitness.
So if your mind has activated the rewind and you are caught up in a negative cycle of thinking, each time you witness your thoughts, decipher their origin and choose to shift to the positive or to come back to a mindful present moment; you are strengthening that positive neural pathway. Same goes for if you are caught in fast-forward and are stressed, catastrophizing or anxious. You can witness the thoughts and make a different choice then you are laying the foundation for it to be even easier the next time.
I know you can use mindfulness and mental – emotional time travel to take back the power in your story! Remember you are the writer, director and main character living your story into existence.
Let me know if you have questions, I am here to help.
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