De-energize Agony – Getting Rid of the Painful Thoughts
In this post, I want to share a simple technique that I use for getting rid of repetitive painful thoughts without any visualization, meditation, or anything that might be new to you.
The method is very easy to do, but it requires a little patience which you will naturally develop with the practice.
I call this process as de-energizing agony because by doing this we are just stopping ourselves from fueling up these repetitive negative thoughts.
I don’t claim that I created this method; it came to me as inspiration while I was trying to deal with a bad memory which kept troubling me for more than a year, maybe my subconscious mind found a way to eliminate that unpleasant memory from my system forever and made me aware of this technique.
I tried many things like my favorite meditation method, mindfulness practices, heart chakra healing techniques and whatever I have learned from many different programs to deal with that painful memory, but despite all of those efforts, the emotions that this particular thought pattern evoked in me kept being as intense as it was initially.
Like me, you may have also learned a lot of methods to heal yourself spiritually, so I would like to clarify that I am very sure that the particular limiting belief that might have caused that problem in my life was gone, still the memory was painful and the thought was distressing, that’s why I think this one essential inner work is something most people miss while using various methods.
Here I will reveal the technique I used and in case this works for you too, then please do come back to share your story, I would be the happiest person to hear it.
The Missing Inner Work
Most of the best working spiritual and personal development practices that are present out there work well. But since many people are too focused on the end results, they rely entirely on the methods and thus they don’t care much about what type of inner work is being done.
As a result, they may have solved a hell lot of stuff on both inner and outer levels; still, some thoughts remain as distressing as it has always been.
Here’s the reason why this happens – See our mind associates things in the outer world with our inner worlds, and our biological system also plays a role in this.
Anyone who has a slight knowledge of human psychology will agree with me that our mind forms certain types of responses to different stimuli and these responses are capable of generating a specific biological reaction.
For example, if you had a bad, depressing breakup and you preferred to listen to a particular type of music repeatedly during that period, your mind associates that song with those thoughts and emotions.
Now, even if years have passed and you are in a good relationship, there is a high probability that you will still feel sad while listening to that song and your body will also react as if you are living that moment once again.
I hope that makes sense to you, now here’s what happens when we do nothing about all the major stimuli that trigger such reactions in our bodies and minds, it becomes our nature.
Usually, when something very bad happens in our lives, the pain gets healed with time. Wounds are healed, but we all know that the scars remain forever doesn’t it?
Whenever you look at these scars you get into a negative state of mind, even though your wounds are healed, you still can feel the pain because your mind has associated that scar with the emotions and thoughts of a certain kind. All the things that remind you of a painful memory are those scars.
What we are going to do here is to recondition our mind in a new way so that it stops repeating the old troublesome emotional patterns and generate a new positive response instead.
When you will use this technique after a recent event, it will take a lot of persistent efforts, but it will be easier to use it for the memories that trouble you even after a long time.
It is done in three steps, this may appear very simple to you right now but it takes a lot of patience and practice to perfect it: –
Three Steps to De-energize Agony
1 – Break the Pattern
Imagine if I gave you the challenge to ride a vehicle downhill from the top and apply the breaks any time after 10 seconds, when will you do it?
I think you will do it as soon as possible because the more time you take, the harder it gets to control the vehicle right?
In terms of physics, the more potential energy gets converted into kinetic energy, the greater will be the inertia which will keep accelerating the vehicle.
Likewise, the more time you will take to apply breaks to your thought roller coaster, the more intense the ride will be. So what you have to do here is to convince yourself to stop for a while.
Yes, you will have to convince yourself to do this and it is very important because your mind will have all the plausible reasons at that moment to postpone applying this method.
Here are a few things you need to be aware of in order to successfully learn how to apply the brakes: –
- Don’t Fight
Try not to fight with your thoughts in order to stop it, understand it is perfectly alright to have such thoughts and feel negative emotions sometimes.
- Take No Other Action
You need to take the required actions at the right time, but when your mind is unstable, you never come up with a proper action step. It makes sense to you right now, but when you are feeling strong negative emotions you will want to do something else other than this method. So you will have to make yourself agree that you will do whatever is needed once you finish this process. (You can also read these lines in such moments, it will help)
- Don’t Go Deeper
In a bad emotional state people tend to believe that they have to go deeper and figure out the whole situation, the mind likes to solve its own riddle and you will want to keep thinking and contemplate over “what’s wrong”, be aware, and don’t fall into that trap.
- Stop Trying to Be Right
This is the most important thing I wanted to share with you, we all make the mistake of forming a victim mindset when things are not working out in our favor. You can see it for yourself when you feel negative emotions, your mind goes into scarcity mentality mode and then shows you how you are right and the world is being unfair to you.
2 – Observe Your Emotions and Thoughts
I am not asking you to meditate, just for a few minutes till you start feeling better sit and observe how you are feeling.
Yes, this is about feeling the pain, something about which most of the spiritual teachings talk about, but most people get it wrong, they try to intensify their pain by thinking more such 
thoughts because they imagine themselves as the gladiators who have to act strong and take as much pain as possible.
That’s the worst thing one can do, what this is all about is “detachment” which means you will have to maintain the present moment awareness and observe these emotions without getting attached to the thoughts that are creating it.
Just be aware and let whatever thought arise to come and go, you can sit or lie down for a while and view all this from the perspective of watching a movie.
Once you start feeling more relaxed, observe the residual emotions. I feel it in my chest area, some people feel it in their heads, it is a heavy feeling that you can feel around a particular body part.
You will see that both the negative feelings and thoughts will be less intense than before once you do it.
3 – Do What “Your Mind Loves” Then Do “What You Love”
I was waiting to say this particular line since this is an essential step, but trust me, you should not skip to this step, otherwise, the whole process will fail to change your mental state.
First, do what “Your Mind Loves”
The stuff that your mind likes to do is something that you can do for hours, it doesn’t necessarily have to be something that will make you happy but it is something that will keep you engaged.
There are things to which you say no because it wastes your time and you cannot resist it, well this is when it becomes useful. Obviously, I am not asking you to get intoxicated or do something of that sort which people use as a distraction during hard times.
I sometimes restrain myself from watching my favorite shows and save it for this purpose. I deliberately keep myself eagerly waiting to watch my favorite shows and movies for the time when I need to engage my mind in something very interesting. You have no idea how grateful I am to the game of thrones season 5.
There is a strategic video game that I keep myself away from because once I begin playing it; I find it very difficult to take a break for hours, so that too adds to my list of what my mind loves.
Be sure that you don’t overdo this, our purpose here is to just keep our mind busy doing something else for a while, so only do it till you can confirm that you are ready for the next step. The time taken in this step will depend on your situation.
Our mind does not allow us to do something joyful when we are sad because our subconscious mind is like a kid who likes to stubbornly do something that is not good for him due to our inner belief systems, so this is a type of trick we play on our own mind.
Do “What You Love”
Doing what you love is simply doing something that makes you happy and fills you with joy.
It could be something big or small, but only you can know what truly makes you happy. When the last time I used this method, I spent a whole day playing with my pet dog.
Being emotionally healthy is all about doing what you love. Think of something that really puts you in a happy mood, it could be playing with kids, traveling, going to your best friend’s place, doing some volunteer work, etc.
We obviously could have jumped to this method right away, but how many people are able to do this when they are disturbed? So we are using a strategy to take our focus away from the negative thoughts and then do something that makes us happy because our mind offers less resistance to happy emotions when we use these steps.
Alright, that’s it. See, with this technique you are reconditioning your mind in a different way than earlier. When you repeatedly do these steps what will happen is that your mind will associate these happy feelings with the stimulus which used to evoke strong negative emotions in you earlier.
What we have done here is a transmutation of negative energy into positive, I use this whenever I find myself disturbed due to unpleasant thoughts and emotions.
This process is in a way working on the symptoms, you should also work on the cause in order to avoid repetition of such problems in the future.
The root cause of our problems is always the subconscious beliefs that we unknowingly form during our childhood. Hypnotherapy is one very effective way using which you can work on removing all such inner beliefs, Marisa Peer’s Uncompromised Life is one very good program that I recommend for this purpose because of her powerful transformational hypnotherapy method is something I find very amazing.
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