The majority of people live their life in this matter. Many negative experiences we have in our life, can become behaviour projections for our future.
What do I mean by this?
I suffered from anxiety for over 24 years. It was social anxiety for me, I would start to sweat when I felt anxious. Because it was physical and people could see me sweat, it made it much worse for me. My worst experience of this was when I was about 16 years old.
My school team were the only people on a bus going to a match. All the players on my team were on the bus towards the back. I was sitting in the middle of the bus with only the coach and school teacher in front of me. I thought great!!… I am safe. I shouldn’t get anxious now.
10 minutes later the bus pulled up outside the other local school, whose team we were playing. They all got on the bus. Now I was living my worst nightmare. I was right in the middle of everybody with no escape and no safe place. The second I realised they were getting on the bus, my anxiety went into overdrive, I started to sweat heavily.
It got so bad, I was burning up, there was steam coming off me. I looked like I had already played the match….but I was only sitting in my seat. People all around and talking over me to people behind me. I had no escape, I was stuck on this bus for at least 30 more minutes until we got to the playing field.
People were asking me if I was ok. I said “ya im fine”. People tried to talk to me, but I would not engage. I was busy talking to my worst fear and living it. This just made the whole thing worse.
By the time I got off the bus, it was like somebody had poured a few buckets of water over me. I will never forget that feeling. I don’t remember anything about the match but what I do remember is…. having to go back into the dressing room and put back on those same clothes drowned in my own sweat.
I can still remember that experience nearly 30 years later as if it was only yesterday. However the difference is that it no longer controls me. It’s no longer a projection for future experience in my life.
For everyday after that traumatic experience for me, it became a projection for every future experience I had. Every situation I went into, no matter how big or small it was, was preceded by the fear of me reliving that situation on the bus. Will my mind and body react in the same way again.
Many times it did unfortunately.
What I know now, is that I was the master of my own anxiety. I was the MASTER of all my projections. Everytime I replayed that situation on the bus in my mind, I was reinforcing that as the natural response, for how my body was to react in any future situations like it.
When you are in a situation like that, it is very hard to change one’s thinking to think positive thoughts. You get so consumed in the negative thinking and hating yourself for your body reacting in this way, that you just can’t break the cycle.
Again from what I have learned over the years, it’s not when you are stuck in that negative cycle, that you should only be thinking positive thoughts. We should be thinking and feeling the positive thoughts and emotions when we are in a calm state.
This helps to reinforce the positive emotions in our body. By practising feeling and thinking positively when in a calm state, helps to break the cycle of negative thinking, it helps to break the cycle of the anxiety, or the panic or the fear, or whatever it is for you, re-occuring at the same intensity again and again.
These issues may come up for you again and again. However they may become less intense each time. The more we practise feeling the positive emotions in our body, the more we will have positive experiences.
The more we continue to feel and think about our past negative experience, the more we are going to have these types of experiences in the future. We need to break this cycle. We need to feel and think positively more often. Doing this in a calm and relaxed state, is the best time to do it.
This is why I love Dr Joe Dispenza. He makes it so simple for people to understand how we live our life like this, caught up in the negative cycle. And the reason I wrote this post, is after listening to him in the video below. I highly recommend people to listen to this video, and then download some of his guided meditations and practise them every day. This is what I have been doing for the past several months and it has been a game changer for me.
Enjoy!!