This morning I was thinking about words and and about self-talk, which I call silent words. They're words, they're in sentence form so even though we may not say them out loud; they are words. And I'd like to expound a little more on the first agreement from, The Four Agreements, which is "be impeccable with your words." (Being impeccable with your word is not using it against yourself)
Yesterday I wrote how using our words can build someone up or tear them down; how speaking positively is so much nicer than being like Eeyore. We do the same thing to ourselves with silent words, or self talk.
Since I believe that thought precedes feelings and words, I'd like to ask the question, "What is the first thing you think about yourself when you get up in the morning, or for that matter, even before you get out of bed?" When you look in the mirror ,when you brush your teeth or put on your make-up what do you think about yourself? If we are not careful our thoughts will lead to negative self-talk. We beat ourselves up when we are the ones who have the power to build ourselves up more than anyone!
There's a book called, Hidden Messages in Water, written by Dr. Masaru Emoto. In this book (and I have to preface this by telling you that I have not read the book but have seen his experiment in a movie) he does an experiment on water crystals. He took distilled bottles of water and labeled each one; "I love you", "thank you", and so on as well as "I hate you and want to kill you" and others with negative labels. After labeling them he took a drop of water out of each one, put it under a microscope and looked at the formations of each water drop. The drops that came out of the positive labels formed beautiful crystalline shapes whereas the drops that came out of the bottles with negative labels formed ugly crystalline shapes (yes, there are "ugly" shapes and you can find this on youtube if you'd like to check it out).
Since our bodies are made up of 90% water, what do you think our bodies do when we are feeding them negative self-talk? If all our bodies and spirits hear from us are how bad we are at something or how fat or ugly we are or how stupid we are, what do you think we will get back from them?
We have been given the wonderful gift of having a body. When you think about it, our bodies are miraculous! Heavenly Father designed our bodies to take care of our spirits; they heal from wounds, function to keep us moving, move when we tell them to (usually!*S*) and do we show them appreciation? And let's not forget that our bodies house our spirits; what do we want our spirits to feel?
One way to help our negative self-talk is to speak positive affirmations each morning. Some of them could be: I am loved, I am gratitude for my body even if it's not what you want it to look like (the more we speak gratitude the more we have to be grateful for), I am forgiving myself, I am forgiving others,I am perfect just as I am in this moment( your experiences to this point have brought you to where you are, and you have learned many lessons and have grown ;I have to say that I've learned from some experiences and maybe not so much from others but I look forward to more opportunities to learn and grow, so you are perfect at this very moment for where you are on your journey) as well as many others that you can say that are just right for yourself. Think it, feel it, say it out loud and see how that feels. If you are feeling like a fake or hypocrite because you aren't what you're speaking right now then "fake" it for now. There's a saying, "fake it til you make it" or say "I am "practicing" being loved, etc.....
I hope I haven't rambled too much; I just know how silent words floating around in my head can affect me, and sometimes I feel like it's nearly impossible to stop them so why not make them positive and see how that works for me?
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