Let Go of Negative Thoughts & Habits
“Every encounter is an experience, and every letting go is an insight.” (unknown author)
I don’t remember where I came across this quotation, but I was able to remember it immediately. Letting go is difficult, sometimes extremely difficult. It is connected with feelings of loss, pain, and grief. However, this is exactly where I see something positive. We let go, it hurts, we mourn, and a new path begins. A new path on which a person, a conflict or problem, old thinking patterns, and behavior will no longer accompany us.
I do not want to equate these situations, because surely the loss of a loved one is something completely different than giving up patterns of thought and behavior. We are usually aware of the love we feel for others. But we tend to be unaware of negative thoughts and habits. However, they are often related to our relationships with other people. We sometimes adopt behavior from other people, or their behavior influences our thinking and acting. If we detach ourselves from these relationships, this does not mean that we also detach ourselves from the related thoughts and habits. They often tend to solidify.
It is not unusual, in particular for women to start a diet after a separation or increase their activities in order to be as attractive as possible. The basis for this is usually the thought of not being enough. Not enough in many respects, but attractiveness is often in the foreground. A pattern of thought establishes that perhaps had its origin much earlier in life. Thinking turns into actions and actions become habits. Maybe a lost love was even your entry into a dieting career? There are many other examples that correspond with this pattern. Which ones do you know?
Holding on is the opposite of letting go. The more we hold on to something, the more rigid and inflexible we become. Here lies the danger of holding on so much that we miss the chances for a new path. A path to ourselves. Especially thoughts like, I am not enough in this or that respect, have fatal influences and we should reflect very carefully where these thoughts come from if we want to let them go.
For me letting go has a very big influence on personal development. I have been able to let go of many of my thought patterns and habits already step by step, but this process is definitely not over yet. Nevertheless, I have realized that many issues were related to unsolved problems, traumatic experiences, conflicts, and also relationships with other people. This insight helped me to better understand my thoughts and habits. Only through this awareness, I was able to detect the root cause.
Understanding where negative thinking and habits come from is the basis for breaking away from them. Even if we become aware of them, we cannot simply discard them overnight. They are part of our history and our development.
Besides meditation, movement, music and creative activities help me to free myself from negative thoughts. Reflection is always at the beginning, but without a suitable strategy for discarding these thoughts, it doesn’t help much. Therefore, think about which of your favorite activities help you in freeing yourself from negative thoughts and avoid things that have the opposite effect.