Mental Diet

Like many others, Emmet Fox says that if you change your mind your conditions must change too. ‘As within, so without.’ That means your health, your wealth, home life, work life, etc. Pretty powerful concept, huh?

Fox talks about training yourself to choose the subject of your thinking and to choose your moods. He suggests a seven day mental diet whereby you must not allow yourself to dwell for a single moment on any kind of negative thought. Once you start on the diet, you must go right through for seven days. If you go off the diet, you have to start all over - seven days of unbroken mental discipline is essential in order to get the mind definitely bent in a new direction once and for all.

Now, I’d not intended to go on this mental food plan, but reading about it yesterday did heighten my awareness about my thoughts.

In the first place, I noticed the number of all thoughts swirling in my head is huge. It’s no wonder I can be confused or blocked – I need a traffic cop in there! Then, it’s pretty interesting how often negativity can slip in.

However, before getting fully discouraged, I continued reading about the diet today. Ahhh.

Fox doesn’t intend that we will not have a negative thought. Rather, the diet is about not entertaining the thought, not dwelling upon it. The idea is that when a negative thought comes up, one whisks it away like a red hot cinder that flies out from a fire and lands on one’s sleeve. The emphasis here is on not staying on the negative thought. I feel better now.

Having an ego in this illusion, there is no doubt that negative thoughts (fear, anger, judgment, etc.) will come to my mind. My job is to let them go with love. And, I’m more and more able to do this. I may not have followed Fox’s plan – I think it a great idea – but by focusing on Spirit and returning quickly to thoughts of God and Its Will when I stray, I am able to stay in the positive realm of thought. It’s a different type of mental diet, but one that works nonetheless.

Commitment

It’s been 246 days since I first started this blog back in November and I’ve been thinking that when I hit one year and 365 blogs, perhaps I’ll drop from daily writing to several times a week.

But then I started thinking about why I began this blog in the first place and how are those reasons holding up.

The strongest reason for starting it was to place myself in a regular daily practice of connecting to God by contemplative writing. Now, I’ve not always spent much time in contemplation before writing; sometimes I’ve written something just to meet my commitment for a daily entry. But what a gift this practice has been on those days when my other spiritual practices have gone by the wayside. No matter what, that daily commitment has been a spiritual anchor in my daily life, getting me to pause and focus on God.

Take today for instance. We got back from Tucson this afternoon, hot, dirty, and exhausted. I “threw” myself in the shower and went to bed for a nap at 230pm. Four hours later I was still napping, sleeping more blissfully than my usual night time manner, and I could have kept on sleeping. But, as I told Rog, I got up and out of bed because I needed to blog. So, after a light dinner, here I am.

In a day that held no routine at all and in which I did not make time to be in the silence, this commitment to blogging helped get me back on track. Sitting down at my laptop, glancing through some daily spiritual readings, and thinking about what I could write about my relationship to God, I feel closer to Spirit and more centered.

My original main reason for starting this blog clearly holds up. This spiritual blogging practice is a discipline that has worked well for me and continues to do so. One day at a time I’ll keep at it, remaining open to Spirit’s guidance.

And now, it’s off to dreamland once again!