Your Negative Mind Is Like A Crappy Radio (And It’s Time To Change The Station)

My favorite analogy for allowing positivity and abundance— health, wealth, success and happiness— into our lives is that of our attention as a radio.

Every day, we make choices that determine what we’ll experience. When we focus on the good in our reality, we’re able to find and appreciate beauty in everything. When we focus on the bad, or the lack, in our lives, we set ourselves up for disappointment.

That’s not because the good doesn’t exist, but because what we focus on grows and therefore becomes our own personal truth. You can’t turn a radio dial to 101.1 FM and hear a song broadcast on 800 AM. Both frequencies exist simultaneously, yet we only hear what we tune into.

Our hearts act as transmitters, filtering our experiences of “good” and “bad” and sending them to the appropriate frequency. We often feel overwhelmed by the loud and chaotic chatter of our mind because it is constantly being flooded with mixed signals. We think of the things we want to accomplish but have doubts about; the person we want to become is also someone we aren’t sure about.

If these warring thoughts weren’t enough, our thoughts are repetitive and often obsessive. Research suggests we have up to 70,000 thoughts per day, and yet 90 percent of those are habitual— the same thoughts as the day before. They’re like the song we keep hearing because the on-air host refuses to play anything else, even though we (and pretty much everyone else) is sick of it by now.

We’re all creatures of habit, worry and obsession. Even though some thoughts feel natural to have, they’re really just floating around in our mind-space because they’ve been there so long and we haven’t found a better thought to replace them yet.

But static noise is deafening, and within it lives the churning of all of our unfulfilled hopes and wishes— in short, all the things that we wanted but didn’t get. Those impressions lead us to the false expectation that none of our desires will be fulfilled, which simply isn’t true.

Static thought is the sound of war, but we can’t simply tune it out, because everyone and everything inside the noise is us. We have turned into the walking, talking human versions of all of those old, repetitive conflicts, and they will not disappear until we change.

They will not disappear until we tune ourselves to another frequency.

To do so, we must first acknowledge that we have had at least a few hopes and wishes come true. Without any work on our part, people have called just when we needed to talk to them, help has come from unexpected places, and prayers have been answered. All of this has happened on our positive frequency. When we have an intention and send it out on the radio waves, we are actually talking to ourselves in another form. As the sender of the signal, we are here in time and space. We are also the receiver of the signal as we interpret it.

Sending a signal out and getting a response back isn’t something we have to work for. It’s all we do. There isn’t a single thought we can have that doesn’t send back a result.

The problem is we overlook results that are too subtle or don’t immediately fit our goals or coincide with our judgment about what should happen.

But the should we build in our minds aren’t really anything other than habitual ideas based on what we’ve experienced in the past (chalk another one up for repetitive thought.)

If we take a few minutes every day to examine the content of our minds, we allow ourselves the ability to figure out what frequency we’re tuned into.

If our thoughts are telling us: “I feel bad,” most everything will feel bad. We probably won’t even notice when the clerk at the gas station smiles at us.

If our thoughts are telling us: “I feel good,” most everything will feel good. We probably won’t even notice (or feed into) when our friend complains about something irrelevant.

Once we realize where we’re at in relation to the broadcast we’re listening to, we can choose to keep listening to tune out to find a better station. How do we do that?

It’s simple: scan until something sounds good.