Focus and Refocus #2 Mind Exercise
To illustrate how the mind will give you, or reflect back at you from the outside world, from what you consciously focus on, here is a simple mind exercise which will demonstrate this fact:
Wherever you are, whether sat in a room, out and about, or wherever you may be, consciously think of a colour. While thinking of your chosen colour, notice how all the objects in your environment with this particular chosen colour, seem to ‘pop’ out or resonate with far more emphasis in relation to the objects which are not of the chosen colour. For example, if you choose to think of yellow, all the objects coloured yellow will seem to be highlighted, with everything ‘not’ coloured yellow, fading into the background. You may also notice that this exercise seems to take no effort to little effort to achieve the results stated here.
In essence, by practicing this technique for long enough and focussing on the colour of your choice, which in this case/example would be yellow, will result in seeing a world of full of yellow objects, or at least will be the dominant colour being reflected back at you from the ‘outside’ world. The conscious process of practicing focus on the colour will eventually transfer into the ‘automatic’ part of the mind, thus becoming a habitual ‘program’ or learned skill.
This mind exercise shows in a simple way, how what we focus on will affect how we see the world around us and applies to everything we choose to focus on. Unwittingly, we all use this method of thinking and somewhere along the line, all of us who developed anxiety conditions focussed on the feelings of anxiety at the expense of all the positive things which we have in our lives. We gradually, over time, created a world which reflected mostly or only anxiety back at us.
The good news is, we can use the same method to train our minds to focus on what we want reflected back to us. Again, this will take practice, in the same way we unwittingly practiced focussing on the feelings of anxiety and an anxiety provoking world at the onset of our ‘condition’.
Another wonderful aspect of this method and once the realisation of how this part of your mind works becomes knowledge through experience, is that you find you have a choice in how you wish to see the world, or your own world. Some of us choose to see beauty in the world, whereas others choose to see the world as a depressing place to live. Both view points in reality are most likely true and to ignore the ‘bad’ things (for example, injustice, cruelty, etc.) which happen in life would be morally wrong from my point of view, but what I am talking about here is strengthening the part of ourselves which sees the positive aspects of the world and of our lives at a healthy psychological level. I am not promoting apathy. I am promoting a healthy mind which benefits the individual and who/what the individual is associated with. I believe by developing a healthy mind, strengthening a positive view of ourselves and of the world around us puts us in a stronger position to deal with the ‘darker’ aspects of reality, including our anxieties, concerns and so on. This is the way I ‘choose’ to see things and of course everybody is different and everybody can choose their own realities in which they wish to live, for better or for worse – I choose the better!
Have a wonderful day!