Today’s Mandala
Free
“For to be free
— Nelson Mandela
is not merely to cast off one’s chains,
but to live in a way
that respects and enhances
the freedom of others.”
“Emancipate yourselves
— Marcus Garvey
from mental slavery,
none but ourselves
can free our minds!”
“You wanna fly,
— Toni Morrison
you got to give up the shit
that weighs you down.”
Today’s MotD encourages us to free ourselves from the shackles that keep us down, mainly the shackles of our negative thoughts, our limiting beliefs, our age-old conditioning; in other words the negative internal dialogue that “weighs us down”.
We do that firstly by mindfully monitoring our thoughts. What are we saying to ourselves? What critical, judgmental, negative things are we saying. (I’ll refrain from posting any of them here so as to not perpetuate them).
So we tell ourselves from now on we’re going to monitor our thoughts more closely. Then when we catch one, we acknowledge it, thank it for sharing (yes thank it) and immediately rephrase it. For instance if we catch the thought “no one wants to hear what you have to say”, we can rephrase it to something like “people want to hear what I have to say”. We will probably catch the same negative phrase multiple times and we’ll rephrase it multiple times with less and less frequency, until we have successfully transformed that thought.
For extra credit we could dig a little deeper into the negative thought: where did it come from, who would have initially said something like that to us when we were younger, was there a particular incident or was it something said multiple times in different ways.
With each release of our mental shackles, we free ourselves more and more from the cocoon of internal suppression until we let ourselves fly freely as a butterfly.
Blessings,
Maureen
The Mandala Lady
btw…started with this:
Mandala of the Day 