We all face negative and limiting thoughts at some point in our lives, and sometimes they stop us from doing the things we deeply love and desire. In this article, I share my personal experience of understanding how they work, so that you can recognize the same mechanism in yourself.
In my reflection “The Self,” I described the kind of thoughts that filled my mind before I started Emanation Art. They were mostly negative, and all of them aimed at stopping me from doing what I had dreamed about for years. At first, they had so much power over my behavior that they blocked every action needed to make Emanation Art a reality.
But by staying with those thoughts long enough, I realized that what really blocked me was not the thoughts themselves but my relationship with them.
How a thought becomes a belief
Let’s take one of my recurring thoughts from before my decision to create Emanation Art:
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The thought: “You are not good enough.”
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The proof my mind attached to it: “I’ve never created or managed a business before, and I don’t have all the necessary skills to start.”
Notice what happened here. At first, this thought had no impact on my actions until my mind started to attach proof to it, which came from my previous experience and my self-image (I will dive deeper into this topic in a separate reflection). Taking this information into account, I automatically believed the thought.
Here I would like to put the emphasis on the extraordinary power that belief has over our behavior, and on what it really means. To believe, as I perceive it, means to empower something, to give weight to it by accepting it as true. As a result, a belief influences our behavior: we act according to our beliefs.
A thought is only a neutral sentence until we give it weight by believing it.
When two beliefs compete
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What spoke against the original thought: My intuition and my passion for art and self-discovery. Something within me said, “You can do it. You only need to take the first step.”
This was a call from a completely different realm, the invisible one. Here is the greatest difference from the original thought: it did not require any proof. No previous experience was taken into consideration. It was a direct call to action, a thought based only on faith. Something within me just believed it. It was an intuitive hit that I could not explain or rationalize, and I became really confused.
It felt like two forces within me were in conflict (one based on the physical realm and the other on the invisible one), and I had to decide which one to listen to. What I was dealing with was really a cognitive dissonance, a conflict of opposite beliefs that pushed me to take action and choose a side.
After weeks of this inner battle, I decided to surrender, listen to my intuition and start working on Emanation Art. I think the decisive factor was my enthusiasm, curiosity and passion, or what I might call “emotional weight.”
Our beliefs can be formed not only by our previous experience (or by other factors such as education, culture or religion, which I do not discuss here) but also by our emotions. In my case, emotions played the decisive role.
Coming back to the decision itself, I thought my inner conflict was over, but little did I know what was about to unfold.
How a negative belief becomes a fear
After I firmly decided that Emanation Art would be created, my mind started to throw unexpected thoughts at me, and this time they were more threatening:
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“What if you fail?”
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“What will other people think of you then?”
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“What if you lose all the money you invest?”
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“What if you invest a lot of effort and time, and it is all for nothing?”
This time it hit me more deeply, because these thoughts were projecting vivid images of different scenarios of my possible failure in my mind. Seeing them felt heartbreaking, and that got me emotionally attached to the scenes.
Here belief changed its nature. Before, “you are not good enough” was accepted only by my analytical mind. Now, with images added and an emotional response on my part, it was accepted by my emotional mind too. And that is exactly how fear got under my skin.
I no longer believed it only with my logical mind but with my whole body. Without belief, those images would have been just scenes in my imagination. With belief, they felt real.
Vividly imagining a scene and becoming emotionally attached to it can reinforce a belief and make it feel more real.
How fear feeds the belief
Once fear is present, it starts to work as proof: “I feel afraid, so there must be real danger.” The thought creates the fear, and the fear confirms the thought. The more vividly I imagined failure, the more “real” it seemed, and the more I believed it. In the end, the whole experience made me discard my previous decision.
After several days of letting it all sink in, the thought that I needed to start anyway kept coming back, but the decision to give up stayed the same until I learned how to overcome fear, which I will explore in my next reflection.
Building a healthy relationship with thoughts
Negative thoughts don’t have power on their own. They are just neutral sentences in our mind. What gives them power is how we choose to relate to them. There are two ways to do that.
The first is to give them weight and let them grow into beliefs and fears that might control us.
The second is to observe them without attachment. In order to do that, we need to step back from the thought without arguing with it, feeding it or pushing it away. Here is what helped me along the way:
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Create space between the thought and your identity. For example, instead of saying “I am not good enough,” I said “I’m having the thought that I’m not good enough.” This method helps me move into observer mode and avoid triggering the mechanism of finding proof or confirmation and accepting the thought as truth automatically (the believing phase).
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Question the proof and know the limits of the mind. Most of the time, your thoughts will find proof, or confirmation that they are true, based on your prior experience and self-image. I consider this a huge limitation of the mind, because it automatically takes the thought as a prediction, without taking into account the role of other invisible faculties, like intuition, and traits, like curiosity and passion. All these elements are extremely powerful, but the logic of the mind simply discards them while adding proof, or weight, to the negative thought.
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Notice the images and the feelings a thought carries. When you catch your mind painting a scene, label it: “This is an image, not an event happening in the future.” Then notice how much emotional weight it is carrying and become aware that these feelings were triggered by a mental image, not by an actual event.
The key to implementing all these recommendations is becoming more self-aware and being able to move into observer mode. This takes practice, so do not be harsh on yourself if it does not work like magic at first. In time, as it starts working, you will be surprised how many of the thoughts you carry turn into beliefs and then fears that stop you from experiencing life, and yourself, to your fullest potential.
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