Every thought you have is tied to a string of words. These words are so incredibly powerful; they can influence your genes such as those that regulate your stress response. When you have a negative thought, or are coming from a stressed position, the fear part of your brain becomes active and causes the frontal lobe to become less active. This effects how you speak, as you can sound more irritable and tension appears in your facial muscles.  This causes a defensive reaction in your listener and has negative effects on your relationships and in your body.

Relationships are built from good communication, but what is frequently overlooked is how you communicate with yourself.  You have an internal voice that chatters away voicing your thoughts. Telling you what to do, what not to do, that you are not good enough etc. These subconscious negative thoughts can leak out in your body language and lead to a listener thinking you are inauthentic.

How often do you really listen to what your internal voice is saying?

This voice can often be negative, mean, belittling, self deprecating.  The meanings that you have assigned to words are often not true, though you believe they are. These meanings then lead to negative outcomes and reinforce negative beliefs: “I am a failure, I’ll never succeed, I’m not worthy” etc. They become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As you listen, ask yourself whether you would talk to others in this manner?

My guess is that your answer would be “No way.”  So why are you talking to yourself in such a way that is destroying your self esteem and confidence?

You do have control over the words spoken by your mind; it just feels at times as if you don’t! You have the choice to believe, or dismiss what it is telling you. The more you dismiss it, by taking your awareness to your body and how you are feeling right NOW, the easier it becomes to change the thoughts to a positive, or put things into perspective. The voice in your head should be a translator of how you are feeling and what your intuition is saying, not a storyteller that is keeping you stuck in the past, or worrying about the future.

Most people see the meaning of a word as a picture, a feeling, or an action. When you say, or hear the word ‘table’ you see something with legs and a flat surface. In western culture you recognise ‘yes’ as a nod and ‘no’ as a shake of the head.

The mind doesn’t recognise words such as ‘don’t’ or ‘can’t.’  In order not to see or feel something, your mind first has to feel, or see it before trying to erase it. Therefore, what then happens is that you are reinforcing what it is you don’t want.

For example…

If I said to you: “Don’t look at the elephant in the corner,” what do you instantly see? An elephant in a corner! This means that if you are in pain, every time you think: “Ouch I’m in pain,” you are reinforcing it and eventually it becomes chronic as ‘neurones that fire together, wire together.’  Therefore, you can be experiencing pain though there is no longer anything physically wrong. It is possible to reverse chronic pain and even cure cancer by telling yourself you are healing and using positive language, rather than using negative words like pain, or cancer.

I used to have chronic lower back pain, from an injury that occurred when I was nursing.  I had back pain for over 20 years, despite regularly seeing a physiotherapist, osteopath or chiropractor.  Physically, there was no longer anything really wrong with my back, but I had focused for so long on pain that the neurons in my brain had become wired for pain at that point in my back.  I then discovered the power of my mind and whenever I felt pain in my back instead of saying ‘my back is painful,’ I switched it to ‘my back is healing.’  It took about three months but I no longer have chronic pain. My back is no longer preventing me from doing something that I thought I couldn’t do, as it would aggravate the pain. My back was literally holding me back!

I know now that the ‘Law of Attraction’ simply gives you what you are thinking of the most.
Extract from Beyond Hot and Crazy-A Radical Guide to Living Well with Menopause