Читать книгу How to Live a Positive Life: The Art of Living Well - Dr. Robert Puff - Страница 3

Everything we watch, listen to and experience gets stored somewhere in our minds. In that sense it becomes a part of us. Just as what you eat, drink and possibly smoke affects your physical body, so too the words, visual images and other input you receive impact your emotional and psychological well-being. There is no way to control all of the stimuli you receive. For example, there is nothing you could do to avoid witnessing a car crash on the road in front of you.

Luckily, it is not these random events that have the most impact. Ask yourself: Is it the occasional slice of birthday cake that clogs your arteries? Or is it the daily breakfast of eggs, sausage and bacon and the regular cheeseburger with chili-fries for lunch? It is the daily influences that you are exposed to over and over again which are the greater determining factor in your well-being. Most of us know that we can’t eat like that without some serious consequences to our health, but do we realize the negative consequences it can have for our quality of life if we do not watch our intake of other types of input?

Here is another image I often use to help clients understand the importance of managing the input we receive. Imagine a thousand gallon acrylic aquarium filled with water. At one end of the aquarium is a tube going in, and at the other end is a tube going out. In the beginning the water is crystal clear, but throughout the day water is continually flowing into and out of the tank. Sometimes the water coming in is clean, and sometimes it is full of “gunk”. This gunk tends to settle, and the water starts to darken. When the water is clear you notice a clump of algae as it enters, and can move it toward the exit pipe. But once the water is murky, you no longer notice the new “gunk” as it enters the aquarium and so it sets, making the water darker and dirtier.

In a similar way, we are born “whole” or “good,” like a tank of pristine water. What happens is that throughout our lives, experiences come in that are both positive and negative. The negative things slowly start to cloud our awareness and interfere with our joy and our ability to love. The more unprocessed negative experiences we have stored inside us, the more difficult it is to notice and deal with negative input as we receive it.

In this analogy, if you were to start scrubbing the walls of the tank and get rid of the crud that has built-up, this would be the process of doing Anger Work, which I have described in detail in my book Anger Work: How To Express Your Anger and Still Be Kind. Anger Work can help you process childhood trauma and other negative events. That is not the focus of this e-book. This e-book is about taking the next step. It is about how to filter the water that we allow to enter our aquarium, and thus prevent having so much crud to deal with as we move forward.

In this e-book I will discuss the main types of input that we need to be looking out for because they affect our overall sense of well-being and wholeness. The primary influences in our lives can be separated into two categories: those that come from outside of ourselves (External Influences) and those that come from within us (Internal Influences). Our External Influences include our entertainment choices and the people we spend time with. Our Internal Influences include our physical state of being, our conditioning, our self-talk, and our level of awareness.