Choose Your Thoughts Wisely

“Your thoughts and beliefs of the past have created this moment, and all the moments up to this moment. What you are now choosing to believe and think and say will create the next moment and the next day and the next month and the next year.” ~Louise Hay

As I’m developing “My Dreams Matter” you’ll see more inspirational quotes from some of my favorite mentors. For now, I want to talk about the quote I have posted above by Louise Hay. Long before it was fashionable to discuss the connection between the mind and body, Louise L. Hay published the book, Heal Your Body. Louise had compiled a reference guide detailing mental causes of physical ailments after several years as a counselor. She developed positive thought patterns for reversing illness and creating health.

Her practice hit home when she was diagnosed with cancer. Instead of surgery and drugs, Louise decided to use affirmations, visualization, nutritional cleansing and psychotherapy. Within six months of incorporating this intensive program, she was completely healed of cancer.

Let’s stop and think about this for a moment. Louise was confronted with a life-threatening ailment and decided to choose positive thoughts, clear thinking and healthy visualizations to cure her cancer. In a world of science, this sounds absurd. Except that she cured her cancer and here it is 35+ years later. She’s still alive and kicking. Her experience touched her so greatly that she has made a career out of positive affirmations and is teaching the rest of us how to make life-changing decisions.
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Back to the quote: “Your thoughts and beliefs of the past have created this moment, and all the moments up to this moment.”

I used to think that since I was from a small, rural town in the Mid-Western United States, that it would be hard for me to ever “make it”. In fact, I used to think that by moving to Chicago, I had in fact “made it”. I wasn’t really doing anything too exciting in Chicago, but hey, I had gotten out of that small, rural town. In college, I remember looking through a job resource guide and seeing jobs in Los Angeles for theater set decorator or scenic artist. I used to think that was way out of my league and even though I had such a strong pull to do something like this, I really believed that it just would never happen. For as long as I believed that, it didn’t happen.

“What you are now choosing to believe and think and say will create the next moment and the next day and the next month and the next year.”

When I met my husband, we instantly knew we would be much happier in a warm environment that never included snow or temperatures below 50 degrees. He’s an actor, so it made sense for him to be in LA in order to advance his career. I remembered my dream of working on a set and couldn’t say no to year-round summer weather. Soon after we married, we moved to Los Angeles. Within six months of living here, I had the opportunity to work on a set as a set decorator. Of course, at first I was nervous, after all, I had believed that this could never happen, it was new to me, and I didn’t have any experience. I went for it anyway. Since then I have worked on more than a dozen sets. I’ve learned that the limit to what I can and cannot do exists only in my mind. I made choices about my beliefs which led to moments that reflect what those choices were.

In closing… if you are unhappy with where you are in your life at this moment, try to change your expectations of yourself. Believe in bigger things. Believe that you are meant to be great. Because you are! Believe in a destiny that fulfills your dreams. If this advice seems intimidating, take a smaller step and simply recognize what it is in your life that makes you unhappy. Try to imagine what you would replace that unhappiness with. The more you pay attention to these insights, the closer you will get to making your own dreams come true.