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As a personal trainer and health coach, I am often privy to the most sensitive information that clients and share. As I listen, I get a better understanding of their thoughts, feelings, and how they treat themselves. There is the obvious kind of self-care that we encourage across many levels, including physical activity, nutrition, adequate quality sleep, hydration, and social connection, among others. There is a common game-changer, however, and that is how we talk to ourselves.
Scientist and researcher Dr. Masaru Emoto, author of several books, including “Hidden Messages in Water”, performed a series of experiments on water. In these experiments, different water samples were subjected to a variety of human intentions, thoughts, words, and feelings. The water samples were then frozen and, using a very powerful microscope in a very cold room with high-speed photography, newly formed crystals were then captured on film.
Dr. Emoto discovered that crystals formed in frozen water revealed changes when specific concentrated energies were directed towards them. Water that had been exposed to loving words, thoughts, and intentions as well as water exposed to classical music showed brilliant, complex, and colorful geometric snowflake patterns. Water exposed to negative intentions, words, thoughts, or heavy metal music formed dull, incomplete, and random asymmetrical patterns.
Our bodies are made up of around 70% water, as is the Earth. If thoughts and vibrations affect the molecular structure of water, they will affect all living beings.
How do you talk to yourself? To develop your awareness of this, you can use journaling and/or meditation. Or just sit with yourself in silence and listen. Keep in mind that we tend to think in habitual, patterned ways. In fact, we have over 60,000 thoughts a day and most of these are the same thoughts we had the day before!
Do not panic if you find that many of these thoughts are negative. A negativity bias is our brain’s evolutionary strategy to keep us alive.
Think of it this way: your first thought is a reflex, and we cannot control reflexes. We can and should, however, control our reactions to our first thoughts with skillful responses. In this way, you can become our own coach. When this becomes a habit, the mind’s “default” setting will genuinely begin to change.
Keep in mind that this is different from “toxic positivity” in which we refuse to acknowledge and feel our genuine emotions because they are "negative", and therefore, unacceptable..
If you have experienced a lapse in your exercise program and are working on getting back to it, be gentle with yourself. Yes, you lapsed. No, it is not the end of the world. Yes, you may have gained some weight and lost some fitness. But the more we beat up on ourselves with unnecessary shaming and self-criticism, the more demoralized we will feel and the less likely we will be to follow through with positive action. Kindness and self-compassion, in contrast, will put us in a position to up-level all of the other habits!
How will you choose to talk to yourself, and what inspired action can you take now?
Very insightful and well written. It brings up principles of which I was aware, but which I hadn't thought about for a long time.