Stop Sign

One of the tools I use in my day to day life is visualization.

Whenever I find myself in a circular thought pattern worrying over something and repeating the thought on automatic pilot, I have to find a way to break out of the loop. A simple tool is to visualize a stop sign. Everyone in this country knows what a stop sign looks like. It's a big octagon with a deep red background and white lettering surrounded by a thick white border.

Take a moment and visualize--close your eyes and think about a stop sign until your mind's eye brings up the image. Hold it there for a few seconds. This is an easy thing to do. It only takes a second, but it sends a clear message down to the subconscious that it needs to cease it's current operations and get back to normal and productive business.

Try it the next time you find yourself enmeshed in unproductive thought. Put up the stop sign and think of something else. Within a few seconds your brain will probably bring the cycle of negative thoughts back, but you can respond with another stop sign. Keep doing this until the subconscious gets the hint and puts that thought pattern away.

This is a simple way to train your brain to behave.

Trial by Combat

When I find myself in difficulties, I look for a calm voice just to hear someone who is not angry, opinionated, hateful, argumentative, or otherwise a stress-inducer in my life. I hope that each of you has someone like that in your life. Often, the calm voice doesn't exist at home, at work, at school, in the media, or any other place we congregate. Sometimes it doesn't even appear in the holy places we attend.

We are awash in controversy, adrift in a sea of counter opinions, and lost amid the voices who all claim to be right when everyone else is wrong.

How did we get here? It might be that we have set up a binary system in the hope that truth will come out of the conflict between two sides. That may well have worked at some point, preventing one party rule and one voice trials where guilt is assumed. Nevertheless, we appear to have lost the concept of the search for truth through conflict. It now serves as much purpose as did trial by combat in ancient times. We have professional arguers who tell us what we want to hear, reinforcing their ideas with cherry-picked facts, loud voices, vehement arguments. We need to grow beyond the new trial by combat. We need to discover within ourselves the calm voice and see where that leads us.