Jim Madrid on Dealing With The Coronavirus COVID-19’s Impact On Our Lives
What do we really need to protect ourselves from this nasty COV-19 virus? Besides all the handwashing and disinfecting, what can we do to our minds from COVID-19?
The stores have run out of virus protection hand sanitizers. So, we need to wash our hands more often. Especially if we can’t get our hands on hand sanitizer. No pun intended. Protective masks are back ordered. We are running out of surgical gloves. No more sanitizing wipes. We are used to protecting what we care about. We even have antivirus protection for our computers.
We have all this external protection in our lives but what about our brains?
With social media, mainstream media, and just going to the store and standing in long lines just to make chicken noodle soup and it is hysteria at its worst. This is crazy you say to yourself or do you? Does your mind wander with the question of fear and ‘what if?” What if we do run out of toilet paper, water, and food?
We are afraid, absolutely, we have never had to encounter anything like this before on a global scale.
But what about our minds?
How do we control the anxiety of today’s Coronavirus news that is everywhere?
Let’s compare our minds to computers, it would be all too clear that we often try to run conflicting programs at the same time.
We let other people enter data, but rarely check to see if it is useful or even correct. And whether other people have put them there or you’ve generated them yourself, when negative, self-disparaging thoughts are allowed to take up space in your mind, you’ll soon find that your most valuable “programs” are being sabotaged.
Read: EVEN WITH COVID-19: CHANGE IS WHAT YOU MAKE IT
Creative visualization offers a powerful tool to use in your quest to deal with these changing times, like a computer’s virus protector. Negative thoughts are like a mind virus. If you don’t catch and delete them as soon as they appear, you’ll begin to act erratically and may eventually become immobilized. Creative visualization allows you to scan your thoughts and disable any potentially harmful codes. It helps you back up the important stuff and delete the junk.
In spite of what many people think, visualizing doesn’t mean that you have to “see” pictures in your mind.
Use of your imagination is vital to the process, but it doesn’t matter at all whether you can really see any images. If you’ve ever watched a sad movie and found yourself beginning to cry, it’s because you are imagining yourself in that situation. You may not actually “see” yourself there, but your tears prove that your subconscious mind is sensing that this is happening to you. The fact that your body is responding to the images by generating real tears shows how powerful the imagination is.
Creative Visualization is easy. You can do it right now. In fact, you’ve been doing it throughout your entire life. This is how you got to be you. This is how your personality, relationships, health, work and talents became what they are today.
Now consider how much of who and where you are today is a result of incorrect information or negative, self-limiting beliefs.
To run your own virus protection program, all you have to do is this: Relax your body, quiet your mind, and takes a few minutes to imagine, as vividly as possible what you will see, hear, touch, say, and feel when you have achieved your goal.
It’s really that simple, but the results are profound, particularly if you use it regularly.
Why not make today the day that you start your life over, by dismantling what you no longer wish to maintain and recreating what you want? Why not make today the day that you take success so seriously that you begin to rehearse for it, using creative visualization?
At AST, we are about, as my friend Dr. Kristen Willeumier has taught us, BRAIN HEALTH.
What if you tried it? What if?
