Milking Good Things - A Change of Pace
You are free to slow momentum down and redirect it
We have a tendency, due to past momentum of thinking negatively, to discard our positive feelings when they occur. Once you notice it you can’t stop noticing it. If you have been picked on, teased, or abused because of your looks, you may find it very difficult to accept a compliment on looking nice today. If you are used to meeting inconsiderate people, meeting someone who is considerate may be a nice change of pace. But rather than appreciate it, you’ll swipe it away with thoughts such as, “Maybe he’s playing games and trying to get something from me,” or, “It’s a shame most people are so inconsiderate, that this person stands out.”
Why Can’t You Be Happy?
Why can’t you let yourself enjoy the positive feelings when they occur? It is momentum as I’ve said. You have been thinking negatively about these topics for so long that when something doesn’t match your beliefs about a subject, it can cause cognitive dissonance. God-Source, the universe, your higher self, your inner being (however you want to think about it) is attracting positive situations into your life all of the time. But we have these blinders on (our negative, limiting beliefs) that keep us from seeing and appreciating the good there is out there.
Question Your Beliefs
Beliefs are thoughts you’ve continued to think over and over and usually started when you were a child and were simply trying to make sense of the world. Your parents, friends, or teachers may have told you something and then you start to see those patterns playing out and simply believed them, rather than question if there were examples when those beliefs were not true. The question, “Is it true?” is important to ask when you notice a negative, limiting belief of yours.
Milk The Good Experiences
If you have a belief that people are inconsiderate and you see someone being kind and thoughtful, rather than immediately re-membering (playing over your memories of people who are inconsiderate reinforcing your negative beliefs), take time out to focus on appreciating this person.
Your brain is experiencing cognitive dissonance and it is trying to get back to your normal pattern of thought. As Dr. Joe Dispenza says “neurons that fire together wire together.” In this example, you have created a link between people and inconsiderate acts. Your brain is not used to putting people and considerate acts together. But you can start to create new associations. It starts with appreciating that a person who is being considerate exists. Notice it.
When you first start to milk an experience like this it may feel like a fluke. That’s okay. It takes time for your brain to open and start to associate the opposite of something you’ve had a long habit of thinking.
Start New Affirmations
But if you do this enough, noticing every time someone is considerate, eventually you break your old belief that all people are inconsiderate. You can then start new affirmations for yourself such as, “I meet considerate people.” You should believe an affirmation when you say it or think it. You shouldn’t lie to yourself. But at this point, you should believe this affirmation because you’ve had experiences meeting them.
Other Examples
I gave a pretty clear example in thinking most people are inconsiderate and shifting that belief through appreciation and then affirmations. You will have to be mindful and check where you have specific negative, limiting beliefs and milk when you have good experiences that counteract those beliefs.
Another belief could be, “I don’t have enough money to buy that.” Remember, you should believe your affirmation, so this won’t work in circumstances where you don’t have credit, but here’s an example. You could ask yourself, “Is it true? Is it true that I don’t have enough money to buy it?” You may find out that you could buy it if you put it on credit. It isn’t wise to buy it on credit if you don’t have the cash to pay it off. But the belief that you can’t buy it is wrong. You could appreciate that you could buy it. You have the freedom to buy it on credit if you wanted to. You don’t want to buy it on credit. You want to focus on appreciating the fact that you have freedom and you could buy it if you wanted to. But you don’t want to right now.
Another limiting belief could be, “I can’t do this/that.” A lot of people have a fixed mindset in that they don’t believe they have the power to learn and grow. We also see other people doing things that took them a long time to master, but they do it so well and we don’t see the work put into it that we think that they had some innate talent that we will never have. Is it true that you can’t do that thing? Try to get a growth mindset and remind yourself that you have learned to do a lot of things in the past and you can learn how to do something new in the same way. You can search online for video tutorials or groups on how to do something and learn a lot that way. You want to appreciate all the ways in which you could learn and have learned in the past.
Milking Good Thoughts & Emotions
You don’t have to do anything physical. Simply emotionally and mentally hold on to and appreciate the good thoughts and emotions that you are having. I was driving to work last Friday and I passed by a dock on the lake. For some reason, the sun was hitting it the right way, and emotionally I’d time-traveled back to fishing on the dock with my mother and brother in the summer. The same emotion of loving the sun’s warmth and calm, relaxed feeling rushed over me. But, of course, there was traffic around and I was back in the real world in a few seconds. But rather than simply think of the emotion as a fluke, I appreciated it. I had attracted that very peaceful emotion into my life. I took that attraction of emotion to be a great sign of more to come.
Oftentimes people will have a flashback to a positive memory when they hear an older song or smell some familiar smell. That is a time to milk those positive emotions and if you can, sit quietly and try to feel that feeling for as long as possible, appreciating it.
But sometimes people have negative emotions wrapped up in it. What if you’re remembering a really great time with a lost love and then you think that person was really cruel at some other time, or you really miss that person and think you’ll never be able to feel that love again?
These are the times to truly appreciate the positive moments the most. In the case of thinking you will never have that love again, I would say, “You’re feeling that love right now.” That’s the point. The emotion that you think you will never have again just popped into your heart. You attracted that loving feeling.
The belief that you will never have that feeling again is proved wrong because you just felt it. You have a belief that you need another person to make you feel that feeling of love, but that’s wrong. I recently wrote about the idea that we think other people will make us feel the feeling of love. It’s wrong. The feeling of love comes from us.
Why Do People Feel A Need to Cheat?
Steer Your Mind
You may not be able to control those negative associations from popping into your head when you feel positive emotions (seemingly out of nowhere). But you do have the capability to steer your mind into appreciating the positive event or emotion that just happened rather than allowing yourself to turn back to wallowing again.
Just because you have created those associations in the past doesn’t mean that you are stuck that way. You can create new associations with things. I made this video a while back about creating new associations or “vibrational anchors.”
You have the capability to create new meanings of events and new associations. Whenever something makes you feel good you should milk the hell out of it. Appreciate that you have the ability to feel this way. Appreciate that you are learning that you have this ability. Appreciate that you know how momentum works better now, because, although momentum of negative thoughts sucks, you can turn your mind around and get momentum of positive thoughts.
You are in control over what you spend your time thinking about. As I said thoughts will pop into your mind based on past associations but you don’t have to milk the negative thoughts, just go back to what you can appreciate and focus on where your power is.
