Create your day - May 2, 2004—
Yesterday, the track team was visited by a kinesiologist, hypno-therapist, and follower of the "psych-k" philosophy. It's all terribly new-age and would have never been permitted, or even considered, when I was in high school. Times have changed.
The basic philosophy behind psych-k has much in common with yoga, martial arts, quantum physics, and the mind-blowing movie, "What the BLEEP do you Know" (you haven't seen that yet? Go. Immediately. Tonight. I'm not kidding.). It says basically that your subconscious beliefs have great power over your conscious mind, and your physical body. He used some interesting techniques called muscle testing to convince the classroom full of dragged-out-of-bed-on-a-Saturday teenagers that this stuff was real.
The rhetoric and some of the concepts involved in the philosophy sound way out there, but at its heart are some things that I know to be true, and that go beyond religion or the theoretical sciences. Positive thinking is powerful, and not just towards oneself. Your mood is reflected in your body's energy, and influences the people around you. Athletic performance is, for the most part, limited by what we believe we can do, consciously and subconsciously (how else can you explain the odd history of the 4-minute-mile and other performance barriers?). Our mind holds on to things, and it screws up our relationships, our life skills, our coping behavior, our successes and failures in the every day.
How can you use this? Well, first, go see that movie at the Baghdad if you're in the area. Let it sink in. Next time your toddler screams at the top of his lungs in the middle of the juice aisle at Trader Joe's (yep, that was me), instead of stressing out and wanting to scream yourself, try giving him some positive thinking. When your husband does something amazingly inconsiderate and you want to slam doors, just take a breath and tell yourself, "I create my day." Get up the next morning and decide what's going to happen. Maybe it will.
