The Allergic Mind: Overreacting to Negatives
We all know what happens to people who are allergic to bee stings. Their body overreacts to the sting causing the person to go into a type of shock that can shut down breathing. It can be pretty frightening. When you are not allergic, a simple wasp sting is more like an annoyance that after a few minutes is no longer felt.
Just as with bee or wasp stings your mind can go into an overreaction. The other day I realized that this was happening to me. I became annoyed at someone for basically not having trust in what my group was doing and then in my mind I overreacted to the annoyance. Instead of calming down, breathing and just seeing it as a weakness in the other so that I could let it go, I blew it up in my mind and then my whole body got very weak.
When I sat down to think about what my life was really calling for at the moment, I realized that I was having a great deal of difficulty being enthusiastic about doing positive things in the said environment. When I was supposed to be enthused and going for things, I was irritated and blew things up in my mind way out of proportion until I became really weak and unable to do much.
Upon waking up this morning, I realized that the key was to easily let go of the irritating behavior just like I am able to with a wasp sting and then to really blow up small things in my memory that are positive until they fill my mind leaving no space for the negative. Enthusiasm is about blowing up the positives so that the seem exaggerated. If I can do the opposite which is to blow up little irritating things until I am so weak I can hardly do anything, then by blowing up the positive memories in my mind then I should be able to get much stronger and do much more.
I went out for my Saturday morning run with these thoughts. At first I had blown up negative thoughts and then I would run for awhile before stopping and walking. As I kept letting go of the negative irritating thoughts by being calm, then I started replacing them with positive memories and blowing them up. You can guess the result. Instead of doing the 9 k that I had planned to run, I did about 14 k with each kilometer getting a little stronger and faster. By the end I was running with a great deal of speed and strength.
I am thinking that you can tell you are having an allergic reaction in your mind when you get irritated with someone for something relatively small and then build it up in your mind to be huge. To get out of the allergy we first can let go of the irritation and then really exaggerate the smallest positive memories in ourselves until they seem huge.
What are you mentally allergic to?
What is the positive memory you would most like to blow up?
Richard Hastings is an expert in change work and dream work and author of Dreams for Peace. He is a 
Dreams For Peace 
Richard,
It is great reading this today; perfect timing! lol It is amazing how optimism makes such a big difference in what and how we do things. We are surrounded by negative things but the positive is also around us (in great abundance) and if we open our eyes and focus on it, coping with the rest is much easier.
Lots of love to you and Debbie,
Jena