Could Your Enemy Walk Through Your Mind Unharmed?

On Sunday, I attended Unity Church in Lynnwood, it was Youth Sunday, and instead of being downstairs with the teens, we were all upstairs participating in the service. This is an evolving process, with the teens wanting t do the whole service, and actually getting to participate in it less and less. That is an issue for another blog though.
We were presented with an interesting challenge on Sunday. Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.'s principles are a season now, the 64 days from January 30th to April 4th. Of course, we are challenged to practice non-violence for the whole period, but more than that we are challenged to practice non-violence in our thoughts. "Could your enemy walk through your mind unharmed?"
This is similar to the Unity approach to Lent - Let's Eliminate Negative Thoughts - which is very difficult, (and not nearly so difficult as giving up coffee or chocolate).
This is an aspect of the power of positive thinking but more than that, it is focusing on how easily we fall into the habit of mind games. Fantasy versions of life that depend on harm to someone or something else, revenge or repayment for all of those little or great slights..
Evidently we have about 50,000 thoughts a day. If we are conscious of them at all, we are not really getting many, so what we aren't really aware of is directing our lives. This is not my idea of a healthy life, I don't want to be run around by my subconscious repeating stupid things I thought were valid beliefs when I was 10 or 21 or just born. I want to create something better and bigger than I can currently imagine. Basically, I want to erase those old tapes (there's some real 70's language), I want to drop those limitations and borders I have put on God and experience the unbounded life that is truly out there.
This reminds me of a story a minister told one day - she got up to give her talk and said she appreciated that everyone had wished her well on her recent vacation and she really didn't have pictures of wonderful beaches or beautiful landscapes to share because she had really been recovering from surgery. She went on to reveal that she had had elective cosmetic surgery, which she had decided to talk about because she realized that the little voice in her head had made her feel inadequate to the point of surgical enhancement, which she intellectually knew was a lie, because as a child of God she was created perfectly, her heart had not yet fully gotten the message. It was a perfect example of how an uncontrolled thought could taint our aspect of ourselves. Her childhood memory of someone claiming to know what family she was from by her "squinty Cherokee eyes" dogged her thoughts and challenged her self image for 40 years until she finally had surgery to change the shape of her eyes.
In her case, the punishment was self directed, but the principle is the same, she could not walk unharmed through her own mind, she felt inadequate and unattractive from the time she was eight years old.
Most of us are vulnerable to this process, we have limited our careers, our aspirations, our whole lives by thoughts we have carried and beliefs we formed, often unknowingly. I have practiced several things over the years that help overcome the "tapes". Of course, Unity teaches Denials and Affirmations. Myrtle Fillmore and Charles, founder's of Unity, used denials and affirmations to heal long standing illnesses. The process is to identify the things that are hanging us up, deny or release them, and affirm what it is that you want to be running in your mind.
In the 70's Sondra Ray put out a book called "I Deserve Love" . It was based on the denials and affirmations format, although she didn't call it that, and also on the principle that doing things over and over create a habit, and we can do the negative ones or consciously replace them with positive images and words.
The process she used was to write down your affirmation, and then write down everything that comes up opposed to it - at first that can be pages!! And, it is really revealing, and surprising, what is stored in our brains. Then do it again. Each time the responses will come, until you have affirmed the positive so many times you actually have changed that part of yourself.
And, with repetition we create/increase the grooves in our brains, making more folds and wrinkles, increasing brain surface.
There are so many pluses to this process. Freedom from self doubt, improved self image and ability, and improved brain function. Whoohoo!