For some time, I’ve been seeking answers to questions and shifting all my focus to becoming more mindful and conscious of every thought and every emotion.

I absolutely love studying brain. I’m what you call a brain-geek. I’m obsessed with learning as much as I can to help overcome my own past trauma so that I can help others.

Lately, in one area of my life, things felt a little off or “out of alignment.” I could feel in my bones that something just wasn’t right. I kept having these similar negative situations happen to me, but I couldn’t figure out why. After the 4th time of almost the exact same negative experience, I knew I had to do some really deep inner healing work to figure this out.

In my 20s, I discovered the amazing work of Dr. Sarno. His books helped me heal my back pain and live a normal life free from medication and surgery. Although, I understand Tension Myositis Syndrome, I felt like there was something more I was missing. Through my desperation to prevent further heartache, I began researching neuroscience and new information on the mind-body connection. What I found made me realize how important meditation and daily reflection is.

We know that thoughts have energy. This energy has either a positive or a negative charge.  Different mental states can positively or negatively affect biological functioning in the body. This occurs since the brain, nervous, endocrine, and immune systems share a common chemical language with our emotional responses, which allows constant communication between the mind and body through messengers like hormones and neurotransmitters.

We need to understand that the brain and the mind are two different things.

The brain is like our computer and the mind is the computer program. Each time we “think” a thought and have a “feeling” about that thought, the brain uploads it to the mind or you could say that the brain programs it into the mind.

If we think about something that makes us upset or scared, the mind communicates to the body to send out chemicals to protect us. This is what’s known as the “fight or flight” stress hormone.

This stress hormone is great if someone is attacking you and you need to save your life, but it’s not so great if you are just angry or hurt because of a situation.

The same chemical reaction can happen when you fall in love.  Have you ever experienced this? You think about that person and your whole body vibrates. Everything in your life could be in shambles, but you just met the love of your life and you are on cloud 9. This is the chemical reaction that is happening due to your emotional state.

Our thoughts, charged with feelings, is what the mind-body connection is all about.

There is a famous truth that states:

”What you think about most will manifest”

Maybe you’ve also experienced this when you are thinking about a friend and then all of a sudden they call you and you say “I was just thinking about you!”

It’s not a coincidence – it’s our thoughts in action.

Furthermore, the mind is always trying to prove that what you think & feel is true. It will look for every opportunity to prove that you are right. The mind’s job is to make you feel safe and protected at all costs… even if what you think about isn’t good for you. The mind only knows what you tell it to be true.

Let’s talk about feelings. What is a feeling?

Feelings are perpetual thoughts that become our emotions.

When you see someone who looks down, you might ask them “what’s wrong?” Their response is “I’m sad” or “I’m hurt” or “I’m so angry.” Their perpetual thoughts turned into “feelings”. These feelings have allowed them to experience a mental state or emotion.

The big ones like sadness, anger, resentment and jealousy are pretty easy to spot and many of us can overcome them with counseling, prayer, and forgiveness, but others aren’t so easy to spot.

There is one you might not realize is operating in your conscience and sub-conscience mind that might be sabotaging your hopes and dreams and sending negative stress hormones to your body. This is what happened to me.

This tricky little feeling is called “disappointment”.

If left unchecked, the feeling of disappointment turns into an emotion and ultimately if allowed, a state of being.

But wait, disappointment isn’t so bad, right?

We can be disappointed, can’t we? Sure you can… but you might not want to allow that “thought” to become a perpetual feeling or a state of being and here is why…

Disappointment means that I had expectations of someone or something. Expectations (also sneaky) although some might be worth having, generally speaking, expectations are the mother of resentments. Being “disappointed” also means that I am not in control which relates to so many other feelings like frustration, anger, sadness and hopelessness.

The last 5 years, this feeling of “I’m so disappointed” had become a perpetual feeling and my body had memorized it as an emotion. It quite literally became my state of being in one aspect of my life.

Even though I had moved on, let go, and forgiven, I still allowed this feeling of disappointment because I didn’t recognize that it was a harmful. I didn’t realize that each and every time I allowed myself to feel “disappointment”, I was manifesting, you guessed it … more disappointment.

Remember how I told you that our mind is always trying to prove that we are right? My mind was choosing people, places, and things that were going to give me my desired outcome … disappointment.

But wait, what? I didn’t desire disappointment so how can that be?

Remember, what I said earlier? Our minds don’t know the difference between the truth and a lie – chemically speaking anyway. The brain is just and over glorified -yet still pretty dang amazing – computer.

Our mind has one objective: to protect you.  Its job is to make sure that what you think, believe and yes, “feel” is the truth, so that you don’t suffer the pain of being “wrong” (computers are never wrong by the way… they just malfunction).

Your mind wants to prove you’re a genius even if that means your “genius” is the fact that you are always right about being disappointed!

Rationally, I can think “I don’t want to be disappointed” but even then, what is my focus?

Being “disappointed.”

Crazy, right? Who’s lightbulb just went on?

My brain was literally sending out a broadcast message “I AM disappointed” and my mind was looking for every opportunity to make sure that feeling was proven accurate… because you know, I’m a genius. 🙂

So what now?

How do we stop reliving this feeling of disappointment?

I looked up disappointment in the dictionary and here is what it said:

“sadness or displeasure caused by the nonfulfillment of one’s hopes or expectations.”

Did you see that? Expectations… okay, folks, now we are onto something!

Now, look at the “similar” words to disappointment

Similar: sadness, regret, dismay, sorrow, dispiritedness, despondency, heavy-heartedness, depression, distress, mortification, chagrin, disenchantment, disillusionment, displeasure, discontent, dissatisfaction, disgruntlement.

Yep, unknowingly, I have allowed all those “feelings” as well.

We can deduct from logic that if we don’t want to feel disappointed, then we need to feel the opposite, right?

I want you to look closely at the opposite words.

Opposite: Satisfaction & happiness.

What we focus on manifests, remember?

Okay BUT … a “yeah but” type person might be thinking, “How can I feel satisfaction & happiness, if I’m always disappointed?”

It might not be easy depending on your situation to focus on the feelings of satisfaction & happiness, but what we can do is to stop allowing feelings of disappointment to be programed into the mind.

It’s as EASY AS 1, 2, 3!

1. The first step is recognizing. Is this feeling of disappointment something that you often feel? How often? What triggers it? Make list and memorize it! Learn how to recognize it.

2. Each time you “think” a thought that matches the thought/feeling of disappointment or any of its “similar” friends, change your thoughts. Figure out how you can find just one thing to be grateful for or happy about. If you can’t, then think about something else. Thinking isn’t going to “fix” it anyway and programing that feeling into your mental state we know won’t help so, find a new thought!

3. That’s it. Just change your thought to something that doesn’t disappoint you.

We can reprogram our minds through repetition. Take every thought captive and compare it to what it is that you DO want out of your life. If it doesn’t align, change your mind.

Give it 30 days and watch your happiness rise and your satisfaction increase! As always, thank you for reading. Let me know if this helps you!

XO,

Kerri

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