I believe that while your head and your heart are definitely important to the human experience their importance should be tempered. You need your head to think and reason, to get from point A to point B. You need your heart for human emotions so you don’t leave your children out in the cold to freeze. However, the head and the heart should bethought of as five year old children. Yes, they function well enough but would you let a five year old rule your life? Of course not. Both your head and your heart can and quite often do, lead you astray.

How many times has your mind taken a little mote of something that may have not ever have been true to begin with and blown it up all out of proportion until you have this huge ugly hideous monster of thought eating away at your mind. The “blah, blah,blah” of the mind will make you crazy! You think too much! If you could have thought it out by now, and being an intelligent being, you would have already done so. You should surrender your problems not to your thought process but to your instinctual process. You can dither hither and yon, and think a thousand thoughts and never be closer than what your gut instincts know to be true.

When something happens to you that you would normally get very upset about use this very effective tool. Instead of pulling your hair, screaming, cursing or punching the walls try to think of FIVE THINGS YOU HAVE TO BE GRATEFUL FOR ABOUT THAT SITUATION. This does not mean that you are thankful for not living in Antarctica or something that doesn’t have anything to do with your situation that is causing you to be out of your boat. It means to find five things about this situation that you are truly grateful for. This is not

always an easy thing to do at the time but the more you do the exercise the easier it is to do. The first time I tried this I was on my way to work the crisis hot lines in Hilo at a new time schedule and was driving my ex- husbands tank of an old Mercedes. The road that we lived on was very rough and my tire got punctured by a rock on the sidewall. Luckily, I managed to get the behemoth to the paved part of the remote road that I was on. I got out of the car and decided to try the Five Thank Yous out. I started off thankful that the rock that got my tire was at least near the paved road so I had a chance

of changing the tire on even ground. Then I looked in the trunk of the car that I was driving for a spare tire and there was a tire and I had my second Thank You. However there was no jack or tools for taking the tire off which needed metric tools. I looked down the deserted road, and though the sky was overcast it was not pouringdown rain in an area that gets 169 inches of rain a year. This way I could stand outside of the car and hopefully flag down the next vehicle – my third Thank You. Then I remembered that I had left early for my job, as I wanted to pick up a meal before my eight hour shift and that gave me some leeway. If I did flag someone down, they could at least call the crisis line and tell them their crisis worker was in a crisis – my fourth Thank You. As often happens in the Five Thank Yous, it gets harder to find the fifth one. I turned around trying to think of one more thing to be grateful for and there driving towards me was a tow truck!

It stopped and the nice man asked if I needed help, which of course I did. He had the proper tools and changed my tire in five minutes! I stuck a twenty in his shirt pocket and I had my fifth and final Thank You!! How’s that for beginners luck? I find the Five Thank Yous also very helpful when I encounter a person that makes me uncomfortable whether they are irritable or presenting problems or just in a sad state of affairs such as an ice head in Puna. I take that opportunity to step aside from the automatic emotions of the situation and say to the universe, “Thank You, that I’m not that person because believe me, whatever lesson they are supposed to be learning, it looks like a doozey. I am truly Thankful that is not the path the universe chose to give me.” This really puts you in a state of earnest gratitude for the blessings that you do have and

the lessons that you have learned. It helps you put a positive perspective on things that you once might have had trouble dealing with.

Do you live in the past? Always worried about what happened, or what was? Do you constantly worry over things that are in the future, things that might happen, things that may or may not ever be? Then you are surely wasting a lot of energy because with the exception of hypnotherapy and shamanic journey work, we only have this time, this moment in the here and now within which we can live and change.

This moment is the only moment that you can change. At this present time you can change how you think, how you feel, how you react or don’t act. Right now you have the power to envision your life any way you choose. You can change your present position to a positive thought and a positive reality. It does not matter what your thoughts were just a moment ago, that moment is past and done. It is important that you know that you have the power to choose what you will do, think, feel and be, right now. People often wake up and start having a bad day or something happens during that day that makes them think that the rest of their day is ruined. That is a conscious choice. You also have a conscious choice to choose to turn your energy around at any moment. Just because you had a bad spot doesn’t mean that you have to continue to dwell in that hell. You can choose to take any moment and turn that around. You can choose to laugh at yourself. You can choose to learn from that rough time and you can choose to make it better. I was given an exercise about what to do when you find yourself having bad thoughts. When you catch yourself having negative thoughts, simply stop. Think, zero, go back tothe beginning. Erase what you were thinking and start all over with a new positive thought. If another negative thought comes in, stop again, start all over again, and again and again until that negative energy is turned around. When you have a positive thought, congratulate yourself, affirm it and think of yet another one. In this way you can build your chain of thoughts and that new chain of thought will turn your position around. It can be done at any time but the best time is now.