Desirable Thinking: Stepping into my Happiness
In my life I've had many upheavals, and I've been forced to adapt to increasingly difficult circumstances before. As solid as it sounds there's no place to live at rock bottom. The fact that you can't get any lower than that means that there would at least be some kind of basic stability, but ironically it feels uncemented. Like slowly sinking into quicksand.
I woke up a few days ago from a dream that I couldn't remember comics except for the words: “I wish to have desirable thoughts.”
I've spent this short time since trying to figure out exactly what a desirable thought is. It sounds pleasant, even necessary, but I'm not sure how to identify it except by what it isn't.
Thoughts about self-harm aren't desirable. Self-deprecating thoughts aren't desirable. Self-defeating thoughts aren't desirable. I can identify the kinds of thinking that I don't want inside of me, but it's harder to figure out what I want to fill myself with. What thoughts are most nourishing? Should they be thought that make me feel joy and are such thoughts not illusory? Or is it that deep… Is it enough that a thought makes me happy?
I'm still a bit stumped, so I did what I always do I made a list. I didn't really know what to put on it, so I just made a list of words that I thought or at least good topics to think about:
- sensation
- warmth
- love
- esteem
- poetry
- holidays
- spa
- libraries
- girliness
- normal
- paint
- food
- intimacy
- intensity
- delicacy
All of these words make me feel safe and conjure up images of experiences I want to have. Just thinking about what each word means to me, makes me feel like I'm that much closer to having the life that I want purely because I am able to visualize it.
Maybe for now it's enough to have a list of topics that I enjoy thinking about. Maybe having desirable thoughts is just a habit that I need to get into. Either way, I want my life to be full of positivity and abundance. I want to remove this fear that I have fallen short and that there's no way to get up. Though I'm proud of my accomplishments, I know I can still be hard on myself about all I've yet to achieve.
I want the cultivation of desirable thinking to help me remember that there is a path forward when I am feeling low, and that even when things don't turn out the way they were supposed to there is still room for positivity and happiness.
Perhaps my confusion was the focus on individual thoughts. Desirable thinking as a skill though makes more sense. The ability to remove myself from nightmares and to place myself in dreams or thought spaces that are productive, relaxing, and worthwhile. The ability to transform the negative into the positive. The ability to transcend the need for coping mechanisms at all.
The wish to have desirable thoughts felt as though it came from somewhere unconscious in my body, somewhere that was tired of feeling constant stress. And I feel like in that respect, the most positive thing I can do is grant my own wish.
