Mental Health Musings…

Mental health has become a popular topic nowadays. People are becoming more and more aware of the importance of their mental health and how it positively or negatively affects their lives. It might surprise you to know that as long as there have been human beings, mankind has endured mental health problems. As thinking beings and the only thinking beings as we know it, man is forever impacted by the thoughts he chooses and the thoughts he entertains. To separate the mental health issues that plague mankind and his thoughts serves only to make man a victim and not someone that has control over his thoughts and thus his mental health. A healthy mind must be fed healthy thoughts and the thoughts that contradict health always lead to sickness, first in the mind and later in the body. Have mental health issues got you down? If so, listen to my mental health musings and see what you think.

As free-will beings with complete free agency over what we choose to think about, I think you would agree that most folks’ thinking is downright awful. It’s not negative here and there, it’s awful, if not cruel. We berate ourselves, judge ourselves, analyze our every move and generally pick ourselves apart. We are often our own worst enemy. We focus on everything that might be wrong with us. We chastise ourselves for not being thin or attractive enough or sexy or handsome or pretty. We level unfair and unjust criticism regarding anything and everything. Instead of embracing who we are and who God made us to be, we look for flaws and imperfections. And that encompasses our flesh only. We focus on the things we don’t like about ourselves or at minimum the things we have foolishly decided we don’t like about ourselves. It never dawned on us that all of the negativity we have assigned to ourselves did not come from us first, but originated elsewhere. No man or woman naturally dislikes themselves. Instead, they have been talked into those thoughts by forces seeking only to steal and to kill and to destroy. This kind of thinking is sick and only serves to further the sickness. We wonder why we have so many mental health issues yet never consider the cruelty we level upon ourselves day by day. No one forces us to think the way we do, but instead we are choosing what and how we think. We cooperate with it and often without a fight. If you are not for you, how can you expect anything else? How could you ever win in a world that opposes you if you do not support your own self. Yet onward you march clinging to falsehoods and lies because someone told you so. Are you really that bad? Or is it something you have been persuaded of either by public opinion, or social media or those people closest to you?

If you want to have a healthy body, you have to choose the things that promote good health. You cannot carry around loads of excess weight, nor can you feed your body poisons or substances that make you sick. To get your body healthy you have to take the steps that promote good health. If you don’t do anything, nothing will happen. That doesn’t make you a victim, it means you decided not to exert the effort required. Similarly, your mental health requires the same level of attention. It does matter what you think about. Carrying around the thousandfold baggage of yesterday impedes your progress. Feeding on angry thoughts, frustrated thoughts, critical or condemnatory thoughts doesn’t make you better, it makes you ill. You have to change what it is you have been feeding on. What are you watching on TV? What information have you been digesting into your soul? What you read, what you see, what you look at does matter. That’s not to say that all of TV is bad or everything you see online is evil. But, you still have to pay attention. Most of the deception that occurs happens day by day during mindless and empty thinking. If you aren’t willing to direct your thinking, something else will. Change what it is you are thinking. Stop opposing yourself. Stop cooperating in opposing yourself by drawing terrible conclusions and thinking the worst about yourself. You are the only you, you have and to constantly participate in opposing yourself is crazy and makes you crazy.

As I muse on the importance of mental health, as someone with a similar mind and similar tendencies, I can’t help but to lament on how easily you and I have been led to to the wrong assumptions concerning ourselves. Not everyone cares about what is right and in doing right, so how insane is it for us to find ourselves unworthy as members of the group that cares? Surely something else is involved, something that seeks that which is wrong over that which is right. How slow we have been to realize what is behind that persuasion. You and I are in a fight and we can only win when we make the effort to think as God says to think. Contrary thoughts and contrary feelings are no guarantee for what is true. We are all imperfect creatures and God does not require perfection from us. Instead He requires that we control the one thing we can control and that is our thoughts. Think healthy thoughts. Allow yourself to be a human and as such experience your humanity. When you are wrong it is always apparent. Learn from it and let it go; for goodness sakes, let it go. Every wrong thing you and I ever did we did because of the influence of evil and we would not have done so otherwise. To allow evil, the source of our errors, to accuse of the evil it engendered is the ultimate deception. Likewise, to persist in thoughts that serve only to oppose us, coming from us and directed to us is insane. They are your thoughts and they are my thoughts. We can control them and we must control them if we want to protect our mental health.

It really does not matter where you have been or what you have done in the past. It doesn’t even matter what you did yesterday. What matters is what you choose to do with your mind in the moments called now. If you want to have a healthy mind you have to feed it healthy thoughts. Quit dragging around in the misty flats and get up on the high road. Stop feeling sorry for yourself or lamenting your life choices up to this point. God functions in the now and can help you in the now. Take control of that unruly mind of yours and see how quickly things turn around for the better. It is your mind and it is your life. These are mental health musings worth thinking about. Live who God made you to be.

Just some good thoughts…