Showing posts with label experiences. Show all posts
Showing posts with label experiences. Show all posts

Sunday, April 24, 2016

Trapped in Our Subconscious Mind

sea, landscape, beach 
 

The soul is our mind, will and emotions, or I like to call it our thoughts, choices and feelings. When life happens all around us, it registers with our soul.

We analyze the occurrence with our thoughts, decide how we feel about those thoughts and then make choices according to our thoughts and feelings.

We tuck away many of these experiences in our subconscious mind, never even giving them any conscious thought at all. This happens in a matter of seconds. Yet, these stored memories affect our choices for the rest of our life.

Our soul often attempts to draw our attention to these memories through dreams, negative emotions and bizarre beliefs. We need a resolution for them or to make a decision about them.

We can continue to ignore them and allow them to fester like a blister in our soul, or we can confront them, find God's truth about them and find freedom from the trouble they cause.

The easiest and most lasting way to heal our soul is to journal our thoughts and feelings - uncensored and unorganized; any way they come to mind, just write them down that way.

Underline all of the negative thoughts. Which topic is the most prevalent? That is the biggest lie by which Satan is keeping your soul captive.

Pray about that negative mindset and ask God to show you where it came from. Is it attached to a memory, or more than one incident in the past? It may have been a simple insignificant comment by a significant person in our life.

Ask God to tell you His truth about this issue. Now, use that truth to help you to change your focus about the issue. Ask yourself how you feel about that negative attitude now. It should diminish in intensity.

If it is not totally gone, then pray about it again and take time to listen to God's truth about what He shows you. Repeat this process until that emotion no longer bothers you and then go on to the next negative emotion.

This may take minutes, hours, days or even months. You may not get resolution during your prayer time; but it may occur when you wake up some morning, or while cooking a meal or carpooling the children. God speaks in His own time and way.

Prayer:
Father God, thank You for caring about soul as well as our body and spirit. You are our great God and our great King and You rule over every principality and power in heavenly places. Thank You for teaching us that spiritual warfare is a very real occurrence in life in this earthly realm, and for giving us Your Spirit to take authority over Satan and his demons.

You set us free from the negative world of thoughts and events, which plague us. You capture us for Your glory and You use us in Your Kingdom all the days of our life in this world and in the next. Thank You for redeeming us, transforming us and using us according to Your will.

Thought for the Day:
The object of prayer journaling is to persevere in prayer about each negative emotion until God resolves them for you and you are free from the tyranny of the past; you will feel lighter, happier and more at peace with God, yourself and with your personal relationships.


 

Saturday, January 2, 2016

Renewed Mind - Part 2 - Healing for our Wounded Soul



 

Satan plants lies in our soul throughout the experiences of our life. These misconceptions cause us to over-react irrationally and with intense emotion in our current life situations.

There are personality issues and woundedness in every person’s soul, which may trigger our wounds and hinder us, or our partner, friend or relative from changing or growing spiritually.

We need to see life through their eyes, not only through our own. God will give us His agape love to accept them for exactly who they are. Then we can also pray for them to be all that God wants them to be.

If we put their needs above our own, He gives us the patience to love them through their episodes. We realize that they are reacting from fear and woundedness, which our behavior triggered; and we do not take their rage or sullenness or impatience personally.

We pray for them and love them even more when they are behaving badly than we do when they are rational and kind. They have no idea why they are acting this way, but God does.

All negative behavior is a red flag to alert us of the woundedness in our soul. It may also be a false belief that is now an idol in our soul, because we give our pet peeves and misconceptions too much importance in our life.

We can take these irrational beliefs to God and gain His perspective on them, asking Him to change our focus about them until they lose their importance to us.

During rational moments, when no one is in a hurry or in need of our time, we can offer to pray with our spouse, friend or family member about their negative emotions.

They may be as clueless about their behavior as we are. They can start by journaling what they were thinking during their outburst. What thoughts were going through their mind? What did we do that triggered this reaction in them?

As we pray together, these problems are resolved as God reveals their root and origin, uncovers Satan's lie for us, and then speaks His truth to our soul. ( www.theophostic.com )

Prayer:
Father God, remind us that our soul longs more for a relationship with You than with a person. We often go from one person to another in this life, trying to find our soul mate, or someone to complete us.

Yet, the only way we can feel fulfilled is through deepening our commitment and our relationship with You. This is true even for married people. The more we find acceptance and develop satisfaction in our relationship with You, the more we can serve our mate out of our love for You (Ephesians 5:22, 6:7; Colossians 3:18, 23-24).

Thought for the Day:
Our support and acceptance of our partner’s, friend's or relative's shortcomings will do much to improve our attitude, as well as to improve their behavior through our love and consideration of their needs above our own.

Monday, November 23, 2015

Negative Strongholds




 


 
God gave us a wide gamut of emotions, which signal to us the mood in which our spirit, soul and body exist. Joyful emotions arise from positive experiences, but also from a spiritual outlook on negative circumstances.

Negative emotions signal areas in our life, which need our attention along with prayer for God's wisdom, direction and solutions. These emotions are not meant for expression, but as red flags to gain our attention and point out negative strongholds.
                                                                                            
They will destroy us if we ruminate on them or over react because of them. However, they can also apprise us of how life is affecting us and give us an opportunity to change our circumstances or to give the issues to God's faithful care (1 Peter 5:7).

The most basic source of these negative emotion signal us of an unmet need for our body or soul - our thoughts and emotions. Once we discern their cause, we realize that we can meet our own need or trust God to care for that need.

Also, Satan's lies will create negative emotions in the battleground of our mind. He whispers his lies and we believe them. 

These lies affect our feelings about our self, destroy our relationships with God and other people, and also fuel other negative emotions, which may even effect our physical, mental and emotional health.

We often have unrealistic expectations for God, people, places and situations in our life, which disappoint us when they fail to happen. This causes a myriad of negative emotions to bombard our soul, which often overwhelm us.

These inordinate expectations, pet peeves and stresses in our life are idols, because we exalt them above our trust in God (Colossians 3:5). We desire fulfillment in areas that are unhealthy for us or out of God's timing or will for our life.

Our adverse reactions to life can be both destructive and informative. The ultimate outcome depends on our attitude, spiritual maturity and the action, which we take because of them.

Prayer:
Father God, teach us to heed the warning of these negative emotions, so that we can meet our physical, mental and emotional needs in ways, which are pleasing to You; we can hear Your truth about Satan's lies and either dispel them or change our focus about them; or we can surrender the idols in our life to You and wait on your timing and will or Your wisdom on dealing with the root cause of our negative emotions.

Remind us to schedule quiet times throughout our day, regardless of the amount of time we can make for them, so that we can take an inventory of our physical, mental and emotional health. Strengthen our inner being by Your Holy Spirit to hear Your wisdom from Christ in us in order to bear with, to change our focus about, or to deal with these issues. We trust You to care for us.

Thought for the Day:
Although we live in this earthly world, we exist in the spiritual realm; God gives us spiritual weapons to pull down strongholds, cast down Satan's lies and anything else, which attempts to exalt itself against the Truth of God as God's Spirit enables us to bring every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ. - 2 Corinthians 10:3-5