“Change your thinking, change your feeling and behavior ” is half-baked. It’s only part of the truth. Emotions often proceed and control thoughts. Emotions can send your thoughts on a ten mile hike before you realize you’ve left your conscious mind or these negative emotions can send you on a trip that meanders through the guilt of the past or soaring into the unknown fear of the future. Your emotional life is the transmission fluid of your brain. Science may “know” that cognition of thoughts most influences behavior. However, your emotions have not been informed of these findings. They are too busy reinforcing their influence positively or as cycles of negative emotional addiction –the emotions we are conditioned to feeling in a patterned way. These emotional cycles underlie all addictions. Actually, present research in positive emotion is changing our view of emotions altogether and where positive psychology leaves off, quantum physics has taken over. Your thoughts and your emotions travel on the same neuropathways, and strong and consistent negative emotions have the power to tell your positive thoughts to get off the road. In a like matter, positive emotional muscle travels on that same highway, preparing the way for positive thought and even altering negative thinking. Positive emotions have great power. Until you develop positive emotional control and management, it is a “draw” over which controls you most, negative thought or negative emotions. To grow a positive mind, it is not enough to simply think positive thoughts. Just because you eat good food doesn’t mean you will grow strong muscles- unless you use them. Just because you think positive thoughts doesn’t mean that positive emotions will cooperate and grow unless you work them and exercise the positive emotion. Positive emotional muscle is the lubricant to the neuroplasticity that grows a positive mind. Let me put this in a more scientific way. Positive emotion, concentrated and over time, increases your gamma waves (did you know you have brain waves like that?) You do- wonderful, synchronous gamma waves, that over a period of time, as you increase left brain asymmetry, will decrease the power of the limbic system’s amygdala to general negative and over-reactive emotions of fear, doubt, anxiety, anger and rage. The brain changes as you develop positive emotional muscle. That is the period of evolution we are now entering upon! Growing the Positive Mind Dr. William Kent Larkin