I'm thinking today about thinking. Interesting concept, huh? How often do we really stop and think about the way we think? How might the way we think about things really have an impact on the way we see the world?

I've been listening to Wayne Dyer and also to Deepak Chopra recently, and they have been talking about how our beliefs really do shape our reality. Deepak, who is a medical doctor, was telling a story about a fellow doctor friend of his who was a heavy smoker (this was a few years ago when many more people smoked). Deepak said his friend was always coughing and Deepak suggested that he get a chest X-ray just to make sure he was OK. His friend refused. One day Deepak said his friend was coughing profusely, and Deepak dragged him in to get a chest X-ray and it revealed a coin-sized spot on his lung. Deepak said within a week his friend was coughing blood, and within a month he died.

Deepak went back and checked in his friend's medical file and found an X-ray that had been taken five years before and there was the coin-sized spot - no different than it was on the last X-ray. What Deepak concluded was that his friend didn't die of cancer, but died of the diagnosis. What he knew of cancer was that it was a death sentence and he proved himself right. Wow.

If we can start to see that whatever shows up in our lives is a result of the way we are thinking, what would that mean to the voices in our heads that are masquerading as the "victim" and the "villain"?

I don't know about you, but this shift in my thinking has caused an amazing shift in the way the world is occurring to me. When I started thinking about this, I discovered that I don't have any negative friends; I don't have depressing conversations with people; I don't really have too many complaints in my life. At first I thought that was just a lucky phenomenon until I started examining the work I've been doing on myself over the past couple of years. I started noticing that as I shifted my attitude, things started shifting around me. Now I look for positive things in my life and that's exactly what I see.

On the one hand it seems almost amazing ... but on the other hand, isn't this the way it should be for all of us? Shouldn't life be wonderful and peaceful and supportive of us? Wouldn't that be a better space for all of us to exist inside of? What would you be freed up to be if you didn't have the worries and stresses in your life?

I met a new friend a couple of weeks ago who told me that she has worked hard all her life to save money. In her words, she said she has been a "hoarder" and one night she figured out that she had enough money socked away so that she could live for the rest of her life without working. Wow - that's pretty freeing! She went to sleep that night with all kinds of exciting ideas in her head ... and then she bolted awake three hours later and went back to her checkbook and discovered - to her horror - that she had the decimal point in the wrong place, and she wasn't financially independent like she thought she was three hours earlier.

The good news is that during those three hours of freedom, she had all kinds of new thoughts about how she would live her life without constraints - and she remembered what they were. Nothing had changed in the universe in those three hours - but in her mind they had and her thought process allowed all kinds of new energy into her space. Although she didn't have the money she thought she had, she still had the ideas and the thoughts and she committed to staying on that path and living that way in spite of the reality. And she's seeing a lot of those ideas come to fruition in her life just because she intended them.

What are your thoughts producing in your life? Where might you be able to see something different by thinking it that way? Try it - and let me know what shows up in your space!