Life Power Now - for gay men

On a daily basis we spend a lot of time thinking about our life challenges and dealing with many conflicting thoughts in our heads. We think about all sorts of difficult life situations, including financial problems, and make ourselves believe we can’t handle them. Catastrophic thinking about our lives bombards us with anxiety and contributes to our feeling of insecurity. Life issues get blown out of proportion when we approach them with our exaggerated thoughts. Obsession with our financial insecurities or other life problems will not go away as long as we approach them with the same thinking pattern that created them. Our brain has a tendency to project our past disappointments and failures into the future and make us believe they are going to happen again. Consequently, we are going to feel paralyzed and unable to come up with creative solutions for our life problems. It is very difficult to feel confident, creative, and brave while we are intensely anxious.

As a psychotherapist, when I listen to people’s life struggles, I see how much of their life suffering has to do with their way of thinking. A common-sense approach might be to recommend positive thinking and offer people tools to challenge their dysfunctional thinking. There is nothing wrong with that except we are being lead back to our thinking function and having to deal with more thoughts in our heads. Never-ending battles between positive thinking versus negative thinking, which keep us in our heads, is not our only option.

We can learn from Sufi spiritual teachings on experiencing life through our hearts and less through our limited thoughts. These teachings give us the opportunity to be in our hearts and not in a battle with our thoughts. Our thoughts need to be experienced in the field of the heart and not the head. Thoughts must obey the heart and facilitate the process of coming from the heart. By using the gift of imagination we can remember and picture anything that we love and open up our heart. We can meditate on the love in our heart and stay away from conflicting thoughts in our head. The flame of this love will burn our thoughts and transform our anxious state of mind to a new, peaceful, and loving state.

The goal is not to stop thinking, but to start experiencing love in our heart. A good example of this is Chad*, a 34-year-old man who used to worry a lot. Every time he stayed with his thoughts about his stressful career or his relationship problems he felt worse. After encouraging him to share his concerns about his life and providing empathic listening, I encouraged him to try something different. I asked him to remember any loving situations he likes and to feel that love in his heart. He imagined his love for his pet, and that love became the key to his heart. After entering his heart I encouraged him to stay in that place. Any thoughts could be experienced in his heart. By practicing this simple meditation he was able to let go of his worries. Throughout the day when he found himself lost in his thoughts he would remind himself that the place to be is “in my heart and not my head.”

Chad was able to heal his thoughts through his heart. This type of healing can happen on a collective level as well. Not only can we make personal changes by coming from the heart but also collective changes. The mind has not been able to solve issues like war, disease, poverty, racism, homophobia, nor violence against women and children. In fact these issues have to do with destructive thoughts and were created by them. As we learn to open our hearts and let the love flow in our hearts, we can pour that love into the universe and let it be used for the good of all people.

In Sufism we learn that the heart is more important than our minds. By being in the service of the heart, we have a better chance to resolve our personal and global problems. By letting our hearts take charge of our minds we can change ourselves and the world.

This article is copyrighted by Dr. Payam Ghassemlou, a psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles, California. Send comments to DrPayam1@aol.com or visit his website at www.DrPayam.Com

*Names and other details have been changed to protect privacy and confidentiality.