As the new year begins, commitment to free thinking sets the tone for empowered changes. An open mind without the limitations of belief transforms perceptions. January is the month of resolutions, new beginnings, and renewed dedication to maintaining healthy habits. Many of us are returning to self-care routines and personal goals that got lost somewhere between the spiked eggnog and second helpings of our favorite holiday meal. Some are still there among the missing or hibernating.
Free thinking challenges us to reevaluate our convictions and shows us there’s no one way to live right. It also helps us to get real about our judgments. Employ free thinking to consider your choices earnestly, decide that you alone have the authority to make them, and live a better life.
My primary resolution is balance. It is my self-compassionate agenda to align with the inner security that comes from non-reactivity. With a grounded awareness of the myriad potential truths, I step back and breathe, tuning into my senses. It’s easier to detect manipulation and uncover larger agendas in this space. With my heart centered, my discernment becomes fine-tuned. I continue to be well-guided instead of distracted. This new way of being feels like finding treasure while browsing antiques. It offers me the freedom to discover what brings joy, strengthens my psychological state, and enhances my ability to show up as my best self. I’ve learned that only I can give myself this gift.
Gently unearth rare finds using free thinking as a tool.
Consider how precious and transformational this is. It’s the holy grail of self-love. It’s freely available. You needn’t ask, beg, or bargain to receive it. You need to claim it; however, every day (like a trillion times). This most life-changing endeavor requires your patient self-mastery and you’re worth it!
Use Free Thinking to See Beyond Your Present Reality
Could you allow the noise of what you don’t like to fade into the background? Entertain thoughts that quell negative expectations and expand your realm of possibilities. Free thinking and healthy boundaries liberate us from the resistance that blocks our blessings. Consider the following practices to expand your thinking and relationship with the present moment.
- Resolve to start each new day, free of yesterday’s debris.
- Commit to healthy habits that elevate your thinking, being, and interpretation of the world.
- Do the stuff of life with appreciation and mindfulness.
- Release your attachments with a firm, gentle hand and with unwavering resolve. To experience life in its fullness moment by moment is not contingent on outside circumstances changing.
- Life has heavy parts, so add lightness when and where you can.
I aim to help you move beyond your VHS tapes and floppy disks so you may more fully come into your power. Some defunct programs were never any good! Horrendous energy-sucking programs, playing on a perpetual loop beneath your consciousness, are like living in a house with Jaws 3 running on multiple TV screens all day. Outside of the incessant distraction of a slow-moving shark, you’re free to view upgraded movies with no sharks at all!
Use Free Thinking to Expose Outdated Ideologies
Uncover mental programming by pushing the limits of your beliefs and asking yourself why you believe as you do. Expanded perspectives broaden potential and understanding. Consider the possibility that your beliefs cloud perceptions of what is or can be.
New ways of thinking will open new doors! They will help you with radical acceptance so you may consciously master the use of your creative power. I have my truths that continue to evolve and strengthen. Collectively, we are all in this production together, yet each of us interprets it differently. The examples I highlight are based on my experiences, growth, and soul lessons.
Accept that we all have old tapes, and many remain buried in closets. Take compassionate ownership of any internal spilth that clouds your view of self-worth or suggests you need to visit any unpleasantness in thought or emotion when conjured from the outside. Your new shark-less lens counters any dreadfulness you detect with righteousness.
We are not here to serve worldly systems. We are here to embody the higher aspects of ourselves as much as we can as we stumble along. Seize the opportunity for joyful creation, instead of being conned into fretting it away.
Big Business Keeps Your Thinking Small! Tightly Wrapped in The Box They Made
Big business has gained possession of our airways. They have our social media accounts, emails, and phone numbers. Your activation in response to scare tactics designed to have you take part in the world as a consumer sucks the lifeblood of your free thinking. To minimize the contamination, consider the following:
- unsubscribe or spam emails, remove yourself from marketing texts
- reassess and release attachments to previously held beliefs about wellness
- consider information from sources that align with the natural world and healing intentions
- look beyond big business solutions
We’re encouraged to talk to our phones for information and advice. Who is this search assistant wizard? Have we relinquished our free thinking to a nebulous fact-finding god?
The methods used by a preventative culture to induce fear have indoctrinated our way of living. Have you had your flu shot? This hijacking of creative power aligns our energies with maladies. Illness focus masquerading as wellness does the opposite of what it promises. Direct attention to what is wrong or could be wrong makes people more vulnerable to physical and mental illness, not less.
Health insurance and pharmaceutical companies bombard our lives with marketing that withers our expectations of good health without their help. The result is a population with a diminished capacity to entertain scenarios beyond this paradigm. Advertisements, presented as gospel, inflict worry on even healthy young people.
Why squander your priceless imaginative power in this way?
A more effective wellness model honors our wholeness and daily choices that support living well. Free thinking beyond a mainstream medical schedule that expects frequent check-ups and screenings, I focus on maintaining healthy habits (How to Stay Healthy 18 Simple Habits). There are countless ways we may have robust wellness through our daily care. There is no need to ask your doctor what their drug representative recommends.
Use Free Thinking to Withdraw Your Participation, and Resources From Anything That Doesn’t ADD Value to Your Life
Last year, I went to the dentist for the first time since March 2020. After the exam and x-rays, they said to schedule a deep cleaning. I joked with the staff about how I obsessively care for my teeth. However, having my teeth scraped while hanging upside down for an hour is beyond unpleasant! Besides, they benefit from an unnecessarily extended appointment time. I don’t.
At first, they denied my request for a regular cleaning. They explained it was their protocol to require more extensive cleaning even though my teeth and gums were in good shape. After all, it had been almost 4 years since my last cleaning.
At one point, I said: But I’m the consumer! After a lengthy, painstaking conversation with the dentist, she agreed to the hour. My cleaning took 45 minutes. This time included several pauses for the hygienist to talk about her grandchildren.
Freshly cleaned teeth feel satisfying, so I returned. When I was done, for fun, I asked the hygienist scheduling my next 6-month cleaning if I would be required to have x-rays. Guess what? They have made an exception because I said I wouldn’t come back. I didn’t explain why, so the hygienist was guessing. No, not because of radiation or discomfort, but because it’s unnecessary.
Remember, you’re the boss of you!
When my daughter was young, she’d say, you’re not the boss of me! I don’t know who told her that or if she came up with it herself, but no parenting curriculum had prepared me for her fire. One day, a physician blurted, You have a very willful little girl! It was an uncomfortable situation, but it took some restraint not to smile. I thought to myself, good! I’d done all I could to keep her that way and stay sane.
At her age, I had already succumbed to the pressures of doing what others wanted, regardless of what I wanted or didn’t. I believed I’d be in trouble for not following the rules, no matter how bogus, so I did. It was a conditioned response. There are many scenarios in which we learn to meet expectations to stay safe—to swallow our anger and discomfort. Free thinking may become squashed, a product of punishing environments, or covertly suppressed under our noses, like the frog in water, slowly turned up to a boil.
Some people are naturally free-thinking, independent, and questioning. Groupthink and the pressure to conform thwart and derail these natural inclinations. Now, more than ever, people seem oblivious that they have choices.
Have we become so accustomed to following outside expectations that we forget to question why? Remember, you are the boss of you!
Use Free Thinking to Establish Ways of Living That Are Truly Healthful for YOU
Free thinking unveils how suspiciously opportune mainstream recommendations and expectations have become. Reconsider your choices. Ask yourself, does this make sense? Are the choices and decisions I’m making about my life based on my true values? The opportunity to work remotely in 2020 awakened many people to parts of their lives they were missing out on. Simplistic nourishing ways of being that eluded them while stuck in the daily grind. Profit-minded individuals who benefit from the box want you to forget your awakened insights.
Use Free Thinking to Establish Boundaries and Break Free From Bogus Expectations
Prioritize personal values and discard anything incongruent. Forget about what others are doing. Simple kindness and goodness are worthwhile ventures. The exhilarating truth: what most merits your attention is like a radiant flame burning bright within, not what bulldozes into your experience. Decide to withdraw from anything self-serving vying for your reaction, like spam notifications warning you that you owe back taxes or your credit score is in danger.
What’s good for health, good for life, doesn’t feel like a cloud shadowing the sun. Maybe core wellness is as effortless, and flowing as fresh air, a pot of home-cooked soup, or a belly laugh with your favorite people.
Use Free Thinking to Expose Underlying Motivations and Force-fed Facts
Not too long ago, I saw an article on ancient remedies that listed the benefits of garlic, lemon, and ginger. Fact-checking tagged it as fraudulent. Pharmaceutical advertising and articles had no such tags. Discussions about eliminating fact-checking on social media have prompted outrage and joyous celebration. There are as many viewpoints about proclaimed facts and purported misinformation as there are versions of history. Openmindedness brings us all closer to truths.
Free thinking reveals that historians record historical facts filtered through their perspectives and experiences. Historians will chronicle current events, respectively. Data interpretation includes only the data collected. In the example of side effects of pharmaceuticals, the AER (Adverse Effects Reporting) estimates suggest the FDA receives only about 1 to 10 percent of adverse events. I’ve written about this here: Not So Rare Side Effects of Medication. The motivation of a research sponsor to achieve specific outcomes is an extraneous variable to factor in, yet it isn’t.
Use free thinking to discern the validity of a narrative.
If the characterization of an event, or single story ignites fear, anger, or hopelessness, question it. In a non-reactive state, consider who stands to gain from your dysregulation. It’s not you that benefits, despite what your reptilian brain tells you. Life has its heartaches and atrocities. At any given moment, multiple realities exist. Choose the remedy, not the poison.
Free thinking will enlighten perspectives beyond what you’re shown, irrespective of external influences or expert opinions. In this space, you’re primed to create consciously! Read more: Conscious Creation From What’s Foul.
Use Free Thinking to Upgrade Your Beliefs and Entertain New Possibilities
Be like a feather that delicately dances on a breeze pulled upward by the gentle current so you, too, may effortlessly move toward resonance. What prevents you from the reality you most desire? Your resistance does.
Upgraded beliefs bring to light your power.
If free thinking reveals that ‘what is’ is not what you thought it was, let the clarity of what you most desire steer your focus. Nothing is more powerful than where you place your attention. Don’t fall for the trick that what you don’t like needs to infect you. A belief system or agenda contrary to your own needn’t harm you and is powerless over you unless you energize it.
Use Free Thinking to Make Decisions that Honor the Precious Short Lives You’re Part of
Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking.
Leo Tolstoy
Free Thinking Helps With Discernment and Can Simplify Your Life
When you make inner quieting a daily priority, free-thinking thrives! Listen, make observations, and then shift your attention inward. How does what you’ve taken in through your senses land? If something feels off and your heart says no, proceed accordingly. We are all born with the tools to discern for ourselves. You don’t owe agreement to any outside source unless it’s your higher source! Your explanations or apologies are not required. Have the courage to listen to and follow your insights to expand free thinking. This will diminish any fear of disapproval or criticism. You won’t live forever, so be honest about what is true for you now, not later.
A lion doesn’t concern itself with the opinion of sheep.
George R. R Martin
Prevailing practices and widely believed views that don’t meet my standards for honoring life don’t get my agreement. What I allow into my life strengthens it. We may have very different ideas about what is healthful versus harmful. Disagreements about our choices are typically trivial, yet we must maintain our integrity. The people-pleasing parts of self may feel jammed up about disagreeing. You may feel tempted to over-explain when it’s clear you drum to your beat or don’t have a drum, just a boot with an oversized heel that you knock rhythmically against the wall to the thrash of Enter Sandman, but don’t. Live the reality of your choice as a kind, unapologetic, free thinker.
If you keep coloring inside the lines and live in fear of some impending unknown possibility, ask yourself who or what you are living for. Get out of the cage of your conditioning and into free thinking! The crown jewels are there for you behind the dry sink and rotary phone you don’t need.
Please visit my Coaching Services or Metaphysical Services (Spiritual Tools 101) pages to learn about services that will expand your thinking and support your discernment.
Are you interested in supportive services to help create an environment that supports intentional living? Please visit me here: Estelle Bonaceto. The more your perceptions optimize, the easier it is to make environmental upgrades, and vice versa! Isn’t it time you eliminate what is harmful, unnecessary, or imposed on you? Cut those cords and live an empowered life.
