First We Make Our Habits

"First we make our habits, then our habits make us." John Dryden, seventeenth-century English Poet and dramatist

There is unreported goodness in the world that never gets our attention or time because it never makes it to the front page of our daily lives. Why? My friends in the newsroom say it's because they have a hard time finding it. They have to feed the 24 hour news machine and they have only the resources of the wire services to work from. So where does that leave the rest of us aching for another story? It leads us right here.

To quote Jerry Maguire, "Breakdown, breakthrough. " If this country is to move from the fear-based thinking of the past and all that it attracts into a transformed consciousness that reminds us of who we are and what power we may have to change our lives, we need a better story to tell.

Marci Shimoff's bestselling book, Happy for No Reason, cites a scientific study that reports we have 60,000 thoughts a day. That's one thought per second during every waking hour.  For the average person, 80 percent of those thoughts are negative. That means that every day most people have more than 45,000 negative thoughts. With the rise of economic instability in this country, that explains the 40 percent increase in therapeutic treatments this year.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health, among others, have measured the flow of blood and activity patterns in the brain and have found that having negative thoughts stimulates the areas of the brain involved in depression and anxiety. On the other hand, positive thoughts have a calming, beneficial effect on the brain. Our negative thoughts are quite literally poisonous to our system and positive thoughts are medicinal.

According to Bruce Lipton, a molecular biologist and author of The Biology of Belief, our DNA is influenced by our positive and negative thoughts. We can use our thinking to reach greater levels of health and happiness by choosing those pieces of information that bring us positive feelings. We can use the news and other forms of narrative to improve our lives if we consciously choose what we read and what we listen to. Good news can heal our lives.

When a group of people come to a collective awareness of the need for change, transformation unfolds. That time is now. It is up to us to find the good news that is all around us and report it. If the bestselling book and movie, The Secret is right and we do indeed attract more of what we think about then we need to choose our thoughts with discretion. This doesn't mean we are without knowledge or recognition of the world we live in but only that we are choosing what we focus on. In that choice lies the secret to increased health, wealth and happiness. Be a conscious player in the new world we are all creating and be a part of Good News Girlz. We can't do it without you. Life is good and we want your story.