The Seven Day Mental Diet

The Seven-Day Mental Diet

The food you furnish your mind determines the character of your life.

The subjects you allow your mind to dwell upon, make your surroundings what they are.


Everything in your life today - the state of your body, the state of your fortune, the state of your home, the present condition of every phase of your life - is entirely conditioned by the habitual tone of your past thinking. The condition of your life next week, and next year, will be conditioned by the thoughts and feelings that you entertain from now onward.

In other words, YOU CHOOSE YOUR LIFE!

Thought is the real causative force in life, there is no other.
You cannot have one kind of mind and another kind of environment.
You cannot change your environment while leaving your mind unchanged.
This is the real key to life; if you change your mind your conditions must change too.
Your body must change, your activities must change; your home must change;
the color-tone of your whole life must change.

And be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind...
(Romans 12:2)

This may be the GREAT COSMIC LAW

The practical difficulty in applying it arises from the fact that our thoughts are so close to us that it is difficult, with out a little practice, to stand back and look at them objectively. Yet, that is what you must learn to do. You must train yourself to choose the subject of your thinking at any given time, and also to choose the emotional tone.

If you are not determined to start in now and carefully select all day the kind of thoughts that you are going to think, you may as well give up all hope of shaping your life into the kind of thing that you want it to be.

To train yourself in the habit of thought selection will be difficult for the first few days, but it is the most interesting experiment that you could possibly make. You will be amazed at the things that you will learn about yourself. This week may be the most significant week in your whole life; not only will you be able to face your present difficulties in a better spirit, but the difficulties will go. You cannot change conditions directly – you have often tried to do so and failed – but go on the seven-day mental diet and conditions MUST change for you.

The way to start on a Seven-Day Mental Diet is to BEGIN NOW.

This is your Seven-Day Mental Diet prescription

For seven days you must not allow yourself to dwell for a moment on
any kind of negative thought.

You must watch yourself for a week and must not under any pretense allow your mind to dwell on any thought that is not positive, constructive, optimistic, kind.

This discipline will be so strenuous that you could not maintain it consciously for much more than a week, but a week will be enough, because by that time the habit of positive thinking will begin to be established. Some changes for the better will have come into your life, encouraging you enormously, and then the new way of life will be so attractive that you will find your mentality aligning itself almost automatically.

What is meant by negative thinking?
A negative thought is any thought of failure, disappointment, or trouble; any thought of criticism, or spite, or jealousy, or condemnation of others, or self-condemnation; and thought of sickness or accident; or, in short, any kind of limitation. In practice you will never have any trouble in knowing whether a thought is positive or negative. Even if your brain tries to deceive you, your heart will whisper the truth.

It is not the thoughts that come to you that matter, but only such of them as you choose to entertain and dwell upon. Many negative thoughts will come to you all day long. Some will be given to you by other people, or you will hear disagreeable news. These things, however, do not matter so long as you do not entertain them.

Red Hot Cinder Analogy
An analogy is furnished by the case of a man who is sitting by an open fire when a red hot cinder flies out and falls on his sleeve. If he blows that cinder off at once, without a moment's delay to think about it, no harm is done. But, if he allows it to rest on him for a single moment, under any pretense, the mischief is done, and it will be a troublesome task to repair that sleeve. So it is with a negative thought.

Rock On
People often find that the starting of this seven-day mental diet seems to stir up difficulties. It seems as though everything begins to go wrong at once. This may be disconcerting, but it is really a good sign. Suppose your whole world seems to rock on its foundations. Hold on steadily, let it rock, and when the rocking is over, the picture will have reassembled itself into something much nearer to your heart's desire.

Do NOT tell anyone else that you are on a mental diet.
Remember that your soul should be the Secret Place of the Most High. When you have secured your new mentality, then tell the story to anyone else whom you think is likely to be helped by it.

Meditation
There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer; no disease that enough love will not heal;
no door that enough love will not open; no gulf that enough love will not bridge;
no wall that enough love will not throw down; no sin that enough love will not redeem.
It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble, how hopeless the outlook, how muddled the tangle,
how great the mistake; a sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all.


The Seven-Day Mental Diet comes directly from
Around The Year with Emmet Fox – A Book of Daily Readings, p. 360-363. ISBN: 978-0-06-250408-1
Available at our online store at www.livingshoppe.com