Change the channel

What is the film you hate the most? You just can’t stand this movie and whenever it comes on the TV, you just have to change the channel and watch something else. Anything else!

It doesn’t even have to be one film… what are the movies that you really detest? You can’t take them at all. They irritate you, annoy you or bore you to tears.

Why not add in TV programmes to the mix. Which transmissions of terrestrial TV find you scrambling for the remote control quicker than a speeding bullet?

One film I have to switch off is The Wizard of Oz. That bloody musical would come on every Christmas when I was growing up and my delightful sister always seemed to have the monopoly on the small screen switcher (except when the footie was on, for some strange reason). I had no chance of getting that thing off her, any attempts would see her scream the house down that I was a murderer.

So whenever Dorothy and her crew were singing ‘We’re off to see the Wizard’ I was off to my bedroom to see sanity.

Now, as an adult and in the luxury of my own home, with no sister to kill, I am able to watch what I like on TV, and so when The Wizard of Oz comes on at Christmas, every bloody Christmas dare I say. I turn it over as soon as it starts, and watch something better like, Back to the future 2. Now that is a film worth watching repeatedly!

Maybe it’s my sister’s fault that I don’t like the Wizard of Oz. She watched that celluloid classic so many times that whenever it comes on the telly nowadays I have to switch the channel before I break out in a sweat.

But that’s what we do when we don’t like a film or TV programme on the box. That’s what we do when we don’t like a song on the radio, we change the channel. We change the frequency.

So why don’t we do that with our negative thoughts? Why don’t we switch the channel on them and watch positive thoughts instead? They are just as readily available to us as the negative ones are.

We let negative thoughts enter our minds and then we let them stay there. We even replay them over and over again like a classic on UK Gold. We don’t like these thoughts, we don’t want them but we let them play on and on and on. Thoughts about the past. Thoughts about the future. Nervous thoughts, anxious thoughts. We let them affect the way we feel. We let them affect the way we behave. But we don’t change the channel. We keep it on the same frequency watching the same thoughts again and again.

We don’t stop to think, that these thoughts are stories that we have created in the mind. They are mini films, blockbusters, thrillers and horror films that we have made up in our thoughts.

It can be easy to get lost in our thoughts, feeling like there is no other way. But there is we can change our negative thoughts to nicer ones just as easily as we can change the channel on the television from a bad show one to a good one. We just have to think positively.

Whenever the mind produces dark thoughts, we can try working with those thoughts instead of fighting them by letting them come and go.

We can even explore our thoughts without judgement to see what they mean.

Or we can change them to positive ones by thinking about positive things.

Thoughts are going to appear in the mind whether we want them to or not, the key is to not give power to them, to not hold on to them, to not stop and think about them. When they come just let them go, as though you were letting go of a red balloon and watching sail up into the cool calm air. Let it go. Let them go.

You are in control of your thoughts, so when the crap ones come on just change the channel, or as I used to do when I was a kid leave the room and do something else.

There is little point in watching something that you don’t want to watch, no point in having thoughts you don’t want to have. There is so much more choice these days that we are not as limited as we once were. We can change what we don’t like to what we want in an instant, we can change the thinking we don’t like into thoughts we do like in a blink of an eye. So when BBC iPlayer isn’t cutting it for you there’s always Netflix instead.

Change your thoughts, change your life. Don’t get stuck on the same channel.