(Exercising Your Mind) Compiled by Hakeem Alexander for HypnoAthletics

You will remain in the same undesired places, covering lots of distance with no displacement from your current position until you act upon your reality with the force of new thoughts and new behaviors. Sheer magnitude of will is not enough, what is needed is a new direction.

“To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances. This challenge is both easier and more difficult than it sounds: easier because the ability to do so is entirely within each person’s hands; difficult because it requires a discipline and perseverance that are relatively rare in any era, and perhaps especially in the present. And before all else, achieving control over experience requires a drastic change in attitude about what is important and what is not”. –Mihaly Csikszentmihaly; Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, p16 –1990

“Every one of us is the sum total of his own thoughts. He is where he is because that is exactly where he really wants to be, whether he’ll admit that or not.” -Earl Nightingale; The Strangest Secret, 1956

“To think what you want to think is to think TRUTH, regardless of appearances. Every man has the natural and inherent power to think what he wants to think, but it requires far more effort to do so than it does to think the thoughts which are suggested by appearances. To think according to appearance is easy; to think truth regardless of appearances is laborious, and requires the expenditure of more power than any other work man is called upon to perform.

There is no labor from which most people shrink as they do from that of sustained and consecutive thought; it is the hardest work in the world. This is especially true when truth is contrary to appearances”. –Wallace D. Wattles; The Science of Getting Rich, p25 –1910

“All truth exists within and never in the world about. One who studies the world studies effects. One who studies his own mind studies the cause and source of things as they really are”. –U.S. Anderson; Three Magic Words; 1954

In order to effect true positive change in your experience, you must disregard how things are–as well as how others are seeing you–and give more of your attention to the way you prefer things to be”. -Esther and Jerry Hicks; The Law of Attraction, p38 –2006

“When the voice and vision on the inside become more profound and more clear and loud than the opinions on the outside, you have mastered your life”. –John F. Demartini; The Secret –2006

“And the truth turns out to be nothing less than the amazing but undeniable fact that the whole outer world–whether it be the physical body, the common things of life, the winds and the rain, the clouds, the Earth itself–is amenable to man’s thought, and that he has dominion over it when he knows it”. –Emmet Fox; The Sermon on the Mount, p13 –1934

“We may pass through good fortune and bad, but if we can come to the point where we are not disturbed by ‘things’ we have found the secret”. –Ernest Holmes; The Science of Mind, p187 –1938

“…you have to train yourself to feel secure even if there is no evidence to suggest such to be the case. You have to settle into the uncertainty of things and be comfortable with it”. –Stuart Wilde; The Trick to Money is Having Some, p60 –1989

Yours is the choice. You have within you a force against which the whole world is powerless. By using it, you can make what you will of life and of your surroundings. ‘But’ you will say, ‘objects themselves do not change. It is merely the difference in the way you look at them.’ Perhaps. But to a great extent, at least, we find what we look for, just as, when we turn the dial on the radio, we tune in on whatever kind of entertainment or instruction we may wish to hear. And who can say that it is not our thoughts that put it there? Who, for the matter of that, can prove that our surroundings in waking hours are not as much the creature of our minds as are our dreams?”. –Robert Collier; The Secret of the Ages, p46 –1926