How to Go Green Between Your Ears

Much of the news about the ecology of our planet focuses on grim statistics and the crisis state in which we have found ourselves. In my new book, The LifeQuake Phenomenon: Your Definitive Roadmap Through Seismic Change™, I talk about how this crisis is really just a symptom of an awakening process taking place for us humans. The planet itself will go on no matter how we treat it over the years. It has survived many environmental crises throughout its history but it often brings on major climactic changes when we as a species are in need of evolving. The latest buzz topic of global warming is pulling our society together no matter what our political affiliation, ethnic or racial background, or even religious belief system. Through this crisis we are moving from our sectarian, tribal mentality to an identity as part of a planetary family.

If you are anything like me, you saw AL Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and you have taken on some environmentally friendly practices like recycling, using environmentally friendly light bulbs, and maybe even have or aspire to own a hybrid car even though media saturated words like green initiative, carbon footprint, and sustainability are not a part of your every day language. In fact, you might even feel pretty uneducated when it comes to “green intelligence.” As someone who feels pretty ignorant on the subject of living green, I have pondered what I, the average person who doesn’t really like to make changes that involve discomfort, can do to positively contribute to the environmental LifeQuake™ taking place on the planet.

There are probably plenty of people in this and past issues of Awareness Magazine who can give you much better guidance on how to reduce your carbon footprint. I will offer a way to live more “greenly” that has nothing to do with your outer ecological habits. Instead of picking up trash or carrying a reusable lunch box, I suggest we clear out the clutter and trash in our minds and thoughts.

What might happen if you decided to start recycling your daily thoughts? What I mean by that is that as an idea comes up you think of a new way to use that thought. For example: You gained ten pounds last year and keep criticizing yourself because you haven’t stuck to a diet or exercised. Instead of the endless recording that goes around and around, what if you found a new way to think about that weight gain? You aren’t getting any where with the self judgment so what if you decided to tell your body that it was acceptable to have this extra weight because you actually need it right now and when you don’t need it anymore, it will fall off. Every time you look in the mirror and don’t like what you see, you will affirm that this weight is helping you feel more powerful and when you don’t need it to feel powerful, it will easily disappear.

This method can be applied to any unproductive habit or addiction. If thoughts create reality, all those negative judgments about what you should be doing in your career or any other part of your life are just contributing to the universal pollution. We all desire clean air but how many of us think about a clean air space in between our ears? What if all it took for us to “save our planet” was to stop seeing ourselves as being inaddequate? There might be so much more room in our brains for creative problem solving. If we stopped polluting ourselves with toxic thinking maybe the collective consciousness of that kind of massive planetary LifeQuake™ might organically shift our ecological practices so that all the information we are being bombarded with in terms of green practices could be integrated into our lives without a lot of resistance.

I don’t know anything about carbon footprints but I do know that we can change our psychological blueprint from the one we inherited simply by paying attention to out thoughts and refining them so that there is energy conservation in our inner conversation. Since this is the year of change, perhaps our pre-frontal lobe is a good place to clean house so that we can hold a consistent vision of the planetary future as one of a place where every human being is thriving. Imagine that…

Dr. Toni Galardi is a Jungian based psychotherapist and career coach. Her new book The LifeQuake Phenomenon™ is available on her website and at amazon.com. Her website is www.LifeQuake.net and for private coaching she can be reached at 310-712-2600.