Why is it critical to reign in your mind? Because the quality of your thoughts determines the quality of your emotions. And if you don’t have healthy emotions, you won’t have a healthy physical body either. Amy Killingsworth lays out practical steps on how to reign in your mind. You have to heal your mind by overcoming lies and replacing them with the truth. Until your mind is under truth’s jurisdiction, you will never truly have wisdom. Tune into this episode and learn how to master your mind!

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How To Reign In Your Mind: Practical Steps To Wisdom

This is season 2, episode 17. This episode is a continuation of a mini-series on the mind. I am going in sequential order here. If you missed the last couple of episodes, you may want to go back and read them but I’ll give you a quick little recap so that we have context. We are unpacking the Rise to Reign framework, which is seven categories of healing that have seven pillars of wisdom applied to them. We have finished the seven pillars of wisdom and we’re into the seven categories. The categories are the body, soul, spirit, relationships, finances, creativity and calling. We’re in the soul and I’m doing a mini-series on each of the different components of the soul.

The Hebrew concept of the soul is a complex of your mind, which is your mental space, your will and your emotions. That’s what makes up the soul. To recap, the truest part of who you are is the spirit and that exists outside of time. It existed before time and it will continue to exist in eternity after time. You have a soul and that’s your mind, will and emotions or your personality. You live in a body.

That’s what makes up the tri-part being. Most healing approaches especially Western healing approaches focus on one of those things to the exclusion of another. If you go into the doctor and you’re like, “I have a pain in the neck,” they’re going to prescribe you a drug or give you a procedure for the pain in the neck.

To treat the physical body without addressing the emotional component is useless. Click To Tweet

Most of the time when you have some kind of physical element, maybe even all of the time, there is an emotional component underlying that. To treat the physical body without addressing the emotional component or the subtle emotional body is to not do anything at all, not to get to the root cause. You might be able to create some comfort, which is also known as numbing and some distraction away from that symptom but you have not addressed the root cause.

I would consider this area here of the soul to be what the entire process of healing turns on because this is the essence of a human being. When your soul leaves your body, it isn’t animated anymore. When you have damage to your soul, you see that play out in a myriad of ways and problems in relationships, in your job and all sorts of issues that bleed into every other area of your life, including your physical health. This area right here, the mind, the will and the emotions is a strategic and important conversation to have when we’re talking about healing. It may even be like the conversation.

I did two episodes ago on reigning in your body and talked about applying the different categories to the body. The body is the low-hanging fruit when it comes to healing. That’s somewhere where we can start like getting enough sleep, hydrating, supplementing and eating healthy food. It’s where we can send the signal of safety to the nervous system to begin the real healing that happens in this area right here, which is this subtle emotional body. It is said and it is true that the quality of your emotions determines the quality of your life.

The Quality Of Your Thoughts

The quality of your thoughts is what determines the quality of your emotions. If you keep peeling back the layers, you’re going to eventually get to something besides where the symptom is showing up usually. If you address one part of the personality like if you go to a counselor, psychiatrist, if you’re having immense intrusive thoughts or if you have a mental illness situation going on and you address that without addressing the physical body and spiritual health, you’re not going to have a root cause or functional approach to healing.

 

We’re talking about the soul. It’s the mind, will and emotions. There’s a concept of the heart also that goes along with this and this is a biblical Hebrew concept, an Old Testament concept of the heart. That is the entire human personality, mind, will, emotions, the core of one’s being where there is no pretense. Your heart is a component of your soul, not a separate component but it’s maybe a way of describing your soul before your soul was corrupted by outside influences. Every single one of us that lives here in the 3D matrix that is earthbound has a soul that has been to one degree or another corrupted. I handled original sin in the last episode, which I promise you, it’s probably a different spin than you’ve maybe heard of or taught in religious scenarios or circumstances.

When we heal the mind specifically, we are correcting the way that we think, not even necessarily what we think, although what we think is corrected when we correct the way that we think. When we heal the mind or the systems of thought, we are correcting lies that we have believed about God, ourself and the nature of the universe, how the world works or even what the nature of reality is. When we heal the mind, we’re correcting the lies that we believed about God, ourselves, who we are and others, our surroundings or the nature of the universe and reality.

That could also be called an awakening. This is where you begin to get outside. When you heal your mind, you begin to get outside of the narrative or the story that your trauma and conditioning has been playing for you over and over throughout your life. Some of that was passed down to you through generations. It’s ancestral, something that you picked up through your DNA and then it’s reinforced in the family that you grew up in but nobody gets out of this world without some level of trauma and accepting something about ourselves or our identity that isn’t true.

This all happens in the thought world. What you think about yourself, God, the world, the universe and the nature of reality will determine your lived experience. This is important. There’s a scripture in Proverbs that says,“As a person thinks in their heart so are they.” As you think, that’s going to create your life. Thoughts precipitate emotions. Emotions precipitate words. Words create worlds. We have to correct the way that we think. We have to correct what we think but we have to correct the way that we think and that will automatically correct what we think.

The process of healing the mind is overcoming the lies we've believed and replacing them with the truth. Click To Tweet

In this episode, what I’m going to do is handle the seven pillars of wisdom as applied to your mental structures. I want to touchback. The last episode, I unpacked the idea of patterns of thinking or mental strongholds. I want to touch back on that concept and talk about how our thought systems are like these tangled balls of yarn. We have to unwind those with introspection. The Bible tells us a process that is taking every thought captive, which is unwinding and examining with self-awareness what we’re thinking and holding it up to see if it’s true.

The process of healing the mind is overcoming the lies that we believed and replacing them with truth. A.W. Tozer said that what you think about God is the most important thing about you. We talked about this in the last episode. If you believe that God’s a tyrant, doesn’t exist, doesn’t care, punishing you or holding out on you, those are thoughts. Beliefs are systems of thoughts or strongholds. If you believe that way, that’s how you’re going to run your life. That’s what creates a lot of problems and what gets us outside of the original design.

When we think about God and what I believe is the truth and the true premise is that God created us very intentionally. He designed us specifically and then told us how to run ourselves. That’s our original design. There’s this overlay of lies that we believed. When we begin to peel back those layers of lies, start to uncover and embrace our true self, that’s when we discover who we are, who we were made to be and what we are here to do on the Earth. It’s critical what we think but more importantly, how we think.

With that level of background, what I want to do is take the seven pillars of wisdom and apply them to the mental space. The first pillar of wisdom is identity. The definition of identity is a condition of being a certain person like, “I’m Amy Killingsworth. That’s my identity.” It’s a set of characteristics by which a person is known. This could be that they are crying, loving, have brown hair or a podcaster. It’s how you see yourself, how others see you and who you are. To help us parse out and have a hook to hang this concept of identity on, I use the four archetypes of the prisoner, the slave, the princess and then the royal, which is either the king or the queen.

The King Or Queen Is Your True Identity

The king or the queen is your true identity. What is beneath all the layers is the king or queen. When we’re talking about mental identity, we want to focus on how does a king or a queen thinks. I want to add a little anecdote here. I have three children, most of you know that. I have a little handful of outcomes that helps me decide what’s important when I am parenting my children and what kind of humans I want to release into the world. What is my vision for my children when I’m parenting them? That helps inform the decisions that I make, what I consider important and how I structure my parenting choices.

 

One of my main outcomes for my children is that they would be critical thinkers, that they would know how to think. Thinking is a skill. You have a mind that is going to be a completely wild animal if you haven’t disciplined it. If you’re like me in your 40s and you’ve never intentionally disciplined your mind to examine your thoughts and become self-aware then you’re going to be out of mental shape. It takes some effort, training and intentionality to get your mind into discipline and deciding what you’re going to think. The process of taking every thought captive is thinking about what you’re thinking about. This is where the king or the queen steps back and observes the thought process. It’s useful to have these archetypes when you’re thinking about what you’re thinking about.

The prisoner is like the consummate victim, always in victim energy and characterized by blame. When you notice yourself going into blame, thinking blame thoughts and victim thoughts, the king or the queen can identify that by stepping outside of the story or the narrative like, “They hurt me. They suck. They’re a jerk.” Then they’re choosing to think about that situation like a queen or a king. We have the ability to do that. That’s called consciousness. That is endowed in us by our creator. When we’re in the prisoner, the slave or the princess though, we are unconscious. It’s like we’re asleep.

The queen or the king is the one that’s like the adult in this situation. It’s the one that’s going to go like, “No, I’m not doing that. I’m choosing differently.” Sometimes it can be very hard especially when you’re not practiced at it. Think about like if you want to get in shape or want to run a half marathon and you have been sitting on your couch eating ice cream for your whole life, it’s going to take some training. The first time you get out there, you’re going to be huffing and puffing. It’s not going to be easy but when you stick with it, you eventually get into better shape. Running for you becomes easy and maybe even enjoyable. It’s the same way with mental discipline. With your mental identity, you have to decide what is your outcome? Who do you want to be in the world? You have to arrange your thoughts around that identity.

You can give your authority away, but you can't give your responsibility away. Click To Tweet

The slave is the martyr. This is like the codependent person, controlling and manipulative. The princess or the prince is the empowered version of the lower self where it’s like, “I’m not going to take it anymore. I’m going to rage against the machine and stand up to this.” This is where we see feminisms would be in the category of the princess like, “You had your chance. I’m taking over. I’m rising up.” It’s girl power, girl boss kind of stuff. The queen or the king, depending on gender, is truly at peace with who he or she is and doesn’t have anything to prove.

Based on the archetypes and I can handle this in detail in the identity episode way back at the beginning of the season, you can go back and read that if you haven’t, you decide you’re going to be the queen. That’s who you are but you decide that you’re going to show up in the world. A big component of your identity is how others see you.

Others see you through the lens of their patterning. That’s not always correct but other’s experience of you has a good amount to do with how you show up, how you behave, how you speak whether or not you can be trusted and what your character is. Mental identity is a basic function of making the decision to understand how a queen or king would think, paying attention to what you’re thinking about, examining those thoughts and choosing to intentionally line them up with your chosen identity, which is of a queen.

The next principle of the Rise to Reign framework is sovereignty. Sovereignty is supreme authority or rule. It’s also self-governance. Sovereignty is encapsulated by this quote, “You can give your authority away but you can’t give your responsibility away.” A good example of this is if you get into a car with somebody who has been drinking, you’re giving your authority to that person to drive you and they’re impaired.

 

They don’t have to have been drinking. If you get into somebody’s car, you’re giving your authority to move your body through space and time in a car to another person. If they wreck the car and you’re injured, that’s your responsibility. You’re going to have to go to the hospital, get surgery or maybe go through rehab. You can give your authority away but you cannot give your responsibility away. I’m sorry. I can’t leave it alone.

What we see in the medical field and the medical intervention is a whole bunch of people who’ve given their power, sovereignty or authority away to a system, a doctor, a professional or a mandate. The process of giving your power or your authority away is yours to do. It’s yours. You can give it away but you can’t give your responsibility away. If you take a drug or get a procedure and there’s a side effect, you may be able to blame somebody else but you are still going to have the responsibility of dealing with that thing.

Mental Sovereignty Is Choosing Your Story

What is mental sovereignty? I want you to catch this. Mental sovereignty is choosing your story, thoughts and reality. There are one million categories and bites of information coming at you all the time from social media, news and people around you that are constantly trying to suck you into their narrative. It’s important that you choose intentionally and consciously what you are going to think about so that you can have the emotional health, strength and atmosphere that you want to have. Remember, your thoughts are going to create your emotions. Your emotions are going to create the quality of your life and seriously affect your finances, relationships and everything else.

Mental sovereignty is the process of deciding what you’re going to think. It’s critical thinking. It’s not just accepting a piece of information because it’s part of a narrative. What do I mean when I say a narrative? There are all sorts of agendas that want to create your reality and tell you how things are, the nature of reality. Most of those are controlling, manipulative and have nefarious agendas, meaning that they aren’t in your best interests. They’re in the best interest of the person, organization, group of people, government or company that is spinning that narrative.

What is super important is that we all make a commitment to mental sovereignty, meaning that we critically examine every piece of information before we accept it. We have lots of people who are conditioned to accept a narrative or a story because that’s all they’ve ever heard or what their parents believed. What’s needed desperately in the world is mental sovereignty, which is the process of critical thinking. That’s mental identity and mental sovereignty.

The next category is mental amnesty. Amnesty is a robust concept of forgiveness. Not only did I need to make it an alliteration and have the TY at the end of it but I like the idea of amnesty because when we we’re talking about the sovereign and the king or the queen, they have the political authority to let people off the hook. Amnesty is to grant a pardon so to speak, like a political pardon. If we let people or situations off the hook, we grant them amnesty. All of these were handled separately in separate episodes, closer to the beginning of the season if you want to go back and touch on these.

Critically examine every piece of information before you accept it. Click To Tweet

Amnesty is to grant a pardon like grant a general, no exclusions pardon to and a forgetting or overlooking of an offense or a class of offenses. Amnesty or forgiveness is how we heal our thought system. I don’t have a lot of time to spend on this but I want to walk you through a process of what this looks like. Usually when we start inquiring, observing or starting a process of mental inquiry and observing our thoughts, we can very easily get into a shame spiral. What this looks like is, “I’m going to think loving thoughts about people.” Then you have an unloving thought. If somebody does something, you have an unloving thought about somebody.

Mental Forgiveness

Instead of dealing with the unloving thought, you have a shame spiral. The accusation is coming against you. “Look at how unloving you are. You can’t do this. You don’t even follow your own rules.” That shame spiral happens when we do something that we didn’t intend to do or maybe is not in line with our chosen character or the way that we want to show up in the world. This is where mental forgiveness or forgiveness of our thoughts becomes important. This is how we heal the thought system.

When you have a thought that’s fearful or unloving that intrudes and pops up, the process is to notice it and then to forgive it. Forgive it is to let it go, not dwell on it and hang out there. The other thing too and I’ll get into this more when I talk about the actual spirit and spiritual things but those thoughts often aren’t even yours. When you have a horrible thought about somebody, usually that’s been injected into you by an entity outside of you.

If you take, love, nurture and accept it as your own, it becomes yours because you attach your will to it. You gave your sovereignty to it and now it is your thought. That’s how strongholds are formed. The skill is to notice the thought and then forgive it, which means letting it go instead of dwelling, dealing, nurturing and agreeing with it. You have a thought come in and you let it go. There’s a scripture in Philippians I referenced in the last episode, chapter four, where St. Paul tells us to think about things that are good, true, noble and make us feel good.

Think about things that make you feel good. You get to choose what you think about so why not think about things that make you feel good? This is something that people will argue me to the ground on, which amuses me in a perverse way because it’s like, why wouldn’t you think about things that make you feel good? When you feel good, you attract good to your life. You show up well, happy and joyful for the people around you. How can that possibly be a bad thing?

 

For some reason, there’s resistance to that. I invite you to drop your resistance and try this. When you have thoughts that are unpleasant, maybe ruminating that’s about what somebody did to you, something that happened to you, the state of the world or the opposing political party, my invitation to you is to let go of it, not grab a hold of it, start ruminating and rotating around it. That’s what mental amnesty is.

Mental integrity is the next pillar. Integrity is the quality or condition of being whole or undivided. It’s the concept of being complete. For Rise to Reign purposes, we say that integrity is the outside matching the inside or telling the truth without manipulation. Where mental integrity is concerned has to do with being honest with yourself about the state of maybe your mental health, thought cycles or systems of thought. Integrity is like looking at your thoughts and saying, “I have patterns of negative, vengeful, lustful and prideful thinking.” Mental integrity is the process of observing, being honest with yourself and maybe trusting others about what is true.

When we talked about it, especially in the coaching world, we talk about creating change. There are two points of data that we need before we can create any change. The first point is where do you want to go? “We want mental health. We want to have our thoughts taken captive to the obedience of Christ, which means following Christ’s example of unconditional love. That’s where we’re headed. We want to have good, true, pure and loving thoughts.” We have to get that data point. That’s where we want to go.

The other data point that we need though, equally as important is where are we at right now? This is like the searching and fearless inventory of what’s going on inside of you and inside of your thought system so that you can accurately get that representation so that you know how to close the gap and you can pay attention. You know what your patterns are and you come conscious in your patterns. I shared in the vulnerability episode that I have a pattern of blame thoughts where abandonment is concerned and feeling like people are letting me down or believing that people are letting me down, which creates feelings of being abandoned. Integrity is to come conscious, be the observer to pull back and look at the thoughts that you’re thinking of, let go of the ones that you don’t want and continue with the ones that you do want.

The next principle in the Rise to Reign framework is polarity. This is the possession or manifestation of two opposing attributes, tendencies or principles. In the Rise to Reign framework, it’s the case of gender polarity, which is masculine and feminine. For this, I’m not going to handle it a lot because you would have to go back and read the polarity episode, which I covered in detail. When it comes to your thoughts and mental state, how does a man or a woman think? It’s important to know that.

This is the process of self-observation and self-inquiry. If you’re a female wanting to come back into wanting to more embrace the feminine then what does that look like? What are feminine qualities? What are feminine thoughts? Intentionally choosing that. The next one is vulnerability and this is uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. It’s the unstable feeling we get when we step out of our comfort zone or do something that forces us to loosen control.

Vulnerability is honestly is more of an emotional construct. I’ll get to that more when we talk about emotions but this whole process that we’re talking about of self-inquiry requires a high degree of vulnerability. You have to be willing to admit that you aren’t where you want to be in your mind and your thoughts. You want to see change and create a different reality. That requires vulnerability even to start that process.

Mental integrity is the process of observing and being honest with yourself. Click To Tweet

The last one is generosity. What does mental generosity look like? Generosity is the quality of giving unselfishly to others, money, material, objects, time, generosity of spirit. If you’ve decided that you’re going to be generous, vulnerable or feminine, you can apply this to the last three of the principles. What are generous thoughts versus what are maybe selfish thoughts?

It all starts in the thought life. If you have determined to be generous or to embrace vulnerability, femininity or masculinity then your thoughts need to be centered around generosity. When you have decided that you’re going to be generous and you notice a thought go through your mind that’s like a me, mine thought, that’s one of those thoughts that you would want to let go of and release. You would maybe want to embrace a thought that is giving unselfishly of yourself to others.

That is our time that we have to deal with this. In the next episode, we’re going to stay in the soul but we’re going to move on from the mind into the emotions. I’m super excited about this category because I feel like it’s where the most transformation takes place, where I feel like my zone of genius is and where I see the most change, healing and deliverance happen in people’s lives. Thank you so much for being with me. I’ll see you in the next episode.

Important Links:

• Episodes – Last couple of episodes
• Episode – Reigning In Your Body
• Episode – Reigning In Your Soul: Understanding the Complex of the Mind
• Episode – Get Ready to Rise to Reign Once More (Season 2 Preview)
• Episodes – Episodes closer to the beginning of the season
• Episode – How Vulnerability Helps You Heal Your Emotional Wounds and Become Emotionally Free
• Episode – Gender Polarity and the Image of God

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