We’ve all been taught to focus on positive thoughts and avoid negative ones like the plague. Consequently, when a whopper of a bad wave hits, we’re driven even further into despair by judging ourselves for allowing such a self-destructive thing to happen.

What if I tell you that your bad thoughts are just flotsam and jetsam in an ocean of awareness? What if I tell you that you cannot micromanage your thoughts and neither should you try to? You are not your thoughts; you are the one observing them, as Eckhart Tolle would say. Your energy would be much better spent speaking to yourself with compassion than it would be criticizing yourself.

Matt Kahn says that as he entered the field of personal growth and began helping people to heal, he saw that nearly everyone he met experienced a self-imposed necessity to watch thoughts, reframe them or chase them away.

“This ignited a fury of passion in me,” Matt writes. “In noticing how many people had entered personal growth only to be further disempowered [rather] than liberated by such widely believed principles, I was determined to discover a new way of empowerment; one that does not require exhausting micro-management, a lingering fear of personal instincts . . .”

Dr Sue Morter’s take on empowerment is that every experience, whether interpreted as good or bad, serves a purpose in your growth and development. You have to learn to see every incident and happening as working in your favour. Outcomes are as bad or good as the lens through which you see them.

Take stress as an example. In its essence, stress is neither beneficial nor adverse. It simply is. It is your response to stress that determines its impact on your life. Dr Sue says that when you reframe your relationship with stress and embrace it as a catalyst for personal growth and evolution, you unlock the power to transform adversity into opportunity.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to take a gratitude dive. Pick one of the most significant stressors you’ve faced recently. See if you can express gratitude for the lessons it has brought into your life. Then write down at least three things you’re thankful for about this specific challenge.

Matt says that the more aware you become, the more you learn to use your imagination in empowering ways, instead of being overpowered by the negativity floating in your mind. Your job is to discover the thoughts that offer the deepest sense of relief and the most expansive viewpoints so that you can see how each moment supports your development, no matter the judgements projected upon it.

It is your freedom of will to decide why anything comes or goes throughout your life, says Matt. It means that you have the chance to picture how anything that is happening unfolds for your evolutionary benefit.

“You don’t need to control your mind in order to find peace within it . . . While there will come a time when mental noise subsides and the overactive use of imagination fades, it doesn’t occur by attempting to track your thoughts or reframe negative ones into more pleasant ideas.”

The idea is to witness your thoughts with mindful compassion, instead of policing them. Matt says that the less you have to track your thoughts and manage your own mind, the more often the mind can be used to receive intuitive guidance instead of battling against the existence of thought.

“Perhaps you may come to realize, maybe it’s not your thoughts that are making you sick, but the belief that they can make you sick that suppresses the recognition of your naturally expanded awareness,” says Matt.

A belief, says Abraham Hicks, is simply a thought you keep thinking: “A belief is only my habit of thought. It’s only a practiced thought. A belief is only a thought I think a lot.”

And your naturally expanded awareness – what would that be? In ‘The Metaphoric Mind: A Celebration of Creative Consciousness’, Bob Samples writes that the metaphoric mind is a maverick. He says Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind a sacred gift and added that the rational mind was a faithful servant.

Girlfriend, as Bob says, it is paradoxical that in the context of modern life we have begun to worship the servant and defile the gift.