Thought Allergy

My Runny Nose

When I was young, between the ages of around 6-23, I suffered daily from sinus problems. It was like having incessant common cold symptoms but without the sneezing. I had the moist eyes, the blocked-inside and runny-outside nose – it was like I couldn’t ‘dry up’. Of course, when I really did have a cold, I had it full on and ‘with interest’.

I had a great aunt who’d been a nurse, and her judgement every time I was in her company was “that child should have his adenoids out.” She lived and worked in times where children would “have things out” as a matter of course – things like tonsils and adenoids. Her era was the same generation that still administered corporal punishment to left handed children in schools to beat right-handedness into them. She put the fear of god into me every time she noticed my sniffling.

Honey

My Dad suffered from hay fever at certain times of year, and I noticed that when he did, his daily suffering was rather like mine. Now whilst I didn’t make the connection, I did notice that he used honey to help alleviate his symptoms. I must have been aged 20 when I was reading a science fiction short story in which the inhabitants of a particular ‘world’ only had honey as a sweetener. Something in me set off a train of thought and I wondered what it would be like to have honey instead of sugar. Consequently I experimented by having honey instead of all the times I had sugar – in tea, coffee, on cereals etc. Some of the tastes were a touch challenging, but I really allowed myself to be engaged in being my own ‘laboratory rat’.

Very soon I noticed something different – my daily nasal problems eased dramatically. When, eventually, the honey fad wore off I went back to my usual eating and dietary habits, the sinus symptoms, runny nose et al returned. So I stopped the sugar and went back to honey – and they eased off once more.

These were the days before the noticing and understanding of food allergies was in the public domain. However, I had stumbled across a food allergy that was blighting my daily life and had also found what would be a suitable alternative to sugar. Eventually, after some more trial and error, I discovered that when I had brown sugar it was almost as effective as having honey. So, given the taste challenges (and cost!), I switched to brown sugar – realising that I had an allergy to white sugar. I then deduced how many other things I was eating used refined sugar in their making or processing and either cut them out or reduced them from my food and drink intake. I’d been able to take control of that part of my life.

It is still working for me to this day. Around Christmas time, with the excess of sweets, confectionery, and cakes in my diet, I have nasal trouble every year from late December for about 2 months. This is also a very bad time for colds and ‘flu anyway, so my issues are amplified!

“Hell on Wheels”

The thing is – I know what effects these ‘toxins’ bring for me. Having a ‘sweet tooth’ doesn’t help – however I do know that my own (nasal) destiny is in my own hands and that it is my choice if I have some sweets, cakes, biscuits, or not.

Now what would my life have been like if I’d just endured and lived on with the symptoms, daily, for over forty years? If I’d lived on, totally unaware that my own solution was actually in my own hands! If I’d lived on oblivious to knowing that by changing one ever-present, innocuous - yet influential - substance in my diet that I could and would bring about such an enduring change for myself. It would have been a variety of “hell on wheels” cocooned in spent tissues and wet handkerchiefs!

Thought Allergy

There is a huge degree of similarity between my white sugar allergy and its effects, and errant thinking, mistaken beliefs and warped and irregular ‘maps of the world’. There is a great deal of truth lying around the idea of ‘toxic thought’ – thought that is harmful, thought that does us no good and causes symptoms within us that we would happily avoid if we knew what it was happening.

What if we could see and come to understand what, for each of us, were our particular Thought Allergies?

All of our emotions and emotional reactions come from our thinking. When we experience anything it doesn’t come in a box with a warning on the side saying “Danger – this experience contains X,Y,Z and E(motion).” – No, the emotion is added by us, by our thinking. We carry around a vast palette of emotion, ready to add whatever colour we feel driven to do, to enhance our experiences. Whether those experiences are good, neutral or bad we have the ability – through our thinking – to amplify them, by dabbing (or daubing) bits of emotional ‘paint’ onto everything.

Now if some of this dabbing and daubing involves some thought we have an allergy to – then the outcome of the experience is not going to be very good for our wellbeing. Added to this – every time we encounter this (and any similarly generalised) experience, then the allergy starts to kick in.

All phobias are highly virulent thought allergies. All embarrassments are thought allergies. When we become red-faced through certain experiences, it is our body’s allergic response to our own particular thinking. If we don’t like something a certain person has said to us, then that “don’t like” has come from our thinking, and our response is to dab how we’ve experienced that remark with a blob of particularly coloured emotional paint! Then, every time we hear a similar remark we match it with the memory of the experience and notice, “Oh look there’s a blob of X coloured emotional paint here. Perhaps this is the way I should respond?” And most times we do just that. More repeats – more daubs and blobs – building up the conditioning on that response.

So how can we change, once we know about these allergic thought responses? Well, rather in the same way we might do it for a food allergy – we can choose to keep that particular thinking out of our diet, keep that train of thought off our railways, look at our menu and decide to have the ‘vegetarian’ or nut-free choice today.

“I can’t help myself”

I am confronted by a lot of people who say “I know what I should do, but I just can’t seem to help myself.” Now, this might be their response to dietary issues, choices they need to make when they are endeavouring to lose weight and gain fitness, issues with self-esteem and confidence, the need to enjoy better health, deal with stress and anxiety, and a whole range of negative experiences big and small – as they just look for and hope to bring more wellbeing in their lives. And we often find ourselves in this “just can’t seem to help myself” kind of situation.

If we don’t have any idea that it’s an allergic response to our thinking, where our processes of recognising our toxic thinking or our thought allergies, have become clouded by highly painted emotion, then we’ll just plough on regardless – probably using more toxic thinking to help deal with toxic thinking! Even if we do know the cause – i.e. realise it’s an allergy – we can still “eat the sugary stuff” and suffer the consequences. The thing is – ONCE we know what’s causing things THEN we have a choice, and once our recognition isn’t clouded any more, then we can easily make the RIGHT choice.

Take a response to something our partner has said or done – whether it is appropriate, justified, or not. We can paint it with emotion and allow it to smoulder or catch fire or we can recognise our thinking and put down the emotional paintbrush. If we choose the former, we can then let it blaze on unabated, or we can dampen down the fire and let it go out – by again realising what is really causing the fire. Not the original response even – but the fire that has resulted from it. Now for as long as we think we are always right – or we ‘kid ourselves’ that they think we are always wrong, our relationship is going to be blighted. And the common denominator here is we think. This we think is an allergy for us, especially when it causes in us a response we don’t like.

Conclusion

I’d invite you to look into The Three Principles, and watch, listen to and read about the inside-out nature of Reality. One of those Principles is Thought – and it is from here that I am able to draw a distinct metaphorical parallel with the allergies of my youth. There is a growing number of accessible means of discovering information on The Three Principles, which is a very straightforward and yet fundamental approach to our day to day psychological wellbeing. There are also a growing number of teachers, guides, mentors to help us all gain an embodied understanding of these Principles. The thing is – there is no extensive learning that needs to take place! It is more about opening ourselves up to an intuitive understanding – rather in the same way I did when I chose the honey route with my, then unknown, white sugar allergy. Fortunately for me, I dared to take the honey route long enough to get the insight about white sugar.
The thing about thought allergies, rather as with food allergies – once we know what they are, then life becomes much more what it should be for us all. Something to be enjoyed!

Once my nose stopped running day after day, the days became much more pleasurable, much more of an opportunity to enjoy everything that was going on in my life. Once I recognised my thought allergies, the days and everything and everyone in them got better and better. That recognition gave me a whole, new and multi-dimensional perspective on reality. For me there were many years between seeing white sugar and thought for what they really are! Mind you, that was how it turned out for me – which doesn’t necessarily mean it’s that way for you or everyone else!

And for the rest of my days I’ll have a lifelong understanding of thought allergies and the real meaning behind the phrase “Who Dares Wins”!