Have you paid attention to what you communicate with yourself?  According to Compton’s Encyclopedia, the total number of words in the English language is around 750,000. Of that number, guess how many words we habitually use?  On average, we use only  500 to 2,000 at the most which represents only half of 1% of the language.

Of all the words we have available in the English language related to emotion, guess how many describe positive emotions and how many describe negative emotions?  In Rogert’s Thesaurus, we found over 3,000 words describing various emotions.  From that group, there were 1, 051 words for positive emotions and 2,2286 for negative emotions- roughly twice as many negative words as positive!  Think of the implications. The labels we put on our experience become our experience.

If we listen to our words we tell ourselves we may identify that we don’t have much self-compassion of loving words spoken to ourselves.  A great website I found that has a lot of research behind it that will help you assess the self-compassion you have for yourself is www.self-compassion.org.

What would your life be like if you could take all the negative emotions you ever felt and lower their intensity so they didn’t impact you so powerfully?  Similarly, what would your life be like if you could take the most positive emotions and intensify them, thereby taking your life to a higher level?

“ A powerful agent is the right word.  Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words… the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.” – Mark Twain.