Why clean the mind? It is easy for our minds to become cluttered up with negative thoughts, old unproductive emotions and garbage information. Some people just have dirty minds altogether (excuse the pun), and have never thought to clean them up. They may be carrying years of old garbage, such as condemnations and judgments. Garbage thinking can lead to depression, addiction and disease in the body. Alcoholics Anonymous calls it "stinkin’ thinking.’"

The real problem with having a dirty mind is how uncomfortable it can make you feel. Mental dirt (negative self-talk especially) is very toxic. Our memories can be full of unresolved conflicts, all holding an energetic charge. This energetic byproduct can be positive or negative. What creates the charge is emotions. A negative memory is always encoded with a negative feeling – anger, fear, bitterness, guilt, shame, etc. Every time you think the negative thought, it triggers the negative emotion that is embedded in the thought. Holding on to the past can thus create a lot of unhappiness.

Negatively-charged thoughts trigger biochemical processes in the body, making one weak and toxic. They can produce unproductive chemical responses that affect the immune system and create allergies. The fight, flight or freeze response can hype up the body, eventually wearing out the adrenals or pancreas. Guilt, shame and hurt turn off the immune system causing immune disorders. They can also shut down the endorphin production causing numbing and depression.

Fresh emotions hold a natural process of expression and elimination. For example, when you allow yourself to feel deep sadness, the body cries. Crying produces a reaction that counteracts and completes the sad feeling, flooding the body with neutralizing healing chemicals. Never miss an opportunity to cry! If allowed to complete its cycle, the fight, flight or freeze response eventually releases an "all is well" chemical that floods the body and neutralizes the toxic emotion.

The problem occurs when we “stuff” our feelings, don't allow ourselves to cry or immerse ourselves in a high-tech, stressful world. In such cases, our emotional processes never have a chance to finish. Then, we start them all over again by re-running negative scenarios in our head. The sub-conscious mind, which houses our autonomic nervous system, cannot distinguish between reality and fantasy. Think about any negative event and your body can produce the same chemical feelings as if it was happening all over again.

This is precisely why forgiving and letting go is such a powerful thing for all human beings. If we don't forgive, we weaken your bodies and allow emotional charges to build. In refusing to forgive, your mind justifies anger, bitterness or resentment, making you believe entitlement to those feelings. It thus becomes harder and harder to let go. Forgiveness heals the person doing the forgiving and has absolutely no effect on the one forgiven. Our minds may tell us not to forgive -- that we are letting others off the hook or making what they did okay. This is a lie.

As a matter of fact, our brains lie to us all the time. They exaggerate, minimize, and slant data to back up our current beliefs or perspective. Tell yourself the same lie three times and the brain will automatically begin to believe it is true. The mind needs to believe. We are believers by nature. I can't tell you the number of times a client says, "Why didn't I see the way they really were? Was I blind or stupid?" The answer is neither: we just believe what we want to be true. We want to believe the best of people, especially those close to us.

Being “believers,” we can accumulate a lot of false information as fact, when it is truly just garbage. To clean up your mind, start challenging the data you hold in your brain or that comes to you daily. It is a very simple technique to ask yourself: Is this true? That simple question will eventually clean out your whole brain, and the truth will literally set you free.

If your brain says, Yes, it is true, then question the proof: How do I know it is true? For example, if your mind says, “You are worthless; you just got fired from another job,” ask yourself: Am I worthless? Is that true? Does getting fired make people worthless? What about the other five jobs you had that awarded you for great performance? Self-esteem is a byproduct of positive programming about self. Your own programming is all that needs to change in order to raise self-esteem.

Questioning incoming data is also a good practice; especially if you believe everything you hear or read. Begin to ask yourself: Is this true? If you don't know if data is true or not, don't accept it as true. Just because the information pleases you or because someone tells you so, doesn't make it so. Not believing can be a very healthy thing.

Also, be aware of the assumptions made from incomplete data. Assumptions can lead to unhappiness and over-reactions. Don't allow your mind to jump to conclusions. Wait for the whole picture. When you question the truth of your programming, you will probably find that much of it was built on false assumptions. We are all over-reactive to some degree because of the current world situation. Fear can make us jump to the most negative conclusions.

A clean mind is a positive, simple mind. Along with positive thinking and re-framing negatives into positives, the most powerful thing we can do is meditate. If you just take a few minutes here and now to still the mind and become quiet, you will release stress. Daily meditation cleans your mind and meditation over a period of time also gives you control of your mind.

Effective mind cleaning takes some practice, but it is easy and free to do. So, don't give up even if the negatives seem insurmountable. As in learning any skill, you get better and better with practice.