People Who Have Influenced
My Life
Sometime
back our topic in the third Thursday Writing Ministry Group was “a person
personally known or not personally known whose ideas have influenced you.” The
following is what I wrote on that subject. I can narrow it down to eight people
who have influenced who I am today, and how I try to think and act on a daily
basis.
Going
way back to the 1950s, Norman Vincent Peale’s book The Power of Positive Thinking was the first one that got me going
on the power of thought.
Next,
in one of her books of the 50s or 60s, Catherine Marshall spoke of her
discoveries about the importance of forgiveness - the importance to the forgiver,
not the forgivee, and as far as I’m concerned not to God. The importance
is to oneself to one’s peace of mind, and how “unforgiveness” can block the
good from coming into your life. Referring back to the concept of the power of
thought, forgiveness versus resentment, anger, and vindictiveness are thoughts.
I began to really put this learning to use at the time of my divorce later on in
1975.
In
1969 and the early 1970s it was Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, her book On Death and Dying, and my attendance at
two of her lectures which taught me that coming to grips with, and accepting my
own mortality, could help me be more accepting of myself, and would require me
to get to know my innermost thoughts and feelings about death. This would help
me live more fully in the present.
Somewhere
along the line I read the saying attributed to Socrates: “the unexamined life
is not worth living.” This means to me that if things are not going the way I
want them to in life at the present time, I need to dig down and determine if
some unresolved something in the past could be affecting my behaviors and/or
attitudes in the present, and putting up a roadblock to current goals and
desires.
In
the 1970s I read Nathaniel Brandon’s Psychology
of Self-Esteem which taught how negative thoughts about myself affect my
life negatively, and I began changing those thoughts.
In
the 70s I also read Albert Ellis’s book Rational
Emotive Therapy which teaches that in childhood we can learn things about
ourselves and our world which aren’t true aren’t rational; and as thoughts these
can influence us to behave in self-defeating ways.
Also
in the 70s I came across James Allen’s book As
a Man Thinketh, which states: “Mind is the master power which moulds and
makes, and evermore it takes the tool of thought, and shaping what it wills,
brings forth a thousand joys or a thousand ills.”
In
the 1990s I read Meister Eckert who said, “if the only prayer you ever say is ‘thank
you,’ that will be enough.” I have been showered with so many blessings in my
life that it is hard for me to think these are just lucky happenings or
coincidences. I feel that I must say ‘thank you,’ but to who? The Great Unnameable. And ‘thank you’ I do say daily, many
times a day. And the more I say thank you the more blessings I receive. And
again this is yet another way that shows the power of thought.
