Positive Thinking: A Pathway or a Prison?

​You grow, learn, and find meaning, ordinary wisdom, and stillness through stillness practice and through your lifestory. However, the restorying journey does not involve simply choosing a better story to replace the old one. Also, new meaning does not come from forcing yourself to think positively about a troublesome situation. In fact, I agree with the statement that positive thinking can become a prison.
Your life as a story is made up of thoughts, emotions, and actions or behaviour—that is, how you think, feel, and act. It may be possible to change your thoughts about something, and there are techniques to help you try this approach.
Yes, positive thinking is one of these techniques. However, the effort it takes to maintain this attitude may become exhausting, as with such challenges as chronic pain, for example, or an addiction. The problem is that you are still attempting to control or fix the problem, as your thinking mind scrambles around to find a positive solution. In addition to this, it is a prison in the sense that you are either a winner or a loser, depending on how successful you are in keeping up the program. In contrast to this, a stillness approach, such as restorying, suggests that you first get out of your thinking mind, step back, and try to see the larger picture.
In this way, instead of fighting or denying the particular change that has occurred in your life, you make room in your present story for the change that has occurred, or that you want to occur. It is about finding new meaning in your whole story, not just attempting to fix the broken part.