How To Start Creating Your New Future

Whether you’re looking for health, happiness, love, or success, the future is yours to create. Here are five ways you can start creating your new future today.

RELATED: Harnessing the Power of Thought for Healing

1. Create Your New Future by Changing Your Thoughts

When you decide to stop reliving your past and start creating your new future, you may feel some resistance because it’s harder to predict what will happen next, which is why change can feel uncomfortable for many people. 

Doubts and feelings of uncertainty may flood your brain and body as you start to think that what you want may not exist or may be too hard to attain. It’s important to remember that just because you have a thought, doesn’t mean it’s true. At a talk in London in 1913, Abdu’l-Baha, one of the central figures of the Baha’i Faith, said:

Nevertheless some thoughts are useless to man; they are like waves moving in the sea without result.

We can’t let negative, useless thoughts dissuade us from achieving our goals. So, every time a negative thought enters your mind, you have to instantly think of a positive, encouraging thought that is defined by your vision of the future. At a talk in Paris in 1911, Abdu’l-Baha said:

When a thought of war comes, oppose it by a stronger thought of peace. A thought of hatred must be destroyed by a more powerful thought of love. Thoughts of war bring destruction to all harmony, well-being, restfulness and content.

Thoughts of love are constructive of brotherhood, peace, friendship, and happiness.

2. Create Your New Future by Making New Choices

If you want to start having more positive experiences, you need to start making better choices. Create new habits that will only improve your total health and well-being. 

For example, instead of watching a sad fictional movie, you may want to watch an inspiring documentary. Instead of playing video games, you may want to take time for prayer, meditation, and reflection. Intentionally plan more productive and beneficial days.

3. Create Your New Future by Making Amends

Making amends with people who have hurt you may be one of the new choices that you decide to make because holding on to past anger and resentment is physically unhealthy, emotionally exhausting, and “spiritually poisonous.” In a letter to an individual in 1992, the Universal House of Justice, the global governing body of the Baha’i Faith, wrote:

To nurse a grievance or hatred against another soul is spiritually poisonous to the soul which nurses it, but to strive to see another person as a child of God and, however heinous his deeds, to attempt to overlook his sins for the sake of God, removes bitterness from the soul and both ennobles and strengthens it.

Moreover, in a letter written on behalf of Shoghi Effendi, the Guardian of the Baha’i Faith, to an individual in 1951, it says:

When criticism and harsh words arise within a Bahá’í community, there is no remedy except to put the past behind one, and persuade all concerned to turn over a new leaf, and for the sake of God and His Faith refrain from mentioning the subjects which have led to misunderstanding and inharmony. The more the friends argue back and forth and maintain, each side, that their point of view is the right one, the worse the whole situation becomes.

When we see the condition the world is in today, we must surely forget these utterly insignificant internal disturbances, and rush, unitedly, to the rescue of humanity.

In order to heal from the past, we need to forgive, let go, move on, and make amends if we can as we place our attention and energy on creating a brighter future for ourselves and our world.

4. Create Your New Future Through Visualization

What does your new future look like? How would you think, act, and feel? It’s important to take time each day to specifically visualize who you want to be and what you want to attract to you and practice feeling those emotions as if you already have it. As an early Baha’i stated in the “Star of the West,” there are “two distinct phases of optimism”:

One is based on the assumption of conditions, which the objective mind has first conceived and pictured, as it were, on the walls of the subjective mind. By holding this thought or picture without wavering, we may possibly bring things to pass. We may brighten our own paths by happy, cheerful thoughts, and help uplift others who are in negative states of mind. But this effort must be diligently continued, for all depends upon our own power to hold the pictures formed.

“When you…saw that picture in your mind, the next thing you know, you started to feel the emotion as if you were living in that future reality in the present moment. And we could say then, the moment you started feeling the emotion, the thought became the experience in your mind,” explained Dr. Joe Dispenza in episode two of his “Rewired” series on Gaia.com.

“You were giving your body a sampling or a taste of the future. …You started thinking about all the choices you had to make, and you wrote them down. You started to think about all those experiences that would get you to that vision, all those goals. And every time you wrote those goals down, you felt more of those feelings and you kept reviewing them in your mind so you can put your conscious mind on what you wanted.”

5. Create Your New Future Through the Five Steps of Prayer

If you want clarity on how to achieve your goals, I recommend that you follow the five steps of prayer for guidance and problem-solving that Shoghi Effendi conveyed to Ruth Moffett, a Baha’i who published her recollection of the following steps:

Pray and meditate about it. Use the prayers of the Manifestations, as they have the greatest power. Learn to remain in the silence of contemplation for a few moments. During this deepest communion take the next step.

Arrive at a decision and hold to this. This decision is usually born in a flash at the close or during the contemplation. It may seem almost impossible of accomplishment, but if it seems to be an answer to prayer or a way of solving the problem, then immediately take the next step.

Have determination to carry the decision through. Many fail here. The decision, budding into determination, is blighted and instead becomes a wish or a vague longing. When determination is born, immediately take the next step.

Have faith and confidence, that the Power of the Holy Spirit will flow through you, the right way will appear, the door will open, the right message, the right principle or the right book will be given to you. Have confidence, and the right thing will come to meet your need. Then as you rise from prayer take immediately the fifth step.

Act as though it had all been answered. Then act with tireless, ceaseless energy. And, as you act, you yourself will become a magnet which will attract more power to your being, until you become an unobstructed channel for the Divine Power to flow through you.

As Dr. Joe Dispenza said, “The moment you start embracing the feeling of empowerment, you are stepping towards your success. The moment you’re in love with yourself and in love with life, you will create an equal. And the moment you start feeling grateful and you start feeling whole, your healing begins. The moment you are in awe of life, you will have a mystical experience. Now that’s causing an effect.” 

So, what effect will you cause? What new future will you create? What desired outcomes will you mentally rehearse so “your brain is no longer a record of the past,” as Dr. Joe Dispenza said, but “a map to the future.”