Attention & Focus · “You Become What You Hold”
Meeting Adverse Suggestion
Stay un-swayed by the negative, fearful, or degrading suggestions constantly arriving from environment and other people, by deliberately answering each with a chosen counter-suggestion until the guard becomes automatic.
Catch the moment an outside cue tries to swap your state for a worse one — name it as a suggestion. Then answer it with a chosen counter-suggestion, and persist, with feeling, until it holds. Repeat this enough and the guard becomes automatic — your mind springs up with the wholesome answer on its own. Keep the mind full of good so there’s no room for the bad. Stay open to information; just don’t blindly obey the negative.
What it is
Larson’s defensive attention practice. He defines a suggestion broadly: “anything is a suggestion that brings into mind some thought, idea or feeling that tends to undermine some similar idea, thought or feeling that happens to be in the mind.” A degrading image that displaces a wholesome mood, a remark that turns your joy to depression — these are suggestions taking hold.
His claim: “most people are controlled, most of the time, by suggestions that come to them from their environment.” The practice is to stop being a passive receiver — to meet each adverse suggestion, in the moment, with a deliberately chosen counter-suggestion, repeated until the guard “springs up of its own accord.” It is the active, in-the-moment cousin of a “mental diet”: not a standing rule about what to read, but a reflex you train for the instant a negative cue lands.
The Method
- Recognise a suggestion as it lands. Notice when an external thing has just tried to swap your state — “If you feel joyous and some idea given to you makes your mind depressed, you are in the hands of suggestion.” Naming it breaks the automatic acceptance.
- Answer with a chosen counter-suggestion. “Whenever you are in the presence of an adverse suggestion, concentrate your attention upon some idea or mental state which you know will act as a counter suggestion; in other words, when adverse suggestion is trying to produce in your mind what you do not want, persist in suggesting to yourself what you do want.”
- Persist until it sticks. It’s persist in suggesting — repeat the counter, with feeling, not once but until it holds (pairs with: feel the inner life of the wanted state).
- Train it to become automatic. “This practice, if employed frequently, will soon make you so strong in this direction that you will unconsciously be on your guard; in fact, the very moment that an adverse suggestion is given, your mind will spring up of its own accord with a wholesome suggestion.”
- Crowd out by filling the mind. The structural version: “fill your mind so full of good, wholesome thoughts and suggestions that there is no room for anything else. Feel right at all times, and nothing from without can tempt you to think wrong.”
- Keep the mind open, but selective. Larson is not for closing the mind (see his master-mind teaching): receive impressions, but use them constructively rather than blindly obeying the desire they suggest.
Source & Lineage
Your Forces and How to Use Them (1912), Chapter XI; the selective-use-of-impressions side is developed in Chapter XVIII (“Imagination and the Master Mind”). Christian D. Larson (1874-1962). → (larson christian d).
Common refinements
Suppressing instead of replacing. Don’t try to not think the negative; supply the chosen counter and feel it. Suppression rebounds.
- One half-hearted counter. Larson says persist; deploy it with feeling until it holds.
- Walling off all input. This guards against habitual negativity, not against genuine warnings, criticism, or feedback. Stay open and discerning.
- Forgetting to feel it. A flat counter-statement won’t displace a charged one — engage the “power back of suggestion.”