So Much Happier Blog
Free Your Mind
“The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces - in nature, in society, in man himself.”
When dealing with a long-term challenge, even if you find that you're well on the way to a solution, it's often true that nothing happens as quickly as you want it to. Problems that you acquired over time will usually take time to solve. The thorniest part of addressing them is often dealing with the daily disappointment, or even heartbreak, of still having the problem despite all your efforts. One of the most powerful things you can ever do is condition yourself to celebrate even your smallest wins rather than bemoaning your losses and worrying about how you will confront tomorrow. This may also be one of the hardest things you'll ever learn to do. It sounds very simple, but is, for most people, astonishingly difficult. It also changes everything about how you experience your life and what is possible for you, once you understand and become practiced at it.
When you think about what a downer it is to harp on what's not working, it makes a lot of sense that consciously focusing on the progress you're making instead would be more helpful. (I'm sure you've spent time around someone who complains all the time. I bet you can't wait to get away from that person when it's someone else.) Unfortunately, your mind is most likely in the habit of worrying about what might go wrong, including everything that ever has for you before. This may be due both to Nature and to Nurture—it's a rare family situation that teaches children only to be aware of risk for practical reasons, but otherwise steeps them in confidence and zest for challenge. Usually there's a lot of "you can't" and "don't you dare" and "what if" mixed in in frenzied tones. It might all be protective and well meaning, but sometimes it's also other things like power plays and unconscious panic. As far as Nature, the mind is designed in part to protect us from risk, and in addition to running the the stressful thinking patterns we learned from others, it tends toward obsession over possible risk as a survival mechanism. If you want to counter these powerful formative and ingrained forces, expect it to take some doing. And here's the kicker: The work you do, if you really want to succeed, can't all be done in and with the mind. Uh oh! Wait, doesn't that make this all of a sudden a lot more complicated? Yes, my friend, it sure does. And that's why it ends up being difficult!
Focusing on progress rather than fueling your every moment on fearful thinking requires work that goes to the very nature of being alive, to all your notions about how safe you are, and what human nature is all about. These reside not only in your conscious mind, where it becomes apparent what your basic beliefs are if you just choose to start becoming more aware of them, but also in the subconscious parts of your mind, where your body and spirit are much more involved. You may be starting to wonder what the use is of my opening up these complexities, since rarely does anyone teach us what it's like to deal in the coin of these realms of us. Because of the personal journey I've been on, I know from experience that a deep well of experience and belief that you're probably unacquainted with is running your life far more than you would believe if I tried to tell you at this moment.
It might sound like I'm trying to scare you or manipulate you, but I'm not. I want you to understand that, from what I've found, a better quality of life, less stress and more confidence, result from clearing out chaff that is weighing you down in ways you can't even see. While there are many wonderful ideas, systems, and people out there in the world doing good work, nothing I have found has ever done for me what EFT/Tapping does in facilitating this clearing out. Because it's a self-help tool, you are in the driver's seat as far as how you use it and on what. You also often become aware of profound understanding and shifts in how you think and feel as you use it. This process is empowering in ways I can't describe. You really have to experience it in order to fully understand what I'm saying. Once you start to get on a roll with this clearing out process, it's amazing how much easier it becomes to think in more constructive ways so that you can enjoy a more happy, vibrant life. I've said it before, but I'll say it again—there's little else I can recommend that would be more helpful to creating more of what you want than learning the basics and making a practice of using EFT. As you do, you will encounter and clear out impediments that will help you greatly. I'm betting that some of what you find there will also surprise you as it did me, and that the process of removing its charge will thrill you as well.
When you can spend more time using your mind in positive ways, you make fewer decisions out of fear and more out of inspiration, and the healthy desire to create better conditions for yourself and others. As long as you're trying to accomplish everything with your mind, you're missing out on the power that can be yours when you get other important parts of you on board. As you use Tapping, you will also tend to naturally build compassion for others that will make you even more effective in understanding and communicating with them. So much can be gained from this practice, so don't put it off! Learn it, love it, and live it!
The Enigmatic Turbo Boost
“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
Last week we considered a systematic, structured approach to planning out strategies for change in your life. Using a template like that one can be extremely helpful to keep you on track. Doing so also helps to remind you that it’s normal for change to be a process that requires a continuing loop of thought, work, and experience—most of us don’t have a functioning magic wand to make change instant and effortless, unfortunately! However, there’s also another side to this coin…a more feminine-energy aspect of the change process as I see it, and that’s intent.
Just deciding that you’re going to do something and holding the intent as you go about the business of the structured approach opens you to unpredictable leaps of insight that might not favor you otherwise. Inventors and artists often say that the idea just appears, or the story tells itself. In order to benefit from this kind of serendipity, it’s important to pose a request to the unconscious parts of yourself (in which you could also include your connection to a higher power if that makes sense to you) to send you answers your conscious mind might not find. I call that request intent. It really does have a power that’s hard to describe because the experiences it creates are not structured or linear, but more like the capricious comings and goings of a bird in the night.
Here’s the process I recommend:
· Once you’ve gained some clarity using the more structured approach, define the problem you wish to solve as specifically as you can. Use positive language, as in, “I intend to come up with an idea/find information that will help me to become well easily and in an enjoyable way” rather than “I don’t want to be in pain.”
· Even if you have absolutely no idea how this could happen or doubt that it could, be open to finding a solution. Invoking an open state allows help to arrive in ways that can be surprising.
· Be willing to be a little stupid while you wait. In other words, refuse to worry about how inspiration might strike, and ignore anyone who tries to tell you that a solution is impossible. I personally know some people who have done “the impossible,” and there are plenty of people you can read about who have too. Sometimes finding what you need just takes some time.
· Know that the subconscious deals in the language of symbol. Some people find it useful to keep a pad of paper by the bed at night in case they have a dream that seems meaningful, or some interesting idea that might be helpful. You might think you’ll remember it in the morning, but often you won’t if you don’t write it down.
· Be on the lookout, in a relaxed way, for anything you come into contact with in daily life that might apply to your problem. Keeping your intent in mind can do wonders to help you notice things you otherwise wouldn’t—an overheard conversation, an advertisement, a passage from a book that sparks an insight you can use to move forward.
· Holding your intent in mind also helps you to focus on what you want to move toward rather than the thing you don’t want. For most people, this feels a lot better and helps in maintaining openness to possibility. That’s more productive than dogged pessimism that can result when you harp mentally on the problem. That tends to drain people’s energy and creativity in a hurry.
· When you think about reaching a solution, enjoy the vision of how that will be, how it will feel, and what it will enable you to do. This helps to make the end result seem more real and keep you excited about the prospect as you wait.
· It’s also a good idea to share your intent with others you can rely on to be supportive. Those others can then keep an eye out with you, and may become the source of new information and ideas you wouldn’t have come across yourself.
· Avoid sharing your intent with anyone who might not be supportive.
· Take moments throughout the day to be grateful for what is good in your life already, and for solutions you’ve already found that were a big help in reaching a goal or a milestone.
While you don’t have to become a single-minded, obsessed weirdo about this, I do recommend that you bring your intent back to mind several times per day. Otherwise it’s easy to become busy and forget all about it for days or weeks at a time, and then you’re losing all the benefits you might have enjoyed with a bit more focus. And don’t worry if all of this seems a little awkward at first. It may take you some time to become comfortable with the idea of focusing on an intent that might seem unlikely; your mind may tell you that there’s no point, but the mind is not in control of all things. Working with your intent is not a substitute for structure and strategic action, but it can be a real boost to a process you’ve begun to move your life forward. Try it out and see what happens. You just might find that interesting experiences are set in motion in ways you couldn’t have predicted. Structure and intent together form a synergistic whole that you might find to be a new adventure in the pursuit of your ideal.
Who's Driving This Thing?
“The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.”
I’ve noticed in my work with clients that many people are much harder on themselves than they would be on anyone else, especially people they love and care about. Something for which one would easily forgive a friend becomes unforgiveable in oneself for reasons that are hard to fathom. Sometimes the client will even say that it seems irrational for him to feel so guilty about something relatively minor, and yet he does. What gives? And why is this such a common experience?
I think the answer is that we have learned this behavior, usually from people who had no idea what was being passed down, in two different ways. First, the conscious part of the equation: When we’re children, we hear from all the adults around us, as well as from friends and peers, about what constitutes being a “good” person. We may have trouble unifying everything we’re told into a cohesive theory about how to behave, but we do know that we’re supposed to try to be “good.” We doubtless remember times when we were accused of behaving badly and intentionally embarrassed by someone, whether publicly or privately. We may learn that life tends to go more smoothly when we behave in a pleasing way toward others; we then take on the job of policing our own behavior, taking on the voices of people we respected or feared and obeying them even in their absence. This is relatively easy to recognize if you think about it—by which I mean that it may take some work to notice when you’re trying to please someone who’s not there, but if you pay attention to how you make decisions, you’ll probably start to see some of these habits before too long.
And now for the second part that is not conscious. Figuring out how this piece is affecting you can be quite a bit trickier. In The Biology of Belief, Bruce Lipton writes about how recent scientific study has revealed that children under the age of six spend most of their time in different brain wave states than adults. Until the age of two, children exhibit mostly delta brain waves, which in adults are associated with sleep states, and from ages two to six they spend most of their time in theta brain wave activity, which in adults is associated with the kind of “suggestible, programmable” state that hypnotherapists lead people into in order to help them accomplish change. In other words, young children are generally not in a fully conscious state that adults would recognize. They do not have access to conscious decision-making and analytical abilities. Therefore, whatever a small child hears is downloaded into her subconscious directly. Did you get that? Young children have no filter; what they hear is recorded directly into their subconscious minds as truth. When you were young, you learned a great deal that you are not aware of now, and it’s still affecting you today unless you’ve taken concrete steps to update that information.
That explains a lot about why it can be so hard to change old habits and beliefs even if we want to. The reasons why we feel a certain way may well be rooted in events and verbal commands we can’t even remember! We have years’ worth of programming that we’ve never had the opportunity to examine. We may remember plenty from childhood, and still be unaware of some pivotal beliefs that were instilled in us very early. The people who taught them to you have changed or may not be alive anymore, but the messages have not. Part of your mind is being run by ghosts.
We all know that parenting is a tough, demanding, and often exhausting job. Parents do what they can to keep us safe and healthy and stay sane at the same time. One of the methods most use is the application of shame to keep us in line—a sharp tone of voice telling us to stop it and a withering look, questions about what we were thinking when we did something that seemed really dumb or dangerous from an adult perspective, maybe a slap upside the head to let us know just how unacceptable our choice was. (Some of this is non-verbal, or even learned from things we just overheard rather than experiencing them personally.) If they can make us feel bad about certain choices, it’s less likely that we’ll make them again. While this can be effective, its continued use can also leave us with a general feeling of not being good enough/as good as others, or the feeling that we need to talk to ourselves harshly in order to avoid bad decisions and consequences. Once it’s installed, this habit of self-talk can run for decades or a lifetime without your awareness of what it’s really about, or that there are other alternatives. The only thing that really makes this second half of the equation different from the first is that it occurs before we can be fully aware of what’s happening, and we may not be able to recall it later.
Some of this may not seem very empowering. After all, what can we do about things we don’t even remember in the first place? In fact, there are ways to clean up even the mysterious things that may be holding you back. Making positive change happen in your life often requires the use of tools that can open a dialogue between your conscious and your unconscious mind. My favorite of these is EFT/Tapping because it’s highly effective, and it’s a self-help tool that almost anyone can learn and use safely. Once you’ve spent some time getting the hang of it, it’s astonishing what you can learn about yourself and what might be keeping you stuck in a particular area of your life. It takes practice to become confident in this dialogue, but it’s well worth the effort if you’re someone who would like to feel better physically, emotionally, or spiritually, or to work toward more positive mental habits. Despite what we may have been taught, it is possible to learn to treat yourself more kindly, and think and problem-solve more constructively. Quieting habitual negativity can free up a lot of energy for better physical health and greater creativity. And now that you know more about how children function, you might want to spend some time thinking about how you talk to the little ones in your life. What you say to them will shape their habits more directly than you might think. Choose your messages carefully to support their long-term health and happiness just as you learn to be more careful with how you speak to yourself.