Read it? Good.

All right. This is a true story, and I often tell it to my clients. You’ll see why.

photo credit: futureatlas.com

Towards the end of World War II, a Japanese soldier got separated from his unit on one of the Pacific islands – one large enough to have a jungle that he could disappear into. And that’s exactly what he did – for several decades.

Eating what he could find, sleeping in improvised shelter, his uniform becoming rags, his rifle rusting, he kept on faithfully fulfilling his last orders. He was still fighting the war.

Meanwhile, though, back in Japan, there was a new government with a new agenda. Instead of approaching other nations as enemies, this Japanese government approached them as allies and trading partners. It was a new era for Japan, an era of increasing prosperity – and they wanted all their citizens to participate, not only in creating but in enjoying the new way.

But off on his island, here was this man, alone, still following the old orders – because nobody could reach him to tell him that the war was over.

If you’re experiencing a conflict within yourself, what’s likely to be happening is that there’s a part of yourself that’s still fighting an old war, still trying to protect you – faithfully – from a threat that doesn’t really exist in your current situation. What you think of as “yourself” is like the post-war Japanese government, headed in a new direction, connecting to the world in a new way, but there’s another part hidden away somewhere that doesn’t realise that the war is over.

And by bringing that part of yourself into dialogue, finding out what its critical agenda is that it’s pursuing so faithfully, and helping it to discover how to pursue that agenda without sabotaging the agenda of other important parts, you can reincorporate that faithful passion into yourself and align it with your highest goals. At the moment, that part is using its energy to struggle against another part of yourself, which is using its energy to resist – and all that energy is going to waste. Imagine what would happen if they were pulling together towards your main goal.

photo credit: DVIDSHUB

This is the kind of work I can help you with: re-integrating those parts of yourself that passionately want to protect you, but have an outdated way of showing it. At the moment I have a few spaces open for people to work with me (and yes, we can do it even if you’re elsewhere in the world). Email me for details: mikerm at hypno.co.nz.

What might that part of you be protecting you from?

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Now we’re going to travel into the future – kind of like Marty McFly in Back to the Future II, where he got to encounter his middle-aged loser self and learn valuable lessons that helped him avoid becoming that guy. Except what we’re going to do is encounter our future successful selves, and learn valuable lessons that will help us to become that person. So, not very like Back to the Future II at all, really.

(And before you ask, we’re not going back to the Old West in the final part of the series, either.)

Anyway, the technique we’ll use is called Future Pacing by Neuro-Linguistic Programming people, who always have to give things fancy names. It’s simply imagining yourself into the future.

If you’ve done my AIM Your Mind self-hypnosis course, you’ll be familiar with the idea of a “future imaginary memory”. If not, here’s how it works.

The Future Imaginary Memory Technique

First, think about some way you would like your life to be different in the future.

Now imagine watching your future self, who has achieved that goal. You’re watching yourself in the third person at this point. Your future self is moving around, going about a normal day – normal in the new situation, that is, of having attained your goal.

This isn’t an idealised still image in a ray of golden light from heaven. It’s a realistic movie.

Imagine it as clearly as you can. If you aren’t a very visual person and don’t visualise very clearly, that’s OK, but think about how the future you moves, walks, stands, smiles, gestures. Think about what your future voice sounds like. Think about the way in which your future self interacts with other people.

Walk around your future self, as if you have an imaginary movie camera that you control, that looks at your future self from all angles.

Got that? Good.

photo credit: Clauz Jardim

The Cable to the Future

Now you’re going to do the next step – making a connection between your future and your present. I call this the Cable to the Future.

From your position in the present, find yourself with a cable in your hand. One end is connected somehow to your navel, and the other end has a hook.

Now throw the cable through time so that it reaches your future self, the self you want to be, and connects the two of  you, navel to navel.

Now wind the cable in, however that works for you in your imagination. As you do so, you find yourself easily and naturally and inevitably drawn towards your ideal future self.

Eventually, you meet and merge. And now you feel what it’s like to be that person, to move like them, to stand like them, to talk like them, to gesture and smile and interact with people like your ideal self.

Just enjoy that for a bit.

Imagination is Like Memory

The reason that we pay so much attention to storytellers in every human culture is this: Vivid imagination is fundamentally like memory. (It’s not identical, of course, but there’s very substantial overlap in the brain systems that are used. If you’re into neuropsychology – and who isn’t? – there’s a recent study by Donna Rose Addis of Auckland University and colleagues about the differences and similarities.)

So when we hear or read a story, or watch a play or a movie (which is only a story presented particularly vividly to our imagination), in a sense we absorb it as if it was real. That’s why teachers of all religious traditions have used stories. By imagining ourselves as the characters in stories, we learn the lessons they learned as if we’d experienced the events ourselves.

And exactly the same applies to our own vivid imaginings. That’s why Future Pacing and the Cable to the Future work so well.

photo credit: Lee Jordan

Next time, we’ll go on a Motivational Time Tour. Until then, practice connecting to your future successful self.

Technorati Tags: future pacing, imagination, memory, time travel

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It’s often a theme of time travel fiction that the really big events can’t be changed. In Connie Willis’s hilarious novel To Say Nothing of the Dog, for instance, no time traveller can get within 200km or 5 years of the Battle of Waterloo, which famously could have gone either way. And it’s well accepted in popular time-travel fiction that you can’t assassinate Hitler.

Steve & Terry in 1940 are reminded that you can't assassinate Hitler

But what about the events of your own life? Can you go back in time and change things, get a different outcome? Even for the big, defining events?

In fact you can, and I’ll tell you how.

1. Prepare

First of all, you need to be ready to face the past incident and put it to rest. If it’s still so painful that even thinking about it is unendurable, you’re not going to be much use to yourself.

It’s surprising, though, how much pain you can endure, if enduring it is going to remove it – and you’re not going to re-experience the pain directly in this exercise.

Sit yourself down in a comfortable place where you’ll be undisturbed. If you prefer to lie down (and are confident that you won’t go to sleep), that’s fine too.

Take several deep breaths, and as you take each breath, let your body relax, the muscles calming and loosening, and any tension leaking out and evaporating like mist on a warm road. If you find this difficult, use a self-hypnosis recording like my Blue Sky Induction to help you.

Spend a few minutes thinking of a safe place – which can be real or imaginary – where you feel completely relaxed.

Now give yourself a trigger word, like “safe”, to return you to that place in your imagination if things become too difficult to handle. You’ll almost certainly not need to use it, but just knowing it’s there will reduce any anxiety you might feel about the process.

2. Travel

Now it’s time to time-travel. I’ll assume for the sake of this exercise that there’s a specific past event you want to deal with. You’re going to go there as your present self and help your past self.

Sir Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley off to rescue Galileo

Build the memory of that event, in its full sensory detail. See what you saw and hear what you heard – but watching from the outside, in the “cool” mode of the third person. You can see your younger self in the difficult situation.

What do you notice about the situation that you never noticed before?

3. Intervene

You have all the resources of your current self – mental, emotional and physical – that your younger self lacked. If you like, since this is an imaginary trip, you can even have more resources that you wish you’d had – anything you need to intervene effectively, up to and including magic and futuristic technology. Why not? You’re travelling through time already. If you need a wand or a phaser, it’s yours.

Step into the situation and help your younger self. This may involve confronting someone else who was in the situation on behalf of the younger self. I don’t recommend violence here. Firm intervention should be sufficient. Tell them where they get off. They may even apologise.

Whatever else you do, it’s important to comfort the younger self and help him or her to deal with the aftermath of the situation. Do this as you’d comfort your own child, or a friend (depending on the age of the younger self). It doesn’t matter if you don’t actually have children. Just hold the younger self and support him or her until he or she feels better.

4. Inform

A lot has happened in your life since the moment you’re revisiting. Some of it has been positive beyond what the younger self could hope for. (I know this because you now have the resources to go back and help.) So tell the younger self about how things do eventually get better.

Place the emphasis on ways in which the situation you’ve just intervened in is not the end or the all-defining moment, because that’s how your younger self probably thought of it at the time.

5. Grow Up With an Alternate History

Watch now as the younger self grows up in a universe in which someone came and intervened and helped and supported at that critical moment. Watch how the younger self has different experiences (and some of the same experiences) and deals with them more positively, drawing on the resources you have passed on.

When the younger self reaches your present age, embrace each other and allow yourselves to merge, and your timelines to merge.

You now have that history of the self who got the help at the critical moment and whose life was improved by it. Those are your memories too.

Return to your safe place with the trigger word, and gradually let yourself come back to your usual alert consciousness and reconnect to the real world around you. Perhaps have something to eat or drink to get yourself all the way back.

How does the world look different now?

Jamie and Adam from Mythbusters confirm time travel

I hope you’ve enjoyed and benefited from your trip into the past, and that you’ve decided to use your powers for good and not for evil. Especially since next week we’ll be travelling into the future (and not at the usual one-second-per-second pace either).

If you liked this technique and want more ways to manage your emotions and move on from painful events of the past, make sure to join the Beat the Rush List for my upcoming Emotional Circuit-Breaker Toolkit. You’ll be informed as soon as it’s available, and you’ll get a significant discount over the normal price.

(Gratitude to David Morgan-Mar, creator of Irregular Webcomic!, which is one of the most regular webcomics on the Internet, and one of my personal favourites. He generously makes his work available under a creative commons license, and never personally makes a cent from his creativity. If you want to thank him indirectly with a donation to charity, though, he has some suggestions for doing so.)

Technorati Tags: time travel, therapy, hypnosis, self-hypnosis, hypnotherapy

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photo credit: SuperFantastic

I’ve never been a coffee drinker. I’m one of those rare people who doesn’t even like the smell of coffee, so the current fashion for drinking fancy coffees has passed me by completely. Nor do I like substances that change my mental state. I prefer to do that for myself.

So what do I do when I want to be more alert? How can I possibly get through a busy day without a cup of coffee?

Before I answer that, I’d like to discuss the findings of a study just published in Neuropsychopharmacology by Peter J. Rogers and colleagues. What they did was take 162 people who consumed little or no caffeine and 217 people who were medium/high caffeine consumers. They told them not to consume caffeine for 16 hours, and then gave them either two doses of caffeine 90 minutes apart, or two doses of a neutral placebo.

The participants gave a self-rating of anxiety, alertness and headache before and after the first dose and after the second dose.

Before I discuss the results, let’s briefly talk about how caffeine works. The study refers to it as an “adenosine A1 and A2A receptor antagonist”, which just means that it’s about the same shape as a signalling chemical in your brain called adenosine, and it can fit into the receptors for adenosine and block adenosine itself from connecting there and giving the brain its signal. And what adenosine signals is that you’re getting tired. It’s a product of processes in your body which lead to fatigue.

So caffeine blocks off the signal from your body to your brain that tells you you’re getting tired. It doesn’t give you any extra energy; it just hides from you the fact that you’re running low. It’s a bit like disconnecting the lead from your fuel tank to your fuel gauge. It doesn’t give you more fuel. It just prevents you from realising that you don’t have much left.

photo credit: chego101

Back to the results of the study. The scientists already knew that a particular genetic variation in the receptors for adenosine (the signalling chemical I just mentioned) increases the anxiety-producing side effect of caffeine. What the scientists were actually trying to find out was whether this genetic factor also affected the amount of caffeine people would habitually drink, and whether drinking it regularly would reduce the anxiety-producing effect.

What they discovered was that drinking more caffeine reduced the anxiety effect for everyone, regardless of genetics (the brain presumably adjusts itself after a while). But it’s their other conclusion that is receiving press coverage. They found no increase in alertness from caffeine. The no-or-low consumption group didn’t become more alert, and the medium-to-high group went from being less alert because of caffeine withdrawal effects to being as alert as they would have been if they hadn’t been coffee drinkers.

So, let’s sum up. Caffeine isn’t increasing your energy, it’s just hiding from you the fact that you’re low on energy – disconnecting your mind from your body, which in my personal view is one of the biggest problems of the modern West, but I’ll forcibly restrain myself from that rant for now. Ahem.

It’s not increasing your energy, and it’s not increasing your alertness. It only feels like it’s increasing your alertness because the withdrawal symptoms make you less alert, and having the caffeine takes you back to where you would have been without it.

So “caffeine to wake you up and give you more energy and alertness” is a big con, an illusion. Of course, there are plenty of other reasons why people drink it – for the taste, for the social connection, for the break, even for the warmth. But if you’re drinking coffee (or tea) for increased energy and alertness, the news is all bad.

I said I’d tell you what I do instead, didn’t I? I’ve just started a new practice in the mornings. What I do is set my alarm a little bit earlier, and spend 10 minutes doing a concentration meditation. All I do is use my simple meditation method, but tweak it by focussing strongly on the word that I say with each outbreath – paying attention to it, and returning to it if I find my mind wandering off at all.

This wakes my mind up and focusses it. Then throughout the day, and especially at the end of the day, I practice letting go of tension, stress and anxiety – all the things that eat my energy if I let them. The answer to “I don’t have enough energy” isn’t “let’s pretend I do” but “what can I do to waste less?”

photo credit: JohnSeb

I don’t have time to go into the letting-go techniques in depth here, but there’s a lot more in my upcoming Emotional Circuit-Breaker Toolkit. By following that link I just gave you, you can get in on my special Beat The Rush List – meaning you’ll be among the first to know when it’s available and you’ll be eligible for a substantial discount before it gets released to the general public. It’s fashionable to compare the price of things to cups of coffee – if you’re on the Beat The Rush list, the price of the Toolkit will be not very many cups of coffee at all.

Technorati Tags: caffeine, coffee, energy, alertness, concentration, meditation, anxiety

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I only do it with people who, themselves, personally, want to stop smoking.

I learned this after two unsuccessful experiences with clients in their 20s who were booked in, and brought along, by their mothers. The young man was pretty clearly just there because it was the path of least resistance; the young woman, I think, wanted to be able to say to her mother that she’d tried and it hadn’t worked (so that her mother would shut up about it).

Neither of them were motivated to change for themselves. It wasn’t a priority for them, it wasn’t important to them, and they didn’t really believe they could do it anyway.

So if someone rings up on behalf of their son, daughter, partner, mother, father, brother, sister or friend, I politely turn them away, because the outcome’s not going to be good for anyone. It’s like trying to teach a pig to sing. You waste your time, it annoys the pig, and the farmer thinks you’re a bad singing teacher.

photo credit: The Pug Father

But if there’s a change you’ve been thinking about, and wondering about, but just not doing anything about, you’re not stuck with your current level of motivation for change. Here’s how you can increase it, by working on the three elements of motivation: Ready, Willing and Able.

Ready

Readiness to change is about priority. If the need to change isn’t taking up a big slice of your mental landscape compared to everything else that’s going on, it’s not going to get the resources it requires. This is why it’s almost impossible to sell prevention, but easy to sell rescue: People in need of rescue are highly focussed.

photo credit: Tim Green aka atoach

One of the most successful methods of stopping smoking is to be told by a cardiologist, when you have just had a heart attack, that you are definitely going to die if you don’t. Being told exactly the same thing when you’re feeling perfectly healthy just doesn’t have the same impact.

It’s sad but true that you often won’t be ready to change until the need for change looms in your view like an elephant you’re about to hit with your car.

How to be more ready: Start to make your desired change more prominent in your life. Leave pictures lying around, or pin them on a bulletin board, that remind you about it. Subscribe to (and read or listen to) blogs, podcasts and mailing lists that talk about it. Get books about it.

Sit down for a few minutes, close your eyes to screen out distractions, and think about it for a few minutes. Bring the most vivid sensory imagination and the most intense emotion you can into play and attach them to the change you want to make. Picture yourself after the change.

photo credit: Valerie Everett

Willing

Willingness to change is about importance, which is different from priority. A change can be important without being high-priority. It’s important that I get my tax done soon, but it’s not high priority, which means it keeps getting bumped by other things that are.

“It’s not really that bad.” Those are the words that stifle the impulse to change. Even if we don’t like our current life, we may put up with it rather than change, because change can be uncomfortable and require energy.

How to be more willing: The question to ask is: What are your highest goals, and how does this change serve them?

Think about the benefits of the change. How does it take you closer to being the person you want to be?

Think about the benefits of the benefits.

Keep thinking (and write them down) until you get to the heart of the matter: If you make this change your life will be better than it is now. The change will be worth it.

Or maybe you’ll conclude that it won’t. If the shoe don’t fit, it ain’t your shoe.

photo credit: chaosinjune

Able

Finally, you can be convinced that change is important, you can have it as a high priority – but if you don’t have a basic confidence that it’s possible, you’re unlikely to start.

The thing is, too, you can actually have the potential to change without realising it. If you think you can’t change, you’re right. But if you think you can change – and have a realistic plan and possibly some support to do so, because hope is not a strategy – you’re probably right about that, as well.

This is the part of the motivation process that most people find hardest, and it feeds back into the other two. If you don’t think you can do something, trying is not going to be a priority, and you’re going to convince yourself it’s not that important.

How to be more able: Having a plan – any plan – is better than having no plan. Even if you abandon the plan for a better one once you’re underway. You can’t steer if you’re not moving.

photo credit: Andre Charland

And there are very simple, very accessible skills that anyone can master which put change within your reach (and help you to focus on it and make it important and a priority).

Here’s my suggestion. If you don’t have a plan yet, sign up for my free course, Seven Steps to a Personal Change Plan.

And if you’ve already done that course, or you know what change you want to make but aren’t sure how to get moving, get focussed and succeed, sign up for my cheap course, Change Your Mind. It shows you a simple, step-by-step process for achieving your goals – and I’ve just added a new bonus: an ebook which reveals seven top techniques and tells you exactly how to use them to work on 12 very common real-life issues. It’s still just $29, though (NZD, so even less in the rest of the world).

You can increase your motivation and change your life for the better by working on these three elements: becoming ready, willing and able.

Technorati Tags: motivation, personal change, self-efficacy, confidence

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Cooking is enjoyable for me because it turns something that must be done into a skilled pursuit which exercises my creative side – at least, the way I do it. Here’s what I’ve learned.

1. Start with the best ingredients

You can’t go very far wrong in cooking if you are starting with good ingredients: fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, lean protein and monounsaturated oils. And you can’t go very far wrong in life if you are starting with sound basics: willingness and ability to learn, hard work, perseverance and a desire to connect to other people positively. It’s like learning your scales if you want to play jazz. You can’t jam until you know the basics of how to play.

photo credit: ragnagne

My go-to book for good ingredients, by the way, is George Mateljan’s The World’s Healthiest Foods, Essential Guide for the Healthiest Way of Eating. That’s an Amazon affiliate link, but I’d recommend it regardless. It’s about 700 pages of wonderful knowledge on over 100 foods, including scientific evidence on what is good about them, how to store and prepare them, and some quick and simple recipes – the author claims that all the recipes take less than 7 minutes. I’ve based several of my own recipes on ideas in this book, including my delicious healthy fruit and nut treat bar, which is consistently the most popular post on my blog.

2. Stand on the shoulders of giants

Sometimes on the cooking shows, you will see creative cooks whose specialty is combining unusual flavours together. Almost invariably, they are knocked out because they produce some ridiculous random combination like pork and peaches that was never going to work, “because if it works it’ll be amazing”. Well, yes, it would be.

Don’t be those people. I rarely follow someone else’s recipe exactly, but what I do do is look through recipe books and websites for recipes that use my planned main ingredients, and get a sense of what else is frequently combined with them. I then imagine what that would taste like and come up with my own combinations.

photo credit: FotoosVanRobin

If I’m learning to do something, I’m aiming eventually to do it my way, but I’m going to do that after I’ve learned what generally works. You don’t seriously think that nobody ever considered pork and peaches as a combination, do you? The reason that you don’t see it served as a classic dish is that the flavours just don’t work together that well. Someone tried it and discovered that – so you don’t have to. Pork and apples, on the other hand…

3. Season to taste

Sometimes, when I create a new recipe, it’s a success first time (though I’ll usually still try variations when I make it in the future). Sometimes, it’s OK, but it’s not quite right. The other week I made a venison and mushroom pie. The flavours of the herbs and the red wine and the onions and garlic that I used (following principles 1 and 2) were lovely, but they lacked a bit of oomph. I knew just what it needed – tomato. And indeed, when I opened a can of tomatoes and added them as a kind of sauce, the taste was, if I can say so, excellent.

The thing about creativity (or any new thing you do) is that your first attempt often isn’t amazingly wonderful. What the first attempt does is show the potential and suggest ways to improve. This is where your creative imagination comes into play – figuring out what would make a good thing even better.

Those, then, are my three principles. Start with good basics, learn from what classically works, then do something that’s new – as a learning experience, a data point towards producing something amazing.

I’d love to hear your comments and suggestions on how to apply these principles to things I’ve never thought of, by the way. That’s part of my learning too. (Oh, and some of my other recipes are here.)

Technorati Tags: cooking, creativity, recipes, life lessons

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These 10 ways are inspired by the last chapter of Robert Emmons’ book Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier, which I just finished reading. (That’s an affiliate link. If you buy from it, I get a tiny amount of money.)

I’ve split one of his practices into two, dropped another, renamed most of them and generalised them from his focus on cultivating gratitude, which is why I say “inspired by”. It’s an inspiring book, and you can read my review on Goodreads.

1. Keep Track

Keeping a daily journal, whether it’s in a notebook by your bed, a digital voice recorder, a blog or even a video diary, creates, as Emmons puts it, “a daily habit of paying attention to important… events”. We’re talking here about both inner and outer events, or rather, both outer events and your responses to them. With a goal in mind, your perceptions of the events can start to shift, and your behaviour is likely to shift also in the direction of your goal.

photo credit: jessica.garro

2. Look Back

I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a walk and, after struggling up a hill, paused and looked back and been amazed by how far you’ve come? Reviewing your progress is a good way to remind yourself that you are making progress, and to motivate yourself to go further.

3. Ask Yourself Questions

Good, thought-provoking questions prompt introspection, and help you to both shift your perspective and show you how far you’ve come (and perhaps where you need to go next). Good questions might include:

• How do I feel about my goal now?
• Where did this pattern start?
• Am I ready to let go of this?

4. Shape Your Thoughts

Liturgies, litanies, prayers, affirmations… All these are among the traditional means of shaping your thinking by memorable, often poetic sequences of words that lead in a desired direction. At its negative extreme, of course, this becomes propaganda or brainwashing, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. If you choose for yourself a form of words that reflects your genuine aspirations, your habitual thoughts, feelings and behaviours will follow as you repeat, recite, and even chant them to yourself day after day.

5. Come To Your Senses

Dissociation from our bodies and the world around us is the Western norm. Reconnecting to our bodies and the world is, I firmly believe, one of the surest pathways to good mental, physical and social health.

Here’s a brilliant little game a friend of mine plays with her children, who are all preschoolers. It’s called the Now Game. All you do is say a sentence that starts with “Now” and describes what you can sense around you. So, “Now the sky is cloudy.” Or, “Now I can taste chocolate.” Or, “Now I hear a bird.”

Whenever my friend’s kids are upset or being difficult, she kicks off a round of the Now Game – and it takes them out of their internal feelings of unhappiness and works an immediate transformation on the situation. (They love it, too.)

6. See Reminders Everywhere

Devout Jews have short blessings they say whenever they encounter a particular everyday situation, to remind themselves to be conscious of G-d. Sufis will deliberately leave behind circling thoughts and feelings whenever they pass through a doorway. Whatever your particular goal, you can keep it in your consciousness by connecting it to your daily activities, making the things you do habitually contribute to the habit you want to build. And you can add reminders to your environment, too – an image of your goal, a copy of your affirmation, a random beep programmed on your phone to remind you to be conscious.

7. Join With Others

There’s no better reminder, and no better motivation, to help you with your goal than someone else who’s doing it with you. Emmons quotes a study that found that participants in a weight loss program who were recruited individually had a 76% completion rate of the program and 24% kept their weight off for 6 months, while those who were recruited along with friends had a 95% completion rate and a 66% maintenance rate.

As social beings, we naturally reinforce each others’ thoughts, feelings and behaviours, the group norms. If you start a group with positive norms, chances are good that it will help towards a positive outcome.

photo credit: Let Ideas Compete

8. Make a Vow

Again from Emmons: Research suggests that a verbal vow, as compared with a written commitment or no commitment at all, increases the likelihood that you’ll carry through with an intention. It seems we still take our given word seriously.

9. Use Good Words

The basis of the highly successful practice known as cognitive therapy is to shift behaviour by shifting thoughts. One intriguing study of antidepressant drugs found that even though it took several weeks before patients felt better, the number of negative thoughts they had reduced almost as soon as they started taking the drugs. While telling yourself lies, that you know to be lies, about yourself is counterproductive, there is something to be said for using the way you phrase things to shift the way you think. “I’m getting fit”, for example, is a good phrase if you want to cultivate a habit of exercise.

10. Act As If

Thoughts, feelings and behaviour feed into one another. Changing your thoughts will change your feelings, and changing your feelings will change your behaviour, but changing your behaviour will change your feelings too. Do the thing that you want to succeed at, and it will come to feel more and more natural as you practice it and build your skills from a basic to an advanced level.

So there are 10 ways to cultivate positive change. My suggestion: Pick one, and try it today.

Technorati Tags: habits, behaviour change, personal change, practice, motivation

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As I’ve been presenting it so far, the Welcoming Practice is simply this: When you become aware of a powerful negative emotion, you pay attention to it, allow it into your awareness, and welcome it by name. You say something like “Welcome, anger”, and then allow anger to be, and then allow anger to go. And then you go on with your life without having reinforced your usual emotional cycle.

photo credit: Incase Designs

The Emotional Circuit

I’ve talked about the cycle (or circuit) in depth in earlier posts in the series, but to review, it starts with the three emotional programs for happiness: power and control, esteem and affection, and security and survival. These programs condition our attachments and aversions, the things we move towards and the things we move away from, and from those we generate hidden agendas with which we go through life.

Inevitably, our hidden agendas clash with those of others (or with things that just happen in life) in triggering events, which lead to an experience of frustration. At this point, we can go one of two ways. We can break the cycle using a “circuit breaker” such as the Welcoming Practice, or we can go on around the cycle of identifying with the afflictive emotion, which leads to well-practiced internal dialogue about how this always happens to us and it’s someone’s fault and it’s not fair, followed by emotional turmoil which takes us right back round into the emotional programs for happiness again. Round and round and round.

photo credit: alanwoo

The Welcoming Prayer

So, the Welcoming Practice (as I call it) is a circuit breaker, one of a number. But the Welcoming Prayer is a little bit more. It’s the creation of the late Mary Mrozowski, and came together in the context of the Centering Prayer movement, which is where I encountered it. (All of this material – the emotional programs for happiness, the cycle, and the Welcoming Prayer – is covered in Cynthia Bourgeault’s book Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, chapter 13.)

There are three steps to the Welcoming Prayer. The first, which arises from Mary Mrozowski’s background with biofeedback, is to “focus and sink in”: that is, to become aware of your physical sensations connected with the experience of frustration. Bear in mind that you are using these sensations to become “associated, but not identified” – by paying attention to the physical sensations, you pull yourself out of your head and are no longer swept along helplessly inside the current of emotion, but you are also not dissociating or repressing. You are aware of the emotion.

The second step is the “welcome” itself. This is the hardest part to understand. Why are we welcoming this thing again? Don’t we want to be rid of it? And this is the secret of the welcoming prayer: It’s not about being rid of the emotion (though that is going to be the outcome). It’s about remaining conscious and present rather than fleeing to the comfort of the internal dialogue and the emotional programs for happiness.

It also (this bears repeating and repeating, because it’s the thing that we keep getting wrong) isn’t about welcoming the context or the situation which has led to frustration. Often this context is genuinely bad and not something we should welcome – it may be abuse, cruelty or injustice. We are welcoming, not the context, but the content. We are welcoming our own reaction and owning it as a part of ourselves – and in so doing we are remaining connected to that part of ourselves and increasing our integration as people.

photo credit: alborzshawn

The first two steps are not to be rushed. The more you practice, the quicker they get, on average, but the third step comes along in its own time, sometimes after you’ve gone back and forth a few times between being aware of the physical sensations of emotion and welcoming the emotion as part of yourself. When the emotion begins to dissolve and evaporate, as it will, you make a mental gesture of letting go of it. Clinging to it carries you right on round the circuit. Letting go of it allows you to move on without reinforcing your emotional pattern.

How do you make this mental gesture? You may open your hand, in your mind or literally, as if you were letting a small bird fly free. Or you may use words.

One form of words you can use is simply “I let go of my anger” (or whatever emotion it might be). But there’s also the litany that Mary Mrozowski used, if you dare:

I let go my desire for security and survival.
I let go my desire for esteem and affection.
I let go my desire for power and control.
I let go my desire to change the situation.

Boom! That’s huge. That’s really breaking the cycle in a dramatic fashion, because what you’re doing is giving a vote of no confidence to the emotional programs for happiness and acknowledging that they aren’t going to take you anywhere that is ultimately satisfying. You’re remaining present to the real situation as it is, and recognising that the really important thing is how you respond to it.

That may be at a higher level of development than where you currently find yourself (it’s higher than I currently find myself, I don’t mind admitting). But people who use it consistently become very, very remarkable people.

UPDATE: I’ve now revised the material in this series and turned it into a self-reflection process as part of my ebook, Your Emotional Hamster Wheel and How to Get Off It. It’s included when you sign up for my free Simple Stress Management Techniques course.

Technorati Tags: emotion, Welcoming Prayer, Centering Prayer

Related posts:

1. A Transforming Practice
2. Breaking the Emotional Cycle: Introduction
3. The Three Emotional Programs for Happiness: Esteem and Affection

Got that clear in all your senses? Close your eyes if you need to.

Now, imagine, just as vividly, that you are in one of the cars and it is taking you somewhere you don’t want to go.

photo credit: kevindooley

It’s a very different experience, isn’t it? That’s the difference between being associated and being identified.

Let me explain those terms quickly. When you’re associated (as opposed to dissociated), you are connected to what’s going on, aware of it, paying attention to it, but from a position of being an observer – you are looking at it in the third person, if you like. On the other hand, when you’re identified, you’re immersed in the experience. It’s like the difference between being in a boat and being in a river.

photo credit: Orangeadnan – Photo Art

I remember an interesting experience of being associated, but not identified, from an acting class I took years ago. In the class, we were partnered up, and we had to act out a scene with our partners. The script my partner and I were using was a domestic dispute between a couple, and it called for me to act angry.

Now, I wasn’t actually angry. I was pretending. But leaving the class afterwards, I felt the sensations of anger in my body, while simultaneously knowing that I wasn’t really angry. It was rather like those dreams where a place both is and isn’t your house.

The reason I took the acting class in the first place was to help me to become more comfortable about expressing emotion. I used to be very poorly connected to my emotions, which led, inevitably, to my being driven by them unconsciously. My friends would ask me if I was upset and I would honestly deny it, because I didn’t feel upset, even though they could hear it in my voice and see it on my face. I was, in fact, dissociated from my emotions a lot of the time.

photo credit: vancouverfilmschool

The acting class was an important step in connecting to my emotions, and by a stroke of fortunate timing, I took it just before my father died unexpectedly. I was able to grieve my loss much better as a result.

Over the next couple of years, I was able to develop my first successful romantic relationship and get married. Within our marriage, I’m able to express all kinds of emotions, positive and negative, in what is usually a helpful way. (I say “usually” because, as with anything else, the learning continues.)

These are the benefits of being associated to my emotions. I recognize them, I can name them, I’m aware that they’re going on, and I can express them appropriately.

Of course, sometimes I go beyond being associated into being identified. I run out into the traffic and jump into a car. I fall out of the boat and am swept away by the current.

photo credit: trenarren

But that happens very rarely these days, because I know how to use the Welcoming Prayer.

The secret of the Welcoming Prayer is that you are associated, but not identified. The basic form of the Welcoming Prayer is to pause, recognize the emotion with which you are becoming identified, and welcome it by name. You aren’t welcoming the circumstances; you’re welcoming the emotion, and that requires that you recognize it and pay attention to it and name it.

Paying attention to it and naming it sets up a process which was explored in a brain scan study published in Psychological Science by Matthew D. Lieberman and colleagues. The parts of your brain which handle emotion are conveniently located deep down inside, close to the brainstem, which connects to your spinal cord, and other very basic, well-protected parts of the brain which regulate your breathing, heartbeat, blood pressure and so forth. This is why they can so quickly and efficiently get your body ready to fight or escape danger.

photo credit: thomascrenshaw

Most of the time in modern life, though, the kinds of things that get us wound up are not things we can physically fight or run away from. Getting our bodies ready for physical effort that isn’t going to happen is counterproductive; it fills our bodies with chemicals that aren’t going to be used and, left unused, can cause damage over time. So what we want to do is calm this reaction down.

When we name the emotion, what it does is create a circuit from deep inside our brains out to the verbal parts of the brain, which are closely connected with rational thought and higher-level decision-making. This circuit seems to bleed off the activation of the deep, emotional brain and calm it down. Your perspective shifts, and you’re no longer identified with the emotion, feeling an experience of (for example) overwhelming anger taking control of your whole being; you are associated with the emotion, paying attention to it and being aware of it, but from the outside.

It’s extremely simple – but it works. Consult my page on the Welcoming Practice for the instructions, and give it a try.

UPDATE: I’ve now revised the material in this series and turned it into a self-reflection process as part of my ebook, Your Emotional Hamster Wheel and How to Get Off It. It’s included when you sign up for my free Simple Stress Management Techniques course.

Technorati Tags: emotion, Welcoming Prayer, overwhelming emotion, dissociation, emotional expression

Related posts:

1. One Simple Step Towards Managing Emotions
2. Don’t suppress emotions – think: brain imaging study
3. The Welcoming Practice: Letting Go

Our two cats, who used to lie in the middle of the hall perfectly comfortably, have taken to dashing through it at top speed as if something is about to jump out and eat them. We have no idea what happened, but somehow or other they’ve developed a fear of the hall.

photo credit: kaibara87

The emotional program for happiness that the cats are operating under is the program for security and survival, and fear is the characteristic emotion. Now, I don’t want to get too doctrinaire about the characteristic emotions of the three emotional programs – anger for power/control, sadness for esteem/affection, and fear for security/survival. They are strong tendencies rather than absolutes; indicators, diagnostic symptoms if you like. These emotions can sometimes be converted into each other – and if you think about it, the programs themselves are not necessarily separate sealed boxes either. Humans are social creatures, so esteem and affection affect security and survival, power and control. If we are rejected and despised by our social group, we have more difficulty getting the resources we need to survive, and less control over our lives. Turning it around, having power and control is famously a generator of esteem and affection.

With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s look in more depth at the emotional program of security and survival.

Security and survival isn’t just about physical security and survival, naturally. It’s just as much about our self-image, our financial security, our security from change, and our survival unchanged. Deep down in our brains, most of us are intensely conservative – we resist personal change, because there’s always a sense in which change brings about the death of our former selves. We fear change, because change, even good change, is a risk and a small death.

photo credit: 1031

And security includes feeling like we’re able to cope with life, to deal with what it throws at us. I often see anxious people in my hypnotherapy practice, and frequently what they’re anxious about is that someone, usually a parent, has given them an image of what they’re supposed to be like, and they don’t believe they can do it. They’re terrified of doing something wrong (perhaps because, at a key time in their lives, everything they did was characterised as wrong). So they try, as much as possible, not to do things.

Susan Jeffers wrote a book about this very issue, called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. I have to admit I haven’t read it, but a friend of mine did, and embarked on the amazing program of doing something that frightened him every day. Naturally, he saw great personal growth as a result.

And here we start to touch on the secret which I’ll talk about in more depth in my next post in this series. Part of the key to the Welcoming Prayer, which is a way to bypass the misdirection we get from the three emotional programs for happiness, is to connect to the emotion and then let it go. We call people “courageous” when they continue in the face of fear, when they risk their security and even survival in service of a higher goal or greater ideal. Most of us in the modern world won’t be called upon to risk our physical survival, but we all have an implicit challenge to risk what we are now in pursuit of what we can be.

Next time: how to be connected to your emotions without being overwhelmed.

UPDATE: I’ve now revised the material in this series and turned it into a self-reflection process as part of my ebook, Your Emotional Hamster Wheel and How to Get Off It. It’s included when you sign up for my free Simple Stress Management Techniques course.

Technorati Tags: fear, happiness, emotion, Welcoming Prayer, survival, security

Related posts:

1. The Three Emotional Programs for Happiness: Esteem and Affection
2. The Three Emotional Programs for Happiness: Power and Control
3. Breaking the Emotional Cycle: Introduction