Tag Archive for: depression

A New Paradigm in Emotional Healing

Reading Time: 3 minutes

For awhile now, the approach to emotional healing has been to notice what the problem issue is, such as anxiety or depression, and then manage the symptoms the best you can with medications or coping skills. There is certainly a time and place for symptom management. However, as consciousness rises, a new perspective in healing is emerging which is to view the emotional symptoms as not something to fight against, but instead as something that is yearning for your full attention, because it is ready to be released from your body/mind system. And in so doing, you will also understand why it has been there, like a puzzle to solve.

A natural response to a triggered feeling, such as anger or fear, is to avoid it. However, when you give it your full presence, a type of alchemical reaction takes place. The feeling becomes reduced to a sensation in the body. As you become fully present with this sensation and allow your awareness to sink deeper into the heart of it, you shift from thinking mode to feeling mode. This means two things: 1) you no longer suffer because suffering is generated by the thinking mind, and 2) you become present-moment focused and able to access the subconscious mind. As a result, images or pictures can emerge that give clues as to what the triggered emotion relates to. And as you dive still further into the sensation, other feelings may emerge that underlie the triggered emotion. These are the layers of thoughts, feelings and beliefs that hold the triggered emotion in place. Ultimately, as you allow your consciousness to drop through the physical sensations of all the layers of emotion, you may eventually find your consciousness immersed in a vast nothingness. This usually marks the nearing of the end of the journey, because as you continue to focus intently on this nothingness and notice what’s deeper still, you begin to feel a very light, vast, expansive presence that you are not separate from. This is who you are at your core self…a boundless, infinite presence of oneness which is your deepest essence. In this bottom foundational layer, the words commonly used to describe it are “love, freedom, peace, joy, light, and expansiveness.” There is no longer emotion, but pure awareness, and you know and experience your true self to be this presence which underlies all feelings and limiting thoughts…exactly which people like Eckhart Tolle have been writing about! It’s also known as Source energy.

The result of steeping in this core Self is ultimate clarity. You fully see through all of the deep-seated negative, limiting feelings and beliefs that you have been operating from. An example might be “undeserving and unworthy of success and love”. These limiting feelings/beliefs are easily seen through as not having anything to do who you are, but rather they are seen for what they actually are…an untrue mind program that got passed down, usually through the generations like an unconscious virus. In that moment you know without a doubt that who and what you actually are goes far beyond any limiting thought or belief, thus these limiting beliefs begin to release their grip on your subconscious mind and your identity. Thus you awaken to your true self.

Lately I’ve been guiding many of these healing inner journeys to freedom as part of the Emotional Healing Session that I use. I first read about the process years ago in a book by Brandon Bays titled The Journey, a book well worth the read. I’ve since observed a number of practitioners who use variations of this healing process which essentially utilizes negative feelings as a portal to the profound peace that we all possess within ourselves. It’s been my experience that healing happens in layers, and each journey inward allows you to feel more peace, joy, clarity and freedom as the negative mind programs lose their grip on your subconscious mind and identity. Guiding people to fully experience their true, authentic Self is absolutely part of the new paradigm in emotional healing.

How to Love Yourself

How to Love Yourself

Reading Time: 3 minutes

One day when I was leading a group, someone shared that their goal was to learn to love themselves, but felt it was an impossible task. Others agreed with this statement. Most of them were either bombarded with an endless barrage of negative self-talk, or they felt strong guilt from some past actions. I offered that the easiest way to love yourself is to really know your yourself…to realize that you aren’t who you think you are. The ‘you’ that you have a hard time loving isn’t really ‘you’. You are not your programming and conditioning. Negative thoughts about self come from somewhere, they all have a beginning point in an event or circumstance – you’re not born with these thoughts, unless there’s a past life influence, but even then they began at some point in that past life or the one before, etc. Sometimes the programming can be subtly and unconsciously passed down through the generations, with parents influencing their children based on how they were raised, how love or anger was communicated or not communicated.

Just like you can open the hood of a car to explore how it’s wired and how it works, you can engage in deep self-reflection to see how your programming and conditioning began. An effective way to do this exploration is to go within to access a higher state of awareness. For example, if you have a strong feeling of guilt because of a past action, you could imagine floating above that scene and investigate what was going through your mind at the time. Perhaps you did something regretful because at the time you thought you were gaining or getting something from it, given the mindset that you had of yourself and the world at that time. The only purpose of guilt is to point to what you could do differently next time, and in that moment of awareness you are doing precisely what your highest purpose in life is…to learn, grow, evolve and awaken. The primary way humans learn is by making mistakes. So from the viewpoint of your soul, mistakes are only seen as an opportunity to grow, and in that moment of seeing, your soul is happy. The highest part of you is timeless and guiltless; it doesn’t care how long it takes to get a lesson. Just as you can tinker with a machine to make it run more smoothly, we can be aware of the amazing impact we would have on ourselves and the world if we released the negative thought programs that govern our life and replace them with clarity, confidence, creative potential and freedom – all qualities of our truest self. We’re not here to berate ourselves, or remain stuck and recoiled in fear and guilt, living from a false sense of self. We’re here to challenge ourselves to shine and thrive, to learn to live from our potential, and to experience that the joy of doing so feels better, freer and “more real”.

You are the infinite being that can be aware of a passing mood or thought, and investigate where beliefs originated. There’s a part of you that can be aware of your thoughts. Who or what is this ‘I’ that can say ‘I’ feel happy, and then can notice ‘I’ feel sad 10 minutes later? Thoughts, moods and beliefs can come and go, but the more permanent ‘real’ you is the constant, unchanging awareness, forever anchored in the here and now, that can notice the mind’s ever-changing moods and thought patterns, like watching sticks or debris washing down a stream. The awakened sage, Eckhart Tolle, says the next step in human evolution is to become aware of our thoughts, thus creating a gulf between ‘us’ and our thought patterns. Therein lies the difference between suffering and liberation. It depends on where we place our identity…the ever-changing mind or the mysterious, expansive, boundless awareness that can witness it.

 

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What is Hypnosis?

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‘Hypnosis’ is perhaps one the most misunderstood words that exists. It is actually the opposite of what most people think, which is often derived from stage hypnotists and movies. The two main myths are: 1) you are not in control; 2) you are not awake and aware. No matter how deep you go in hypnosis, you will be in control and you will always be wide awake and aware. For example, when you are swept up in the drama of a film in a movie theater, you are actually in a fairly deep state of hypnosis. In an engaging movie, you are very focused on the story that is unfolding on the screen to the point that you barely notice the people eating popcorn near you. But of course you’re not asleep…you know that if you wanted, you could get up at anytime and buy popcorn or use the bathroom. The same is true with any form of hypnotherapy – even at the deepest point of the session — if you wanted to, you could open your eyes and declare that you want to use the bathroom, or write something down, etc. It’s just a different level of consciousness that you’re accessing.

Hypnosis is a relaxation of the body and mind, together with a focusing of the mind. A definition of hypnosis is “a bypass of the analytical and critical thinking factor of our minds.” To apply this to the movie example, it’s when we don’t continually tell ourselves during the film: “what’s happening on that screen is not real, it’s only light images from a projection booth, and besides, those people on the screen are only acting, none of this is real, etc…”. If we continually focused on those facts, we could not let go and enjoy the movie. We go into varying states of hypnosis every day, such as when you are driving down a road while being lost in a daydream. Therefore, anyone can and has been hypnotized.

It’s important to know that all hypnosis is really self-hypnosis. I don’t actually hypnotize you – you hypnotize yourself using my suggestions and your imagination. Therefore, you can allow yourself to go into as deep of a hypnotic experience as you want to be, and you’ll always be awake and aware, knowing that you’re in the chair. During the experience, you may hear a car going by, or a dog barking outside, but none of that disturbs you as you continually focus inward.

The power of hypnotherapy is that we can use it to access and change the subconscious thought patterns that govern our lives. When we dream at night, sometimes those dreams are filled with metaphors that mirror the issues that are going on with us, whether we are aware of them or not. Who gives us these dreams? No one else does, yet we don’t consciously give it to ourselves. It comes from an unconscious, very wise part of us. Using hypnotherapy, we can easily access the same part of us that gives us our dreams, yet the difference is that we are awake and aware during the process. It is a very effective tool in healing because we can access and heal the emotional core of our anxieties or any stuck, limiting pattern where the root of the problem lies – the subconscious mind.

With spiritual hypnotherapy we can also access information from other lives that our eternal soul has lived, simply because we cannot separate ourselves from our indestructible soul self which exists outside of time and space. As we quiet our thinking mind and go deep within, we can tune into our “more permanent”, eternal aspect of ourselves.

A Sure Antidote for Depression and Anxiety

Reading Time: 2 minutes

There is a reliable antidote for depression and anxiety, and that is wisdom, which is to understand a “truer” version of yourself, which is to spiritually wake up, which means beginning to identify more with the life energy behind the body and less with the mental and emotional programming of the body form. The biggest value of past life regression is that it essentially helps in this process of spiritually waking up because you can directly feel and experience yourself as the life that animates the form. It can’t be known by thought, but from a higher dimension of consciousness beyond thought, whereby which you experience yourself as vast eternal stillness and presence.

From the perspective on earth, the sun appears to rise each morning and set each evening. But this is only relatively true. From space, it’s known that the sun never actually rises or sets, but shines continuously. Similarly, the identification of being the human is only “relatively true”, and according to the Buddha, is the root of suffering. As you become more aware of the one sustaining life behind not only your body, but all other forms, and you identify with it more and more, the subtle beliefs behind depression and anxiety begin to fall away. You identify more as a being of pure creative potential, which in actuality is a “truer, more absolute” version of yourself. This is a truth that can be known by experience, and not merely as an intellectual concept.

Eckhart Tolle writes that the most significant thing that can ever happen to a human being is the process of becoming aware of your thoughts. As this happens, you eventually begin to identify less with the incessant mind stream of negative chatter that holds you back in life, and more with the awareness that notices a thought or a subtle unconscious, limiting belief. This is the beginning of the “waking up” process, where you see an out-dated thought or belief for what it is…just faulty mental conditioning that you believe in less and less. Again, the biggest value of past life regression is that you fully experience the separation between you and the incessant thought stream. You instead experience yourself as vast stillness, awareness, and enormous potential. From that vantage point, all negative beliefs about yourself seem erroneous and silly. In this manner, it serves to help you in the “waking up” process.