scienceofselfhealing.com

No matter what you do, who you see, or what you read in order to find ways to change your life, one thing requires understanding and acceptance: the responsibility for change is always and in all ways yours, and no one else’s. It doesn’t matter how much money you spend, there is no magic wand or pill that produces permanent change. With tools you can easily learn to use, YOU are the change-agent, and YOU are what changes - not the world or anyone else in it. And a lot of people working on their own give up too soon because they don’t understand this, or don’t accept it. For them, the elusive magic dust is always just out of reach.

Think of it this way - which option sounds achievable: changing the world around you, including people, or changing yourself and the way you perceive and interact with that world and those people?

If you chose the first option, be prepared to battle endlessly to change what can’t be changed, and to lose that battle. On the other hand, if you chose the latter, you’re correct, AND realistic in your expectations, and if you decide to change yourself by finding the tools that will help you, and using them, you’ll succeed in your undertaking.

When I work with clients, I share this responsibility in the beginning of our work together. In addition to being guided through a process of change, they learn how to use the tools that will work most effectively for them in “hard-wiring” the changes we make together. They also learn that they can use these tools on their own for the rest of their lives to make what I call “course corrections” along the way. It’s up to my client, however, to do the work of using the tools to maintain the changes and continue to grow.

For more information about change-work, look here:  http://scienceofselfhealing.com/services/private

In order to successfully change something in your life or yourself, understand that you are the architect of your own universe. Accept responsibility for everything both good and “bad” in your life today, and recognize your role in creating it.

Does that mean it’s your fault that something terrible happened to you when you were a child? No way. It means that how you deal today with that fact, and those memories, is a choice; you can blame your current problems on what happened in your past, or recognize that if you’re going to be rid of your problems you can only change yourself, in the here and now; you’re not going to be changing something that happened in the past.

Your thoughts, actions, decisions, and beliefs create your world. There is no issue of blame or fault; rather, this is the acknowledgment that your choices produce results. The way you choose to respond or react to the world around you is the cause, and the results of your choice are the effect. When you realize that your response has a greater effect on your world than the circumstance itself, then change becomes possible.

If you blame something or someone else for what’s happening in your life, you give that person or thing power over you; you’re saying that you’re helpless, “It’s their fault, not mine.” Well, guess what? THEY are not going to change you or change your life for you, only YOU can do that. And to do it, you have to accept the job of change-agent for your self. It’s possible and not even too difficult to change the way you respond to your world; the same cannot be said for changing the world around you.

Science has determined what the Ancients already knew: everything vibrates, or said another way, everything is energy. We also know, based on science, that energy of a certain vibration attracts energy of a similar vibration - this is known as the Law of Vibration, first referenced several thousand years ago, and today commonly called the Law of Attraction. And THOUGHT IS ENERGY.

What wasn’t discussed in detail in the film The Secret is that all the positive words you can think of will not compensate for negative thoughts and feelings that run on a different level of your consciousness. For instance, let’s say you’re consciously visualizing an island vacation, soaking up sun, playing in the surf, eating dinner oceanside, but underneath your vision, a little voice is saying, “Right, like that’s going to happen; what do you think, money grows on trees? How are you going to pay for THAT?”

You now have positive words and pictures coming from your conscious mind, being undermined by negative thought patterns from your unconscious mind, and it takes a lot of positive thoughts to outweigh a negative one. It’s enough to derail manifestation of your vision.

Why does your unconscious mind do that? Because it’s been programmed by the events and experiences of your life to expect certain things and react in certain ways. Perhaps there was a lack of money in your family when you were a child, or your parents experienced the Great Depression of the twentieth century. Even though they were children at the time, the fear of lack and scarcity during that period may have determined their adult lifestyle, and therefore your lifestyle. You may even have learned or inherited their fear.

Fear is a negative emotion, and old negative emotions, remembered by your unconscious mind (it remembers everything that’s ever happened to you) are a central factor in why some people think the Law of Attraction doesn’t work. It works, it just doesn’t work unless you’re fully congruent about what you want, and by that I mean without conflict between your conscious and unconscious minds. This is the real secret.

Some people find it easier than others to convert to the positive on both levels of consciousness, and some find it impossible to do so without help. That’s because negative emotions from the past, which are still held on the unconscious level, have created negative thought and behavior patterns that run automatically and below the surface in response to the environment and the events within it.

There is a way around this. Releasing negative emotions from the past disconnects those behavior patterns and gives you an opportunity to create new patterns. Once this happens it’s possible to achieve the congruence necessary to make the Law of Attraction work for you.

Sound interesting? If you’d like to know more, see the information on my website regarding BreakThrough Programs.

Have you ever wondered why something you considered beautiful was considered uninspiring at best by someone else? Or why eye-witnesses to accidents or crimes never seem to agree on what happened? Or why an event from childhood that you remember with joy is remembered with anger or sadness by your sibling, or maybe not recalled at all?We take information in through our senses (sight, sound, feel, taste, scent, etc.), process it with our critical thinking faculty (i.e. conscious mind) and send it to the unconscious mind for storage. Perception is the meaning, or label, we attach to that information. The catch is that we’re bombarded by enormous amounts of information every second - different sources say anywhere from 2 million to 400 billion bits of information per second, 24/7, waking and sleeping - and the conscious mind can’t process (attach meaning to) all of it.

The conscious mind can process only an infinitesimal amount of this information - an average of 130 bits per second. Using a hierarchy of selection, your conscious mind picks the information most important to it in that second, and someone else’s chooses what’s most crucial to them in that moment. With so much information to choose from, the likelihood that two people will choose all the same information is low to non-existent, & the probability that those two people will attach the same meaning to the common bits is, well, just not going to happen. This is why each of us has our own unique perception of the world around us.

To paraphrase Mike Dooley, the delightful and inspiring speaker, author, and creator of TUT.com (TUT=Totally Unique Thoughts), it’s as if everyone on Earth wears glasses, and every pair of glasses has different colored lenses. The lenses not only color the scene differently, but based on their color, they may also block out certain other colors. Some lenses might block the color blue, others the color yellow. You can see how this would give each wearer a different picture (perception) of the world around them. Oh, and you can’t trade glasses with anyone else; you can only IMAGINE what they see!

The same principle is at work when our minds are selecting which information to pay attention to. As with the hypothetical glasses, you can’t trade your perceptions with someone else so they’ll see what you see, or vice versa. You CAN, however, understand that there’s a reason why individuals have different views of people, places, things, and events, and why it’s such a waste of energy to try to convince others that they’re wrong and you’re right. You’re both right, based on the information your minds are processing!

We’re each doing the best we can with what we have to work with, and what we have to work with are our perceptions of the world around us. Can those perceptions be changed? Yes. We can each, individually, create change within ourselves that will help us perceive differently, so the answer is a qualified “yes.” Qualified, because while we can mindfully change our own perceptions about what’s happening around us, we cannot do it for others.

If you want change, your only choice is to change YOU in some way, and understanding how perception works when interacting with the world around you is another step on the path to change.

I recently saw a banner hanging across the road - “Crop Walk - End Hunger,” it said, and it caught my attention because it focuses on the wrong thing.

I’m not saying that I think there should be hunger. What I’m saying is that putting energy into what you don’t want actually adds power to the wrong side of the issue. To say “End Hunger” actually gives energy to hunger; this is focusing on what’s not wanted. “Feed the hungry,” on the other hand, focuses on the desired outcome.

Think of it this way: studies have shown that when a group of people get together to collectively pray for the recovery of a seriously ill person, their prayers get results. These prayers are not said against the ailment or injury from which the person suffers; the prayers are said for the healing of that person. In other words, the prayers that work focus on what’s wanted (healing), NOT on what’s not wanted (illness, injury, disease).

Putting energy into what you want - individually or collectively - creates an energetic shift that makes it more likely that you’ll get it. This is why I tell all my clients to focus on what they want. This works on a group basis too, so whether it’s a political candidate, war vs. peace, illness vs. health, or hunger vs. food, put your energy into the one you WANT. Envision your favored candidate winning, peace where there’s conflict, health where there’s illness, or food where there’s hunger.

A nice side effect - it feels good! It literally feels better to focus on what you want rather than focusing on the opposite. It’s a subtle but very important shift in attention, INtention, and energy - try it!

Just what does it take to change your life? Where do you start? What do you do? I get asked these questions by those who never gave it a thought before that moment, and by those who have read every self-help book they’ve come across and still couldn’t find the starting point that worked for them.There are definitely some concepts to understand and accept if you want to change something in yourself and your life. Over the next few weeks, I’ll tell you about some of them, beginning this week with The Mind/Body Connection.

The mind/body connection is created by naturally occurring chemicals in the brain called neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters communicate your emotions, among other things, to every one of the trillions of cells in your body. Each cell has a physical reaction to every thought and feeling; subsequently, your thoughts and feelings have a direct impact on your physical well-being as well as your reality.

If you experience very strong negative feelings (emotions) often enough and for prolonged periods of time, your immune system can be compromised - things happen in your body that can result in a weakened ability to fight off disease or other health-related problems.

Consider this: physical pain is your unconscious mind screaming that there’s a negative emotion that you’ve ignored long enough to push it into physical manifestation. So remember that negativity is unhealthy for mind and spirit, and also for the physical body. When you experience it, ask yourself if it’s worth it - you may find that it’s not, & you’ll know that you’re on the path to change.