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Moving to a stress-free reality

How to Successfully Ruin Your Life in 3 Easy Steps

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How to Successfully Ruin Your Life in 3 Easy Steps

by Robert S. Vibert

Here you will find exactly what you’ve been searching for! This vital information is not covered by those magazines at the checkout counter that you have been browsing through for years, nor those hundreds of websites and books you have been reading. Here you will also discover the latest and greatest details on what you absolutely need to do. And, best of all, it will be explained in three easy steps! Read on!

If you have paid any attention to the average recent article on just about anything, then you’ll not be surprised by the claims made above. They are rather routine and common while still being new and improved! And, best of all, they are not to be found anywhere else! They are yours exclusively… not counting everyone else who is reading this, of course.

Now, on to the meat of the question, or the pumpkin, if you are vegetarian. How exactly does one ruin one’s life in three easy steps? You may be surprised to discover that it is very easy and requires no initial investment. In fact, it will cost you nothing at all! (Unless you want the hard copy, which is available for a modest processing fee…)

Without further ado, here is what you’ve been waiting breathlessly for all your life, or at least since you started reading this. (Do take a breath now, as it will make it even easier, if that is possible, to take in all this wonderful material.)

Step One: Pay no heed to what is going on with you and the world

Even though there are all kinds of important things happening around you all day long, you really should ignore them as much as possible. If you pay any attention to them, you might make informed decisions, and you certainly don’t want to do that. Ignorance is always the best defense!  You can claim that you did not know that products go on sale at the supermarket every week, and that is one of the reasons why you are always short on cash.  You can also state for a fact that you have no idea why your car keeps breaking – who knew it needed to be serviced regularly??! Generally speaking, you want to be as oblivious as possible to the happenings of the world.

With regard to your self, it also best to completely ignore the signals your body and emotional heart are giving you. Numb down those physical pains with massive doses of painkillers and distractions, as you don’t want to know that you might need to change your habits or get out of that chair and exercise a little. And, if your heart is complaining of emotional distress or pain, do your best to medicate that as well, using as many substances as you need, ranging from chocolate to ice cream to brownies and if that does not work, bring out the heavy guns: alcohol and drugs.

For good measure,  distract yourself with massive doses of TV, sports, romance novels, and any other distraction you can find. The last thing you want to do is look at what might be troubling you. After all, if you notice anything about your life, you may have to own your part in it, and have to resign your membership in the Professional Victim of Circumstances Beyond Our Control Club.

Step Two: Focus exclusively on the small stuff

There are significant changes happening in the world today, including pollution, growing inflation, widespread bankruptcies, food shortages, catastrophic natural disasters, severe depletion of fish stocks, and increasing contamination of food by toxic industrial chemicals, to name just a few.  To be successful at ruining your life, you should have ensured that your mind wandered off in the middle of that last sentence. After all, you do not want any more than milliseconds of your attention to be on these sorts of problems. They are serious ones, so best you make sure to only pay attention to what immediately concerns you.  You know, stuff like the sports game on TV, what your favorite  celebrity is up to, and how traffic is flowing on the roads and behind the checkout counter in your local big box store. You can also add to this collection of minor stuff that you pay excessive attention to your latest sitcom and “reality” TV programs, fashion trends, computer games and anything else which is really not all that important to your survival or personal growth, but that does provide for mindless distraction.

You want to keep your attention firmly on those things which will keep you away from noticing that the world you live in is being neglected and abused at a wholesale level. Surely someone else will take care of all that boring stuff so you can focus on “whatever”.

Step Three:  Gain more skills

This last step is not so obvious to many people, as it has become part of the mantra of modern life. Much of the “education” we receive is based upon learning and perfecting skills. Day after day, we learn more and more skills and credential-ism reinforces this trend, as getting a new job often requires that we can list off an impressive group of skills and courses that we somehow managed to complete.  Whether or not we can actually remember and apply these skills in an effective manner or even judge when to apply one or none of them is usually ignored, so best you ignore that too. Just keep on acquiring more and more skills until you cannot remember when to use them or even how to really use them. You need to stockpile them, like arrows in your quiver, ready to be shot at a moment’s notice.

If you are trying to improve your relationship, for example, the Relationship Obtaining, Improvement, and Repair (ROIR) industry has dozens and dozens of skills they want you to learn as they are sold as absolutely essential to relationship success. You read about these all the time in the magazines of impeccable research sold at newsstands everywhere – you need to communicate better, you need to tickle more, you need to pander to your partner’s insecurities by constantly telling them how wonderful/pretty/thin/handsome they are, etc., etc.  Never mind that most relationship problems are caused by unresolved  inner emotional pain and traumas, and no amount of skills will fix that. The ROIR folks want you to learn these skills which are actually pretty useless for those who are suffering from the wounds of their past (i.e. about 99% of the population), so get out there and do that! Read another magazine article about how to fake it until you make it, even if that is a dismal approach to real success.

And, there you have it! Three simple steps guaranteed to make it easy to ruin your life. Consistently applying these steps will ensure that you regularly get sideswiped by things that happen in your life, that you waste a lot of time and energy on activities and substances that provide only temporary relief from what ails you, further draining your bank account and spirit. In short order, you can join the hordes of happy sufferers who spend most of their time complaining about the sad state of their affairs, looking about puzzled at where they are in their life. If you really want to ruin your life, there are many more steps that you can take, but given that they actually might require some effort, best we leave them for another day.

What’s that you are saying? You don’t actually want to ruin your life?  Then why did you read this article? Were you enticed by the “three easy steps” and missed the part about it being an article on ruin, not on success? Oh, you are actually looking to improve your life? And you noticed how many of the resources you have been consulting are like recipes that require lots of steps and skills you must develop and yet you wonder how they could actually work.

Well, far be it from our normal procedure to present more than one main concept in a single article, what with all the union rules on that sort of thing, but here’s a hint:

When you find it hard to improve on any life skill, look for what is blocking that effort. More than likely, it is an emotional issue with that subject. Once you resolve the emotional issue (usually by simply releasing the stored emotion) you can then get back to improving your life and developing whatever it was you were trying to, without that major distraction getting in the way. Succeeding is not complicated, but it does require that you put some effort into it, and stay focused on the important things in life, which are not money, celebrities or entertainment.  Any time you find it hard to focus on the bigger life picture, look inside and see what is being stirred up. Take care of that and the rest will much easier fall into place.

If on the other hand, you do want to ruin your life and remain a victim, then please diligently follow the three steps above and successful ruin is yours to be had!

Copyright 2011, Robert S. Vibert, all rights reserved. May be posted elsewhere with proper attribution and a link back to this blog.

 

AER is a system to enhance the natural human release mechanism. One of the recorded AER sessions is available for FREE at my Facebook public page. Other AER recordings are available for the low cost of $10 each.

Healing and our Brains

Change is not just about your thoughts

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I recently watched the film “The Living Matrix” which features the work of a number of people involved in examining how our world actually works.  It was a good film in many ways and explained well some of the top-level notions about quantum physics and the interconnectedness of life.

One of the things I noticed was the usual preponderance of people pronouncing that our thoughts determine so much in our lives, and the mention of NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming). Speaker after speaker emphasized the importance of our thoughts and how they affect us.

There was a small portion of the film that discussed the power of emotions and the power of the heart, and then the focus shifted back to the brain and thoughts. If one only had access to the material presented here, one could conclude that changing one’s thoughts was the key to better health, peace and happiness.

For a long time, I was in that same camp. I studied NLP and Hypnosis (Ericksonian Hypnosis was the basis for NLP), read books, took courses, listened to lectures, etc., etc. all about how to improve my mind. I can’t recall exactly when and how, but eventually an awareness in me was triggered – we’re not our thoughts and changing them is not the answer, but only part of the process of transformation.

The danger of specialization

I’ve written before about the conceit of the prefrontal cortex, that part of our brain that thinks it is charge and tries to overcome our emotions. One of the dangers of being too specialized is that one can miss all kinds of other information that lies on the periphery of our focus. This is what I observed when watching The Living Matrix. I saw a series of people, with brilliant minds and incredible aptitude, focusing almost all their attention on just one part of what makes up the complex beings that we are – our brains and thoughts.

What was missing from the film, and it is a big omission, is a discussion of how we are made up of, at the very least:

  • our emotions
  • our body sensations
  • our thoughts
  • our beliefs
  • our memories
  • our consciousness filters
  • our ways of being.

Humans are a complex organism and our various aspects are intertwined to such a degree that we must take a “whole person” view to properly honor our reality. We must acknowledge that each one of these aspects affects all the others.  Our thoughts do not stand alone nor do they drive the ship that is us.

To effect any substantial change in ourselves, we need to have our various aspects in alignment and agreement – we need to have congruency. The evidence to support this notion is all around us – many people say they want one thing, and yet it never appears in their life. They might blame all kinds of external factors, but it does not take very long to discover that their actions do not match their words and underneath there is dissension. They might have a life-long fear of success or a preconceived negative notion about their own self-worth or  a belief that it takes too much effort to attain that goal. It could also be dozens and dozens of other factors, any one of which is enough to introduce incongruency and internal dissension.

All together now

If one has the intention to change some aspect of one’s life, then one needs to become aware of how each of the various aspects is affecting the movement toward that goal. One needs to benignly notice the beliefs, the thoughts, the emotions, the memories, the body sensations, etc ,which are evoked when this goal is contemplated. Anything which is out of alignment needs to be gently brought into alignment. If a fear is present, for example, it must be released using some sort of technique such as AER. If a limiting belief is present, it needs to be acknowledged and released as well. The same is needed for all aspects which are not congruent with the movement toward the goal, and this is more a project of releasing blocks and dissension than it is about forcing oneself into conformity.

Next time you hear or read someone say that one needs to change one’s thoughts, remember that you are not your thoughts – they come and go, thousands of times during each day. Your thoughts influence you, yes. So do your emotions, your beliefs, your memories, your body sensations, etc..

Take a “whole person” approach, get your aspects into alignment,  and you may be surprised at how much easier it is to obtain your goals.

Copyright 2009, Robert S. Vibert

Healing and our Brains

A Breath of Fresh AER

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One of the conditions which so many people suffer from is emotional trauma and yet, this is also the condition which has been most in need of effective methods to resolve and release it. According to some research, it is possible that almost every one of us suffers some degree of emotional trauma during a point in our lives, and if we are exposed to repeated trauma, the effects are cumulative. What is needed is a way to take us from traumatized states to healthy ones, without costing a fortune or requiring many years of effort.

For more than twenty years, I carried around the weight of loss from the death of my father when I was barely out of my teens. Like most people, I created for myself a series of coping mechanisms to avoid touching the pain I held inside. In fact, although I did not consciously think about it, my coping mechanisms were designed to keep me safe from the grief, the anger, the sadness, etc. that had lodged in me the day I was told of his death. These feelings had never been fully felt since that day. I was walking in the middle of a crowd of thousands when someone who knew me approached and expressed their condolences. I was baffled – what were they talking about? In a moment, they blurted out that  my father had died while traveling. There I was, in the middle of so many people, and like others who find themselves in similar situations, not feeling comfortable to express openly all the emotions which surfaced. I stuffed the feelings inside that day and it was only 20 years later that I finally felt it was safe to really feel them.

My story is like that of many – we experience a traumatic shock to our system and instead of allowing the feelings to flow through us, we bottle them up. In the end, it does not matter why we bottle them, the fact that they are stuck inside us is what really needs to be addressed. Searching for the “why” is really a distraction from releasing those feelings.

Feelings need to flow

Research by people like Dr. Peter Levine, Dr. Robert Scaer and Dr. David Berceli into how humans experience and then store trauma in our brains and bodies confirms what I had noticed in my own journey of healing and then helping others: feelings are supposed to flow through and out of us, just like they do for animals.

Unfortunately, our evolutionary path has provided us with a double- edged sword – the prefrontal cortex. This part of our brain is excellent for analysis and figuring things out. It is also a serious impediment to letting go of trauma, as it constantly ruminates over traumatic events, keeping the trauma alive inside us.

As a result of personal experimentation and systematic analysis of all the healing modalities that I was exposed to, I came to a simple but important conclusion: if we don’t release our stored feelings, we will always carry
with us the pain of the past.

Pain, Pain Go Away, Come Again Another Day

The most common human response to an exposure to pain, especially trauma-related pain, is to move ourselves away from it. We use distractions such as TV, movies, sports, etc.  or medications to numb ourselves (alcohol, drugs, ice cream, chocolate, etc.).   We take trips, we engage in intense activities and endeavors, and we generally do whatever we can dream up to avoid feeling the pain.

While these are natural responses to pain, they are also counter-productive. The pain does not go away  – it is merely masked or ignored momentarily. The neural circuits in our brains which store the thoughts, the sounds, the images and most importantly the emotions/feelings related to a traumatic incident are all fully charged and ready to pop into our consciousness in a flash, triggered by something that reminds us of the incident.

My research and work with many people has shown that to release a stored emotional charge (activated neural circuits) one has to feel the emotion. Resisting it only keeps it present. Avoiding it only delays the inevitable. Feeling the feeling, and allowing it to flow through and out of us is what we were designed to do.

Ah, that sounds pretty simple, right? Just let go of the pain. Actually, it is that simple – but the fly in the ointment is your thinking brain. Emotions are not stored in the thinking parts of your brain, so just thinking about something traumatic is not enough to release it. If it was, people would go to see a talk therapist, tell their story once, and the trauma would be gone. This has not been the case, as countless people who have been in therapy for years can attest. Talking about trauma does bring some relief, but rarely, if ever, provides a release from it.

Three Steps to Success

The approach that I take with people is to facilitate this natural releasing process using three steps. The first is Awareness. We must be aware of the issue that we are experiencing, in particular the feelings that come up around an incident.

The second step is Expression, in which we briefly express what we are feeling. This expression can be as short as a single sentence such as “I feel anger” or a little longer if we want to be more specific. The key here is that we are honestly acknowledging the feeling, not engaging in a long talk about it – that would shift us into the thinking parts of our brain, and away from feeling.

The third step is Resolution and we get there by Releasing the stored feeling, allowing it to be as it is in the moment, and then allowing it to flow naturally out of us. I have borrowed from several traditional systems and modern healing techniques to come up with an efficient method to facilitate this natural releasing process. I call this method AER – Awareness Expression Resolution.

The word Resolution is important, as there are many systems which will enable a partial release of stored feeling, but essentially leave the neural circuits charged enough to be re- activated. With AER, our goal is to allow all the stored feeling(s) around an incident to flow out. The majority of people are able to release all of a feeling around an incident in less than 1 hour (often in minutes) , and once the feeling is fully released, it does not return to their system. The feeling flows out of them and they are free of it. As it is common for multiple feelings to exist in relation to an incident, each of these feelings in turn is released until the incident itself is only a flat, emotionless memory.

Practical and Inexpensive

One of the design principles that I kept in mind as I developed AER was that it should be something that anyone can learn in about 30 minutes and that should be available in an economical form. To that end, I have
created guided AER sessions for some commonly stored feelings that can be downloaded and followed. Each session takes 1 hour to complete and can be used as many times as desired. You can release sadness, for example, from as many incidents as you can recall using the same recording for each incident.

One of the tricky things I have found doing this work is that most people cannot believe that it is possible to actually release some strong emotion that they have been carrying around for years. And, truth be told, until I experienced it for myself, I would not have believed it either. Words alone are not enough here – one must actually have the experience of releasing to relate to it. And, once one has released one bothersome feeling, the door has opened to release any others that no longer serve you.

Copyright 2010 Robert S. Vibert, all rights reserved