I am sharing with you an article that I wrote for a publication a few months ago entitled “It’s all in your mind“. Treat it as a springboard for a deeper reflection on how your mind operates and the origins of real creativity.
It’s All In Your Mind!
By Helene Liu
www.TheMasterMindsGroup.com
I was at a party recently where one of the guests told us about an unusual health issue involving twitching nerves she had experienced and which puzzled her. She went to her GP who, after extensive checking and examining sent her back home. “There’s nothing wrong with you” he said, “It’s all in your mind”.
EVERYTHING starts in your mind
Since Descartes’ famous distinction between matter (i.e. the body) and the intangible (i.e., the mind), science has focused on the former and moved away from the latter.
However, many traditions that aim toward self-mastery, peace of mind and eventually enlightenment, have studied the mind for thousands of years, and most agree that “everything starts in the Mind” and goes as follow:
1. We take the information from the outside through our 5 senses to experience and make sense of the world.
2. We filter this information (DDG) by deleting (like when you can’t remember where you put your keys), distorting (like mistaking a coiled rope for a snake), and generalising (when we create a rule from an experience that will ALWAYS apply, like for example, a child learns that fire burns while playing with matches.)
The process of generalisation is fundamental to understand, as this is how we create the beliefs we hold about ourselves, about others, and the world at large, i.e., our programming.
Classic example: I worked with someone who used to be a really gifted champion swimmer when he was young. But no matter how hard he tried and what results he got, to his Dad, it was never good enough. So he really developed this belief that he was not good enough at anything, and this created a lot of stress in his life, because he was eternally unsatisfied and that affected his health, his relationship with his family and his well being.
Personal practice: “What did I generalise about myself, or about the world when I was young?”
3. The information, filtered out, is put together to create our own “internal representation”, i.e. our very own version of reality. And here is the point! There are as many versions of reality as there are human beings! Misunderstandings and conflict often arise because we don’t know that we have different internal representations of the world.
Classic example: someone who refrains from “burdening” others with his problems and who ends up coming across as cold and aloof.
Personal practice: “If I was (a man/a woman/20 years younger/from another country/living in another time etc…) how would I see this?”
4. This creation of our mind then impacts our emotional state, our physiology (body language), and eventually all our behaviours.
Classic example: Three years ago, a friend started to develop severe back pain shortly after his business started to run into difficulties. In a period of 3 months, the pain had grown so much that he could not walk up straight anymore and he could not sleep. Finally after agonising over it for weeks, he took the painful decision to close his business. I saw him 3 weeks later, he was walking perfectly well, and his back pain had all but disappeared. (This is a true story; I’m not making this up!)
How is all this relevant? What’s in it for you?
Bottom line is: when everything inside, every piece of who you are, is aligned and converges toward the same point, good things start to happen. It’s called the power of intention.
Classic example: I had my first inkling of the power of intention years ago as a student in France. I had been accepted at business school and after about a month, decided to change major from International Relations to Economics & Finance. I did not know ANYTHING about the power of intention then, I just knew that, 1. This had never been allowed before, and 2. I would not take no for an answer. I just had to change; my life depended on it. I won’t bore you with details, but I was the first student ever to be allowed to switch.
Positive Thinking is greatly overrated.
Positive thinking and affirmations are the equivalent of trying to heal a broken bone by sticking a colourful plaster on the skin. This for a very simple reason: they are conjured up and reside in the conscious mind. But our beliefs (remember the process of generalisation), programmes, learned experiences and habits and all the neurological power to run our body lie in the unconscious, an incredibly powerful part of us.
If you want to be wildly successful, powerfully loved, immensely rich, admirably attractive, but if as a child, you’ve been told that you are worthless, ugly and never good enough, those powerful messages will override your conscious desires.
OK, so what do I do then?
Tip #1 – Know What You Want & Say It The Way You Want
Most people are very clear about what they don’t want (‘I don’t want to feel scared every time I have speak in front of people’, ‘They don’t treat me well’ etc…), but have no idea what they want. There is a major difference between the two.
Your unconscious mind does not process negatives. To understand this, try not to think of a pink elephant. What do you have to think about? Well, a pink elephant of course! You have to think about what you don’t want to think about in order not to think about it. Does that feel different from “try to think of a white elephant”?
Anytime we formulate what we do not want, this is exactly where we direct our focus. And this also applies to false positives such as ‘I want to stop smoking’ (focus on smoking), or ‘I want to lose weight’ (focus on weight), (you’d rather say something like ‘I want to be fully healthy and breathe easily’, and ‘I want to be slim’).
Classic example: A potential client called me 2 weeks ago to ask whether he could come and see me for a career-related issue that was bothering him for the past year. I asked him to do the simple exercise below then to call me if he still needed to see me. He called 3 days later to thank me and let me know his problem was solved.
Personal practice: take a piece of paper and divide it into two columns. In the first one, write down everything that you don’t want in your life (personal or professional). Then, in the second column, just across each sentence, write what you want instead.
Tip #2 – Take the Bird’s Eye View
Dilemmas are one of the most common sources of anxiety and stress. There is an EASY way out, but it involves is a dramatic change in our thinking, i.e. the flexibility to think at higher logical levels or larger timeframes.
When you change your thinking scale, most daily life problems tend to dissolve because:
1. Only the absolutely essential tends to remain,
2. We integrate opposites
3. We become more comfortable with paradox.
To attain higher logical thinking levels on any issue in your life, ask any of the following questions:
– What is this an example of?
– For what purpose?
– What is the higher intention of this?
Take every opportunity to reflect on the situations in your life from the highest perspective.
Personal Practice (timeframe flexibility drill #1): Look at the past. Remember something that really upset you 10, 20, 30 or more years ago; do you remember how you felt about it then? Compare how you feel about it today, knowing what you know now. How is it different?
Personal Practice (timeframe flexibility drill #2): Look at the future. Think about something that upsets you now. How important will it be in one month, 1 year, 10 years, or 20 years from now? Project yourself on your time line into a time in the future, knowing what you know then, and turn around and look back into the past at that situation/person you were upset about. How do you feel about it then?
In conclusion
The secret to real wellness is congruence and detachment.
Congruence is what happens when you feel in control of your life, when you have a sense of meaning. You may not be the slimmest, the youngest, the smartest, the most powerful or the richest, but the compulsiveness to be so has disappeared. Congruence happens when there is an alignment of the unconscious programmes and the conscious desires, of who you are, what you value and how you live your life.
Classic example: I worked with a top female executive client once who was handling communication crisis for a large pharmaceutical company. She had been diagnosed with severe depression and she could not understand why. She was very efficient and persuasive, but she hated what she had to do. The main reason why she remained in the job was her massive income. After a few years, her conscious decision to remain in the job because of the high pay despite having to perform against her deepest beliefs and values had created a dissonance that manifested as depression.
Detachment does not mean not caring about others, but letting go of our attachments, fears, and dislikes. Striving for the best while paradoxically remaining completely unaffected when not getting the expected result.
To close, one of my favourite quotes by Rachel Carson, an American marine biologist and writer who is one of the major influences of the modern environmental movement, wrote in 1962 ‘The Human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery, not over nature but of ourselves’ (Silent Spring). This is more relevant today than ever.
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