Self-Inquiry

            My heart feels kind of heavy today. I’m not sure exactly why. The sun is shining. The birds are tweeting. The flowers are bidding goodbye for the season with an awesome array of final color. Life is peaceful. Love is present all around me. Yet, I feel something looming in the air that feels threatening.

            Have you ever felt that feeling before? The day is completely normal, but you almost feel as if something not-so-good could happen at any moment.

            When these times come up in my life, I do one of two things:

1.    I check my body for a feeling or a pain. If I find that there is something painful or slightly different going on, I do a Gestalt exercise with the feeling. The exercise consists of getting quiet and imagining that your pain is sitting across from you on a chair, as an individual. You begin to ask the pain or, in my case, the fear, why it has come to visit. Then you wait for an answer.

      Of course, you have to be willing to use your imagination (or your subconscious) to allow that part of you that needs to share information with you and can’t seem to access you, to actually be allowed to speak. Then you must actively listen. This could cause a conversation with two individual parts of your being.

      Don’t get freaked out! You don’t have multi-personalities. To be diagnosed with multiple personalities, you have to be consumed by an individual personality, and actually lose time and space, and forget what happened when you were consumed by that personality. That is not the case with what we are doing.

      Parts theory is investigating the different avenues of your brain that have compartmentalized, if you will, like nesting files on a computer. But usually parts come because of trauma and individualize themselves because, for instance, you feel more comfortable being a singer in the shower than on stage, to make a familiar analogy. Parts also are usually there to protect an individual from harm or perceived harm.

      There is plenty more to learn about it if you’re interested on the Internet. Many hypnotherapists and a dear friend of mine, Keith Allen, Licensed Family Therapist, also is schooled in working a specialized program to help integrate parts.

    But I digress. So, I might learn in this case that my fear or the pain in my neck is suggesting that I take a day off to rest, because I’ve overloaded my mind with people’s problems that aren’t mine. I need to regenerate. In a time like this, it is easy to feel like you are in harm’s way or like sickness is looming, because your energy is depleted. So, in a big way, I got my answer. 

2. I could get quiet and begin to think about letting go of my body completely. I might think about my breath coming from my heart instead of my nose. I might consider that my thoughts are being filtered through my heart in pictures, rather than deductive, reasoning thoughts.

    In this case, the result is somewhat different. I let my higher self watch my human self. I become an observer, using only the frontal cortex of the brain to perceive my human thoughts and body. (Isolating this part of the mind takes practice in hypnosis or meditation.)

    When I get to this place, I begin to let my imagination take over. For me, I use the idea that angels are bringing to me wisdom and understanding from a very peaceful God source.

    Usually, when I wake up, I get a sense of what I need to do to make change or why I’m feeling the sadness or grief that took me into the meditation. Again, an answer to my question.

    Life is a process. It will always be a process of balancing humanity with spirituality. Or if you’re not comfortable with those terms, balancing your deductive brain with your inductive (dreaming thoughts). These thought processes are two very completely different ways of thinking. In fact, it is a proven theory that you cannot sleep while in the deductive mind. So, learning to use your inductive, dreaming resources, whether you believe in spirituality or not, would benefit anyone reading this.

            I have to tell you that it really doesn’t matter to me what you believe. It matters to me that you are on a path toward something positive. That is my goal. I want to help people find a path forward, out of the negative past, and into something that gets you connected to the perfect present and the endless possibility of the future. It is here we find our reason for living, our hope for the future, and usually we find lots of love waiting along the way.

            If you have been wanting this path for yourself, I’m knowing that you will find the perfect person to lead you there. Of course, you can always contact me here or give me a call at 615-400-2334.