The Rebellious Approach to Healing
After 30 years of dealing with an incurable disease, I was forced to deal with my life in a completely new way. My main habits were formed by the way I think, so it seemed like I automatically completed sentences as soon as the topic came up. Thinking habits are ways we view our life, but after my illness, many of my old habits did not seem applicable. I had to find a new way of thinking. I had a choice; I could either go through every aspect of my life and determine the best way of doing things or I just had to create habits that changed the way I interpreted my situation.
There is a saying that God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle. If it seems as though you are unable to meet your challenge, just look at it as though the right way of dealing with it hasn’t emerged. Just don’t give up. Let me give you 3 ways I have developed to deal with challenges you cannot control.
First, you need to study how your self-image participates in your challenge. Too often, our self-image has been developed over a lifetime of interacting with this world, but we seldom consciously choose to change it. If your self-image was developed by dysfunctional conditioning, you have every right to change it. Almost everybody can create a self-image based on conscious interactions with their environment. If your interactions have been mostly negative, you probably have a negative self-image. It is possible, though, to find the memory of positive life experiences, even if that was not your experience the majority of the time. But, because it was your experience, you can identify with it. Once you develop a new conscious habit of connecting to your new self-image, you would be able to instantly trigger it as soon as the negative self-image appeared. There are ways you can strengthen this habit, so it literally feels like you identify with your positive self.
Second, how you trust yourself determines how actively involved you get in your challenges. A person who lacks self-trust will hesitate to perform the needed actions simply because they are not sure of themselves. We basically trust what is important to us. We have been taught to place importance into our thoughts by our environment. Significant people in our life transmit their importance in the way they think to you as a child and often those thought patterns influence the way we think. Sometimes, we want to impress them and feel more accepted by them. Then, there are times we rebel against them and try to create our own thought patterns. It really doesn’t matter what you think; it matters how much importance you put into those thoughts. For, when thinking is important, that is what you trust. For those in challenges, they need to develop a new consciousness. They need to trust themselves and their deeper wisdom instead of their thoughts. Thoughts symbolically represent ideas, but beyond thinking exists The Wisdom of the Body and powerful inner resources. We cannot only focus on thinking if we accept this deeper wisdom.
Third, we need to explore the silence beyond our thoughts. We need to easily access that silence. The tricky thing is that we cannot think our way to do this. Awareness naturally travels in our breath. In Latin, the word ‘worry’ comes from the word ‘choke.’ When we focus on thoughts that cause us worry, we tend to cut our breathing short as it chokes us. If you believe this to be true, you have the ability to develop a habit of breathing into silence. This habit simply transports awareness beyond thinking as it lands in silence. We, too often, breathe into our thoughts; by doing so, we ignore this deepest wisdom and live in a mind-created reality.
Norman Cousins said that we either reside in our body or we preside over our body. We tend to be victims to our past conditioning when we reside in our bodies. When we preside over our bodies, we have the ability to consciously change the mental habits that create the way we think. To enter silence, we have to let go of our thinking mind and, by doing so, we can plant the seeds that create new conscious habits.
When you put these 3 steps together, creating a positive perspective, self-trust and freedom from the past, you can preside over your body and create the quality you want to live in. I say quality because over the 30 years of my illness, I would have loved to change and become healthy—but that didn’t happen. I chose to focus on aspiring to the quality of life I really wanted.
© 2011 Marc Lerner and Life Skills Institute
Marc Lerner, the author of A Healthy Way to be Sick, empowers people to use their mind to create a quality life. Go to: http://lifeskillsinc.com to learn a sample technique, listen to archived radio shows and see the work that Life Skills Institute is doing. Whenever you face a challenge that you cannot control, it is an invitation for you to discover the life skills you need to develop. It is possible to actually benefit from a struggle simply by being forced to grow. Rebels don’t accept anything but their heart’s desire.

Comments

[Justin Bieber Shoes]

Since I made this recording it has further occurred to me that "please yourself" can mean both "strive to reach your own standards," and simply "try to get what you really want," and I have been experiencing a curious new sense of freedom from worry about what other people think and expect of me. Perhaps a major step...the changing of a lifelong mental habit of existing in a perpetual state of anxiety to please others...hmm, we'll see.