The Life Skills Approach

The Power of Controlling Your Inner Communications.

      Inner communications is a  two-way process: You communicate with your body and your body communicates with you.  Your self-image is the part of you that determines the quality of your inner communications.

     At a seminar I gave recently, a person with AIDS came to learn the Life Skills Approach.  He named his Negative Self "Indifferent" and his positive self "Joy."  When he channeled his thoughts to "Indifferent,"
he got the uncaring answers that came from a part of him that did not care about his life.  When he directed his thoughts to "Joy," he got responses that came from the part of him that had a real loving spirit and a strong will to live. 

It was very obvious which part of him would create the best motivation in his life.  By creating the habit of accepting his Positive Self, he could find resources that turned his tragedy into an opportunity to grow.  It was easy to see that the little effort it would take to connect to his Positive Self would be                                                              significant in dealing with his health crisis.

      Science shows us that when we develop a habit, that habit can actually change the chemical makeup of our bodies.  Just imagine what would happen if you developed the habit of accepting your Positive Self as the real you.  Your mental response to everything you experience would trigger a different chemical reaction, creating a dramatic positive effect on your life.  When you learn to accept the Positive
Self as the real you, you can make the shift that enables you to better deal with your situation.

      In Stephen Covey's book, The Seven Habits of  Highly Effective People, he talks about the need to "shift our paradigm."  This is the way in which we see the world.  Covey tells the story of a subway ride
he took in New York,  It was a quiet ride until an man and his children entered the subway.  The man sat next to Stephen and the children ran around the car disturbing everyone.   When Stephen asked the man to do something about the children, he slowly looked up.  He said they had just come from the hospital where their mother had died and they did not know how to react.  At that moment, Stephen stopped being annoyed and became eager to help.  He shifted his paradigm and saw the world differently.

      Changing your self-image also has the potential to create that paradigm shift.   When you have the ability to shift from focusing on your Negative Self , where you get negative responses to your
thoughts--shifting to your Positive Self instantly gives you positive interpretations. 

      In a health struggle, it is not the illness that determines the outcome as much as who has the illness.   It is not the struggle you face, but how you react to it.                                                                                                                   
                                                                                                               

2009 New Beginnings, The Art of Starting Over

As we enter a new year there are some things that we can do that allows us to start over. Just as you have to push the clutch in to shift gears, our consciousness needs to be released from our mind to change. Now if you follow a linear thinking path; that is difficult to do. It is impossible to follow thinking out of the conditioned maze created by thinking. So what can you do?

                Start the new year in silence. That is the clutch that disengages your mind. That is where your heart expresses itself without the limitations created from your past conditionings. That is where the Wisdom of your Body lives in a moment that has deep, rich experiences. That is where you cope with health challenges utilizing the Wisdom of the Body.

                So now this is the question we have to ask as we enter this New Year: Why do we carry mental garbage into a potentially new beginning?

                I feel that mental garbage is the main reason we ignore silence. If we learned to simply surrender beyond our thinking mind and just let go for even a moment as our breath turns from an in-breath to an outbreath; our deepest wisdom would take over our lives completely.

                 Unfortunately because we are so committed to thinking we ignore that incredible moment.

                To start a New Year with our deepest inner wisdom we just have to commit to one moment and when that surrender connects, you find that moment to be endless. It exists in every breath and is the only moment available to us. We spend our lives nearly touching it in every breath, but until we deelop what I call an accurate surrender, we simply ignore it.

Develop the accurate surrender that ignites your inner wisdom in a Tele-seminar. With only 30 minutes a day, you can develop the habits that connects you to that moment. Go to http://lifeskillsinc.com to enroll in this Tele-seminar. Download a free intro for “A Healthy Way to be Sick” &  then read it & live it.

© Marc Lerner & Life Skills 2009.

Dealing with stress of a health challenge like chronic illness or Disability

                The way you interpret a new diagnosis sets the tone on how you will deal with that challenge for quite awhile. Your first reaction is like getting knocked down by a blast and your deep reaction comes from when you stand up again. This may be days after your diagnosis, but you have the power to reframe your reaction into an expression of your deepest inner wisdom instead of an anxious ego. The decisions made as you stand up and regain your balance will affect the way you deal with your challenge for a long time…so be super conscious on how you use your inner resources to approach your struggle

                If you could step back from your stress and anxiety and deal with this challenge from a conscious place you would need to have three simple life skills to support you as you go beyond your thinking mind.

·     First you need a strong positive self image that accepts the Wisdom of your Body. This self image is on your everyday thinking level but has the ability to go beyond thinking and tap the Wisdom of your Body and powerful inner resources. Your Negative Self is a captive in the reality of the mind; for that is what created it and all it knows.

 ·    Secondly you need self trust so that you accept your inner wisdom without ego’s automatic limitations. Self trust allows the Wisdom of your Body to be what navigates you through your health challenge. You can have a direct control over how you trust yourself, which many people ignore. The ability to accept our inner wisdom is one of our greatest gifts that we trade for focusing on something familiar.

·     Our breath is a wonderful tool in creating an inner environment suitable for healing. We give life to what we breathe into. If we breathe into negative thinking or our ego, we give that reality life. If we breathe into the Wisdom of our Body, it becomes activated and orchestrates our healing. Most people breathe into their ego and that orchestrates our healing.

      If we combine a positive self image with self trust as you breathe into the Wisdom of your Body you have consciously developed a healing environment that maximizes your healing potential. Now if these skills were developed into habits, these skills would usher you from your thoughts and conditioning in every single breath.

        We have the ability to consciously re-condition our sub-conscious mind. When you have stress with a chronic illness or a disability, your Positive Self with self trust breathing into inner wisdom naturally removes that stress. All you have to do is create conscious habits that escort you from thoughts into silence and back again in every breath.

© Life Skills inc 2008

Fear of Death; A conditioning that can be changed

I met a man who was an engineer and benefited from his thinking mind his entire adult life. He was now experiencing a chronic fear of death in his retirement. Beyond his conditioned mind, which he identified with exists the inner resources needed to deal with his challenge. The fear of death was a problem, but his inner wisdom could deal with it if he was able to let go of his past. Are you able to let go of your past? Learn simple techniques that gives you that ability.

The Patient's Role in Healing; The Benefits of Conscious Habits

      When we find ourselves in a health crisis, we basically have two choices; we either fall back on our past conditioned habits and deal with that crisis from the perspective we learned in the past or we can transcend our past conditioning and connect to the Wisdom of our Body.  For most people falling back on past conditioning is not a conscious choice—it happens automatically.  If you choose the conscious alternative, you will be forced to develop new habits that harmonize with your inner wisdom. If you do that your struggle becomes a gift that forces you to evolve.

       When we face a disability our old habits creates a discomfort because we use to be able to do that, but being handicapped makes it difficult. You can definately feel defeated here or you can see that as an invitation to evolve to a higher level. If in your heart you choose to evolve, you create an opportunity to develop new habits that recreates you. You have the ability to start over and establish the standard you want to live at. You can face your disability as an opportunity to evolve. If you don't choose that route, your old habits will set the standard of life you use to live at;  now with a disability that may have to change.

        This Blog explores the incredible opportunity being disabled forces you to explore. Being released from old habits to develop new conscious habits is a gift; only if you focus on developing the new habit instead of holding on to the old ones. This requires you to live in the moment experientially and let go of your mind-created reality.

         THAT IS AN AMAZING GIFT IF YOU ARE FREE ENOUGH TO ACCEPT IT.

3 Crucial steps in Starting Over

Change requires letting go of the past as you embrace the moment you are in right now. This is a significant step for dealing with change and it requires a willingness to grow.

How we view the situation we are in turns life changing events into profound learning experiences that can improve the quality of your life. The main question has to be; are you committed to past conditioning as who you are or is there a deeper you that needs to be developed?

If we focus on how we deal with the upcoming event internally instead of how we process what is happening in our old thinking habits, we see things as they are instead of interpreting things as good or bad.

Habits; Powerful Healing Tools

While I was on the karate team in college, I fantasized about sophisticated kicks I could try on my opponents. I could see these moves over and over in my mind, but if I never practiced them they remained mere fantasies.

However, once I followed through and really applied myself, my one-time fantasies became powerful tools.

These Blogs can prepare your mind to have that same relationship with your deepest inner wisdom. I have used simple techniques that can forge neural pathways that develop into habits, which become valuable tools for healing.