When we are at our best we feel as if anything is possible; things fall into place and we complete tasks effortlessly. The days seem brighter and time passes quickly; everything is as if happening automatically and we are just piloting this from one point to the other.
An athlete would call this ‘being in the zone’; a point where the mind, body and spirit is working in unison and everything we have worked for unfolds before us.
Wouldn’t it be great if we were able to access that state whenever we wanted and stay there for as long as was required? In fact wouldn’t be lovely to stay there forever?
Well we can if we choose to.
If we strip back to the basics, the way we think is in our control, the effect the outside world has is taken on board by choice. I know, I can hear many of you protesting at this point, but it is true; the outside world is invited in by the way we observe and sense it (be that feelings, sights and sounds or even tastes and smells).
Nice things that happen give us our happy memories and those warm feelings when we smell a certain perfume or take a sip of a drink or even see someone who triggers off a distant thought. They take us to a memory, a state which we stored, sometimes many years ago, and we are accessing it, and it’s as if it happened only yesterday. We assume the age we were and sense the experience through those eyes, those ears, those feelings; we are no longer our chronological age, we are a combinational age of when we laid down the thought and hindsight, where we are now. These are the nice times, the times we are pleased to have a memory of, and organised in the way it is.
Conversely, we store not so nice things and they are triggered in exactly the same way and we experience them as if they were yesterday, and again through that mixture of ages which could take us way, way back. Same system, same response, but different experience. I worked with a client who discovered one of her pet fears had been laid down when she was two and the fear was nothing really to an adult but massive to that two year old.
So how can we be the best of ourselves? How can we sit in that state for as long as we wish and use it for the good of our progression? It takes practice and recognition.
First we have to recognise how the body and brain does us at our best. The way I suggest to my clients is they think of a time when they felt really on the ball, really functioning well and they felt great about it. I get them to describe it in as much detail as they can give me; how they feel, where the feelings are manifesting in them, what type of feelings (are the warm, hot, cold, tingly, mobile or static) can they hear anything and how is that experienced (is it an internal chatter, a quiet softness, a loud cacophony, or maybe a hum) and what do they see, not necessarily as a cinematic picture in full Technicolor but what images do they sense and how are they shown (are they framed, in colour, is it clear, fuzzy, is there contrast) and as they build up a picture we construct a list of what makes the emotional state. This is called, completing a ‘sub-modality analysis’ of the construct of the feeling, and by doing this we are aware of how this has been created within us and if needs be can change it.
Once we have one memory analysed, we would then think of four more and create a fuller idea of how the brain is storing the state being the best of me. By doing this we can build a generalised blue-print as used by that individual and believe me it is different for each person.
As we remember when we experienced these situations, we begin to realise the memories and the way they have been stored, is through the eyes of the person at the age of the memory.
Say you had experienced the loss of a puppy when you were, say, six years old; this is going to be laid down in your memories in the way a six year old would experience it. And here comes the rub, once it is laid down that is how it stays unless we up-date it. And if we don’t update it, but just keep stacking on different experiences which created a similar feeling then we become tied into the feelings of a 6 year old even when we are in our adult years. I have had many a client discover they were at the mercy of something they felt when they were young and which hadn’t been updated because they didn’t realise it was there! And why di we hold onto to these experiences? Because its learning, it’s learning by experience.
So, the way we react to something is dependant upon not only how we experienced it, but when we experienced it and how we have stored subsequent instances which fall into the same category.
The skill of identifying these memory patterns then becomes important if we want to change the way we perceive things as an adult.
Many a time I have worked with clients who have experienced something when they were children and that incident and that age is still running that aspect of them even though they may now be in their forties or even fifties and sixties.
So back to the exercise, how to be the best of me. Once we have identified what the experience was which created the state, the best of me and how to do it, we would then start practising making that state at will.
Like anything, the more you practice the better it becomes and the easier it is to retrieve and recreate it at will. It is like any well trodden footpath, the more it is followed the clearer the path becomes.
This method can be used to un-train the mind in holding some emotions which are no longer useful, such as sadness whenever you see a certain type of dog, or feeling angry whenever a set of words are said in work or perhaps that feeling of frustration which builds within you.
We are the sum total of everything we have learned and we have chosen to hold them within our memories in the way we have. The way we respond then, is as a direct result of that. Once we have learned how we have stored the memories, we have a greater opportunity to be the person we wish to be, at any time we want.
‘Your vision will become clear only when you
look into your heart.
Who looks outside, dreams.
Who looks inside awakens!’
Carl Jung
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