If It's Powerful and Transformative, Does It Have to Take A Long Time?

I was reading a book on addiction  today, and realized that amid some very valuable content, I also learned something very important about myself.

No, I'm not a serious addict!  I have a hard time saying No to yarn sales and Kindle videos, but....  The learning was in aid of my profession, honest.

What struck me was that this counselor only knew about the action plans of cognitive-behavioral therapy and the rewards of behaviorism - both very valuable for helping drive transformation! - and never, ever mentioned the most powerful and quickly-transformative technique of all.

Clinical hypnotherapy with someone who's been through a long, thorough training and assessment program is the closest thing to magic we have in behavioral change.  As I read about the year-long processes the poor sufferers had to endure, I wanted to reach through the page and shake the author.  

Now, don't anyone misunderstand what I am saying!!  I am NOT arrogantly and stupidly offering the Miracle Cure that so many consumers today sign up for.  There are no Miracle Cures in behavior change.  If you were emotionally and/or sexually abused in childhood, yes, indeed, it will take years of hard work to craft a new mind, heart and emotional core that is equivalent to who you would have been if the abuse had not taken place.

However, if we're not talking about that extreme, I CAN turn your life around in a 90 day intensive program.  People with weight or physical pain issues can change direction.  Writers can banish Writer's Block forever.  You can blast through a whole slew of barriers in 90 days, and never see the dang wall go up again.  With skilled hypnotherapy, problems are gone for good.

Hypno works so well because it goes so deep, right to the source of the problem that is causing you the surface difficulty.  All my programs can wipe problems away permanently because they use a powerful mix of hypno, Reiki energy healing, spiritual healing, tapping (EFT) and professional life/health coaching. 

Spring is coming!  Tis the season for hope and transformation.  Don't hold back because you don't believe a solution can be this easy - just 30-90 days.  It can.  You could be free of your nagging problem.  Why not be?

Visit www.soaringdragon.biz and look at how quickly and thoroughly your nagging headache of a situation could disappear.

New Year's Resolutions 1: Your Burdens, My Burdens

 If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough….. Henry W. Longfellow

I am a big fan of resolutions to improve health (lose weight, stop smoking, exercise, change eating) and improve one’s money situation (new job, promotion, more clients, less time wasted with poor organization).  My profession, after all, is healer and change agent.  Using hypnotherapy to effect deep changes and energy healing to reduce anxiety and stress, with life coaching to set up goals, rewards and timetables, it’s a very powerful toolkit and it gets very powerful, fast results.  What’s missing?

Nothing, if your goal is the utterly admirable ones of physical health and the end of limiting beliefs about yourself.

But that’s not all there is to a human life.  We also have a striving to be better people.   All of my tools work really well to help people to extinguish the lingering remnants of harm from childhoods with imperfect families, traumas from adult life like criminal assaults, natural disasters and war, as well as personal imperfections that can’t be traced back to a particular cause or event. 

It’s noble, I think, to truly want to cause less pain to others by wanting to be less quick-tempered, more patient, more kind and understanding or more generous with praise and focus on catching people doing something right.  All of these and more have been resolutions of my clients over the years.  Removing the defect entirely is wonderful, but when we are talking about deeply ingrained barriers like this, even removing a layer or two of habitual patterns is a victory.

There is one challenge that I think underlies all the frustration, the envy, and the anger over the Good Luck in others’ lives, and that is what I’d like to talk about today.  We look at others in the superficial way that we do when we are assessing others’ lives, we see what we think they have, we compare it to what we know we don’t have, and anger arises.  We spin stories about why we don’t have, and why they do.  That story becomes our truth and we live our lives believing the story.

Let’s break this whole conundrum apart, piece by piece, and let’s start with a really common example: you have a particular burden holding you back and I don’t.  One of my many clients who is also a coach or healer tells me that it’s harder for her than for me, because she has two young children and I don’t; in fact, I have an easy life all around.  You’ve done this a million times, and so have we all.  Even I, who am super-aware of the fallacy, occasionally fall into the pit before I realize what I did and jump out.  The truth that we need to learn at a deep level is that we actually DON’T know a damn thing about what burdens our fellow humans are bearing.  All we know is what is public and obvious. 

People assume I don’t know how black people suffer because my hair is blond; they don’t know that I grew up with African American brothers and a sister.  People assume I have no burdens because I tend to be cheerful and don’t ride in a wheelchair.  During flu season, people learn that I have immune system weaknesses that make illnesses very common, but if you meet me in summer?  Nope.  My other health concerns are private; that doesn’t mean they don’t exist or don’t hold me back in myriad ways.  Only their closest intimates (usually) know that a person had a deeply-abused childhood, has been a victim of violence or is battling their way back to wholeness from the effects of PTSD.  And you don’t know any of this.  You know your life.  You don’t know the truth about the hundreds of people you are telling stories about every year. 

The underlying purpose of the story-telling that Person X has fewer burdens than me is to have a ready-made reason for why s/he has something and I don’t, an ignoble goal if ever there was one.  If you find yourself wanting to push back on this wisdom, now you know why your limbic system doesn’t want to let go of the Everyone Has It Easier Than Me story. 

How to overcome this (frequently wrong) story-spinning?  Every time you hear your mind coming to a conclusion about someone, especially after a short acquaintance, STOP.  Take two long, very slow, deep breaths and remind yourself that You Don’t Know A Damn Thing About This Person.  If you are in I Don’t Know territory, your mind is open to collecting additional information.  As soon as you have spun a story, you will interpret all new sensory information (what they say, do, twitch, etc.) through the filter of whether or not it fits in the story. 

The goal of this exercise is NOT to turn off your intuition – absolutely the contrary!  We just to the story that we can trust a person based on our limbic system liking the person’s welcoming smile and generous offer of home-baked cookies.  But sociopaths and garden-variety manipulators are very charming and “nice.”  You need to reserve your story-making/judgment until you have a lot more data.  Only a true sociopath can keep up the smokescreen forever.  The others will start to slip up.  If you are paying close attention, you’ll notice it and step out of range.  If you have your “S/he’s a great guy/gal” story/frame in place, you’re by definition no longer paying close attention. 

Acknowledging your own burdens – you are building a career or a business and want to be a good parent as well; you are battling asthma or ADD to get to your goals – allows you to generate goals that fit your physical and mental limits.  You won’t choose the same goal or timing as some outside entity thinks you should.  You know what you can realistically do and if you don’t, call me and we’ll figure it out in a coaching session.  You can walk from Panama City to Washington DC or from a Auschwitz to Hiroshima if you just keep putting one foot in front of another and don’t give up; my mom the dedicated peace activist did both, in her 60s.

For 2016, let me suggest this additional Resolution for your consideration:  slow down the creation of stories.  And when you hear yourself getting ready to conclude that another person has less burdens than you, remind yourself that you know all the secrets of your own soul and absolutely nothing about theirs.

Call me for a Free Getting Unstuck session, on whatever your goals for the year or your life are.  253-203-6676.  victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com   www.soaringdragon.biz

Down the Driveway, into a Wonderworld

Last night, I came home at 1 AM after picking up someone at the airport.  It’s a rural property, and as my headlights swept down the long driveway, at the far edge of the property 8 glowing eyes twinkled back at me.  The tapeti lucidi of a group of deer!  Two of them swiveled their heads and half-stood, but the others were unworried.  Although they’d never seen me come or go at that ungodly hour before, they knew that I was not a danger.  As I pulled up and parked as far from them as possible, and then exited as quietly as possible, the two “nervy” ones settled down into their sleep positions again. The doe, young fawn and two teen males, who might have been the mum’s fawns from last year, made my heart sing.  The peaceful energy as they settled back to sleep made me smile, but it was more than just a charming scene.  For just over two years, I’ve been watching the local deer who live in proximity to my healing & retreat center.  Generations have grown up under my fascinated attention.  Yet there was more to experience, a whole world of movement and activity, safety and comfort as well as ambush and death, going on mere feet from my door, that I knew absolutely nothing about, because it was happening during the hours when I wasn’t watching.

It makes sense, of course.  Homo sapiens is a diurnal species, as are deer.  We all sleep at night.  No matter how mindful I may be of my surroundings, there will always be lives being lived, sometimes mere feet away from me, that I know nothing about.  Still, this experience has sparked a new respect for the wonder and excitement to be found in life.  It’s so easy for us to think that we understand “what’s going on,” that reality is a known quantity.  If we discover that we don’t even really know what is happening in our physical environment, how certain should we be – about anything?  No matter how well we may think we are “on top of” our lives, we will continue to turn a corner, head down a driveway and walk straight into delight, and wonder, and beautiful, sweet new worlds.  

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I offer 30 minute Exploration Sessions for new potential clients who want to get from where they are to where they want to be.  For the kinds of barriers that I am most effective in demolishing, the transformation I can drive is absolutely amazing.  People like you have been freed from a lifetime of 50-pound emotional packs they never knew they were lugging.  Trauma is healed.  Habits and addictions like smoking and poor nutrition are overcome.  Lives are transformed.  If you have a problem that I am not certified in or prefer not to work with, I'll tell you, and recommend a good alternative.  I love to show people ways to save money through effective between-visit work.

It all starts with an email or phone call. We can do very powerful healing work in any time zone, via the wonders of videoconferencing!   victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com   www.soaringdragon.biz   253-203-6676 (Pacific Time, normal working hours M-F, Sat occasionally)