"The way out of trouble doesn't have to be difficult or complicated.".....Elizabeth Bohorquez, RN, C.Ht
As you work to examine your daily life through the lens of heightened awareness, you may be very shocked at what you find. You will come to find that you spend a great part of your time lost in automatic pilot programs, fired off by emotions that are often toxic to both mind & body. To make matters worse, you may find yourself unfamiliar with other minute subleties that can cause stress chemicals to produce, some of them subconscious or unconscious.
In order to turn things around, it takes a new way of looking at things, including your body sensations. Some areas that need looking into may appear small, even insignificant on the surface. Of course, these labels are personally attached. When I assess patients in my office or in the Workshop, they often answer my detective questions in an off-handed way, as if what I was asking them was somehow ridiculous & having nothing to do with their most presenting issue.
MEET MIKE...
When I met Mike he was about 350 pounds & had a body fat percentage that ran off the charts that I use for calculating. He had come to stop smoking, but only because he was very short of brfeath & that frighgtened him. He hadn't seen a physician in several years, as he didn't want to hear what he knew his doctor would say to him. There was also the embarrassment of being too big for the scale & he would have to hear the nurse say "those words". He was ashamed & felt guilty. All he wanted from the Workshop was to stop smoking.......period.
Unfortunately Mike knew very little about what he needed to get healthy. I began by measuring him, so I could figure his lean body mass & body fat percentage. I truly believe that if Mike wasn't such a nice guy, he would have bolted out the door. Instead, he listened to what I had to say, even though he didn't want to hear it. We all know what that's like.
Like most smokers, Mike had terrible eating habits & actuall wasn't eating sufficiently for his lean body mass. He was only eating one meal per day, feeling that was sufficient because he had "plenty of fat to burn." He was making a huge mistake & a good part of his smoking habit was connected to his food stress issues.
Mike tole me that he wasn't ready to manage his eating issues, preferring to just stop smoking, but I explained to him how these habits were linked, then went on to teach him what he needed to know. Next cam the 4 step plan that Mike placed on his "mind screen" with my help. Mike was now on his way, not only to stop smoking, but to burn fat, as well as changing other stressors in his life.
THE 4 STEPS
There are 4 steps to a healthy & successful lifestyle change plan. Here they are:
1. Nutritional Balance - Personal Body Needs
2. Mindfulness - Awareness - Focus
3. Thought - Emotion Managing
4. Positive Imagery Planting - Interactive Self-Hypnosis
We climb these steps each & every day, in fact many times a day. They are a credo to live by. Once they are planted subconsciously, they appear automatically, making change much easier. the more you learn to climb under a wide variety of circumstances, the better skilled you will become.
We actively work to climb & at the same time to build a new self-discipline mindstate called consistency. Those who become the most consistent win in all departments, for consistency finds it's way into may different areas of life, actually taking charge & firing off aspects of goals all by itself.
"Where do the steps lead?"
They lead to a healthy & consistent homeostasis or balanced body physiology that helps to manage addictions & other excesses, while inviting us to open & work within our very own inner creative mindSPACE.
The past issues of this blog can be found below. Other segments are stored in the following separate blog. For those of you who would like to practice Interactive Self-Hypnosis, there is always a complimentary mp3 sitting on my website. The program that is there presently is a full session called The Life University. This is part of a 2-CD/mp3 program for re-structuring goals & implementing them in all parts of life. I'm sure you will join others who have enjoyed working with this program. I'll be changing this in a few days, so you might want to take advantage of it while it is still posted. The next program will be on goal achievement.
mindART - FULL BLOG
