Friday, December 14, 2007

The Realm of Heightened Creativity

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men, and along those fibers as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects"....Herman Melville

It's amazing what a fall or injury can do! For those of you who read my blog, you might remember that I fell off of my desk & injured my back. Last week I wondered if I would walk again. That thought truly bothered me, especially knowing what I know about the power of words, whether they be verbalized or in the form of thoughts. Luckily for me, I knew what to do & took care of it quite rapidly. My life work & passion is to teach others how to do this for themselves.

But, I want much more for them.

We each have our own realm of heightened creativity. It's like a special city or place on our map of life. It is here that we can actively move past pain & problems & then into our own passion or desires. For many of us the roads to this city are unknown or completely blocked by old business, low expectations or thoughts of impossibility......negative fiction. But no matter what happened in the past, we can all go there. I know ithis because I've not only experienced it personally, but over the many years that I've been in the practice of medical & personal development hypnosis, I've had the privilege to witness this road opening over & over again.

I went back to work last Tuesday, just for a short day. It didn't take me long to realize that I'd changed in some rather profound way. Let me share a bit of this with you, because it does have importance to the changes I am currently making.

When one practices hypnotherapy, it is always a different experience with each patient, for each patient is different. There may be twenty who want to lose weight or stop smoking, or improve their memory or reduce their stress...and while the problems appear to be quite general, the person behind the problem is always different, thereby making the problem different in each case.

Each of us has traveled a different road, collected different strengths & weaknesses that have etched a special effect on the generalized problem, rather like the problem had been soaked in an original marinade, perhaps for decades.

So Tuesday morning was like any other morning for me....but then a very strong & heightened creative part of me began conversing, not only with my patients, but with me. I don't know how much you as the reader know about hypnotherapy, but suggestions are usually designed "right in the moment" & come from the subconscious mind of the therapist. They are beautifully pin-pointed towards the specialized needs of the patient.

It happened that my Tuesday morning patients were all well-known to me & so I was progressing down their particular road when all of a sudden the focus shifted slightly. I found myself talking about unexpected accidents & the importance of the body & the mind being prepared to take on the healing from the position of an expert healer & not from the position of a victim.

There was more urgency in the suggestions....All victim thoughts needed to be recognized immediately & removed right then & there. There is no time ever for hanging out in victim stuff. The patient I was working with in that moment happens to be over-weight & has been meandering on her path towards wellness. In truth, she is going forward, but rather just drifting along in a slow sing-song rhythm.

As I re-organized her suggestions, I became intensly aware that I also meander in certain areas of my own life & certainly can get into my own victim thing. My writing & the producing of my CD programs is one of those areas. Over the years I've written & produced hundreds of programs in different genres to meet the needs of my patients & students. Whenever I send these out to mainstream publishers, editors or agents, I tend to hide behind rejections as if I'm guilty of something & then make excuses as to why I cannot find a publisher to market my work in bookstores, etc. as if this were the most important thing in my life......a true Sarah Bernhardt.

Unfortunately, or so I've been told, my work is not considered mainstream by many publishers, editors or agents....rather odd because I sell these very successfully from my website, in fact, all over the world.. I've been in my field for over 30 years & each day I communicate with hundreds of people who go to work each day, but suffer in their own silent jails. I have tremendous compassion for them, for while they are seen, they not truly seen or they are judged in a way that is unjust, perhaps even cruel.

Why does this happen & to so many? As I've studied this part of human behavior, I've come to realize that we are all so lost in our own lives, that we simply have no time or even desire to see the obvious in others. It can truly be a lonely world & because of this lonliness, small problems grow into big ones. These problems we can see & not only do we notice them, but we take the position of judge & jury...

We see fat people, anorexic people, compulsive & obsessive people, nail biters, skin pickers, hair pullers, emotionally weak or stressed out people, uncooperative people, alcoholics, smokers, poor performers, shy people, those who appear lazy & tend to sleep-walk through the day. We see people with latent talent who refuse to be motivated. We see frightened people, some who can't leave their homes & others who simply can't stand up & make a presentation at work. This is just a short list of what we can see if we bother to look.

While these problems & their solutions appear obvious to us as judge & jury, it is not as simple as that. There are underlying reasons for all of this & more. Much has to do with simply not knowing how to come out & face the problem, release it & then manage stress in a healthier fashion. These are things that should have been taught in childhod, but most of the time parents did not have the skills themselves & so there was little or nothing to pass on to the infant, child & teen. While sometimes psychotherapy is required, in many instances all that is needed is to uncover the blocks, bring the awareness free of emotion, release & then plant new images.

So, my work is to work as detective along with the problem-owner. Then we are ready to free the guilt & shame & enter the realm of heightened creativity. This is where the good stuff resides.

I've come to understand & accept that the large majority of professionals in the publishing field aren't familiar with exactly what I do because perhaps they have no reason to know this. I hope you don't misinterpret this. It is not an ego thing........it just the way it is.

Back to last Tuesday. Just as my weight management patient needed to take off her heavy shoes that were interfering with the speed of her travels, I realized that I must do the same. Can someone help me untie this knot in my shoelace?