The meaning of stuckness

I still get stuck. Sometimes it sneaks up on me and I don't realize I'm stuck until I get the feeling that I'm just not doing what I really want to do. I used to think that all my training would make me invincible to stuckness. Ha! Recently I pulled my feet out of a big bog of stuckness about my business and I realized something wonderful from that experience.

What does being stuck mean? Think about it. People treat it as if it's a bad thing. Not true! Feeling stuck is actually the first step when you're making progress. It simply means that you have come to a new place in your life where you're not sure what to do or what action to take. Isn't that a good sign that you're moving forward?

When a new challenge appears, every person experiences that feeling of stuckness, however brief or long. Feeling stuck is really your Unconscious Mind, the part of you in charge of your safety (physical, emotional and mental), saying, "Oh look, here's something that I'm not sure about. I better stop here until I know how best to proceed." It's simply your Unconscious Mind letting you know that you need to learn a new skill, or to renew an old one, before you can go forward with confidence. When you respond to that internal message by taking action, the feeling goes away and progress continues. When you stop and don't take action, that's called "being stuck". It's a holding pattern set up by you to give you room to figure out a solution. The longevity of that feeling depends on you and your willingness to take action.

Taking action doesn't always happen in the physical realm. Don't think that the answer is in getting busy with tasks. That's the mistake I made (and many people make), and the feeling of stuckness did not go away. In fact it worsened! I was doing all the busy work that everyone says you're supposed to do. I made my lists of action items, called the people I needed to call, wrote and prepared materials. You name it, I was doing it. But I just kept feeling more and more stuck. I knew that I was missing an important something. How do you find out what the something is?

It's been said many times that if you change what's happening inside, the outside world will reflect your internal actions. If we are the center of our own universes, and we are...then perhaps the answer is at the source.

So, I went into action - internally. I had to connect with my Unconscious Mind and find out what was going on. Why was she stopping me from going forward? Time Line Therapy helped me find the cause of the situation, realizing that its roots were in a limiting decision I had adopted from someone about how to succeed in the business of NLP training. Self-hypnosis made it easy to forgive myself for the delay I had caused in my progress and to realize the ways that old limitation had affected other parts of my life. NLP gave me the tools to build an effective internal strategy for taking physical action with my new, empowering decision in place.

With the internal action complete, I was able to turn my "busy work" into effective efforts that propel me forward toward my goals. I feel great about the direction of my business and the progress I'm making to grow it the way I want it to be. The challenge has been met, I learned a lot about myself and about the process we humans use to achieve our goals. This world is set up to present us with challenges so that we can apply what we've learned, test it and refine it, and then improve our results. So the next time you feel stuck, say "Thank you, Unconscious Mind!" and take action inward for your true life's progress.

Your beliefs drive your life

"In order to believe in something you must first agree with it."
(Quoted from 8,789 Words of Wisdom by Barbara Ann Kipfer)

This quote stirred up a memory for me. A good part of my Master-level NLP education focused on beliefs and values. Your beliefs drive everything! Beliefs and values determine how we spend your time, energy, money, the quality of our relationships and everything else in our lives. We all have two levels of beliefs: our conscious beliefs and our deeper, underlying unconscious ones. The conscious beliefs are obvious to you; it's the unconscious ones that show up in all of those troubled areas in your life. And what's weird is that you may think you believe in one thing (prosperity is a good example), but really - based on the results you're getting in your life - you really, at a deeper unconscious level, believe something else (money is evil).

So here's the deal. In order to change what's happening in your life - whether it's struggling with relationships, hating your job, or being financially challenged - you have to discover your deep values and beliefs and create new ones that will get the results you want. The truth is, you literally can't do something unless you believe it. If deep inside you think that money is evil, you will not allow yourself to have money.

Given that beliefs run your life, wouldn't it be great to know what your beliefs are? And better yet, be able to change and believe those things that will make your life great?

People say "That's just the way I am", as if you can't change your beliefs. Actually, it's something we do all the time, every day. What do I mean? New information creates new beliefs. Say a new story comes on TV about a politician you voted for who just got caught embezzeling state funds. That new information makes you stop and re-evaluate what you thought about the guy (your old belief). You then add the new information to what you knew before and, most likely, change your agreement with yourself that he was a good person to represent you. You now believe he's a crook and you decide not to support that politician in the next election (your new belief). That's how quickly and easily you can change. New information is the key.

And notice that the new belief drives the actions you take from this point forward. You'll probably share you new opinions with someone. You may find yourself researching other candidates who you could vote for in the next election. You could feel outraged enough to join a political action group to weed out corruption in government. At the very least, when voting day comes you'll cast your vote a different direction.

Here's the problem. Believe it or not, your beliefs act as filters that prevent new information from coming in. That's why people get so frustrated about changing beliefs. It sometimes takes outside help to see what you can't see, a new perspective. Hypnosis is one way I help my clients. It allows us to bypass the conscious barrier and install new information at the deep levels where the unconscious beliefs live. I also use a questioning process (called quantum linguistics) that help me wiggle through the belief filters and find new handle holds that allow you to create the new beliefs you want.

If you don't like what's happening in your life, find a way to discover your beliefs and values. Start with a specific area of your life. Ask yourself, "What's important to me about X?" Write down all of the answers that come to you. Then, ask yourself again, "What's important to me about X?" Again, write down any new answers. Then repeat the question a third time and write down all of the answers you get. You may be surprised at what you discover. Send me an email and let me know how it goes!

You have to take action in order to change your beliefs.

A kazillion intuitive realities

The intuitive world within us is our unique reality. A brief definition of reality would be to say that it represents a set of laws that govern our ability to interact with the external world. The physical world has it's rules and patterns, most of which have been measured, studied and documented by science. The intuitive world also has its own rules and patterns.

We each have an intuitive reality that is uniquely our own. It is made up primarily of two things: 1) the common knowledge and understandings we share as human beings, what Carl Jung would call the collective unconscious; and, 2) the learnings we have gathered from our personal experiences.

The collective unconscious is where we all begin, the stuff we were born knowing without anyone having to really teach us. Each one of us is cut from the same universal fabric and therefore we all share its common threads, patterns and textures. What's interesting is that this fabric is a dynamic thing. As we change, new threads are added that represent our new discoveries. As new humans are born, they naturally inherit the qualities of that expanded universal fabric. For example, have you noticed that young children today seem to understand intuitively how to use computers? It's as if our collective unconscious expanded over the last 15 years to include a knowing about computers and their role in our lives. Today's children are born with the expanded awareness and they don't even realize it. It is only we who were born before the innovations who recognize the difference in reality.

Sometimes I think of the collective unconscious as our "spandex factor", the potential we have within to stretch our imaginations. The more humans witness new discoveries, the more they and their children can imagine even greater things. Our human awareness expands along with the discoveries we make as a society.

The other aspect of our intuitive reality comes from our own personal experiences. These create the laws and patterns we have in our own lives. As we go through life, we experience things and we make decisions about what those experiences mean. For example, if someone pulled my hair when I was six, I decided what I was going to think about that experience. Maybe I decided something very specific such as "that girl really doesn't like me", or maybe I generalized to something broader, "nobody likes me at all". Little decisions like that get tucked away inside of our intuitive self and we begin operating based on that assumption. This happens every moment of every day. We continue having experiences and making decisions about them, and soon we have created an entire reality that becomes our day to day life. As we do, we stop seeing anything that doesn't fit our expectations and we become fixed in our beliefs about what is "real" and what isn't.

Imagine how many realities there are out there! In NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming), we call that a person's model of the world. And what we've learned is that every single human being has a unique reality inside them that is more real to them than anything else in the universe.We cannot change another person's reality; only they can do that.

One of the most fascinating things about my work as a hypnotherapist is that I get to peek inside the realities of my clients. In doing so, I have expanded my own reality and I have learned that so much more is possible than I ever dreamed when I was limited to my own model of the world. There are more ways to expand your reality than I can possibly list here. I hope you'll find one...or two....or however many it takes to awaken your intuitive self to more than it knew before.

Side note.... I like the way Michael Harner describes the idea of realities and their truths in his book, The Way of the Shaman. He speaks of the Ordinary State of Consciousness (OSC) and the Shamanic State of Consciousness (SSC). In one "reality", the person experiences something as real while in the other that same something would be called a myth or fantasy. Ordinary things like trees and water look one way in the OSC, but when experienced in the Shamanic State of Consciousness they appear as energy or light, or even as speaking entities who are aware and who possess power. Isn't this true for other realities, too? Think back to the last dream you had. Isn't it true that odd things happen in dreams and you accept them completely at the time because dream realities are different than the Ordinary State of Consciousness? Then there's the reality that happens at a family gathering, where we all seem to slip into some other regressive state of being that doesn't reflect the truer selves we live day to day. Reality truly is relative to our state of consciousness, or what could be called our intuitive self.

Recognizing our beliefs...

I just read my last post and realized that the words I wrote reflect my own beliefs about sharing our dreams. It's a belief born of my own experience and is not true for everyone. Reading it alerts me to another belief I am releasing that ties back to the "coming from the source" post a few days ago.

Within me I've had the erroneous belief that what other people think must be right and I must be wrong. I thought their logic must have been better thought out, more articulate, wiser. How on earth can I expect to accomplish my dreams if I held on to this belief?

I see now how the belief has been manifesting in my life. As I strove to create my destiny I began to isolate myself so that I could maintain clarity and focus, untainted by others' beliefs and opinions. While I do enjoy solitude and the reflection it allows, it's important to me that I recognize that one element of seeking solitude has been to counteract that mis-belief about other people's wisdom.

I have another belief that empowers me every day to be the creator of my own destiny. The belief is that when we come from a place of reaction, we are allowing the other force to define our path. I learned this in my work within one segment of the feminist movement. It seemed that much of their energy was spent in reaction to what males were doing, so they were constantly being drawn to confrontation, challenge and outrage. What a waste of energy. Nothing was being created or defined anew. They lived in the world of rebellious reflection and still remained under the control of a male-centered society.

Contrast that with the work of the women's spirituality groups, led primarily by Starhawk. These women left behind the reactionary feminist life and chose, instead, to seek a new way, a new definition and a new set of beliefs. They created exactly that. Women's spirituality focuses our attention on the strength, gifts and magic of women's power. We see the interwoven powers of both genders and learn to define our own role in that relationship. Women in that segment of the feminist movement are empowered creators of their own lives, and in their work, they have shaped a new belief that opens the way for other women to explore.

I thank the teachings of Seth for reminding me of this. I will continue to recognize my beliefs and change the ones that do not serve me. I hope you will, too.

Coming from the source

I get reminded of this often enough that you'd think I would have it down pat by now. Perhaps this time I do.

The true source of my ability to create the life I want comes to me from within, from that source of knowing that has no name. I could call it God. I could call it Intuition. For some, the former would strike a chord, for others, the latter. As a hypnotherapist, I might call it your Unconscious Mind. And as a student of Huna, I might say my ku, my na'au, or even my aumakua. Whatever you want to call it, it's the voice of knowing within you. Some are so completely unaware of that inner voice (as I was in my younger days) that they don't even realize it's speaking. They simply respond to it without conscious thought about what it is to which they respond. No matter the name we use or the awareness we have of it, it is an inner source that guides us and one that we can trust unfailingly.

Abraham's Perspective on the Source
I don't know if you've read or heard about Abraham-Hicks. Abraham is the non-physical spiritual guide that speaks through Esther Hicks. Abraham describes this voice as our "inner being" who speaks to us in the form of emotion. When we experience a negative emotion, our inner being is telling us that our thoughts are not in line with Who We Really Are. Emotions guide us toward creating what we really want in our lives.

Personally, I've found the trickiest part isn't understanding Abraham's explanation. The trickiest part for me has been to identify the thought I'm having that is causing my emotions to give me negative feedback. It's helped me to become more aware of what I'm thinking. Surprising to me was the realization that I have a constant train of thought going on in my head that is not originating from the current moment and its happenings, but from past events and experiences. My thoughts tend, if I'm not being attentive to them, to mull over what past experiences mean or how I should behave now so that I can avoid pain, anger, disappointment or sadness. Here I am, Ms. Progressive, and most of my time is spent looking backward! That was an eye opener.

Externalizing the Source
When I'm not mindful of my thoughts I tend to externalize the decision about whether I am acting in a right or wrong fashion. In those "auto pilot" times, I find myself looking to others for confirmation that I'm doing OK. I fall into the trap of externalizing my guiding voice, looking outward for the source of my direction rather than inward.

A perfect example of this came to mind this morning as I was writing in my journal. A dear friend who I respect immensely gave me feedback once that I allowed to alter my self-perception. This friend, let's call her Sue, is a very talented career coach. She has a knack for helping people focus in on innate talents and find work that uses them. I confided in Sue one day that my deepest desire is to transform my software training skills into personal & spiritual growth training. Her response was lukewarm at best. In fact, she changed the subject! I was devastated.

Believing that she may not have understood how important this was to me, I tried again to explain it to her a few weeks later. The same response; lukewarm, polite "ahs" and "how interesting", then a subject change. Now I was getting angry. How can she call herself a career coach when she can't see what I long so deeply to create in my life?

Months have past since those conversations. My upset continued throughout as I internalized her belief that I couldn't do my dream. I faltered and became depressed, trying to focus on my current job in the hopes that my success there would rid me of my blasted hopes for another career. Everytime my dream would resurface, turning it's trusting face toward me for encouragement, Sue's face and words as she expressed her doubt echoed in my mind, bringing an immediate sense of hurt and loss. How could she steal my dream that way?

The true stealer of dreams is probably more obvious to you than it was to me at the time. Rather than ask how she could steal my dream, I should have been asking, "how could I allow her to steal my dream?"! I believed her when she expressed her doubt. I accepted it. Buy why? Why was it so much easier for me to believe her doubts than to believe in my own dream?

Reflecting Our Inner Voice
it was easier to believe the doubts because her doubts were actually my own, reflected back to me. She served as a mirror to my own internal fears, and I accepted her doubt because it struck a chord within me. A little voice inside said, Yeah! She's right! You're not good enough!

When I realized from where the true source of doubt came, I felt an instant lightening of my spirit. If it was truly coming from within me, then I had the power to change it. Again, my thoughts returned to Abraham's message that emotions are messages from our inner beings. Negative emotion (as I felt toward Sue) is often projected outward as blame. I felt angry and wounded because of what she said, or so I thought. Truthfully, I felt angry and wounded because my own thoughts were undermining my dream. The thought came from within me and my emotions alerted me. What a wonderful gift Sue gave to me. What a wonderful mechanism of learning and awareness our Creator has given us!

Identifying the Source in All Its Disguises
The tricky part in coming to the awareness that Sue was not the stealer of my dream was in recognizing and accepting my role in the experience. I knew the negative emotion was there, but I mistakenly looked outside of myself for its cause...as if someone else's thoughts could speak for my soul. It was only when I identified the source as coming from within me that I found my way out of the doubt and fear and back on track to my dream.

The source always comes from within us, no matter its disguise. Remembering that we can only respond to and recognize words and actions that mirror our own thoughts and experiences will help you to bring your focus back to your inner voice. One cannot recognize a yellow boat if one does not know what "yellow" and "boat" are. Be aware of this and claim your power.

And so we begin...

As every journey begins with the first step, so does this personal journey begin with its first post.

Wisdom
For as long as I can remember, I've craved wisdom. I want to know how we grow into being who we are as individuals. I want to know how we learn to recognize our foibles and faults...and ultimately, how we learn to change them, mature them. I want to know how we can consciously evolve ourselves.

I know I'm not alone. It's nearly impossible to list the number of books written on the subject of personal growth. Each has its focus. Each has its perspective. Some are very practical and others delve deeply into spiritual realms. I've found every sort of topic helpful over the years, as I'm sure you have, too. What interests me most, though, is the spirit.

Spirit & Personal Growth
The spirit survives all other elements of our life here. We can focus on very solid personal growth, such as leadership skills, and get that great job with the nice six-figure paycheck. But when we die, the paycheck ends and we're left with our spirit. The spirit has also grown in the skill of leadership and can carry forth that skill to its next adventure. The same can be said for almost any personal growth that first begins as a means toward earthly reward. It seems that the most satisfying personal growth happens when, at its core, the growth is truly spiritual. It has been my observation, both in my own life and the the lives of others, that it is the person who creates long term spiritual growth who finds the most all-encompassing happiness.

Logic and Intuition
You'll discover as you read these writings that I often wander between logic and intuition. Logic serves well when it comes to organizing and ordering thoughts. We all are probably most familiar with its tenets and methods. While logic is well-rewarded in this science-based world, intuition often suffers sneers and dismal as a valid tool for personal growth. Intuition, I've learned, is a human's best friend. It is that inner voice that speaks in the language most perfectly matched to our own thinking. Given the powerful role it has played in my life, I expect you'll hear a lot about it over the upcoming span of time.

Work calls, so I'll end this for today. I truly hope that these wanderings are a contribution of value to the many that have come before and the many that will be written in the future. I cannot promise to be so perfectly phrased over time, but I do hope to be easily read.