It’s Day 26 of 90 Day Transformation Challenge #5, How are YOU doing?

I’ve gotten a flurry of strong, positive responses to yesterday’s controversial conversational hypnosis post, “Overcoming the Victim Mind Cage.”

Here’s what Linda wrote,

Hello Mark,
I had a real good ASS kicking from you last evening when I listened to your podcast. That was for me. I listened to it 3 times and realized how much and how long I have been wallowing in this shit. The points that hit me:

• I have success, get tested and I resist, resort to crying, handringing, and why me when things get a bit hard. The sustaining of success has been an issue. I have thought it was supposed to be easy, but it is not!!
• Grow up, step into your shit, it’s mine, I can clean it up, I am not a victim, but creating my own pain, feeling so sorry for myself. Why do I have to learn the hard frickin way?
• most of my thoughts have been failing thoughts about failing and never getting over GAD because I believe the physical sensations which can be overpowering. You called it wallowing in self indulging pain.

Thank you Mark for kicking my ass and I don’t feel judged at all-just know you are right. I need to kick anxiety’s ass, but fearful it would turn on me and it would get worse.  Thank you!!     – Linda

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Paula wrote:

Thank YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just what I needed to hear, and so beautifully expressed!

And I was also so pleasantly surprised by the song [Can You Imagine] — I hadn’t heard this before!  What a fantastic surpise!

I feel like I’ve opened wonderfully-packaged priceless gifts from you today!    Thank you!!!

Here’s my response:

Hey Linda and Paula and everybody else!

Thank you so much for receiving that message in the spirit it was intended. Not as judgment or criticism because the intention is to help all of us move through the same “field.”  I’m not placing myself above any of this because I experience the same thing.

I just see it over and over and over again in my own life as well as in the clients I’ve worked with over the last 15 years. They all seem to want me to fix them. They seem to want me to wave my magic hypnosis wand or NLP wand and “Heal” them. Preferably in a single 10 minute session.

And who can blame them? It makes sense. When we take our car to the mechanic, we want it fixed. Logical.

But in personal transformation work, the problem is not a “car” but our process of interacting with reality.

And that’s always an inside job. AND it’s the farthest thing from LOGICAL. The problem is almost always in the conflict between what our conscious mind thinks things should be like… and what the unconscious mind is responding to… None of which is “fact,” but PERCEPTION. And again, NOT LOGICAL…

Working with clients, I can often get them a shift and I can see them making progress but many of them seem to just abandon themselves when the least little thing shows up to test their new “program” and they run scared back to the old familiar place. In some cases they would BLAME ME! (for not FIXING THEM PERMANENTLY…)

Because at least it’s familiar. It may be painful, shitty, horrible even. But it’s the elephant in the room they KNOW.

But the only way out is THROUGH. And the only way THROUGH is to ACCEPT what I call, “Response-Ability.” We can’t always change external events but we certainly can change how we respond, how we interpret, how we think about events…

For example, I climbed a mountain with my friends Mike and Brett… I was in my 50’s THEY were in their 20’s.

About halfway up this fucking mountain in the middle of winter (the 2nd tallest in NY State’s Adirondack Part), I just wanted to go home. But I couldn’t. And once I got up to the summit, I couldn’t care less about the fucking view. It was 15 degrees below zero with gusting winds up to 40 mph. I just wanted to get back down off that fucker without breaking a leg or dying of hypothermia…

It was one of those ALL day ordeals… and I couldn’t wait for it to be over. And I was pissed. and whiny (inside). I tried not to bitch too much out loud but I was wanting to quit big time…But the only way to get out was the same way we went in. Walking. On my own two feet. There were no “stops” to get off.

I had to just tough it out and finish what I’d started…  Mike and Brett couldn’t carry me. I had to move one foot in front of the other… thousands and thousands of footsteps… I started counting them and chanting,

“1, why does it work out better than I can possibly imagine…

2, Why does it work out better than I can possibly imagine…

3, Why does it work out better than I can possibly imagine…”

Every time I got to a 1,000 steps I started over again…” Eventually Mike and Brett were waaaay ahead of me and I was alone in the falling dark… taking it one step at a time… almost delirious with fatigue and cold.and you know what?

EVENTUALLY I got back to the car…. and it was already warmed up. And I didn’t break my neck or freeze to death. And it felt really, good to simply be alive and safe.

In retrospect, I’m really glad I did it. LOL… It felt even better a couple of days later looking back on it.

NOW?

Two years after the “ordeal” It seems FABULOUS! HEROIC! LEGENDARY! LOL. And I’ve now used that story to illustrate a point… Cowabungah! Got me some VALUE out of that EXPERIENCE… That excruciatingly UNCOMFORTABLE experience.

But the whole point of yesterdays video, “Overcoming The Victim Mind Cage” is that we often don’t even get half way up the mountain in our own healing work.

Nothing and no one seems to be able to push or pull us in just the right way to keep us on the path of healing. It’s so much easier to just turn tail and scurry back down the mountain at the first steep or scary place.Milton Erickson, considered by many to be the “father of conversational hypnosis” used to assign people “ordeals” that they had to do before he would consent to work with them. The ancient Toltecs would “trick” their apprentices into expanding their perception by maneuvering them into “sink or swim” kinds of dilemmas that they quite literally had to solve or die.

As a coach or healer it’s tricky because I know personally I do not respond well to “tough love” “drill Sargent” kinds of coaches. I want someone to be gentle and compassionate with me but at the same time I want and NEED to be challenged in the right way for me. I don’t want my coach to just accept my own loudly voiced limitations… but I don’t want my face shoved so deeply in my own “shit” that I can’t breathe either… LOL

You might say, I’m a labrador retriever, not a pit bull.

I like my lessons to be firm but gentle… and sometimes life is just NOT GENTLE. Sometimes we don’t get to CHOOSE an EASY lesson over a TOUGH lesson… and sometimes as the Course in Miracles states, we “do not know what is in our best interests.”

It’s not always easy to figure out how a client responds best or what tactic I need to use to put exactly the right kind of pressure on them so that they keep climbing towards a new perception of their reality… without taking the easy way out and quitting just as they are getting close to the summit…

And then, once we’ve reached the summit and gotten the thrill of the view… guess what? We have to schlepp our ass down off the damn mountain. There’s no elevators up there! There’s no helicopter waiting to whisk us back down to base camp and a warm dinner…

We are all climbing mountains of various steepness at any given point in all of our lives. There is no escaping that this being alive thing is often INCREDIBLY challenging and painful. Particularly for highly sensitive people. And guess what?

The only way out is through. If it was easy it would be boring. The thing to REMEMBER is, YOU are not alone in this. We are all on this same path. We CAN help each other. But we’ve got to do our part by putting one foot in front of the other even when we don’t feel like we can keep going.

Guess what? You are more powerful than you’ve ever imagined… Just take one more little step… now take another one… now take another one… eventually they add up.

So thank you for your honest and heartfelt responses!
May you thrive on challenges and be patient and self loving of all of your attempts, failures and successes at mastering your mind for a change…

– Peace and groovyness!
Mark
p.s. here’s a song that seems to fit today’s message:
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