What’s the *real* secret to happiness?
Acceptance.
Remembering that “acceptance” does not mean you have to LIKE something is the first key to developing a healthy acceptance muscle.
Make that distinction.
There are many things will happen, have happened, and ARE happening that are not to your liking. Some of them are merely annoying or irritating, and some of them cause you actual pain. But where does that pain really come from? In hypnosis and NLP, one of the first principles we learn is that it is our RESISTANCE that is the cause of our discomfort. We have an underlying belief that we SHOULD NOT be having a particular experience, and BAM!, we have a conflict. And that conflict produces pain of one sort or another. Because we ARE having the experience and we want to NOT have it. But the mind cannot process that idea. If I tell you NOT to think of something, you HAVE to think of it in order to know what it is you’re not going to think of.
We hypnotists demonstrate this daily in our practices. As we guide a client into deeper and deeper levels of relaxation, their pain often disappears without any direct suggestion at all. The idea of relaxation has caused them to temporarily focus their attention elsewhere and the pain simply evaporates.
But that’s just the beginning of practicing acceptance.
One of my favorite techniques for managing physical pain is to guide the client into a deeper awareness of the pain itself, deliberately focusing ALL of the attention on the experience of the pain.
Check out the video below and try it the next time you have a pain.
Acceptance.
Remembering that “acceptance” does not mean you have to LIKE something is the first key to developing a healthy acceptance muscle.
Make that distinction.
There are many things will happen, have happened, and ARE happening that are not to your liking. Some of them are merely annoying or irritating, and some of them cause you actual pain. But where does that pain really come from? In hypnosis and NLP, one of the first principles we learn is that it is our RESISTANCE that is the cause of our discomfort. We have an underlying belief that we SHOULD NOT be having a particular experience, and BAM!, we have a conflict. And that conflict produces pain of one sort or another. Because we ARE having the experience and we want to NOT have it. But the mind cannot process that idea. If I tell you NOT to think of something, you HAVE to think of it in order to know what it is you’re not going to think of.
We hypnotists demonstrate this daily in our practices. As we guide a client into deeper and deeper levels of relaxation, their pain often disappears without any direct suggestion at all. The idea of relaxation has caused them to temporarily focus their attention elsewhere and the pain simply evaporates.
But that’s just the beginning of practicing acceptance.
One of my favorite techniques for managing physical pain is to guide the client into a deeper awareness of the pain itself, deliberately focusing ALL of the attention on the experience of the pain.
Check out the video below and try it the next time you have a pain.
Leave a Reply