“I’M NOT SURE I really see any point in trying.” The woman in our office sat slumped in her chair, listless and defeated. “They’re saying I won’t live to see my next birthday. So what sort of goals should I be looking to achieve here?”
A retired dental hygienist, Lydia was in her mid-sixties, what these days is considered a relatively young age. By rights, she ought to have decades of life to look forward to. However, about a year earlier, she had been diagnosed with brain cancer. Despite surgery and radiation, her prognosis was not good. Not surprisingly, Lydia had become quite depressed, and this was the reason her internist and oncologist had referred her to us.
As we took her history, we learned that Lydia had been plagued by a number of issues in her life, including a difficult upbringing with a father who was extremely overbearing and even mean. As an adult, she married someone who followed in a pattern of behavior quite similar to her father’s. The marriage ended in a bitter divorce. Then came the cancer.
Lydia’s hair had all fallen out during treatment. Now it was starting to come in again, and in that first visit, she confided to us that she hated how it looked. We thought it looked fantastic and told her so. But she didn’t believe us. She also mentioned in the next breath that she did not especially like the way her voice sounded. She had a beautiful voice, we told her, and she had beautiful hair. We weren’t just saying these things because we wanted her to feel good. They were the absolute truth. Lydia is a lovely person, and it showed. But, at this point in her life, she was fundamentally incapable of accepting herself.
We walked her through the four steps of the process, focusing on the deep beliefs she had formed early on as a result of her father’s constant carping. She began to feel a shift, but the change was not dramatic (at least not right away), and we scheduled additional visits to help her work through the layers of issues. As we continued meeting and she continued working with the steps of the process, she gradually began to blossom.
When she came to see us that first time, there was a note in her medical file saying that she had been referred to us for “treatment for anxiety and depression.” A few visits later, we noticed a new notation in the file: “Depression and anxiety resolved.”
Resolved—that’s not a word you will very often see doctors associate with the phrase anxiety and depression. But it was not her mood alone that was resolved. Everything about Lydia began to shift from that point on. Even her physical health began to improve. Before long, she was vibrant and full of life—and her tumors began to shrink. Her doctors were frankly baffled, but they couldn’t deny the reality of what was happening before their eyes. Her prognosis changed. There were birthdays once again in Lydia’s future.
What happened here? The shift that Lydia made occurred on several levels at once. In becoming consciously aware of her self-limiting beliefs, together with some of the early experiences that had fueled them, she made a cognitive shift—but by clearing out the static cloud of debris in her biofield, she was also able to bring that shift deep into the level of her subconscious mind. And once that fog of distress lifted, it was possible for her to starting holding a different image of herself.
In a sense, Lydia became healthy because she became able to see herself as healthy.
Images: Language of the Subconscious
This power of images to model and mold our reality is central to the Four-Step Process. If the subconscious is the elephant that shapes and drives our actions, choices, and, to a great extent, our destiny, images are the way to communicate with that elephant. Images are the language of the subconscious.
Human beings have a very special ability: we are able to create inside our brains a realistic model of external events and to an extraordinary degree use that internal model in turn to influence and drive the outcome of external events.
In a sense, it is this ability to create powerful mental images of external realities that made possible the development of human civilization itself, as our colleague V. S. Ramachandran, M.D., Ph.D., points out in his wonderful book, The Tell-Tale Brain. This natural imaging capacity, says Dr. Ramachandran, is embodied in what have been colorfully dubbed “mirror neurons,” neural circuits that are activated when we observe the actions of others and replicate their neurological underpinnings inside our own brains, as if we were performing the actions ourselves.
“It is as if mirror neurons are nature’s own virtual reality simulations of the intentions of other beings,” says Dr. Ramachandran.
The new understanding of mirror neurons helps to explain an entire body of research, going back for more than a hundred years, that says the images we hold in our minds can have a tangible impact on our behavior and physical abilities.
Many of these studies have focused on the ability of “mental rehearsal” to improve athletic performance. For example, in one oft-cited 1977 study, a group of seventy-two college basketball players was split into four groups, all of whom went through a series of fifteen practice sessions on the court over a six-week period. The sessions were identical in every way except that, just prior to practice, three of the four groups were taken through ten minutes of preparation. Players in the first group were put through five minutes of relaxation followed by five minutes of guided visualization in which they imagined themselves throwing baskets from the free throw line. During those five-minute sessions, they were told to recall the sensory impressions of being on the court.
“Try to feel your sensations at the moment you approach the foul line,” the voice on the tape told the players as they sat, eyes closed, listening carefully. “Possibly you can feel your heart pounding. Your legs may feel tired, shaky, or weak. Sweat may be rolling down your back or neck. You may notice the crowd has become more quiet; you may even be able to feel their eyes on you. Take a moment and feel your sensations as you approach the foul line….” The players concluded each session by visualizing themselves making perfect shots.
The second group received five minutes of relaxation only, together with another five minutes of a bogus concentration exercise inserted purely to control for time (that is, so that groups A, B, and C would each have a full ten minutes of preparation time). The third group got the five minutes of visualization together with the bogus concentration exercise. The fourth group got no special preparation at all, only their normal practice session of repetitive drills and free throw practice.
After the six-week training period, all four groups were put through their paces on the court. The first group, consisting of the players who had practiced both relaxation and visualization, showed a statistically significant improvement in their performance; the second and third groups had both slightly improved. The fourth group had not improved at all. Similar results were found in subsequent studies employing a similar visualization process in such fields as karate, tennis serving, and pistol marksmanship.
With the evidence of newer brain-imaging methods, scientists have now been able to observe what is happening in such experiments: when a subject imagines doing something, the exact same areas and pathways in the brain are activated as when actually doing it.
“One reason we can change our brains simply by imagining,” says Norman Doidge, M.D., in The Brain That Changes Itself, “is that, from a neuroscientific point of view, imagining an act and doing it are not as different as they sound.” And this is not a purely mental phenomenon: these vivid images can have real, physical consequences.
Dr. Doidge describes an extraordinary experiment conducted in the early 1990s by Drs. Guang Yue and Kelly Cole. The study looked at two groups, one who performed a set of specific physical exercises and one who only imagined doing those same exercises. Both groups continued this five days a week for four weeks. At the end of the study, the group who had physically performed the exercises had increased the strength of the muscles involved by 30 percent, while the other group—those who had practiced the identical exercises only in their imagination—had strengthened those same muscles by 22 percent.
In other words, simply by imagining they were doing the exercises, the second group physically strengthened the relevant muscles more than two-thirds as much as did the group who actually did the exercises.
Changing Our Genes
If mental rehearsal can strengthen our muscles and improve our score at hoops, might it do something even more dramatic? Such as, say, improve our physical health, even help us recover from an illness? Evidently so, and Lydia is not the first person to have this experience. As with athletics, there is a considerable body of evidence linking positive imagery to physiological health.
Probably the most well-known case is that of the essayist and Saturday Review editor Norman Cousins, whose triumph over a life-threatening collagen disease through the power of laughter and positive imagery (along with hearty doses of vitamin C) was chronicled in his 1979 book Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient. Cousins’s book offered a dramatic illustration of the impact thoughts and feelings can have on human health, and it did much to help this idea begin making its way into mainstream Western thought.
What made Cousins’s case especially compelling was that he recovered from a life-threatening illness by focusing on his emotions and mental images, not once, but twice. In 1980, a decade and a half after the publication of Anatomy of an Illness, Cousins suffered a heart attack that nearly killed him. Determined to once again take his life in his own hands and mind, he embarked on another regimen of self-healing and subsequently described his self-recovery program in his 1983 book The Healing Heart.
“The life-force may be the least understood force on earth,” wrote Cousins. “William James said that human beings tend to live too far within self-imposed limits. It is possible that these limits will recede when we respect more fully the natural drive of the human mind and body toward perfectibility and regeneration. Protecting and cherishing that natural drive may well represent the finest exercise of human freedom.”
Our colleague Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., is a pioneer in the field of epigenetics, the study of the factors that influence our genes. According to Dr. Lipton’s research, our genes don’t just suddenly turn on or turn off because they are programmed by some hereditary force over which we have no control. In fact, our genes are influenced by their environment, including the biochemistry of the bloodstream, which is profoundly influenced by our thoughts and emotions.
When we change our beliefs, as Dr. Lipton explains in his landmark book The Biology of Belief, we change our biochemistry, at least to some extent, which in turn has an impact on our genes. In other words, change your beliefs, and you change the health, behavior, and fate of your cells.
“Positive thoughts have a profound effect on behavior and genes…,” writes Dr. Lipton, “and negative thoughts have an equally powerful effect. When we recognize how these positive and negative beliefs control our biology, we can use this knowledge to create lives filled with health and happiness.”
Stepping into Your Own Shoes
Another key to understanding what happened to Lydia (and to Norman Cousins) is the concept of executive function, which means the capacity to take control of the circumstances and direction of your own life. In psychology, this is called self-efficacy.
The concept and importance of self-efficacy were championed starting in the 1970s by the noted Canadian psychologist Albert Bandura, one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century. According to Dr. Bandura, self-efficacy refers to our beliefs about our ability to “exercise influence over events that affect [our] lives.” In other words, it means acting with the knowledge that you are in the driver’s seat of your life. Having self-efficacy means, in essence, stepping into your own shoes.
This is one of the central concepts underlying the Four-Step Process.
When you have self-efficacy, it means the source and center of control in your life is internal, not external. Misfortunes and other external influences cannot completely throw you, because you see yourself as being at the cause rather than at the effect of circumstances. You cannot always “fix” the circumstance or solve the external problem, but you can always shift how you perceive it. In other words, even if you cannot always solve the problem, you can always solve the dilemma.
This is not to say one should ignore external circumstances. Clearly, it is important to maintain a healthy sense of external reality. But having strong self-efficacy means that the primary source of our validation comes from within, not from without. The praise of others, the diplomas and accolades, the approval and kudos, even the love of those close to you, these are all external validation. If your sense of self is dependent on such external sources, then you are prone to suffering at the mercy of circumstance.
People with poor self-efficacy, says Bandura, constantly doubt their own capabilities:
[Those with poor self-efficacy] shy away from difficult tasks, which they view as personal threats. They have low aspirations and weak commitment to the goals they choose to pursue. When faced with difficult tasks, they dwell on their personal deficiencies, on the obstacles they will encounter, and all kinds of adverse outcomes rather than concentrate on how to perform successfully. They slacken their efforts and give up quickly in the face of difficulties…. It does not require much failure for them to lose faith in their capabilities. They fall easy victim to stress and depression.
By contrast, here is his description of people with strong self-efficacy:
People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided…. They set themselves challenging goals and maintain strong commitment to them. They heighten and sustain their efforts in the face of failure. They quickly recover their sense of efficacy after failures or setbacks…[and] approach threatening situations with assurance that they can exercise control over them. Such an efficacious outlook produces personal accomplishments, reduces stress, and lowers vulnerability to depression.
Sharon, in her mid-thirties, was a field agent with the FBI. A year or two before she came to see us, Sharon had fallen in love with Harry, another agent, while they were working on a case together. Despite strict FBI policy discouraging fraternization among the agents, the two quietly began living together. However, Sharon soon realized that Harry wasn’t ready to commit for the long term. Heartbroken, she nevertheless knew the relationship had to end, and she broke it off.
More than a year passed, and just as Sharon was beginning to feel she was over the breakup, she and Harry were assigned to a training program that would have them working together daily for the next six months. Sharon was in a bind: she feared this would be an intolerable situation, yet she couldn’t explain her dilemma to her superiors, because the relationship was never supposed to have happened in the first place.
As the training began, Sharon found herself going through such turmoil that she could barely function. She came home each day miserable, her stomach in knots, often in tears. A friend, seeing how she was suffering, referred her to our office.
As Sharon went through the Four-Step Process, she discovered that her beliefs about men included the classic image of being saved by a knight on a white horse. Without realizing it consciously, she had been carrying this image for many years, along with the belief it fostered, which said, “I cannot take care of myself—I need someone to take care of me.”
It was this image, together with all it represented, that lay at the core of Sharon’s present anguish. She had given up her sense of control over her own destiny to this image of the man on the horse and thus completely undermined her own self-efficacy.
Once she identified that unsupportive belief, she was able to access her own resources and take care of herself, both practically and emotionally. She stepped into her own shoes and reclaimed her self-efficacy—and was able to go through the remaining five months of training with ease and composure.
Self-efficacy is not a black-and-white, all-or-nothing proposition. Most of us feel a degree of self-efficacy in some or even many areas of our lives, yet we may lack it in others. We may be doing well in our work life, but not in our family life, or vice versa. We may be high-functioning individuals in general, but have certain areas where we feel incompetent or out of our depth, like David, the high-functioning but directionally challenged journalist.
Sharon was completely capable in her work as a law enforcement agent. In fact, the nature of her work required an unusually strong ability to think fast and be powerfully in control of circumstances—and Sharon was good at what she did. It was only when she stepped into the realm of personal relationships that the self-limiting beliefs instilled during childhood would rear their ugly heads and tell her, “You can’t do anything right.”
Likewise, Lydia was doing fine in her life until she retired from her work as a dental hygienist, because in her work and career, her sense of self-efficacy was intact, and this served as a kind of anchor in her life. Once she was retired and no longer exercising her executive function in that professional capacity, circumstances began getting the upper hand.
What we need, in order to let go of our past self-limiting beliefs and live our ideal life, is to step into a full sense of executive function in our life as a whole—to step fully into our own shoes.
As it turns out, this is something we have been striving to do from the day we were born.
The Road to Becoming You
As a newborn infant, you marveled at this world of sights and sounds. You cooed and gurgled, reached out and touched, putting everything you could manage to manipulate into your mouth as a primal way of connecting with it and learning more about it. Soon you were pushing your explorations further as you crawled, stood, and walked. You were absorbing new observations a mile a minute in what was without question the most accelerated period of learning in your life.
However, in everything you learned, there was one thing you did not yet grasp: that there was such a thing as you.
Then, typically at around the age of two, something happened. Ask any parent, and they’ll know what it was: you started saying, “No!” Asked to do something, you declined, and not politely. Seeing another child with a toy, you would point (or grab) and declaim, “Mine!” You found an infinite variety of creative ways to refuse, declare, and insist.
Not every child exhibits this behavior at exactly the age of two, and not everyone manifests it the same way, but we all pretty much go through this phase. In fact, it’s a critically important stage of development. It is not about negation. It is about assertion.
This is when we learn to distinguish between this thing called “me” and everything else. We develop an awareness of ourselves as autonomous, self-determining beings. It is the beginning of our establishing an individual identity, together with our capacity to negotiate our existence in the world. It is the beginning of what in adulthood will become our fully formed executive function.
To a great extent, this outward journey is also a reflection of what is happening physically in the development of our brain and nervous system, especially in relation to a rich, fatty substance called myelin.
Myelin is the material our bodies produce to coat our nerve fibers, forming a fatty sheath that insulates the nerves and, much like the rubber or plastic insulation on household electrical wires, prevents their electrical impulses from short-circuiting or spilling out into their surroundings. This insulation focuses the nerves’ capacity to transmit impulses and allows them to transmit as much as one hundred times faster—something like upgrading one’s Internet connection from dialup to broadband.
Very little myelin exists in the brain at the time of birth. As the nervous system begins to myelinate (that is, to form that insulating myelin sheath around the nerves), it starts with the spinal cord and most primitive structures of the brain, proceeding quite gradually to the parts of the brain responsible for higher functions, with the areas of the most sophisticated mental processing in the cerebral cortex coming last of all.
In the first few years of life, in other words, the brain is still largely unmyelinated—still working on a dial-up connection, so to speak. The frontal cortex does not develop sufficiently to have any significant degree of executive function until the age of nine or ten, and even then, the process is nowhere near complete.
Up until the late 1990s, it was believed that the myelination process was complete by age eighteen. However, more recent research has revealed that this doesn’t happen fully until well into our twenties. In other words, up until our middle or late twenties, we don’t really have the physiological foundation for a fully developed sense of executive function.
Our Hypnotic Childhood
As adults, we can step outside a situation and look at it objectively. We can consider what might be motivating the other people involved as well as how the situation might be affecting them. This level of abstraction gives us a tremendous capacity to process and understand events—a capacity we do not have as children.
When we are very young, everything that happens around us and to us is all about us. We don’t yet have that capacity of abstraction until the age of nine or ten, and even then not nearly as fully as we will past the age of twenty.
We mentioned earlier that we typically do not clearly remember things that occurred to us when we were two or three years old. But why should this be true? After all, these events certainly had as much impact as later events. If we can clearly remember events that happened five years ago, ten or twenty years ago, why not events when we were two?
In large part, this is because our brains were not sufficiently developed to process these events with the adult skills of executive function and self-efficacy. We did not have the language skills or conceptual objectivity in place to put words and reason to these events when they were happening. Today, as grown adults, we process most of what happens to us in articulated, verbal terms. But when we try to zero in on these events of early childhood, it’s very difficult to do. We literally do not have the words to bring them up, because we never attached words to them in the first place. We remember them only in nonverbal, indistinct masses of feeling and emotion.
Lack of executive function means we cannot observe the situation, cannot step back and see it objectively. We lack the ability to differentiate what is real from what is not. We have no filters. We simply soak it all up like a sponge.
In psychological terms, we go through those early years in a hypnagogic state, meaning that state between full wakefulness and sleep when we are partially conscious but deeply suggestive—when the doorways to our subconscious are wide open.
In a very real sense, we go through our early childhood in something very much like an eyes-open form of hypnotic trance. Whatever your parents or other adults tell you, you tend to accept as true. If your father says, “You are amazing, you can do whatever you set out to do,” then as far as you’re concerned, that’s the truth. Unfortunately, it also works the other way: if he says, “You’re worthless, you’re good for nothing,” then that becomes the truth for you.
Again, this is not a verbal concept: it’s not as if you say in your mind, “I, Caitlyn, am a worthless human being.” No, you don’t have any idea what the word worthless means, at least not intellectually. Your cerebral cortex doesn’t have the myelination or the verbal skills to put that together. Because you don’t place words to what you’re experiencing, you don’t have a verbally articulated memory connected to it. But emotionally, you get the full impact of the message: I’m not okay. There’s something wrong with me. And that belief is so powerful that years later, in your adult life, despite your accomplishments and all the rest of the evidence that this is not true, you still have the belief locked firmly in place.
According to Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., trauma has a particular impact on the posterior cingulate, which is the part of the brain where we assemble our internal perception of ourselves—in technical terms, it is the enteroceptive portion of the brain. People who are traumatized, explains Dr. van der Kolk, have more difficulty with self-awareness because the neural site of their sense of self has literally been damaged. When trauma remains untreated, it can over time profoundly suppress our sense of self-reflection and self-examination.
By the same token, he adds, by healing trauma one can actually grow and deepen that self-reflective part of the brain.
Your Perfect Childhood
Imagine you were raised by the perfect parents—people who completely supported you, championed you, praised you at every accomplishment and encouraged you at every setback, and were always in your corner. Imagine what it would be like to be a kid with parents who are always telling you how great you are, how much potential you have, how much they believe in you, how you can do whatever you set your mind to, how if you follow your heart and pursue the life you truly want you will overcome all obstacles and absolutely cannot fail.
Of course, that’s probably not exactly what happened. Your parents may have been wonderful. But no parent is perfect, however well intentioned. We are all human beings, and as parents, we are bound to have “off” days, suffer from our own stresses, and make mistakes. Many of our parenting missteps are probably minor and easily overridden, but there are bound to be some that have significant and lasting impact.
And then, when we were kids, there were also the friends and playmates, the other kids in school, the teachers and coaches, neighborhood parents, and all the other influences in our lives. The teasing, scolding, arguments, unfairnesses, and other emotional scrapes and pains of growing up.
No, you probably did not have the perfect childhood. But what if you had?
Imagine if you had had those perfect parents, and together with them, nothing but the most supportive friends and only the best teachers. How you would have turned out? What would your life look and feel like today if you had been nurtured and developed in such a way that you had an absolutely unshakable sense of belief in yourself and the fundamental goodness of the world around you?
Well, that is exactly the life you can live—because that is exactly what the Four-Step Process does. It has the impact on your core being that those perfect parents would have had over the years—only you do it yourself. When you go through the steps of this process, you take the beliefs you consciously want running your life and install them into your being at that same preverbal, prearticulate level where you experienced your original learning as an infant. You bypass all the structures and limitations of intellect and verbal, cognitive thought, and imprint your new intentions at a very primal level.
The Four-Step Process is in essence the equivalent of giving yourself a perfect childhood. You are replicating a primal dynamic, invoking the same basic process but doing it in a more structured and much more rapid way.
That is what the Four-Step Process is for. It is a tool to help you complete the process of becoming you.
Step 3
Step 3 brings together elements from everything we’ve looked at up to this point. It uses the cognitive powers of the conscious mind and the powerful forces of the subconscious, incorporates exercises that help to reorganize your electrical polarity and directly address the biofield, and brings it all together with some powerful images.
There are three parts to this step:
- Create an image of a healing basket and use it to remove from your life any elements of distress.
- Create a pledge of self-acceptance and combine it with a new self-empowering belief to form your own personal code to joy.
- Flesh these statements out and make them real to your subconscious using a collection of scenes from your ideal life.
Creating a Healing Basket
Picture in your mind’s eye a container. We call this a “healing basket,” but it can be any kind of container. If you like, you can visualize a bucket, a bowl, or a deep well. “Basket” is simply a metaphor—the concept is containment.
Into this container you are going to place the issues and problems you want to let go of, including any self-limiting beliefs and memories of past negative events, as well as any negative factors in your present life that you want to change. The point of the healing basket is that you are exercising your executive power to define and control the situation, and you are using this capacity to contain the pain, struggle, hurt, or challenges that have held you back up until now.
The image of the basket (or whatever container you decide on) is a signal to your subconscious mind that you are in the driver’s seat of your life and that the disturbances and issues you are addressing are going to be contained. They are not going to leak out into your life anymore. You are creating a boundary.
Sometimes clients ask us, “How do I know if I’m doing this right? What if I’m not a visual person?” Don’t worry. There is no wrong way here, and you don’t have to be a visual artist to do this. We’ve had people tell us, “I’m not good at visualizing things.” Fine, we say. Close your eyes for a moment—now, can you imagine the outline of an apple? Sure you can. How did you do that? You visualized it. Anyone can do this.
- Close your eyes and picture your healing basket.
- Place into it all the elements of your fog of distress.
Place into the healing basket the negative, self-limiting beliefs and any other negative elements you identified in step 1, all the hurt, the struggles, the painful memories and past events.
If anything else negative occurs to you while you’re doing this, even if it’s not something you thought about before when you were going through step 1, toss it in there. Don’t worry about it overflowing. It’s your basket: it can hold as much as you need it to. Whatever isn’t working in your life, whatever makes you feel overwhelmed, whatever thoughts, feelings, or hardships interfere with your present life, and going back as far as you can remember—throw it all in there.
- Now, over the next two or three minutes, visualize that healing basket slowly disappearing or drifting away.
A simple way to do this is to imagine placing the basket onto the water’s surface at the edge of a lake or ocean, and then watching it gradually float away and disappear over the horizon. Or, you might imagine tying a balloon to its handle and watch it gradually drift up and into the clouds.
We have had clients imagine their healing basket as a rocket ship that blasted off into space; as a giant toilet that flushed; as a Dumpster that was picked up and carried away by a trash truck; as a mountain cave that was swallowed up in an earthquake. It doesn’t matter exactly what imagery you use. What matters is that you clearly decide on an image that you can focus on, and that the image includes these two crucial ingredients: containment and release.
If nothing else strongly comes to mind, the default image we recommend is a large straw basket that you place onto the water’s surface at the ocean’s edge, and gradually watch it carried away, into and over the horizon.
There is a fascinating concept in psychology called the Zeigarnik principle, after the Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, who discovered in the 1920s that people have a better recall of incomplete objects and tasks than of complete ones. For example, waiters remember a meal only as long as the order is still in the process of preparation. Once the meal is served, the order vanishes from the waiter’s short-term (that is, conscious) memory. Simply stated, the Zeigarnik principle says:
We remember that which is unfinished or incomplete.
To put it the other way, once a task or issue is complete, it then—and only then—disappears from view. We worry about things in which we have not achieved closure. Unresolved issues in your life sit around in your psyche like unanswered emails in your psychological and energetic in-box. After you answer the emails, though—zip!—they immediately flush out of the in-box. This means that once you genuinely resolve the cloud hanging around a traumatic event from years ago, that cloud is over, done, released.
And this is true whether or not we are aware of it. Stefanie was not consciously aware that her parents’ scolding over that quarter was still sitting in her in-box fifty years later, but there it sat, waiting for closure. Once she went through the Four-Step Process, it was gone.
Your Empowering Belief
Earlier we said that we literally grow our beliefs out of new nerve pathways, like a dynamic topiary of the mind. Here is the even more radical corollary: if we can grow them, then we can regrow them. That is, we can intentionally grow new beliefs.
Step 3 is where you erase negative life beliefs and install positive new ones.
To prepare for this, first we’ll have you bring up the self-limiting belief you identified in step 1 and transform it into an opposite, self-empowering belief. For example, if your strongest self-limiting belief is “I am not safe,” then the opposite, self-empowering belief might be “I am completely safe and secure.”
Here is a list of the seven common self-limiting beliefs together with their positive corollaries.
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I am not safe. |
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I am completely safe and secure, and everything is okay. |
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I am worthless. |
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I am worthy and deserving of all success. |
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I am powerless. |
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I am not lovable. |
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I am a loving person and am loved. |
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I cannot trust anyone. |
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I am surrounded by trusting and trustworthy friends. |
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I am bad. |
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I bring value to everyone I meet. |
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I am alone. |
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I am a child of God/of the universe. |
You might reword these, depending on your situation. Whether you come up with your own version or simply use one of the statements above, now we want you to write down your new empowering belief so that you’ll have ready access to it. You’ll be using it shortly.
Statement of Self-Acceptance
The next element in this step is a simple statement of self-acceptance:
I fully and deeply accept myself.
There are a number of reasons this simple statement is so powerful and fundamental. Self-acceptance is a superordinate concept, that is, it is in a class by itself. It trumps any other affirmation you might make. Whether it is confidence, self-esteem, strength of resolve, sureness of ability, or any other capacity, whatever it is you would like to affirm and build into your life, it has to start from a platform of self-acceptance.
Part of the reason this is so is that, before you can set a course for a new destination, you have to know your starting point. Accepting yourself as you are puts you in the here and now. Until you have that clear starting point, any journey is going to be handicapped. If you don’t accept something, it’s extremely difficult to change it, because you can’t fight something and change it at the same time.
The vast majority of people who are in distress, wanting to change their lives, do not accept themselves because they fear that doing so would mean affirming those same negative qualities or circumstances they wish to change. But that isn’t how it works. Denial leaves you powerless. Acceptance empowers you.
Accepting yourself does not mean being satisfied with the status quo or giving up any hope of improvement. Quite the opposite: deep and full self-acceptance puts you in the driver’s seat, in a position of strength. It puts you in a place from which it becomes possible to change and grow powerfully.
Often we tend to identify with our circumstances, and especially with our most challenging circumstances. If we have an illness, a damaged relationship, a financial hardship, we may start to feel that problem is us. But deep self-acceptance means I am not the disease, I am not the divorce, I am not the financial setback. Whatever is going on in my life is not who I am, it is simply what I am passing through at the moment.
Another way of saying this is that this statement moves you from an external locus of control to an internal locus of control. Starting from a place of self-acceptance is a reclamation of your self-efficacy.
I fully and deeply accept myself.
There are many meanings and interpretations you can give to this statement. Here are just a handful of the infinite number of ways one might express deep self-acceptance:
I deeply accept things the way they are, as a place to start.
I fully accept myself, even with whatever faults or shortcomings I have and knowing that there are things I want to change.
I completely embrace myself, all that I have been and all that I will be, with all my imperfections and all my limitless potential.
I fully accept myself as a child of God.
I fully accept myself as a spiritual being.
I fully accept myself as a being in the universe.
All of these are right and all of them are fine, and if you want to create another version of this idea just for yourself, feel free to do so. For our step 3, we like to use the simplest, clearest, most comprehensive statement we can. It’s also important that whatever your statement of self-acceptance is, it’s very easy to remember, so that you don’t have to refer to something written when you are going through the step.
I fully and deeply accept myself.
“What if this statement just doesn’t ring true for me?” clients sometimes ask us. What if you really don’t feel that you can accept yourself?
That’s okay; we’re going to have you go ahead and say it anyway. If you are in a place right now where you feel you cannot accept yourself, just consider that as part of the circumstance you’re including in your statement of self-acceptance.
Your Personal Code to Joy
Now we’ll add these two elements together to create what we call your personal code to joy. Starting with this statement of self-acceptance, we simply add to it a statement of your own self-empowering belief. For example:
I deeply and fully accept myself, and I feel safe and secure in my life.
I deeply and fully accept myself, and I feel loved and deserving of love.
I deeply and fully accept myself. I am competent, capable, and worthy.
This combination of words—a simple statement of self-acceptance together with your new self-empowering belief—is powerful.
Now think about what this relates to in your life. When you say “safe,” for example, are you mainly thinking about your physical safety in the neighborhood where you live, or where you work? Your physical health? Your relationships? Feeling safe in social situations? Whatever the context is for you, hold those issues in mind as you make the statement.
If you like, you can also personalize the statement itself, making it more specific to your situation.
I deeply and fully accept myself, and I am capable in my work as a [whatever your profession is].
I deeply and fully accept myself, and I am fully at ease in social situations.
I deeply and fully accept myself, and I completely deserve a long, loving, and happy marriage.
Again, though, for your present purposes it is best if this statement is short, simple, and easy to remember. For now, as you are first learning the Four-Step Process, we recommend that you use one of these seven versions:
Examples of a Personal Code to Joy
I deeply and fully accept myself. I am safe and everything is okay.
I deeply and fully accept myself. I am worthy and deserving of all success.
I deeply and fully accept myself. I am powerful and capable.
I deeply and fully accept myself. I am loving and I am loved.
I deeply and fully accept myself. I am surrounded by trusting, trustworthy friends.
I deeply and fully accept myself. I bring value to everyone I meet.
I deeply and fully accept myself. I am a child of God/of the universe.
Pledge of Acceptance
As powerful as this statement is, it is still only a statement on the cognitive level. In other words, this is your flea speaking. Now we need to bring your elephant into alignment. Where the real power comes into play is by opening a channel to your subconscious, which we access through your biofield.
This is the purpose of the next element of this step, which we call the pledge:
- Place your right hand over your heart, as if you were saying the American Pledge of Allegiance.
There is a nerve bundle located here, in the intercostal space between the second and third ribs, lying just beneath your fingertips. If you press or rub this spot, it will typically feel a little tender. We call this the repatterning spot: rubbing this spot triggers a neurolymphatic response that functions something like a major acupoint.
Don’t worry if you are not sure whether you’ve located the exact right spot. Firm pressure in this general area above your heart will activate the nerve bundle and produce the desired effect.
- Rub this repatterning spot in a clockwise motion with the flats of the fingertips of your right hand.
- As you rub this area, repeat your personal code to joy, either aloud or silently to yourself, five times.
Rubbing this nerve bundle opens a gateway to the biofield, allowing your statement to enter you and sink in on a far deeper level.
You might think of it this way: imagine you are using an ATM to get some cash from your checking account. You have just put in your card, so the machine knows who you are—but that’s not enough to complete the transaction and get out the cash. What’s missing? You still have to key in your password, key in the amount you want, and press ENTER.
In our exercise, your statement of self-acceptance is the password; your self-empowering belief is like telling the machine how much cash you want the machine to give you; and rubbing the repatterning spot is equivalent to pressing the ENTER key.
Password = “I deeply and fully accept myself…”
Withdrawal request = “and I am completely safe and secure.”
Pressing ENTER = rubbing repatterning spot
This pledge of acceptance and personal code to joy form the center of step 3. It is the meat of the sandwich, wrapped between slices of imagery that speak to your subconscious. The first image, which came before the pledge of acceptance, was the healing basket. Now it’s time to create the images that come after the pledge and wrap this step all together.
Images of Your Ideal Life
The final element in step 3 is to bring to your mind images of your life as you would like it to be—to visualize what you want to have working in your life.
The goal here is to have you see the life you described in your self-empowering belief. This could mean imagining scenes from your ideal life, as if it you were watching a movie about you. Or, it could mean imagining individual images, like snapshots or movie stills. And this does not necessarily have to be purely visual, or even to be visual at all. You can bring up sensations, feelings, sounds, smells, whatever sense impressions vividly evoke the life you genuinely want to be living:
The smell of something baking
The feel of someone’s skin
The chill of new-fallen snow on the ski slopes
The cool, salty spray of surf in your honeymoon or vacation
The point is to evoke a sense or feeling that connects to the positive emotion you experience in your new life, the life you are letting loose by unblocking and letting go of old limitations.
As you brainstorm, if you feel it is helpful, you can jot down a list of words or phrases that will bring back to mind the images that are coming to you. Remember, though, it’s not the words you’re looking for: it is the feelings.
There is a good chance that the roots of your self-limiting beliefs lay in experiences that happened so early in life that you had not yet developed the language of words to describe them. If those beliefs have been embedded in your being as preverbal emotions, then it stands to reason that the most powerful way to replace them is with new, positive, empowering emotions—feelings that go beyond words.
There is an expression in the world of sales: “People buy on emotion, then rationalize it after the fact with logic”—and this is especially true of your subconscious mind. It will “buy” the idea of your empowered, positive, powerful, joyful, fulfilling life far more readily through the language of image and emotion than it will through any logical or rational argument.
You can speak the words, “I am having a loving and fulfilling relationship,” until the cows come home. But give your subconscious mind the salt scent of the surf, the feel of the wet sand between your toes, the sound of your lover’s laughter and the sensation of his or her fingers intertwined with yours as you walk the beach together—that collection of images far outweighs any verbal affirmation you could possibly come up with!
This is similar to the process often taught as creative visualization, positive thinking, or affirmation—but with a crucial difference.
As we said earlier, if you don’t first clear the resistance in your biofield and subconscious, then when you practice positive thinking, affirmations, or creative visualization, what can easily happen is that you simply end up arguing with yourself. Even as you consciously repeat, “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better…,” your subconscious mind is muttering, “Oh, really? I don’t think so!”—and in contests of will between conscious and subconscious, you already know which one wins.
The crucial difference here is that before even getting to this part of the process, you have taken the necessary steps to reorganize your body’s energy so that it is in alignment with your intention rather than fighting it, and you have “emptied the cup” of emotional and energetic charge surrounding the negative past experiences and self-limiting belief you identified earlier.
You have prepared the soil for these seeds of positivity to take root, sprout, and flourish.
Variations
Imagery can be a very personal thing. Over the years we have had clients who have customized the basic elements of step 3 in all sorts of ways. Again, when you are first learning the sequence and elements of the four steps, we strongly recommend that you keep it as simple as possible. Even if you never vary it and use only the very basic default images and language we are providing here, it will still be intensely personal because of the experiences, memories, feelings, and ideal life images you bring to it.
However, we thought it would also be helpful to share with you some of the most common variants and additions to the process that we have worked with over the years. Consider all these as options: some of them may especially appeal to you or strike you as helpful to you, and others may not.
Variant: Images of Release
In addition to letting the healing basket gradually disappear, it can be helpful to bring up specific images of cleansing or letting go, such as:
- Standing under a waterfall and letting it wash away all your negative beliefs and past hurts and cares
- Walking or dancing in the rain and letting it cleanse and purify you
- Dunking in a pure mountain lake
- Swimming underwater and having all negative beliefs washed away
- Standing in a warm shower and watching the old beliefs swirl down the drain
- Standing in a beam of cleansing, healing light shining down from the heavens
Another way to do this is to write down on a piece of paper the negative elements you want to release, and place the paper into a bowl or other container, then bury the container or throw it away. Or, put the paper in a fireplace or candle and let it burn. You might write a few key words with a felt-tip pen on a helium-filled balloon, then release it outside and watch it float away. Adding some physical action to the imagery can be a powerful way to blend the mind and body experience of letting go.
These are rituals of release: by defining, containing, and then letting go of these negative elements, you give your subconscious permission to release them.
Variant: Making the Healing Journey
Imagine traveling from a starting point A (where you’ve been) to a given destination, point B (your ideal life), in whatever way gives you the greatest sense of peace and contentment. It doesn’t matter what form or context you choose; whatever feels most natural and right to you is best.
Some like to envision themselves making their healing journey as a run or a jog. Some like to walk along a beach, or hike a trail through the woods. Some envision golfing and carrying their bag of clubs with them; others ski. It’s completely up to you.
As you work your way from point A to point B, let yourself pass through a beautiful environment that you enjoy. As you go, imagine the trees, rocks, shrubs, whatever scenery naturally occurs there.
This is not idle aesthetics or just a “relaxation” technique. Remember, images are the language of the subconscious. This is a powerful tool to aid in the dissolving and disappearing of a lingering fog of distress that may have held you in its clutches for decades.
This scenery can become a cue to evoke the Zeigarnik effect and “close any open files,” that is, to resolve any unresolved issues. These trees, hills, and any other scenery you pass on your healing journey represent the feelings and circumstances that are part of the issues you are letting go of. This is not something you need to dwell on. You don’t need to dig down into those feelings or issues or stop to examine them. Just notice the scenery in passing and keep walking, jogging, or skiing. The simple act of noticing them is what effectively closes those files and deletes those issues from your psyche’s in-box.
Variant: Locate the Feeling
You can assist the process by locating the specific energy center within your biofield where the issues you’re releasing most resonate.
This is easier to do than it might sound. It’s much like placing your hand on your head and slowly moving it about to discern the location of a headache.
As you think about the negative beliefs, feelings, or past experiences you want to let go of, place your hand on different locations of your body to see where that residue seems to resonate most. You might feel it just below the beltline, in your belly, in your solar plexus, your chest, your throat, or your head.
There are some common qualities that often resonate in particular areas. For example, issues of safety, security, and confidence often resonate deep in the belly; anger or jealousy in the solar plexus; lovesickness, heartbreak, loneliness, and grief in the heart; and issues around self-expression, being heard or listened to, in the throat area.
Common Issues and Corresponding Energy Centers
|
Throat |
|
Expression, identity |
|
Heart |
|
Love, heartbreak, loneliness, relationship issues |
|
Solar plexus |
|
Anger, jealousy, envy, resentment |
|
Belly |
|
Safety, confidence, strength, presence |
Close your eyes, and imagine sending healing energy to the area where you feel that distress or blockage. For some, this can be a powerful reinforcement. Again, though, this is an optional addition to the process, not an essential element.
Variant: Address Your Executive Function
You can identify your own internal executive function by giving it a name so that you can address it directly. We have had clients who decided to call their inner executive “Boss,” “Soul,” “Friend,” “Inner Healer,” or even a personal name like “Sam” or “Susan.”
Once you’ve chosen the name you’re going to use, address your executive function directly and ask it to help clear out whatever is in your healing basket. If you decide to call it Soul, for example, then you might say:
“Soul, please gather up and release any old material from the past that’s in the way of my ideal life.”
The key here is that your being already knows how to heal itself. When you inadvertently get a cut or a scrape, your body knows how to heal it. Your immune system knows how to deal with an infection. You don’t need to consciously give your body all the specific instructions about how to heal: it knows.
The psyche also knows how to self-heal naturally, if you give it the right nutrients and alignment. You don’t have to give it all the detailed instructions. Once you establish the intention to heal, you can trust that your mind and body know how to do the healing. All you need to do consciously is focus your intention on the positive outcome.
Addressing your executive function is a way of stepping into your own shoes to set your healing journey in motion. Imagine the change of belief and perception that you want to effect in yourself, and then ask your healing mind to go into your subconscious and create that repatterning. It knows what to do: just ask.
Variant: Images of Adulthood
You can use a common, everyday tool of adulthood as a powerful image to evoke the fact that you are now an adult and are fully capable of interpreting events objectively. In other words, while things that happened in your childhood may have cast a cloud over your life, if those same events happened today, as an adult you would deal with them very differently—and by evoking images of adulthood you can reclaim executive function and reinterpret those past events.
An authority figure, bully, or other figure in your life who held power over you when you were four or seven has no power over you today, and these images of adulthood help to trigger your psyche to remember that.
For example, close your eyes and imagine holding your car keys in one hand and a credit card in the other. If your profession involves a clearly identified tool—for a race car driver or pilot, a steering wheel or plane controls; for a surgeon, a scalpel—then you might use that as well, as long as does not have complicating childhood associations.
Our favorite image of adulthood is car keys, in part because you hold them in your hand so often that the feeling is usually easy to imagine vividly.
For example, as you are putting past events and old feelings into your healing basket, you can imagine the feel of your car keys in your hand: this tells you that you are an adult now, and those old feelings have no power over you any longer.
This image can serve as a kind of anchor throughout your day, as well, so that every time you pick up your car keys, your entire being is reminded that you are living a new life now:
you are safe;
you are worthy;
you are powerful and capable;
you are loving and are loved;
you are surrounded by trusting, trustworthy friends;
you bring value to everyone you meet;
and you are not alone—you are a child of God, a child of the universe.