Chapter 6
The Second Step: Taking Responsibility for Your Thoughts
Every morning when Susan woke up, the first thing she felt was dread, followed by panic. Her heart began to race before she even got out of bed. The kids needed to get dressed. Had they finished their homework last night? Off the top of her head, she knew she hadn’t responded to two texts and three e-mails. Were the senders waiting for her response? Were they angry with her for not responding?
This particular morning, Susan knew her husband would be in a bad mood come evening if his pitch didn’t go well at work, so she rolled over and said, “Good luck today.”
“Great,” he said in a sleepy voice. “I can’t even have a moment’s peace when I’m not reminded of work. Thanks a lot!” He threw the covers back and got out of bed. Then, he huffed and puffed as he brushed his teeth and washed his face.
“I can’t win,” she thought to herself. Suddenly, she remembered she had to return a pair of pants that didn’t fit her youngest son. After getting everyone off to school and work, she headed to the office.
Her boss sent an e-mail at 9:01 a.m. “I didn’t hear back regarding my request for the charity donors list yesterday. Please advise.” Her heart ached for a moment. She quickly pulled the list with the right criteria from the database, alphabetized it, and printed it with the header the way her boss liked it.
As Susan handed the list to her boss, she said, “I’m so sorry for the delay.”
Her boss smiled and said, “No worries.” But she still worried.
During her lunch break, she drove to the mall, feeling nervous the entire way, as if all of the other cars were only moments from hitting her. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she might be drifting too close to the line. She felt as if she constantly had to steady her car and right herself, as if her autopilot was set to “mistakes.” When she got to the mall, she felt as if everyone was looking at her. A few men said hello. Since she was hardly ever in public without her husband, the sudden attention made her nervous, sad, and even angry. Susan didn’t prepare to be looked at, and she wasn’t prepared to say hello to anyone. She wanted to get back in her car, to just be alone. She wanted her heart to stop beating so quickly, to stop aching. “God forbid I had any real problems. How could I handle an actually difficult life? Everything is perfect, so why am I so upset?” she thought.
She felt guilty that she just couldn’t be happy or at peace, even though her children were healthy, she was the last of her close friends still to be married, and they could pay their bills.
When she returned to the office, she grabbed a cup of coffee in the break room. She knew the coffee would only make her nerves worse, but she felt foggy, as if she wasn’t thinking clearly. She overheard one of the staff nurses say, “I had a hypnotherapy session two weeks ago, and I haven’t had to take Ambien since. I can actually sleep!”
That night, she and her family had a relatively nice dinner together with almost no voices raised. After the dishes, she started to worry around seven p.m. that she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She knew that the thought of not being able to sleep made it harder to fall asleep, but she couldn’t stop the worrying or break the cycle. She was about to get up for her melatonin when she remembered the mention of hypnotherapy at the office. She decided to make an appointment in the morning.
Three days later, on her way to the session, she was angry with herself. She couldn’t believe she had paid up front for the session. What if it didn’t work? What if she couldn’t be hypnotized?
The hypnotherapist asked her a few questions, after which she closed her eyes. Susan imagined every part of her body relaxing, beginning at the top of her head. She relaxed her forehead, her jaw, and the tiny muscles next to her eyes. She relaxed her shoulders, arms, and legs, and she began to breathe deeply and slowly. The hypnotherapist counted backward, slowly, and for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, her heart began to feel better. The pain in her chest lessened and lessened until it was gone. She felt as though she could really breathe.
The hypnotherapist then told her to put her worries in a box at night, where she could always sort through them and pick out whatever she’d like to work on, one at a time. In the bedroom, however, worries would be prohibited. They were to be placed in the box. The box was to stay outside the bedroom, perhaps on the mantle or under a chair. “I’ll put it in the pantry,” she told the hypnotherapist.
“Very good. That’s exactly right,” the hypnotherapist responded. “Now that you’ve put the box in the pantry, it’s easy and effortless for you to fall asleep. It’s easy and effortless for you to fall asleep at night. You sleep easily and effortlessly through the night. If you happen to get up to use the bathroom, you’ll fall right back asleep as soon as your head touches your pillow. It’s easy and effortless for you to sleep. You have a wonderful night’s sleep, and because of this, you wake up the next day feeling completely rested, clearheaded, happy, and full of energy. It’s easy and effortless for you to sleep now.”
After her session, Susan went home and had her best night’s sleep since she was a child. When she woke up the next morning, the first thing she noticed was that her heart felt better. She thought about her children and smiled. She turned toward her still sleeping husband and didn’t say a thing.
As she was brushing her teeth, she looked at herself in the mirror. Today was going to be a better day.
How Taking Responsibility for Your Thoughts Differs from Affirmations
What you’re going to learn in this chapter is how to choose better thoughts. At first glance, this might sound a lot as though we’re headed down the road of daily affirmations, but we’re not. Everything about the Close Your Eyes, Get Free process is about accessing and transforming your subconscious mind directly. Daily affirmations are fabulous, but they only directly reach the level of the conscious mind, which means it takes a long, long time for them to impact your subconscious. Anyone who has practiced them knows it. You might feel better for a short time, but the underlying issue remains unless you repeat those bad boys six hundred times per day for a week (at least). Typically, people give up well before that happens.
The difference here is that we use hypno-affirmations during our self-hypnosis scripts, which means that you have already reached the theta brain wave state before we begin the conditioning process. Because you have already reached your subconscious mind, where your thoughts, habits, and beliefs reside, much less repetition is required. Usually ten to twenty-one repetitions per day does the trick. This is the difference between taking the Concorde to get where you’re going, or a rowboat; affirmations on their own might get you there, but affirmations used during a hypnosis session are a much faster, smoother ride.
We’ve covered affirmations, now let’s discuss vision boards. They’re powerful, but looking at a picture of a house with a pool and tennis courts all day long isn’t going to get you that house if your subconscious beliefs are “It’s unsafe to be rich” or “I’m not smart enough, and I can’t do it.” It’s like having a hidden Mount Everest of limiting beliefs that you have to traverse before your actions will match your desired outcome.
What you’ll learn here is that hypnotherapy, and specifically the Close Your Eyes, Get Free process, will clear the way for vision boards, affirmations, and every other awesome Law of Attraction tool to be infinitely more powerful and effective.
In this chapter, I’m going to show you, step by step, the exact process that I’ve been using for years to live my best life and overcome habits that drove me nuts for a long time. We all know that if just taking responsibility for our actions were enough, every time we read a book and felt inspired by the action steps, we would actually do them for a lifetime. When was the last time that happened in your life?
There’s something that comes before our actions and it gets in their way. It’s our thoughts. Remember that we’re working our way backward from what’s most obvious—the actions, to what’s most subtle—our subconscious beliefs. Right now, we’re smack dab in the middle, at our conscious thoughts.
Have you ever wondered why, for example, when you really want to finish a project, you procrastinate? We’ve actually been conditioned to procrastinate, to have fear, and to doubt that we can be successful. Why do people who know that smoking is unhealthy continue to smoke? They really want to quit, but they haven’t been able to do it. No matter how much we want to change, no matter how many books we read, and no matter how many seminars we attend, unless we meet those beliefs where they live in the subconscious mind, they can never change for the long run. Let’s get some practical application under your belt so that the mechanism behind it makes even more sense later on.
Attempting to change a subconscious belief through conscious action is like trying to clean the bottom of the ocean by vacuuming inside your living room. It’s never going to happen. You can vacuum until the floorboards have been worn thin, and you’ll still never reach the depths of the ocean.
So, you might be asking yourself now, “How the heck do I accomplish this reconditioning? Is there something wrong with me?” And as I said in Chapter 5, this isn’t your fault. We’ve all been conditioned for 20, 30, 40, 50, or 60 years, depending on our age. So, no matter how badly you want a change, to truly accomplish it, we also have to recondition our mind in the same way that it was conditioned in the first place. Our subconscious mind can be either our greatest ally or our worst enemy, depending on its conditioning.
The bottom line is that we have to take responsibility for our mind-set. Our thoughts result in actions, but the thoughts themselves have energy behind them. Thoughts are extremely powerful. It’s vital that we take responsibility for our thoughts because the actions can only get us so far. Our mind-set is the first step toward creating our best life.
What happens if we start taking great actions, but our thoughts are still negative? There’s a distance between what we’re doing in the world and what we’re thinking, and that creates a lot of tension and frustration. For example, “I’m taking responsibility for my actions, but there’s still so much negativity in my mind. What’s going on here? I’m so mad at myself for continuing to think thoughts that aren’t good for me.”
If you’re experiencing this, it’s okay. Frequently, when you first become aware of something like this, it seems to get worse before it gets better. This is simply because you’re more aware of it. So, take a nice, deep, letting-go breath, and allow yourself to become aware of the fact that you’re in excellent company when you decide to improve your thoughts.
It’s all well and good to know that our thoughts create our external world, but if our thoughts are involuntarily negative, this information simply adds anxiety to an already overwhelming sense of powerlessness. We need to know both that our thoughts create our world and how to choose our repeated, habitual thoughts so that they’re in alignment with our goals, dreams, and ethics.
The Frequency of Power
After having read the last chapter, you now understand that by taking responsibility, you’re taking a position of power. When you do this again and again, you begin to build a habit as a powerful individual. This brings us to the discussion of frequency.
There are certain frequencies that only dogs can hear. There are certain UV rays that only cats can see. They operate at a different frequency, as if there’s a secret station on the radio that only cats and dogs know how to tune into.
Some people can run multiple billion-dollar businesses, whereas others seem to accomplish very little over the course of an entire lifetime. As human beings, we have the same skeletal system, cellular makeup, and structure of the brain. The difference is that people operate at different frequencies. It comes down to the difference in the frequency of the thoughts in individuals’ minds.
Imagine two people growing up in the same exact conditions. Perhaps they’re from the same town, the marital status of their parents is the same, and the median income of their home is about the same. But one person thinks again and again, “There are endless opportunities,” and actually finds those opportunities. The frequency opens the knowingness, and that person walks through the door straight into those opportunities.
The other person from the same general upbringing says, “The economy is bad, no one’s hiring, and there are no opportunities.” Because this is what this person thinks, these negative expectations turn out to be true as well.
Your frequency of thought determines the lens through which you view your life, and this impacts the actions you take. Which frequency do you choose to live in? If you want to live in the highest frequency but you’re still bombarded by negative thoughts, it’s time to get excited, because shifting that pattern is what this chapter is all about.
It’s important to understand, however, that although our thoughts are creating our reality, not every thought has an earth-shattering impact on our life. Having a thought in one energetic direction and a contradictory thought a few moments later more or less cancels out the first thought and the net sum for the two thoughts is zero. A positive thought plus a negative thought means there’s neutrality, stagnation, and nothing moving forward. A negative plus a negative thought sends you backward. And a positive plus a positive thought means progress and moving forward. You probably have heard this before, but it’s worth repeating: we become what we think about. Our thoughts become things, yet we still continue to take mini-negative vacations to complain about our day or feel sorry for ourself. Any movement in the opposite direction either neutralizes your progress, results in stagnation, or causes you to go backward.
Thanks to such books as The Secret and authors like Esther Hicks, the Law of Attraction is fairly common knowledge now and the idea of keeping our thoughts positive so that we invite positive experiences into our lives is not that radical a concept. That having been said, complaining is a powerful habit that doesn’t break easily and I find that, in the beginning of our work together, even my most wellness-oriented clients tend to naturally respond to “How are you today?” with a list of everything negative, rather than recounting the many positive aspects and improvements in their life. Take a look at this example of a very common scenario:
Sally wakes up with a smile on her face, stretches, and looks at her vision board; she eats a healthy breakfast; she’s feeling great that she’s in the right frame of mind for her day. Then, her mom calls and asks how she is. Because Sally is used to venting to her mother, she says, “I’m doing all right; everything is okay. My boss was annoying on Friday. My Tinder date on Saturday was awesome, but I haven’t heard back… typical. And the check didn’t clear, so I’m behind on my rent. I looked really fat in this picture my friend posted”; then, realizing all this negativity might just be attracting exactly what Sally doesn’t want into her life, she quickly follows it up with, “But I’m determined to have a great day and be rich and in love and be healthy and happy.”
Feel energetically the degree to which Sally either plateaued, stagnated, or went backward because of that ten-second complaint-fest.
Now, for a moment, just imagine the best life you could live. What would it look like? Imagine it now. What is your best life? Feel the emotions your best life evokes. What are the images? What smells do you experience as you move through your best life? What do you look like in your best life? What actions must you take on a daily basis so as to live your best life?
Now, these actions you’ll take to create that life will be the result of your thinking, so here is the most important question for you to answer:
What thoughts must you be thinking all day every day and every moment to create your best life?
Become aware of those thoughts that you must be thinking now. Is it possible to spend one more dinner complaining about college loans or politics or your ex and truly move in the direction of living your best life? This is vitally important. Now, when you slip up, do you want to spiral down a black hole of “No! I just thought a negative thought. I’m going backward. Everything is going to get out of control. I’m not creating my best life”? Of course not! Every day in every way, you’re becoming more aware of your thoughts so that you can catch the ones that need to be immediately weeded out. Then, you can immediately replace them with thoughts that create your best life. Remember: A negative followed by a positive is a neutral. Catch those old negative thoughts and immediately defuse them.
My favorite way to do this is to say or think “Cancel, cancel” immediately followed by a thought that moves me in the direction of my desired life. Try it now: imagine you have the thought, “Ugh, what was I thinking, I’m so stupid!” then immediately think to yourself or say out loud, “Cancel, cancel!” immediately followed by, “I’m so happy I’ve learned this lesson. I’ll do better next time. I feel better already.” This “Cancel, cancel” tool will help you quickly clean your mental slate of all negative thoughts and fill it up with thoughts that are in alignment with the life you desire to create.
Remember, this is just the Second Step to Mental Freedom. Simply training yourself to think positive thoughts instead of negative thoughts does not instantly create the life of your dreams, but without this step, transforming your actions is rendered nearly impossible. The conditioning of both your thoughts and actions are equally important parts of the equation that ultimately lead to mental freedom.
Let’s go ahead and do a brief self-hypnosis process that will help to transform negativity and complaints much faster than through willpower alone.
Self-Hypnosis Process: Stop Negativity and Complaints
I suggest reading through the following directions two or three times before beginning so that you will be able to follow along easily. Remember, there are video tutorials and audio recordings available to you at www.CloseYourEyesGetFree.com that will help you to become a self-hypnosis pro in no time at all.
• Begin by making note of your starting stress level. 10 = a full-blown panic attack and 0 = zero stress, no stress at all, the most relaxed a person can possibly be. Remember this number.
• Sit in a comfortable chair and place your feet flat on the ground, rest your hands gently in your lap.
• With your spine straight but comfortable, take 4 deep, slow breaths, inhaling through the nose for 4 counts and exhaling out the nose for 8 counts.
• Close your eyes and imagine gentle roots growing from the bottom of your feet down into the center of the Earth, grounding you.
• Imagine a color you love flowing in through the top of your head, all the way through your body, out the bottoms of your feet, and down those roots into the center of the Earth.
• Bring all of your focus and awareness and attention to the palms of your hands. Perhaps you can feel your palms tingling, perhaps you can feel your heartbeat in your hands, perhaps you notice a sensation of expansion in your hands. Just notice and breathe for a few moments (you can choose whatever length of time feels best, about 30 seconds is my personal favorite).
• With your eyes closed, count down from 10 to 1, saying “I am going deeper and deeper” after each number: Ten, I am going deeper and deeper. Nine, I am going deeper and deeper. Eight, I am going deeper and deeper. Seven, I am going deeper and deeper. Six, I am going deeper and deeper. Five, I am going deeper and deeper. Four, I am going deeper and deeper. Three, I am going deeper and deeper. Two, I am going deeper and deeper. One, I am going deeper and deeper…
• With your eyes closed, repeat the following hypno-affirmations silently in your mind or out loud, 10 times: I release all negativity. My thoughts are positive. I embrace happiness.
• Take another nice, deep, letting-go breath and with your eyes closed imagine replacing all negative thoughts in your mind with positive thoughts for the rest of your day until you curl up into bed tonight.
• Once you’ve spent 1–2 minutes imagining the rest of your day filled with positive thoughts and seeing the good in every situation, imagine the same color as before flowing in through the top of your head, all the way through your body, out the bottoms of your feet, and down those roots into the center of the Earth.
• Put a gentle smile on your lips, open your eyes, stretch your arms over the top of your head, and say, “Yes!”
• Notice your new number on the scale (remember 0 = zero stress, the most relaxed you can be) and congratulate yourself on how quickly you improved your state!
Here is a simple summary of the process in case you need to peek your eyes open at any point for a quick reminder:
• Notice starting stress level from 0 to 10.
• Take 4 deep breaths.
• Grow roots.
• Color.
• Notice your palms.
• Count down from 10 to 1 saying, “I am going deeper and deeper” after each number.
• Repeat the hypno-affirmations “I release all negativity. My thoughts are positive. I embrace happiness” 10 times.
• With your eyes closed, imagine thinking positive thoughts for the rest of the day.
• Color.
• Smile while opening your eyes and say, “Yes!”
• Notice new number on the scale of 0 to 10.
• Congratulate yourself for improving your state so quickly!
Next Steps
Excellent! You have completed your sixth self-hypnosis process!
• Now, go ahead and visit www.CloseYourEyesGetFree .com to access this chapter’s hypnosis recording. Pop in your headphones, sit back, relax, and Close Your Eyes, Get Free.
• After you listen to the recording, please let me know how it went! Using the hashtag #CloseYourEyesGetFree on Instagram or Twitter, message me @GraceSmithTV your starting and ending numbers on the stress scale. By using the hashtag, you’ll get to see how other readers are improving right alongside you, plus I will have an opportunity to cheer you on!
• Move on to Chapter 7 and continue to look out for all of the wonderful benefits you’re already starting to receive as a result of learning the power of hypnosis.