If I told you that I will reveal to you the biggest secret I’ve uncovered in healing, which works for 99 per cent of the people who use it, and that I know that most of you, reading this, do not use it, would you believe me? Would you use it if you knew it could change your life exponentially for the better and that you would have more fun, more success and longevity with good health and less stress, fewer frustrations, worries and fears?
Why do you suppose most people sabotage themselves? Why do most people procrastinate? Why don’t most people follow through on their New Year’s resolutions? Why do most people say they want to be happy, yet do everything to destroy their relationships and be miserable? Why do people severely harm their bodies and health? Why do most people ignore doctors’ orders? Why do more than 95 per cent of dieters gain the weight back plus a bit more? Why do we choose laziness, lies, half-truths, negligence, ignorance, denial or suppression when we could have it all? Whom can we blame for our self-sabotage and failure?
CASE STUDY: SELF-SABOTAGE
John was a boy of 14; he was very good at judo. According to his sensei (teacher), John was the best talent he had seen in all of his 30-plus years of expertise in judo. John came to see me after his parents saw me on TV and heard that I had also been a European judo champion many years before and was now coaching some world-champion athletes on an emotional and mental level, with great success. John had never won first prize. All the matches leading up to the final he would win effortlessly, but when it came to the final he would lose.
I tested John for emotional blocks. When he said, ‘I want to be a champion’ his muscles tested weak, indicating an incongruence. An incongruence is when you consciously want something but subconsciously you have reasons to fear that outcome, or you may believe that you do not deserve it, or that it is impossible or unrealistic. When it comes to the mind and subconscious mind, if one wants to go right and the other left, you have a big problem. In the long run, the subconscious mind will win most of the time (causing, if necessary, stress, distractions and detours). The conscious mind is you; what you want or desire. In this chapter you will learn how to synchronize the conscious and subconscious mind and let them work together for you.
I told John, ‘A part of you is afraid of being a champion. Let’s dig deeper and find out how this came about, and then we can do something about it!’ John was visibly excited; this problem had been embarrassing him for so long and he was eager to get over it and trample his reputation for being number two. As a matter of fact he was due to participate the following week in the selections for the national team. He had even read my book,You Are a Champion, in which I describe the emotional and mental techniques that helped me become undefeated European champion in martial arts for seven years.
What I found with muscle-testing was that there had been some sort of incident shortly after John’s birth. This incident I could not define exactly; it came out that it was something the doctor had said. I looked at John’s mother and asked her if anything had happened. She told me that John was her first-born. The delivery had been very painful and the doctor had used forceps to get John out. She remembered that the doctor made a remark along the lines of: ‘That’s always the problem with the first one; they cause the most pain and trouble.’ She also remembered that she had said a ‘rude word’ when the doctor was stitching her up. She said, ‘I was so tired and he was a little brusque and not compassionate at all, and they would not give Johnny to me straightaway, so I was a little bit irritated.’
The little newborn had picked all of this up and associated being ‘the first one’ with causing his mother pain, and had subconsciously decided never to be first again. When I tested John on the following statement: ‘I do not want to be first, because that causes pain to my mother,’ his muscles were strong, indicating that, for his subconscious mind, this was true.
After the session John was very excited; he felt ready and wanted the match to be the next day. A week later they rang me up late in the morning; first his mother was on the phone to tell me that John had won. Then I spoke to John himself, who was so excited he could barely speak. He gave me a full report on how he’d defeated a long-time rival, who had been national champion for three years running. His feeling that something was holding him back had disappeared, as if by magic.
John’s story has many variations in daily life: we want to have a happy and great relationship with our partner, yet we are locked into unproductive patterns which keep us apart emotionally and eventually lead to pain, abuse, escape in alcohol, cigarettes or food, and relationship breakdown.
CASE STUDY: CAN’T QUIT SMOKING
I was presenting a lecture on emotional balance to a crowd of 600 people. After my general introduction, it was time for a demonstration. I asked for a volunteer with an issue that was not too complicated, just to keep it simple. Around 10 people put up their hands; I selected a young woman in her thirties for no other reason than I felt it was the right thing to do. In these selections I always follow my intuition, and always someone comes up who is very helpful in illustrating my point.
This woman’s name was Joan and her problem was that she’d just about quit smoking – but could not give up completely and still smoked one cigarette a day. She hated herself for this and had tried hypnosis, acupuncture and nicotine chewing gum, to no avail. I explained to her that addictions are always predominantly mental/emotional and almost never chemically-induced, and that when we stop an addiction with willpower or with the use of aids such as nicotine patches, chewing gums or herbs, we are not addressing the underlying subconscious causes. I also explained that behind each addiction there is a positive intent either to cover up some emotional wound, self-harm because of negative beliefs or a hidden quest for spirituality. The latter we see more with mind-altering drugs, where people try to take a short cut to the path to enlightenment.
I asked Joan, ‘What does this one cigarette give you?’ She said, ‘It gives me the feeling of personal space, something just for me. I run around all day keeping the house clean and doing stuff for the children and my husband; this is like quality time for me!’ She explained that she had developed a whole routine around smoking her cigarette. She would turn on classical music, get herself a glass of wine and sit down in her favourite chair and put her feet up and smoke. I asked her why she wanted to let go of that cigarette, and she told me that despite what the cigarette did for her, she also had the fear that it would kill her. Her father had been a chain-smoker and had developed lung cancer and suffered for four years before he’d passed away. She had been with him when he died.
Joan had a love-hate relationship with her cigarette: on the one hand it gave her tremendous pleasure, and on the other she associated pain, suffering and death with it. After her cigarette she would always feel overwhelmed by guilt, low self-esteem and sadness. So it seemed like a clear-cut case.
I had already explained to my audience that night that, strangely enough, in my research I had found that the big traumas were never behind the most neurotic or compulsive or self-sabotaging behaviours. What I had found, testing thousands of patients, was that underlying most cases of post-traumatic suffering were minor incidents in the past that led to an inability to cope with the big incidents or traumas in our lives. Also that sometimes we come into this world with some ‘short-circuit’ in our cell-memory, either from previous lives or previous generations.
So I started to check Joan on which emotions were holding her back from letting go of that last cigarette. There were five emotions: sadness, fear, insecurity, suppression of sexuality and frustration. Then I went on to check what had caused her to hold on to these emotions. It had something to do with an incident when she was three years old. The details that came out were: she had been home completely absorbed in playing; her mother had been in the kitchen cooking. She’d heard a noise like something falling; when she went to investigate she’d found her mum unconscious on the kitchen floor. She’d panicked, screamed and run outside to get the neighbours. They were not at home. She was completely frustrated and kept pressing the doorbell, crying and screaming. A postman coming along found her, brought her back home and called the ambulance. Everything worked out fine: the mother had anaemia and low blood pressure, but recovered completely. Joan associated ‘having time for herself’ with this painful incident. The only emotion that was not part of that incident was her suppressed sexuality. That we traced back to around her fourth month in the womb, when her parents had had the first sonogram. When the technician told her parents she was a girl, her father said, ‘Damn, I had hoped for a boy!’ Somehow, she’d either picked up on that or the disappointment behind it.
Joan told the audience that now she understood why she had been a tomboy and why she hated all the traditional ‘woman’s’ chores. That is why she attached so much value to her ‘quality time’, to recharging emotionally after all the chores associated with being a woman. With her father’s disappointment she had linked fear of the outside world, insecurity and frustration. Her whole life she had been trying to prove herself, and had felt insecure and lacking in self-esteem. She’d picked up smoking in her early teens to ‘belong’ and for the first time she was accepted in a group. After her father died she quit smoking except for that last cigarette. What finally came out was that she felt guilty for the relief she had felt when her father had died: she no longer had to prove that she was worthy of his love. Subconsciously, that last cigarette was her last connection with her father, her last effort to connect to him. When she said, ‘Quitting this last cigarette means losing contact with my father,’ her muscles were testing very strong!
Once we integrated the emotions and her subconscious mind let go of them, she tested weak on that statement, indicating she had let go of that subconscious belief. She felt a surge of emotion coming through, and she cried. The audience, which had been silent during all the time it took to unravel this story, started to applaud and she got a standing ovation for her story. You could feel the empathy of the audience for her.
I never spoke to Joan again, but I am sure that she no longer smokes. I did receive some feedback from at least 10 people who wrote to me after that session to tell me they had spontaneously quit smoking from then on.
With this case study one can see that something as simple as one cigarette can get quite complicated – and that it is not about willpower or mental focus. Willpower is not good or bad, but when we use it to suppress our emotions, we create negative energy that will cost us dearly, sooner or later.
Emotional reversal is when we want something and at the same time our subconscious mind is not aligned with it. This will cause considerable amount of stress in the body, which can be measured with biofeedback equipment, a voice-stress analyzer or with simple muscle-testing. When you say something that is not congruent with your subconscious mind, a muscle that is normally strong will immediately lose its strength and test weak. This happens when you are thinking about your goals. Every time we think about our goals, if we are not congruent, we lose some vital life-force.
Our subconscious is programmed just as computer software is programmed. This concept comes from the field known as cognitive science and is called functionalism. Functionalism states that intelligent procedures undertaken in order to achieve a common outcome will reflect the same or similar underlying processes. Functionalism concludes, therefore, that the subconscious mind is to a person what a software program is to a computer’s hardware. We do not need to know anything about how the brain functions on a biological level in order to program it.
The only problem with cognitive science is that it leaves out the emotions. By working with the emotions we can bypass the resistance caused by our unresolved issues, which otherwise will eventually lead to failure.
The subconscious mind is especially suited to help us achieve what we want. It is like an automatic pilot: it will bring us to whatever destiny we have requested. It will not settle for anything less than success – but if success for you means staying in your comfort zone, even if you are miserable, it will find all the ways possible to help you feel miserable. If your goal, however, is to be happy, it will set you on course. So let’s look at your ‘successes’ now; check if there is an area where you can recognize being successful in achieving what you don’t want.
Pain, accidents, surgery (to remove gallbladder, tonsils, appendix, stomach, fibroid tumours, cancer, polyps and other growths), broken bones, scars, premature ageing, a weak immune system, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, high blood pressure, infections, chronic fatigue syndrome, allergies, stiffness, loss of hearing or vision, etc. – the list can go on forever. You should look closely at this area of your life if you’ve had chronic conditions, operations and/or have been to the doctor’s surgery more often than you can remember. If you are not enjoying vibrant health, you are probably sabotaging yourself in this area. If you are smoking, drinking more than two drinks a day, overweight by more than 12 pounds, do not exercise and have never attempted meditation, yoga, Tai Chi or Qigong, you are probably emotionally reversed on health.
Attracting people who make you miserable is a clue that you are emotionally reversed in this area of life. Sometimes referred to as toxic people, in my philosophy there are no toxic people as such. The degree to which a person stresses you (is toxic to you) is the same as the degree to which you allow him or her to stress you (be toxic to you). If you work on changing yourself, you will see that two things happen:
People who stress you are those who annoy you, don’t support you, are demanding, smothering, mothering, abusive, don’t pay attention to you, always criticize you, are unloving or take you for granted. If you feel miserable on a regular basis and think you have no choice but to settle for what you’ve got, that you don’t deserve to be happy or that life is just cruel like that, then you are probably emotionally reversed in this area.
Your pay cheque does not last you the whole month, you juggle payments, cannot save or invest, cannot hold down a job. There is never enough money, you give it away to others without keeping enough for yourself, you buy lottery tickets hoping to hit the big one.
Money problems are rampant in our society; many people live from payday to payday and have no way out. Others work two or more jobs to make ends meet, while others with good jobs still live above their means. Most people have a love–hate relationship with money. There are many reasons to self-sabotage in this area when in your subconscious mind you believe that money is the root of all evil, money never makes anyone happy and many other incongruities.
Money represents energy; by not having enough money, which in turn stresses you and saps more energy, you are in a vicious cycle that can only change when your subconscious programming about money is altered.
This is where subconsciously you are programmed to fail on all levels of life. Your relationship does not work, you have financial stress, health problems and there is no end in sight. You may have been to motivational seminars (I call these ‘temporary feel-good sessions’), psychologists and medical doctors; you may have tried meditation and may have read self-help books and listened to endless self-help tapes – all with only temporary results or none. Your conclusions are somewhere along the lines of: ‘Life is tough, I am a failure, I have no talents, I am not born for luck, I can’t do anything right, I am only doing this because there is nothing else.’ You probably procrastinate most of the time and have a lot of self-pity. These are all part of being massively emotionally reversed.
By now you should have a pretty good picture of where you are sabotaging yourself. Do not feel depressed if it is in more than one area, or even all of them; that is fairly common, and happily the solution is easy and effective. Answer the following questions as honestly as you can and make notes in your journal, because all of this is about to change dramatically in your life:
If any of these questions makes you feel uncomfortable or causes you stress, then we are looking at some issues that are robbing you of life-force. You may not be in touch with your feelings or in denial; that is definitely an area to work on, too. Emotional reversal results in a lot of pain, suffering, misery and feelings of inadequacy.
Three of the keywords that you will hear from people who are emotionally reversed are: ‘should’, ‘try’ and ‘maybe’. They say things like, ‘I should take better care of my health,’ ‘I should exercise,’ ‘I will try to quit smoking,’ ‘Maybe I will start dieting tomorrow.’
Others have excuses, and say things like:
‘I do not have enough willpower.’
‘I am the way I am; I am not perfect.’
‘I am too lazy; I’ve always been like this.’
‘We all have to die of something.’
‘I don’t feel that I will ever be happy, no matter what I do.’
Here are the problems with the three words that are commonly used with emotionally reversed people.
When we say maybe, we do not commit to something; we leave the door wide open not to do what we intended to do. We make it really easy on ourselves so we cannot fail. This is self-defeat before we’ve even started, and seldom leads to success. Maybe is a stressful word for the subconscious mind, and in itself takes away any goal-setting for our mind. No action will be taken if we have other priorities.
Try is very similar. You cannot try to do anything and be successful. Trying means not taking action in the world, but only in your mind. Let’s take an easy example; try to read the next sentence:if you are reading this sentence, you are not trying – go back and try to read it again! You see, if you try to do something and do it, you are not trying anymore, you are doing. You cannot try to do something and do it; that is impossible. So do yourself a big favour and ban try completely from your vocabulary; it’s another word that causes stress to your subconscious mind. Delete it permanently, and if you catch yourself saying it, replace it with: ‘I will do my best’ or ‘I will do everything in my power to make this happen.’
Let’s look at the mother of all bad words: should.Should is probably the worst of this trio, because every time we say should, we ‘shoot’ ourselves in the foot. The word should implies we are at fault, we are inadequate, or we were inadequate, or we will be inadequate in the future. It confirms we are inadequate in being who we are. Should is better replaced by could, as this gives us more positive options.
Every time we use should, maybe or try, we are sabotaging ourselves and not being truthful to ourselves; we are not making real choices and instead we open the door wide for sabotage and procrastination to come in. When we resist something this is based on the fact that we are not congruent with what we think we want to do, could do or are doing.
Under all of this is our negative self-image that we are not good enough. In other words, we believe that we are not lovable and we reject ourselves, and thus sabotage our own goals and objectives. That is why ‘positive thinking’ and affirmations cannot work when they are inconsistent with our self-image. A negative self-image comes from how we interpret the input we’ve received in the past. For example, if a parent says, ‘I do not like the way you are behaving,’ it is very difficult for the child to make a distinction between behaviour and identity. So, now the child thinks he is not a lovable person because his parent dislikes him. That becomes his reality. Our present self-image and the resulting self-esteem come out of what we have experienced (our emotional reality) rather than what actually happened. So now we have to change that emotional reality by taking away the negative charge of the past emotional reality. We have to give a new meaning to our past and thus change the experience in the now.
The secret to changing your life is not reading this book, but experiencing this book by applying its information to your reality. The first step is to identify the issues in your life that need work. Make note of that. The second step is to work on yourself by undertaking certain exercises. You need around three to four weeks to start experiencing real change in your life. Any expectations for faster results are not realistic – though that’s not to say you won’t see results more quickly than this. Reserve all judgement for a minimum of three weeks; that’s how long it takes to change a negative self-image and break through emotional reversal and sabotage.
Changing a negative self-image into an empowering self-image will mean the difference between success and failure, honesty and dishonesty, love and fear, misery and happiness. It can help you rescue a marriage that is going downhill, recharge your life and career, transform you from victim to victor. Creating an empowering self-image means the difference between emotional freedom and being an emotional hostage.
Whether we know it or not, we have a subconscious image of ourselves; this is a fully detailed concept of who you believe you are. This image is the end result of all the programming and conditioning you’ve endured in this lifetime and, if you are open to the idea, many previous lifetimes. Our karma and duty are to ‘update our files’ and ‘delete from our software’ all data which, with our current consciousness and knowledge, no longer serve us. If you are reading this book, you know that we are unlimited beings. All of our limitations come from unresolved issues that we have chosen to hold on to. We have chosen to believe the lies that our parents, peers, teachers and other so-called authorities told us. We have been misled to be sheep, while in reality we are born to be lions. We have learned to bleat instead of roar. We have bought into the illusion of material reality by being a five-sensed person instead of multi-sensorial. We have chosen to believe that we are not successful, not lovable, not worthy, not deserving and not attractive. We have succeeded in limiting ourselves to the lower levels of happiness instead of unconditional happiness. We have not let go of our humiliations, failures and perceived rejection by others. We have forgotten that we are creators of our own destiny and that we all are immortal, unlimited spirits coming from the Source of love, here on Earth by choice to find ways of transcending the self-imposed limitations of the flesh. So now that you are completely aware of the magnificent being trapped inside, you can move on to the next stage of awareness and start creating the kind of self-image that will be your automatic pilot for success, health, longevity and happiness.
All that you do, feel or think is always consistent with your self-image. You are programmed to be a certain way, whether you like it or not, so you will behave in a way consistent with that. If you are emotionally programmed for failure, you will find one way after another to stay consistent with your ‘failure-orientated’ personality. You will sabotage your success in any way you can. An example is getting stuck in a traffic jam on the way to an important meeting. You might think that a traffic jam is something beyond your control, especially when it happens unexpectedly, but if your self-image is ‘victim’, you will attract (read: create) situations in your life that will bear out exactly what you believe. Understanding the fact that we are living biological transmitters and receivers, we can come to the realization that we are magnets to people and situations that will be consistent with our self-image. We create our own self-fulfilling prophecies: if you don’t feel attractive, you will create that reality and find confirmation for your belief. It goes even further than this: if you don’t believe you are lovable, your brain will filter out all messages that say otherwise.
At one of my seminars, one of the participants came up to ask for my personal help. Hannah’s problem was that she thought that nobody loved her, including her husband and her children. When I asked her how come she’d married someone who did not love her, she said, ‘Everybody loves me in the beginning, but they lose interest after a while!’ I got her permission to bring her on stage in front of the audience, so everyone could learn from her situation. Her husband was also asked on stage. I asked him to tell her that he loved her. Immediately her muscles went weak – an indication that she was being stressed by this statement. Then I asked her husband just to look at her lovingly and connect with his love inside for her. Again she immediately was stressed. Then I asked him to tell her that he did not love her. Now she was strong, meaning that her subconscious mind accepted that message and did not resist that. Then I asked him to look as if he were angry and upset with her and not say anything; she was also comfortable with this (indicated by muscle strength). In other words, she was emotionally reversed on being loved.
What I learned was that, when she was around three or four, her sister was born and all the attention went to her. Hannah withdrew herself as much as she could, because she thought her father loved her sister more than he loved her. She also stopped sitting on her father’s lap and refused to be cuddled. Her father, for his part, felt rejected by Hannah and paid more attention to her sister. Thus Hannah locked in emotions of bitterness, jealousy, low self-esteem, resentment and grief.
I did a forgiveness session with her, to help her forgive her sister and her father. After that, she was no longer emotionally reversed. This had a great impact on her marriage and life. She is now more self-confident and assertive.
It is important that we seek always to affirm a positive self-image and thus make it stronger. I have seen many miraculous changes in self-confidence, career, relationship or health when a client succeeds in creating an empowering self-image.
Our self-image leads to emotional reversal because any time we want something that is not consistent with our self-image, we immediately trigger fear in ourselves. This fear comes from wanting something that is ‘not good for us’ because it is inconsistent with our self-image. So, if you want to be rich but you have a self-image of not being worthy of wealth, your subconscious mind will find ways to make being rich scary. You will lose friends, or people will only like you because of your money. If you have money, ‘they’ will try to steal it from you. Many more reasons will come up, and no sane person would want to be rich under those conditions.
How does this apply to something like health? Health may be associated with responsibilities, with having to work, not getting attention, always having to be strong. Disease may be more pleasurable in some ways: it may mean we get attention, love, respect, care, admiration. If as a child you got attention mainly when you were poorly, and you attached pleasure to not going to school, you might have subconsciously created the image that being sick is fun and being healthy is bad.
You might be thinking, OK, I can understand that this is possible with wealth and health, but how can anyone want to be miserable and not happy? Yet even being happy can be associated with unpleasant feelings. You might feel that being happy is wrong when there are still so many people suffering in the world. Being happy can therefore actually make you feel guilty. You might believe you don’t really deserve to be happy because you are a bad person. You might believe that being happy means not showing empathy or respect to others. Some people have associated so much pain with being happy that they cannot enjoy themselves or experience pleasure.
Psychologist Dr Janet Hranicky has studied the personalities of hundreds of cancer patients and has found that many of them have these negative associations with happiness. She calls this ‘pleasure-freeze’. In other words, we can fear what we want when we subconsciously believe it does not fit the image we have of ourselves. One of the techniques we will use teaches us to accept that we may never be happy, healthy or successful. Nobody wants to embrace this, but by accepting that we may never get what we want, we actually take away the self-sabotage that we’d otherwise face when we set out for our goals. If you accept failure as a possibility, it will no longer stress you and you can use the energy you might have wasted on fear to create success. ‘I accept and love myself even if I fail’ is the answer to changing fear into power. We will get more into this later.
The good news is that anyone at any age can change their self-image and thus create peace of mind. This works on the cause and not the symptoms. The symptoms are failure, disease, misery and poverty; the cause is a disempowering self-image. Emotional balance is only achievable if we start with causes. ‘Positive thinking’ alone is not good enough without changing our self-image. We need to create a self-image that is consistent with our goals, values and commitments.
So the question to ask yourself is simple: ‘What kind of self-image do I need to have to achieve what I want in life?’ To create a great life you need to have a supporting self-image that is congruent with your beliefs. You must be able to believe in you. Therefore, you have to reprogram your subconscious mind with the ‘success’ software of your choosing. This will lead to new habits of thinking, imagining and feeling that will be consistent with your new self-image.
Even total emotional reversal can be fixed very simply by using a few affirmations while simultaneously treating some EB points. We will go over this technique at the end of this chapter. The real problem is not loving ourselves enough. We feel we are not good enough, not deserving, not worthy. This is all nonsense, and it is time for drastic change and a new life.
This is also a means of sabotaging what we really want, but it is not as broad as total emotional reversal. We may be totally congruent with being happy, healthy and successful and still sabotage ourselves in some specific areas of life. Where total emotional reversal leads to a life full of depression, failure and bad health, SER will affect us only in specific areas. We may be very successful in our careers and making a good living, while totally sabotaging another area such as our relationships, health or spiritual growth. We might be very successful in areas such as marriage and health while chronically messing up our finances. Sometimes it looks like simple bad luck – but luck has nothing to do with it. The following story will give you an idea of how this works in real life.
I met Joseph on a plane flying from Amsterdam to Atlanta; I was returning after two weeks of an intensive itinerary with back-to-back seminars and lectures in Italy and the Netherlands. After napping for an hour or so on the flight, I was woken up to have lunch. Next to me, Joseph was not eating; he stared ahead with an empty look in his eyes. He was a good-looking young man in his mid-twenties. I asked him if something was wrong with the food. He said, ‘No, I am just not feeling well. Things are not going right for me.’ I sympathized, so started to ask questions to see if I could be of any help. His story was remarkable. He was 24 years old and his parents had died in a car accident when he’d been just eight. By a twist of fate they’d left him home that night, despite his very strong vocal requests for them to stay at home with him. They persisted and he had to stay with the live-in maid. His parents were quite rich and left him around $5 million in a trust fund plus some real estate worth another $4 million. When he turned 18, John was free to invest the money any way he wanted. He’d consulted a reputable financial advisor and invested his money in the stock market. Soon after he’d invested his money, the stock market crashed and he’d lost $2 million overnight. He took all his money out and went to Switzerland to invest it in real estate. Just over a year later he lost another million dollars and had only $2 million left. Following the advice of new financial advisors, he invested some of his money in racehorses and in a very well-established restaurant. Here he lost half of his money and, in a last effort to see what he could do, he had flown to Amsterdam to talk to one of the most reputable and consistently successful investment groups. He was depressed because they’d told him it would take at least eight to 10 years to recover his losses. He was thinking of selling all his real estate, even though the market was a buyer’s market and he would not get the best price. He believed that he was born to bad luck; first he’d lost his parents and now he was on his way to losing all of his money.
I told him that I was doing research on how the subconscious mind is a built-in automatic pilot leading us to our subconscious beliefs, and that I believed it was reprogrammable. I told him that I would like to help him and that I expected that in his case it would cost him, in the worst-case scenario, only 20 to 30 minutes. He had nothing to lose and we were going to be stuck on the plane for the next six hours anyway, so I started to probe his subconscious mind with muscle-testing. He tested strong on the following statements:
‘I want to be healthy.’
‘I want to be successful.’
He tested weak on the following statements:
‘I want to make money.’
‘I want to be lucky.’
‘I want to be happy.’
Conversely, he was also strong on the following statements (meaning they were true for him):
‘I want to lose all my money.’
‘I want to have bad luck.’
‘I want to be miserable.’
Now I had Joseph’s full attention and he was totally blown away by the outcome of this simple test. ‘What’s going on? How is this possible?’ he asked, completely confused. ‘Let’s look deeper for the cause of this,’ was my answer, and we continued testing. The flight attendant was walking by frequently, staring at the two men performing some strange-looking ritual. When I muscle-test someone, I have them form a so-called O-ring by connecting the tip of the thumb on one hand with the tip of either the index, ring or middle finger of the same hand. I then use both of my hands to test the strength of this ‘O-ring’ as the person I am testing says the statements I propose. Obviously this looks quite bizarre to any unsuspecting onlooker!
I started to check which emotions where unresolved in relation to Joseph’s wanting to be financially successful and happy. The following came up: guilt, grief, abandonment, low self-esteem and being unable to forgive. These had not been resolved after his parents had died. What had happened is that he blamed himself for not getting them to stop at home with him; he felt that he was guilty of their deaths and that he did not deserve to inherit their money. He was very unforgiving toward himself and felt abandoned by God, and that caused his low self-esteem and grief.
From this story we can learn that the subconscious mind is able to access data we are not aware of. Joseph selected financial advisors with good reputations, whose advice caused him to lose money. It almost seems like the advisors were part of a cosmic conspiracy to help Joseph reach his goal: to get rid of his money. The other way to look at it is that Joseph’s subconscious mind had the magic ability to influence real estate values in such a way that his properties lost value, to make winning racehorses lose, or to make loyal customers come less frequently to a restaurant. The third possibility is that both things happened simultaneously: on the one hand being clairvoyant and knowing how to lose money on investments, and on the other to influence the world so it will give you what you want. Of course a fourth possibility would be that this was all coincidence and had nothing to do with Joseph. Some people would like to believe this because they are scared of the idea that our subconscious is powerful and will work relentlessly to achieve our subconscious goals. This is an incredible success mechanism, unparalleled by anything we can think of. Yes, there is a cosmic conspiracy going on; that is where all collective consciousness meets to create the circumstances that will serve the karma of everyone. So, either we take responsibility and start making use of it, or we keep ignoring it and believe we are victims or just plain lucky or unlucky when things go well or badly.
CASE STUDY: SPECIFIC EMOTIONAL REVERSAL
Paul was uncomfortable with what he had just told me, and stared down at his feet. Lily, his fiancée, seemed comfortable with the situation and looked at me as if I were some kind of judge and should decide whose side I was on. Paul had just told me that he and Lily had been dating for two years and that he always had to push her to have sex. During intercourse she would just lie on her back and allow him to use her, but would not participate or enjoy any of it. He was 26, she was 27. Both said they loved each other and wanted to continue the relationship; it was just that Lily did not like sex and would participate just to please Paul.
Paul had seen me on TV and had arranged the appointment. ‘There must be a reason why Lily has such an aversion to sex,’ I said. ‘I will test her and we will find out more, but before I do, I would like to ask Lily: were you ever molested, raped, sexually or physically abused or a victim of incest?’ She said no. The only other symptom that she had was that she had stopped menstruating two years before. She had always had a very irregular menstrual cycle. For six to seven years she would have her period only four times a year. I started to test her for emotional reversal and she was congruent with the following statements (indicating that her subconscious mind agreed!):
‘I want to be healthy, happy and successful.’
‘I want to have a good relationship.’
She was incongruent with the following statements (indicating that her subconscious mind did not agree):
‘I want to be able to enjoy sex.’
‘I want to have sex with Paul.’
She was congruent with the following:
‘I want to stop having sex with Paul.’
‘I want to be miserable having sex.’
Both Paul and Lucy were completely amazed by what they were seeing and hearing. The emotions that came up were: grief, shame, despair, sadness, hurt, vulnerability, guilt and disgust. Something had happened when Lucy was 18 that was shocking to her and had caused the suppression of these emotions. I asked her if she knew what had happened nine years before. She immediately started to cry and could not stop for the next five minutes. Then she started to tell her story in bits and pieces.
When she was 18, she became pregnant. Her boyfriend was a schoolmate, also 18, with whom she was in love. She had wanted to keep the baby, but her parents had reacted very negatively, telling her, ‘How can you do this to us? You should be ashamed.’ They forced Lucy, against her will, to have an abortion. She did not want to because she believed it was murder and she wanted to have the baby. Her parents insisted. When she came home from the clinic, they had bought cake and champagne to celebrate the ‘happy ending’. She had fled upstairs to her room to cry and prayed to God: ‘Don’t ever let this happen again; next time I will kill myself!’
So, Lucy’s subconscious success mechanism went to work; after that trauma she started to have irregular periods and then none at all. She broke up with that boyfriend and did not date for five years until she’d met Paul three years before. Then she’d discovered that, although she loved Paul, she did not enjoy having sex. She had suppressed all the information about the abortion completely and never thought of it anymore, until now.
We worked on letting go of her emotions and did a forgiveness session to forgive her parents for being so insensitive and for forcing her to have an abortion. What happened afterwards was the closest thing to a miracle one can get. Lucy called one week later to say that she had had six passionate days and nights with Paul and that she was worried about Paul keeping up with her sexual appetite. ‘By the way,’ she said, ‘this morning I got my period!’ What the specialists could not do with chemical hormones, her mind had fixed easily and naturally.
The most beautiful thing is that these cases are not rare or uncommon; they happen every day in the lives of people who are using emotional balance to address their turbulence. Everyday people and health professionals are using this method all the time. My wish is that this book spreads the word about these tools to millions more worldwide.
This third category is, like the second one, very common. Most people will have a brush with this one sooner or later. We may be completely congruent with being happy, healthy and successful, and congruent with our specific goals, yet still sabotage ourselves in less obvious ways than with specific or total reversal. And this self-sabotage can still ruin our lives, health and success. In PER we do not want to overcome all of the inconveniences we face; we want to keep some of them. For example, someone may have headaches on a daily basis, and when tested be congruent with ‘I want to get rid of this headache,’ but not congruent with ‘I want to get rid of this headache completely.’ This is a strange phenomenon that explains why a lot of people do not get completely well. They get better to a certain extent and hold on to the last vestige of their problem. What purpose can it possibly serve not to reach our goals completely, to keep some of our extra weight, disease, allergies, pain, cigarettes, cravings?
The main reason is that the subconscious mind would prefer that you get to your goal with the least effort possible. When you are sick and you become frustrated with being sick, you may want to be less sick and still get what you want. Let’s take a situation where you learned as a young child that your mother was willing to take a day off work when you were sick and would give you all the pampering and attention you craved. Your subconscious mind becomes programmed to get you attention and pampering by making you sick. The only downside is that being sick in itself is not a whole lot of fun. So you get mostly better – but not completely better.
A high percentage of chronically ill people sabotage the last part of their recovery in this way. Let’s look at a case history of a person with chronic fatigue syndrome.
CASE STUDY: PARTIAL EMOTIONAL REVERSAL
Paulina had seen, in her 12 years of being a chronic fatigue patient, over eight alternative doctors after exhausting every possibility in Western medical science, from Prozac to corticosteroid injections, to no avail. She furthermore had been treated by the best in alternative care, including treatments with acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic, herbal therapy, Qigong, yoga, meditation, flower essences and more. She would feel better for two to three months and get her hopes up, only to relapse shortly afterwards. It was driving her insane. One of the therapists was following a course at my academy for Omega Healing and had discussed her case with me. I agreed to meet her once and see if I could give the therapist any additional insights. He had done extensive testing on Paulina and had checked her for emotional reversal. She was a young woman in her thirties, good-looking and actually not looking ill at all. She told me that I was her last hope. I told her not to say that because sometimes we create diseases to allow us to find our spiritual path. When nothing of the external help we are seeking is working, we may turn inside to find out why we are manifesting this. I also told her that I could only be of support to her; her own body would do the rest.
Paulina was congruent with TER (Total Emotional Reversal), SER (Specific Emotional Reversal) and with PER. She remained strong on the statement:
‘I want to completely get over this!’
And weak on:
‘I do not want to keep any of this!’
Charly, her therapist and my student, had also tested her on this. So I followed my intuition and had her say the following:
‘I want to keep just a tiny little bit of my chronic fatigue.’
She was again strong, indicating that this was true for her.
Charly was completely excited, as were Paulina and myself. We had the feeling that we had found her last little bit of resistance. I had learned something new and found out how important this was. We went on to try and discover her underlying reasons – not that they really matter, but just because it is fun to find out how the subconscious mind operates. As you will see later, knowing what incident caused the emotional blockage is not important; the only thing we really need to do is to let go of the past, whatever it held for us.
In Paulina’s case, what emerged was that if the disease were to be completely healed, she would become responsible for taking care of the house, her two children and her part-time job as a graphic designer. Her subconscious mind did not think that was fair; she was the oldest of a family of four. Her family had always had financial problems. As the oldest sister, she was responsible for running the household and actually managing her two brothers and sister. Only when she was sick was she relieved from her duties. Her emotions were anger, disappointment, frustration and worry.
Paulina totally changed after this eight-minute session and was completely healed in the next six weeks. Normally, chronic fatigue conditions take more treatments, but in her case she had already been treated by reputable doctors and health practitioners; what we were working with was just the missing link.
In general, though, there is tremendous success with chronic fatigue cases and I would recommend anyone with such a condition to look into emotional balancing. It may change your life for the better, faster than with most therapies. What is important is that even if the subconscious mind wants a tiny little bit of disease, this will block complete healing. Sabotage is sabotage and can still ruin your life, relationships, marriages, exercising, losing weight, stop smoking and other areas of your life, such as finances and friendships.
Now let’s look at the fourth and last category of reversal.
This category could almost be called ‘miscellaneous’, because everything that does not fit in the first three categories can be considered IER. Falling into this category are a myriad of reasons why we subconsciously believe that we should not obtain our goals.
It may not be the right time for several reasons; maybe you just want to hold on to a problem – let’s say in the case of an illness – until everyone is convinced it is a real disease and not an imaginary thing. So, if you suffer a little bit longer you can convince them. Maybe you’ll have to wait until a certain person sees you the way you are and, once he or she has given you the attention or fulfilled your needs, you can let go. Maybe subconsciously you believe you should hold on to something harming you (or no longer helping you) because on some level you feel you haven’t suffered enough; you need some more punishment. Maybe if you heal now, it would be bad timing because there is a big project coming up at work and you don’t feel you should be asked to tackle it, because you are still weak. Maybe if you heal now you will get too many things coming at you at once.
Obviously the subconscious mind is very creative about coming up with reasons to keep you where you are. Of course, most reasons seem completely reasonable, and actually in most cases show prudence. But still it is all self-sabotage.
This reason is used a lot. If we get well it may not be in the best interest of others. Maybe Mary is doing your job and, if you come back to work full-time now, it will create stress in the office. Your GP might be embarrassed that you were not cured by him; you have empathy for him after all he has done for you. Your spouse enjoys taking care of you and looking after everything; she feels great in that role and you would hate to interrupt that. The subconscious mind can come up with more reasons: it would be bad for your marriage, relationship, friendships and so forth.
There are many reasons why something you feel you want is not good for you. Having lots of money can be a nuisance and give you lots of headaches you are not prepared to deal with. It may be better to be just comfortable instead of shooting for the stars. Being responsible not only for your successes but also for your failures can also be a frightening prospect. You may have to forgive someone for what he has done to you, and don’t actually feel prepared to do that. You may have the disempowering belief that you do not deserve success, that you are not worthy of it and thus you’d rather not have it. You may think you do not have all the skills you need to really make it all the way, or feel that maybe this objective requires someone with more courage and self-esteem than you currently have. Maybe you won’t enjoy your success; maybe it is not really what you want; maybe you are overlooking something. Maybe it will cost you too much energy, time, money, your health, your relationship; it may inhibit your spiritual growth.
Again, we can only be in awe of how incredibly creative the subconscious mind is at making excuses. And do you know that it succeeds most of the time in tricking you into believing these roadblocks exist out there in reality? You become the marionette of your own mind and if you don’t do something about it, you will be stuck in the same pattern over and over again.
The statements I use to uncover IER are diverse, but the easiest is: ‘I do not want to have any reasons to sabotage myself.’ Or we can ask the subconscious mind directly: ‘Are there any other reasons for you still to sabotage your goal now or in the future? If you still have any reasons left, your muscles will test weak now!’ If we get a weak muscle test, that would confirm that there are still some subconscious issues making you not totally congruent and continuing to sabotage yourself.
Any of these reversal categories can easily be treated. As we will see later, accepting that we may fail is key. By accepting this, we are accepting all our fears surrounding success, and can stop resisting what we want. It is a principle borrowed from martial arts: when you fight something, you struggle and lose lots of energy. You will win some and lose some. By completely relaxing and accepting defeat as a realistic possibility, we are more relaxed and less worried about the outcome and focus our energy where it matters.
CASE STUDY: INCIDENTAL EMOTIONAL REVERSAL
Sandra was 38 years old, a single mother with two boys: one nine years old, the other four. She was studying to become a naturopathic doctor and was juggling being a mum, studying and seeing some clients to make extra income. She was suffering with adhesive capsulitis – or, in simpler terms, ‘frozen’ shoulder. She could not pick up her four-year-old or comb her hair or perform certain movements, like reaching over her head to take something out of a kitchen cupboard. It was pretty annoying and several colleagues had tried in vain to help her with her shoulder. She was ready to get some steroid injections when her sister-in-law suggested she come see me. She had been treated extensively on an emotional level and that seemed to give her some temporarily relief, but after a short while she was back to square one.
Sandra tested fine for TER (Total Emotional Reversal), SER (Specific) and PER (Partial), but became weak for IER (Incidental) with the following statement: ‘I want to completely let go of all the reasons for me having this shoulder condition.’ This indicated an incongruence, so then I tested the reverse and she was strong (congruent) with it: ‘I do not want to let go of all the reasons I have for having this shoulder condition.’ She was also congruent with: ‘It is not good for me to let go of this completely now!’ ‘It is not good for others if I let go of this completely now!’ ‘I do not want to enjoy my life without this shoulder condition!’ and ‘I do not deserve to be completely well!’
So, she had quite some issues left to work on. What came out was that her subconscious mind believed that she could not handle all she was handling, and that by doing all the things she was doing in her life, she did not have time to go out and meet men. By making her unable to do all of her chores, her subconscious mind was trying to create time for her to track down a suitable partner. Also, having a shoulder problem meant there were chores she could not do, like mowing the lawn or fixing the fence. Her subconscious mind hoped for a friendly unmarried neighbour to step in and that they would fall in love and live happily ever after. Getting better was also not good for her own mother, who loved to come and help out. Also, she felt she did not deserve to be completely well because her subconscious mind knew that she had so many defects and had committed so many mistakes in the past. So, for Sandra there were several reasons not to let go completely.
We worked for about 30 minutes to get all of the emotions blocking the energy channels to the shoulder resolved. After that she had full control over her shoulder and was completely healed. After 12 months she was still not in a relationship, but she was happy, had a new job and had moved to another city.
How do you feel now, knowing that you have a subconscious mind that will stop at nothing to get you what you want? So, you’d better be completely congruent with your goals and desires, and crystal clear on what you really want!
In Chapter 13 I will introduce some easy techniques I have developed to help you let go completely of any of the four reversal categories, and I will teach you an exercise to do every day, for just four to five minutes, that will eliminate these sabotage mechanisms for good.
I am happy to see you are still reading; that is an indication that you have got what it takes to be successful. Most people would already have been overruled by their subconscious mind to stop reading because if you follow through, your life may change dramatically. Be sure to read the next chapter which deals extensively with one of the most powerful and yet very simple healing techniques: forgiveness.
Write down all the areas in life where you procrastinate, feel resistant to or self-sabotage, and start to practise becoming congruent by visualizing yourself actually committing to being successful in these areas. See how you are doing what you need to do in order to be successful. Keep practising every day until it feels natural for you to do whatever it takes to achieve your objectives.