Looking for Help?

Hello, 
This blog is about hypnosis and other personal development tools. If you are looking for help, I highly recommend Anthony Cox at http://tokyolifecoaching.com/. He offers life coaching, health coaching (personal training and nutrition), and relationship counseling.

There are also many counselors and therapists at Tokyo English Life Line and IMHPJ who offer counseling services in a variety of languages. See Resources at right for links to their sites.


Best wishes,
Karen

What are the big rocks in your life?

One of the recurring issues in my own life is managing priorities. Even when I am interested in doing something, such as reading a new book, I often put it off for some time because of various other 'urgent' matters. I use quotes on the word 'urgent' because I know that we can always make time for the things that are most important to us if we organize our priorities. Not only can we, but we must.

When I was a child, my father told me the story of a motivational seminar he had attended at work. The speaker brought in a large empty jar and a few containers of materials-- sand, pebbles, small rocks, and big rocks. The speaker poured the sand into the jar to demonstrate how the sand took up so much space that fitting the other items in the jar would be impossible.

He then emptied the jar, putting the sand aside, and talked about how to organize the materials. He said that the big rocks must go in the jar first, then the smaller rocks, then the pebbles, and lastly, the sand. As he spoke, he put the various items in the jar. The big rocks took up a large amount of space, but the small rocks and pebbles easily fit around them. The sand, which had taken up so much space in an empty jar that the big rocks could not fit, was able to fill in all the space around the large rocks, small rocks, and pebbles when it was put in the jar last. The jar was full, but all of the materials fit inside of it.

The speaker said this was a metaphor for life. He said that we must decide what our big rocks are and put them into our jar (life) first. These might be family, work, a favorite sport or hobby, etc. Next are the small rocks, which might be details related to the big rocks. Next are the pebbles, things that matter but not so much as the rocks. Finally is the sand-- all the little items that seem to consume so much of our time and mental space. But the sand must be last; otherwise it will crowd out the larger, more important items.

Although I didn't see the demonstration, the way my father spoke about it, the awareness it brought to him, had a big impression on me. Shortly after that, he started coming home earlier from work and began coaching my brother’s little league baseball team. I could see that it wasn't just an interesting story about something that happened at work, but was instead an important message.

From time to time, I have to take stock and remind myself what my big rocks are. Sometimes it’s an effort to put the sand last but I make an effort to prioritize. How about you? What are the big rocks in your life? Are you putting them in your life first?

Playing to Your Strengths

All of us have characteristic strengths and weaknesses. It's important to have a good idea of what yours are so that you can make the most of your strengths and improve on your weaknesses. The problem is that many of us do not have a clear idea of what our strengths or weaknesses are. How can you find out?

The other day a friend recommended I check out the Authentic Happiness website to take a survey of characteristic strengths from a 240-question survey. Answering so many questions takes time, but the results might surprise you.

Law of Attraction

I have written about gratitude before. It is something we often forget to acknowledge when we see others with more than we have or when situations do not turn out the way we would have liked. It's easy to focus on the negative; it's so glaringly obvious. Positive things can be so much more subtle, like good health or a perfect train connection.

Perhaps you've heard of the Law of Attraction. The short version is this: energy flows where attention goes. If you focus on the negative, you get more of it. If you focus on the positive, you get more of that. It's important to recognize and be grateful for the good things so that the universe knows we want more of that.

I have a friend who puts the Law of Attraction to work for her by making a list of all the things she is grateful for every night. The list can include everything from a great cup of coffee to an abiding love for her husband. While I occasionally take stock, I don't remember to do this nightly. It's a good habit to take up.

Grab a Book!

When I was in high-school or home on a college break, my mother would often catch me with my nose in the pantry or the fridge. When she did, she would say, "Stop that restless grazing! If you're bored, read a book!" I would dutifully close the door and go grab something from my mother's bookcase.

My brothers ate constantly because they played sports like football and wrestling, which required them to bulk up and maintain weight. I also played sports and burned off calories quickly, but I didn't need to eat like they did. I snacked because I saw them doing it, and my mother redirected this into more productive behavior. I am glad she did, as reading has never harmed anyone but overeating certainly has.

In the days after the earthquake, I found myself doing a lot of two things: sleeping and eating. The sleeping I saw as beneficial. I felt much calmer and clearer after a nap. The eating, not so much.

At first, the food was comforting. It was reassuring to know that I had access to food when so many people did not, and some foods, such as sweets, release dopamine. I also rationalized the eating as biologically driven: bulk up now to withstand impending scarcity. By the third or fourth day of one meal blending into the next (punctuated only by naps!), I recognized my behavior for what it was: restless grazing. I picked up a book and started to read.

Once I started reading, I felt a lot better, a lot calmer. The book took my mind off the news, the crisis, the emails and reports coming in from around Japan and the world, and the constant wondering what the best course of action was. Caught up in the story, the world of my book, I didn't have any desire to eat.

The hysteria is dying down now. The tension of the first few weeks has faded. I am not so wound up that I retreat into slumber, food, or books.

I learned a lot about myself from my reaction to the crisis. I sleep and I eat. Next time, I will sleep and read.

Crisis Resources

Here are some useful resources for residents of Tokyo and/or Japan

Foreign Residents Advisory Center (Tokyo Metropolitan Government)
03-5320-7744

Migration Agency
-Earthquake and tsunami information for foreigners in Japan
www.iomjapan.org/news/press_237.cfm

Metropolis Magazine
-Information on electricity and train operations, Tokyo radiation levels, earthquake relief, and more
metropolis.co.jp

Tokyo English Life Line
-Suicide prevention line and telephone counseling
03-5774-0992
-Earthquake news, help, and resources
www.telljp.com

Combating Stress with Hypnosis

There can be many factors contributing to poor health, but one major cause is stress. When we are under stress, our autonomic nervous systems switch into survival mode, slowing down functions that are not essential to surviving. These include the immune, digestive, and reproductive functions. This is why people who are chronically stressed get sick more easily and heal more slowly, develop ulcers and digestive problems, and experience irregular menstrual cycles, infertility, and sexual dysfunction. A form of hypnosis called guided meditation can be an effective means of combating this stress.

Few of us experience true danger in our daily lives, but our nervous systems react to traffic, time constraints, loud noises, and other stimuli in the same way that we used to respond to bears, battles, and other dangers. Stress causes the body to prepare for fighting, fleeing, or freezing, not growing, eating, and reproducing. To bring these normal, healthy functions back online, we need to shut off the survival response. We can do that by relaxing, but many people find that to be more easily said than done.

True relaxation requires mental and physical relaxation. Most of us know how to relax physically but many of us find it hard to relax mentally. Even while receiving a massage, for example, our minds might be active. A mind full of worries or woes is triggering all the same physical stress responses that a massage, a bath, a game of golf, a beer, etc., is trying to remedy. Unless we can quiet the mind, the body cannot achieve complete relaxation.

The best way to quiet the mind is meditation. While there are many different styles of meditation, most people find it easiest to begin with a guided meditation. Most forms of meditation focus on clearing the mind of all thought or focus the mind on a single concept or mantra. In guided meditation, the thoughts are directed. Because the imagination is engaged, guided meditation is actually a form of hypnosis rather than true meditation.

Guided meditation combines progressive relaxation with positive imagery. The progressive relaxation induces a hypnotic state, thereby switching the nervous system out of survival mode into growth mode. The positive imagery then redirects the mind away from obsessive thoughts towards peaceful thoughts, such as imagining a beautiful garden. Since it addresses the needs of both the mind and the body, guided meditation helps you relax both mentally and physically.

By consistently practicing guided meditation, your body will gradually learn what a normal, healthy state feels like. If you have been stressed for a long time, you body may have become stuck in fight or flight mode. Guided meditation will help you to retrain your body to switch out of survival mode so it will become less responsive to stressors and recover more quickly when exposed to them. Your mind will be more peaceful when you replace an active mind with a peaceful mind. Between the mental and physical benefits of guided meditation, you'll feel calmer and more in control of your life, and your immune, digestive, and reproductive functions will flourish.

Afformations

There are all kinds of therapy available to help you change your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors: hypnotherapy, psychotherapy, art therapy, music therapy, and more. One kind of therapy you can do by yourself is bibliotherapy. Perhaps you know how wonderful it feels to read a good book and escape into another world for a little while. That is one kind of bibliotherapy, but I am talking about self-help books.

You may think self-help books are not for you, but even business books can be considered self-help. Anything that helps you achieve your goals, that teaches you tips and secrets to get ahead or to approach challenges in a new way, is a self-help book. By reading a good self-help book, you can learn how to transform and release your perceived or actual limitations.

There is no shortage of self-help books on the market. Many of them are repetitive or insubstantial and some are even damaging or absurd, so it takes some wading through to find a good one. I am currently reading The Secret Code of Success by Noah St. John. The "secret" St. John presents is the concept of afformations. Afformations is a play on affirmations. In hypnosis, we use affirmations (positive statements) to change the way we think about ourselves. For example, if you often think "I'm a failure," you use the affirmation "I'm a success" to reverse that thought. Every time you start to think "I'm a failure," you substitute the affirmation. This can help over time if there is no benefit to thinking you're a failure. If there is a perceived benefit, then that belief would need to be examined through hypnotherapy or other means to release it. For example, being a "failure" may mean not having to try again, not having to change, not having to work, not having to move or leave home, not having to succeed, not having to maintain success, not having to be visible/responsible/independent/etc. There could be lots of subconscious benefits to being a failure. Until those perceived benefits are exposed and transformed, affirmations will never work.

In his book, St. John talks about afformations, which are questions rather than statements. Afformations are positive questions stated in the past tense, as though the goal has already been achieved. When we ask ourselves a question, our brain starts looking for an answer. For example, what did you eat for lunch yesterday? Your brain is looking for that answer now. By asking yourself an afformation, your brain starts looking for the answer. If there isn't an answer yet, then your brain will try to come up with a solution, like solving a riddle. This is how inventors, scientists, entrepreneurs, and other creative people work. By asking afformations, you are using your own creative subconscious mind to find solutions. St. John compares this to typing a few words into a search engine, like Google, and sending the query off to the internet.

So, to relate this to the example above, if you ask yourself, "Why am I such a failure?" your brain will start looking for answers to that question. Any answers you get are sure to be negative. If you transform that to a positive question, you would ask, "Why am I such a success?" and your brain would start looking for answers to that question instead. To make this an afformation, you would state it in the past tense or state it as if it were already achieved, such as "Why did I become such a success?" or "Why does success come so easily to me now?" This will get your creativity flowing so you can come up with even more answers. You might surprise yourself.

This is not all you have to do. Afformations is the "secret" in the book, but there are several steps that St. John outlines in his book to help you achieve your goals using afformations. It's a clear and handy self-help book with an interesting twist on the use of affirmations. If you like affirmations, use afformations to see if you can go even further. If you like to read, check out The Secret Code of Success. If you'd like to become a success, read the book, use afformations, and work through the action steps.

Starting Afresh

Happy New Year! I hope 2010 has started off well for you. If not, here are two things to keep in mind. One is that it's never to late to have a happy childhood, and the other is that life is a journey.

When I read the books Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman and Negaholics by Cherie Carter-Scott, I recognized myself in many of the descriptions of negative people and negative patterns. I remember a conversation I had with one of my friends in 1994. She called me a pessimist and I said I was a realist. Her response? "All of us experience reality in our own way, but your way is negative."

I didn't agree with her and didn't feel I needed to change at that time... and perhaps I didn't. That world view worked for me at that point in my life. I was young and life was good. But eventually, seeing the world that way did not work for me, so I worked on adopting a more positive outlook. Books like the ones I mentioned above helped me see that thinking negatively was not helpful and was in fact quite harmful both mentally and emotionally. My negative outlook affected me physically as well. I needed to change.

One thing to change was the way I looked at the past. If you have experienced a negative event and you expect the future to be the same, then you naturally tend to be pessimistic. So it helps to revise your memory of the past. Instead of looking at the bad points, think about what you learned or gained from a negative experience.

I understand you may have had a serious trauma in the past. I did too. But there are people who came out of Auschwitz able to love again, able to trust again, able to succeed. Nelson Mandela came out of prison able to forgive and able to lead. These people are not divine masters. They are ordinary human beings. If they can move on from the past, then surely you can too. It takes time and effort but it is possible. When you can look back and see the good points or the learning points of your life, the future seems less scary. You can slowly dial down the negativity until you find that you no longer see the world so negatively anymore. You can have a happy childhood by reframing the way you see the past.

When you feel better about the past, it will be easier to face the future. Now go out and make it a happy new year!

Attitude of Gratitude

When I first began to study energy healing in 2002, my Reiki teacher told me it was important to keep the 'attitude of gratitude' in my daily life. I was learning Reiki to treat chronic pain. Since chronic pain causes depression, I did not feel I had a lot to be grateful for at the time. Furthermore, within the month, I tore a ligament in my knee while skiing. With this new additional source of pain, I felt even less grateful. I also started having increased stress at work due to my limited mobility and frequent absences for doctor's visits and physical therapy. It seemed like trouble upon trouble, which made the attitude of gratitude seem unattainable.

However, even in the midst of this, I had a lot to be grateful for. The first doctor we visited suggested we inject my knee with pain medication and forcibly straighten the leg. My husband, a competitive skier familiar with knee injuries, knew this did not sound right. He refused treatment, and we left the hospital. It is extremely unusual to refuse a doctor's treatment in Japan, but he did, and I benefited.

As soon as we got home, my husband searched the Internet for a doctor specializing in knee injuries in our area. The second doctor said the ligament would have torn further if we had followed the first doctor's advice. If that had happened, I would have needed surgery to fix it. As it was, the only treatment I needed was medication for the pain and swelling. I am extremely grateful to my husband for his intervention. I'm also grateful that I could use the Reiki I had just learned to reduce pain and promote healing in the knee.

When I started physical therapy, which lasted six months, many friends and colleagues told me I would have permanent pain and limited mobility in my knee. It's amazing how many people want to tell you their own horror stories when something bad happens to you. They may think it is helpful, but it's not. I see this happen again and again to my clients, who come in traumatized by the advice of seemingly well-meaning people. It's important to ignore this information and focus on healing, which I did. Within two years, I had overcome the constant dull ache in my knee. Within three years, I was skiing better than I ever had before. I'm grateful that I completely recovered from the injury.

The chronic pain that led me to learn Reiki spurred me along a healing path that eventually led to hypnotherapy. Once I learned hypnotherapy, I was able to reduce pain and inflammation anywhere in my body at any time for extended periods of time. I was free from carrying around pain-relieving ointments and pills. I didn't need days of rest to recover from bouts of intense pain. Hypnotherapy was so much faster and longer-lasting than pain medication that I suddenly had a lot more hours of activity than I was used to. I am grateful that Reiki led me to hypnotherapy, and I'm grateful that hypnotherapy improved the quality of my life so significantly.

I cannot say I am glad I tore the ligament in my knee, but I am grateful that what started off as a negative experience did not get worse. Even better, it turned into a positive one. I am grateful that I learned so much from the experience, including how to ski better! Seven years later, I now find it easy to keep the attitude of gratitude in my life, and I am much happier as a result.

If you have trouble keeping the attitude of gratitude in your life, I recommend keeping a journal with a nightly gratitude list. Make a list of everything that is going well in your life. These can be small things like 'I caught the train on time' or 'The sushi at lunch was really fresh' to bigger things like 'I got a raise at work' or 'My baby is healthy.'

You can also write down any and all benefits that have come out of a negative situation. Write as many things as you can on your list. Repeat them from day to day as you add new things, so that your list grows even longer. The more attention you pay to what's good in your life, the more gratitude you will feel in all areas of your life. Instead of focusing on pain, you'll be focusing on joy. That is the attitude of gratitude.