Doru360

You see, one of my core beliefs that led me into starting writing here is that the world can be seen from two radically different perspectives. One is the perspective of seeing the world as a spontaneous manifestation where everything happens in the present moment. This is the liberal point of view where individuals are responsible for their choices which are always made at “free will”.

The other perspective is the conservative point of view where the world is perceived as a deterministic mechanism, where there is not really a “free will” and everything is predetermined, and this subject if we have a destiny or not can continue indefinitely.

Now, I am not going to take any of this sides here, from a personal point of view it doesn’t really matter which way you see the world, and to tell you the truth, I am inclined to kind of stand in balance between the two perspectives.

What I am trying to say here is that from the two perspectives, this blog is heavily biased towards the second view. So if you cannot really create something new , I will just follow the path that is in front of me and write what I have to write, the point will be made later. Trying to be original here is a vanity that I am not going to pursue, and the whole idea of this blog is to copy information with variation and selection.

The last statement is of crucial importance and is derived from a recent discovery made by Richard Dawkins in the late 80’s. He is an authority in the studies of evolution and genetics etc. (see his famous book “The selfish gene”). His most remarkable conclusion was that:

If any organized system that exhibits these three characteristics:

1. Variation – copies are created with little variation.
2. Selection – or survival, these copy population have to compete and cooperate.
3. Heredity – or passing on learning to the offspring’s.

then

This system must evolve (design itself out of chaos without the aid of a mind).

So, everything that you will read here is more or less copied from other sources and I am not going to give you any references from where. Let’s say that is my work for many years of digging through countless number of books and materials that seemed relevant to me. So don’t waste your time thinking about “my intelligence”, think about my ability to replicate things, copyright,,,,

The first characteristic exhibited here is that these materials and ideas are not exactly the same than what the original author had. There is variation from the original and even though the urge was to fundamentally change the original view with my own, the alteration of the original is rather small.

When it comes to selecting what to publish from the large number of materials and ideas, I must admit that is getting more difficult not being “original”. There are just too many possibilities, so let’s just say that the selection process is where my own originality kind of “leaks out”.

You could actually feel my own consciousness in this post, just be aware that is pretty much an illusion. (the post “Against the consciousness” will follow soon, so make sure you stay posted).

The third quality, the “heredity” is what drives me to actually write.

You see, if I would just talk with a couple of people about these things, the ideas would have probably persist for a little while in the mind and then fizzle out. But written texts have a much better chance to survive, I guess that’s why they wrote the Bible, Koran, etc. What is written is written and it cannot be changed. I just started writing few months ago and nobody is reading this right now, but how about in 10 years from now? Would you be able to start fresh and compete against me? Right now I am using my own brain to replicate, vary, select and transmit ideas, but soon I am going to use yours as well if you don’t use it yourself.

As you are going to see here, when it comes to changing, attitudes, success or anything else, I am NOT a believer in “positive thinking”. In fact I believe that “positive thinking” is a very destructive illusion that can trap you in world of wishful thinking.

Here is why.

From my own prospective, positive thinking usually gets down to closing your eyes, ignoring the fact that you are failing or are miserable, and pretending things are going the way you want them to go. Believe and you will achieve, if that sounds familiar keep reading.

First of all, one of the observations that brought me to this conclusion was that every time when I asked for an advice to solve one of my problems, I always got a “positive” advice. And even though I cannot say that all these advises actually increased the suffering I had to endure through my problems, they did not help either.

I can’t tell you how frustrated I used to get at all the “positive” advice I got from friends and relatives back in my 20’s when I used to believe in being positive.

-Love yourself and then people will love you too! Yeah, right.

-You’ll find something! Well, eventually, I will find something,,,,. But who wants to wait? And who wants “something”?

-Just be nice. Nice people are lucky! Don’t even get me started on this one.

And the list is long,,,,,

The problem with “positive” thinking is that it is oftentimes an invitation to ignore the reality of your situation, to turn a blind eye to what you need to learn, and to keep on repeating mistakes. It’s tied together with another destructive “mind virus” that is part of our culture: “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

How About A Dose of Informed Enthusiasm Instead?

Informed enthusiasm simply means that you’ve trained yourself to spot where you are doing well, across many different levels; some obvious and some not so obvious. And, additionally, you’ve developed an incredibly effective way to remove confusion from situations that don’t quite go your way and to see exactly what you need to do differently the next time.

Intelligent motivation comes from knowing that, while you may not get what you want right away, you certainly will learn what you need to get what you want, or better. It’s a totally reality-based confidence in your ability to learn from each and every encounter and situation.

So far we talked about three important key steps to help you making changes in your life and getting unstuck from old patterns of behavior.

Many years ago, one of the key observations that helped me making changes in my life and getting unstuck from my old patterns of behavior, was that many times my focus was answering this important question:

“What do other people want?”

And after many years of research and experimentation, I came up with something that caused a lot of turmoil in my own belief system that I had at the time.

“Only an idiot would care what other people WANT.”

And to clarify the statement, I am going to take a deep breath, and say that:

“Smart people only care about what other people RESPOND TO!”

You know, I am not kidding about this.  I really mean it, and to understand why, you have to make distinction between 3 different perspectives of putting the question:

First, there is what people SAY they want.

Second, there is what people THINK they want.

Then there is what people ACTUALLY RESPOND TO!

And the revelation here is that only the last one counts.

Do you see the shift in perspective from the first two views to the last one?

Do you see the reason most people tend to focus on answering the question of “what people want” from the first two perspectives?

For me, the most important reason, was that I thought that caring about what people want, and thinking what they want, was something that made me a nice person to them.

And in fact, I realized that the real outcome of this was that it only made me boring, self-pitying and a whiner who is too out of touch with reality to see that what I was doing in interacting with other people, just didn’t work.

And rather than changing, I was blaming the others.

So let me draw an important distinction here:

The big shift came when, rather than being “nice” I was being “pleasant”. And this shift is representative from a male perspective.

Being “nice”, is knowing how to be agreeable and not knowing how to challenge others. And speaking for myself, the nice guy filters everything he says through the belief that other people are like fragile little flowers who need to be handled with so much care or  they will get broken.  AUUCH!!!!

You know why the communication with “nice” people cannot be trusted. To put it simpler, they will not dare to say anything that might offend you.

In the other hand, being pleasant is something quite different: being pleasant is power, held in proper restraint and exercised with precision and elegance. A pleasant man will speak his mind and set the lead. He also knows how to listen and show the proper degree of interest and respect.

He may put himself first, but he also genuinely cares about people around him.  They are of great importance to him as long as they treat him right and work within the rules that he has made very clear.

Most important: his world is his own. He never, NEVER makes other peoples worlds his world. He never orbits. He does allow others to come into his world and occasionally even be at the center WITH him.

When you get these distinctions you will move a lot more powerfully in your life.

This last step is very important as a closing step in the visualizing sequence exercise. Just to remind you, the secret key to successfully mental rehearse, is to always be able to visualize in the following sequence:  “dissociated” first and then “associated” to follow.

The closing step of the sequence is that, once you’ve done your visualization for the day, you must dismiss it from your mind and LET IT GO!

Too many times, we are taught that to get something we really want or to change something in ourselves, we have to constantly think about it and keep our “goal” in the front of our mind.

In fact, this “over-motivation load of crap” is the one responsible for keeping people stuck.

You have to find a certain level of motivation to create change, but that also involves knowing when to dismiss it from your mind and let it go.

The analogy here is with baking cookies in an oven.  If you put the dough in the oven but keep opening the oven door every minute to check if the cookies are done, they will never get finished!

All this constant thinking if you are progressing or not, is just another form of doubt. And my lesson here is that: hope and doubt is really the same thing. They both involve uncertainty. So when it comes to making progress, YOU SHALL NEVER HAVE HOPE!!!!!! My friend! I mean: NEVER! NEVER!

Once you’ve done your mental rehearsal, you need to let it go. Just release it, relax and know it will be there for you in the real world.

This BLOG is an important tool that I can use to change and is not one of those “self improvement” shallow talk cluttering the Web.  Any improvements that you make in your life are temporary. And if you think that what life is about is improving, you are screwed, because you’re automatically deprived of that what you are improving on. I guess there will be a lot more postings until this will become clearer, so stay tuned for the next steps in the journey!

Just to let you know…

No matter what situations life throws at you, no matter how long and treacherous your journey may  seem, remember … there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Understand and use the power of visualization.

This important key ingredient in making mental rehearsing successful is not very hard to understand but being associated with some sort of mental whacking exercise is rarely approached from the right perspective.

As I said before, knowing all these techniques of visualizing things and guide your imagination is fairly useless. What really makes a difference is actually when you do it, and it seems that what I’m about to describe has a sneaky way of cheating you out of the “doing” factor and superficially let you stuck at the “knowing” level.

Anyway, first of all, you have to distinguish between two kind of visualization techniques:

There is the kind of visualization where you see yourself in the images. It’s like watching a movie of yourself, so you see your image of what you are doing or experiencing, how you are acting, etc.

This image which is useful for motivation and setting an overall direction for your mind is called “disassociated”. It means you are watching your self go through an experience, but you are not actually in the image so you don’t feel very much, if anything, of the feelings of being there.

The second kind of visualizing is where you do not see yourself in the images, but you see what you would actually see if you stepped into the image and were really there, looking out through your own eyes. This is called “associated” imagery, and this kind of imagery is what is most useful for fully rehearsing new behaviors, responses, emotions and thoughts.

The key to proper mental rehearsal that really works is to first use a dissociated set of images; seeing yourself the way you would like to look, talk, and act and then to switch to associated images, stepping inside the pictures and actually moving, talking, thinking, and feeling the way you’ll move, talk, think and feel when you are actually in the real situation.

Does it make sense?

First seeing the disassociated images of the way you want to be sets a guide post and a direction for your brain, so it gets an overall idea.

Then, seeing the associated images and actually walking around making the actual physical movements, talking out loud the way you’d speak, doing what you’d be actually doing FILLS IN THE DETAILS FOR YOUR BRAIN.

Before you start to practice, remember that the process of re-programming your subconscious mind for change is just that, a process. That means it takes some repetition and practice for the new thoughts, attitudes, behaviors and feelings to take root and take hold.

Now, the good part is yet to come. I am writing these posts to kind of overlay some of this information that I gathered over many years of research. Yes, is all out there, yes, these are things that Richard Bandler started preaching more then 40 years ago when he put the foundation of NLP. But after I will be done with the theoretical portion I will share more personal experiences and stories of how it worked for me and how I intend to use it in the future. The idea is to write about personal live experiments on these life transforming techniques, and about what are the real visualizing exercises that I practice myself and what the real results are.

This post will be an added bonus to the previous one. And this is because, one of the immediate effects of the breathing exercises is that will help you realize one of the major keys to living the life of your dreams…

And that is: To RECOGNIZE and GET OFF Of Auto-Pilot!

You see, one of the most important observations that helped me in the area of profound life transformation is that most people are walking around IN TRANCE. And even more importantly, these trances that they are walking around in are trances of fear, of doubt, of limitation, and of lack.

And these trances are really Not Serving Them!

Actually, these trances serve the “structures of power” that profit and feed off of a society of weak, programmed, obedient and fearful robots, who will look up to the “authorities” on how to live an “acceptable” life.

One of the big pieces of getting off of autopilot and having real choice is becoming aware of your fixed patterns of perception, response, action, etc.

To develop this awareness is a very powerful tool to peel away old, trapped ways of thinking, acting, responding and believing. It makes it MUCH easier to move up ANY learning curve for any skill set.

Now, is important to have technical skills. Many people offer fairly good models for technical skill (how to succeed, how to get fit, how to sell, etc) in different areas of life, yet few people get real changes or the huge leaps they want from following their advice.

And just as often, even with good “advices” and good models for new technical skills, the person trying to follow these advices has a bigger problem: they want to really change an area of life that has been deeply emotionally challenging, evoking lots self doubt, fears, personal limitations etc.

What can often happen is that the new advices, the new skills, the new ways of thinking, feeling, acting and believing are filtered THROUGH the old emotions, beliefs, experiences, etc.

This means that people will seldom consistently act out the new skills from the right frame of mind. They will be just fighting themselves, their tendencies, habits etc.

A metaphor we can use to illustrate this is that, if I give you a pair of glasses dipped in horse shit, EVERYTHING YOU SEE WILL BE BROWN. So, that is why methods that assist in building clear awareness can help us keep old responses, behaviors, choices and beliefs in control. And if they can keep them LONG enough for the new ways to take hold, and long enough so they can move up the new learning curves, they will most likely succeed because they can see the new skills, beliefs, responses THROUGH CLEAR EYES.

This is especially necessary when the new ways are very different from the old ways and require a major shift. Remember, the further something stands from how you are used to, think, feel, act and believe, the greater is the chance you have for HUGE leaps. Also, the greater the chance for old ways to leap back up, more you have a practice and discipline to deal with them.

I will say this again: practice and discipline. Forward… Anything you do to bring your habitual patterns into your awareness (without anger, fear or reaction) is useful. This is why I am challenging you to go from one extreme to another and to pay attention to flows of feeling that trigger all of it. The awareness of feeling this flow is the key to knowing when you are slipping into old patterns of behavior and is also the key to designing in NEW ones!

Does this make any sense? Now, go back and read again my last post and do that 10 minutes breathing exercise!

Alright then, this second post will be a continuation of the first.

And the main idea was to try to understand and incorporate the fundamental principle that explains why only so few people really can change their lives while the vast majority just stay stuck hoping and wishing.

The mind is what the brain do, so the question is what is the important rule about how the human brain works to control a great deal of what we do?

And here I will give it again:

Human Brains are Attracted to Something Different, but They DO only What Is Familiar

Basically, my observation is that in general, people tend to do what they are used to do, think what they were used to think and feel like they were used to feel.

Yes, they may be willing to change, on some level.

But the reality is that, if they are used to act, feel and think in a certain way, and only vaguely wish they could be different, THAN THE WAY THEY ARE, IS NOT GOING TO CHANGE AT ALL.

It took me many years to realize that the key to any kind of real change is mental rehearsal.

Didn’t they teach you that in school?

In order to change, you must learn to rehearse.

You must learn to rehearse the way you like to feel, act, think, believe and respond and do so with sufficient repetition that the new feelings, actions, thoughts and beliefs are perceived by your brain as being more powerful, more vivid, more real and more familiar than they used to be.

This is so important. I will say it again. It is NOT enough to realize you want to change. It is not enough to think about changing. If you want a change that is radically different, you must mentally rehears it! VIVIDLY!

In a future post I will give you 3 key ingredients to make mental rehearsal successful.

The first key ingredient to make mental rehearsal successful is using the role of breath as a vital ingredient to make deep level change.

Now, I am not the first person to talk about this, but based from my own experience, anything that I tried without including breathing exercises, any method, or any system out there that didn’t have this vital ingredient,

Pure and Simple, It Did Not Work!

We will not go into all sorts of meta-physical explanations but for a while, let’s keep it scientific, at least. There is a strong scientific fact that if you have a fear or anxiety response, the limbic part of your brain will control all of your responses that can get progressively triggered by small input signals, (like when you have a “job interview”, or you have to speak publicly,,,,).

Unless you can over drive and interrupt this limbic system, any programming you try to do with the other levels of the brain and mind are going to get sabotaged and disrupted, so change will take much more “will power” and fighting yourself.

It’s better when you do things the easy way.

So the first step to do your mental rehearsal will be to take ten minutes to do a breathing exercise. There are tons of materials on the web to learn breathing exercises, but if you aren’t willing to take ten minutes for yourself to do this then:

YOU CAN PACK UP and MAKE ROOM for other PEOPLE to READ on THIS PAGE!

My favorite breathing exercise is targeting a spot on the body located about 2-3 inches below the belly button, between the navel and the pubic bone. If you’ve studied any martial arts, occult or esoteric disciplines, this spot is called different names: the kunda, the tan-tien, the hara, etc. Without getting into intricate explanations, you just need to view it as a major power center in the body and a major awareness center as well (your “gut feeling” center).

So….stand up right, well grounded with feet planted about 2 feet apart. Take a deep inhale, and as you do, imagine the breath is moving in a soft line of energy feeling down the front of your body and swirling in the “hara” center. It doesn’t matter if it is clockwise or counter-clockwise you will find which ever works best for you.

Exhale by pulling your belly toward your spine and as you do, feel the line of energy from the small of your back up the center of your spine, out through the top of your head.

Repeat this for 10 minutes. Remember that our limbic system is at the core of our existence as biological beings. It is basically making sure that our heart is beating; pumping fresh blood in the body and is making us breathe oxygen to provide our system with life sustaining energy. We cannot beat our hearts consciously (at least, not without being one of those yoga masters practicing this all their life), but we can learn how to become conscious of our breathing in just few minutes.

I am going to start my first post with something that I’ve learned from A. Einstein and it goes something like this:

“The only constant in universe is CHANGE”.

Or to put it in other words; The only thing that doesn’t change is change itself. “Change or die” as Darwin once said, there is no other alternative.

I must admit that I have a certain fascination with the subject of life transformation, a fascination with always questioning the way people connect with their own wishes and motivations, a fascination with asking what is really that moves people, that drives them, attract them, make them do what they do and not do what they don’t do.

Over the years, it became more obvious to me that in the area of life where you really, truly want to make progress, most people make a big mistake.

They know what they are doing, and even if it doesn’t work, they try to do it harder, with more intensity and more repetition hoping that the outcome will be different.

So why is this happening?

Well, first of all it seems that human brains are always attracted by what is new, but they always end up doing what they have done before.

Or to put it simple: people would rather fail with what is familiar than to succeed with something that is different.

And I am going to make a little confession here; despite my best intentions and all my genuine desires for change, I always found myself stuck in such a pattern.

This BLOG is one of the ways and a tool to help me embrace the unfamiliar, the unusual, the new and the counter intuitive. Is to help me get unstuck from my old patterns of comfort.

And if it will helps anybody else reading here, I will be glad to share more!