Author Archives: Joseph

About Joseph

Compassion, imagination, wonder and rational thought are among the greatest human attributes. It seems to me there's no better time than now to exhibit them!

Deflating Unwanted Memories

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Take the emotional sting out of certain memories with this simple NLP technique:

  1. Turn your memory into a flat 2D image – like a picture in a book. Make it black and white. Put a picture frame around it. Hang it on the wall. Why not hang it upside down? Or at a silly angle? What would it look like if it were all in cartoon?
  2. In your mind, play some silly music. Change the voices into Donald Duck, or some other amusing voice, until it makes you laugh or starts to tickle your funny bone.
  3. Feel how flat you have made the memory now.
  4. Lastly, make a new picture of how you want to be/feel and over impose this new wonderful you in front of the picture of you smiling.

Wave or Death of the Future?

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Dr. Burzynski is a true pioneer and luminary in the field of Cancer Research and Treatment.

Dr. Burzynski is a true pioneer and luminary in the field of Cancer Research and Treatment.

As a cancer survivor, I invested in the DVD. It’s an absolute travesty and shame what has been done to Dr. Burzynski, a true pioneer and luminary in the field of Cancer Research and Treatment. His treatment by the Texas Medical Board and the US FDA reminds me of the treatment received by some of the great thinkers of the early Renaissance period (think “burned at the stake”).

How many will die as a direct result of the pursuit of profit in America? I’m talking about Big Pharma, who spends $B annually to suppress effective treatments in favor of their own. I’m sure the crooked fingers of these giant corporations reaches into the lives of just about every human on the planet.

My opinion? Big Pharma want’s Dr. Burzynski’s patents and he’s brave enough to withstand the onslaught. He may instead deserve the Nobel Prize, imho.

Please take a few minutes to educate yourself about this new and promising (perhaps fleeting) option for real effective treatment of cancer. You or someone you know and/or love may owe their lives to it. (At least buy the movie on DVD) Continue reading →

Resilience – Evolutionary Advantage

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Although I sprayed them every year they'd just come back stronger. They had become resilient.

Although I sprayed them every year they’d just come back stronger. They had become resilient.

There is a spot in our backyard garden where the same weeds pop up every spring – and which I spray each spring. Over time, the spray seems to be lessening its effect on them and now, the weeds simply cannot be killed using those sprays I’ve used before – they have survived and learned to be resilient.

For years I’ve believed that victimhood is the key to therapeutic inaction and failure. Clients who believe they are the victim of abuse feel powerless and helpless against the intense feelings that boil within them. “I can’t help it – I was beaten as a child. It’s DADDY’S fault I’m fat!”

What if you were to look at yourself instead as a survivor imbued with a strength called resilience? Rather than feeling helpless and hopeless, might you feel more empowered? And what if you were to learn that by putting your strength to work for you, you might actually make your life work better? What if you considered resilience an evolutionary gift rather than a problem needing correction?

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13 Keys to Goal Achievement

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It's easy when you have the key pieces.

It's easy when you have the key pieces.

  1. Visualize, Speak aloud, and feel the goal clearly.
  2. Remove any internal blocks (use RET, EFT, or a scripting process where you dispute the hindering belief).
  3. Devise/recite out loud a mantra/affirmation (stated 1st & 3rd person, present-tense and positive using all the representational systems).
  4. Convince yourself you deserve it; get congruent.
  5. Raise energy (breath-work, sex, dancing, etc.)
  6. Release the energy into the goal.
  7. Release attachment to the goal and give thanks for its attainment.
  8. Periodically repeat steps 3, 5, & 6 (how often is up to you, but at least daily).
  9. Take physical action towards its attainment (listen for intuitive guidance).
  10. Tithe something and/or do a good deed.
  11. Banish self-pity and forgive yourself and others for any and all misdeeds.
  12. Have faith you’ll achieve your goal (put it in the past on your timeline).
  13. Bless your situation, your possessions, and others.

– Thomas Lomax

Distance – An Effective Way to Deal with Emotions

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When you’re upset or depressed, should you analyze your feelings to figure out what’s wrong? Or should you just forget about it and move on?

The best way to move ahead emotionally is to analyze one\'s feelings from a psychologically distanced perspective.

The best way to move ahead emotionally is to analyze one’s feelings from a psychologically distanced perspective.

New research suggests a solution to these questions and to a related psychological paradox: Processing emotions is supposed to facilitate coping, but attempts to understand painful feelings often backfire and perpetuate or strengthen negative moods and emotions.

The solution is not denial or distraction. According to University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross, the best way to move ahead emotionally is to analyze one’s feelings from a psychologically distanced perspective.

With University of California, Berkeley, colleague Ozlem Ayduk, Kross has conducted a series of studies that provide the first experimental evidence of the benefits of analyzing depressive feelings from a psychologically distanced perspective. The studies were supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health.

“We aren’t very good at trying to analyze our feelings to make ourselves feel better,” said Kross, a faculty associate at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) and an assistant professor of psychology. “It’s an invaluable human ability to think about what we do, but reviewing our mistakes over and over, re-experiencing the same negative emotions we felt the first time around, tends to keep us stuck in negativity. It can be very helpful to take a sort of mental time-out, to sit back and try to review the situation from a distance.”

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Eye and Body Movement for Problem Solving?

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Directing a person's eye movements or attention in specific patterns can also aid in solving complex problems.

Directing a person’s eye movements or attention in specific patterns can also aid in solving complex problems.

A new study appearing in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, is the first to show that a person’s ability to solve a problem can be influenced by how he or she moves.

“Our manipulation [of the body] is changing the way people think,” said University of Illinois psychology professor Alejandro Lleras, who along with Vanderbilt University postdoctoral researcher Laura Thomas, conducted the study. “In other words, by directing the way people move their bodies, we are – unbeknownst to them - directing the way they think about the problem.”

“The results are interesting both because body motion can affect higher order thought, the complex thinking needed to solve complicated problems, and because this effect occurs even when someone else is directing the movements of the person trying to solve the problem,” Lleras said.

According to Lleras, this type of consciousness, “embodied cognition,” describes the link between body and mind in a new and insightful way.

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Fear – It’s in the Eyes!

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“There are reasons to believe that the brain has evolved mechanisms to detect things in the environment that signal threat. One of those signals is a look of fear,” David Zald, associate professor of psychology and a co-author of the new study, said. “We believe that the brain can detect certain cues even before we are aware of them, so that we can direct our attention to potentially threatening situations in our environment.”

amygdala2.jpgResearchers set out to determine if we become aware of fearful, neutral or happy expressions at the same speed, or if one of these expressions reaches our awareness faster than the others.

The team found that subjects became aware of faces that had fearful expressions before neutral or happy faces. They believe a brain area called the amygdala, part of the emotions-processing limbic system, shortcuts the normal brain pathway for processing visual images.

“The amygdala receives information before it goes to the cortex, which is where most visual information goes first. We think the amygdala has some crude ability to process stimuli and that it can cue some other visual areas to what they need to focus on,” Zald said.

Zald and his colleagues believe the eyes of the fearful face play a key role.

“Fearful eyes are a particular shape, where you get more of the whites of the eye showing,” he said.”That may be the sort of simple feature that the amygdala can pick up on, because it’s only getting a fairly crude representation. That fearful eye may be something that’s relatively hardwired in there.”

“We are interested in now exploring what this means for behavior,” Yang said. “Since these expressions are being processed without our awareness, do they affect our behavior and our decision making? If so, how?”

The research was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health. Blake and Zald are Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development investigators. Randolph Blake, Centennial Professor of Psychology, and Eunice Yang, doctoral student, were co-authors of the study, which appeared in the November 2007 issue of Emotion.

How You Feel

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Holding a soft cuddly teddy bear in their lap for just a moment before getting started, may soften a session.

Holding a soft cuddly teddy bear in their lap for just a moment before getting started, may soften a client’s session.

What you feel can affect how you feel. At least that is the conclusion researchers came to after a series of ingenious experiments. They determined that your sense of touch affects your emotional and mental feelings about things at a subconscious level. For example, handling a hard or soft ball before a conversational interaction made participants feel the interaction itself was either hard (difficult) or soft (easy).

Since the famed psychologist Milton Erickson made use of metaphors in hypnosis sessions, hypnotherapists especially have known the value of metaphoric speech. Now, scientists are demonstrating that we have an innate sense of metaphoric touch as well – and it is so ingrained in our psyches as to be completely invisible to us. You may even now be influenced by something you touched moments ago – affecting your current conversations, thoughts, and actions.

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