Change Your Mind – Change Your Life

All that we are is the result of all that we have thought. It is focused on thought. It is based on thought. Buddha, The Dhammapada.

If we think success, health and wealth then by degrees we may become successful, healthy and wealthy. This is the simple yet startling insight provided by Self-Image Psychology and while such a bland idea may on first appearance sound like pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo or smack of ‘happy clappy’ new-age jargon there is increasing scientific evidence that what we think and how we think it can actually have a profound effect on us both physically and emotionally. Our patterns of thought and behaviour are just as much a habit as driving to work or nail-biting; for most of our daily lives we just don’t think about how we think and behave. Usually, it is only when we experience a traumatic incident or when we are presented with life-changing circumstances are we brought face to face with those essential attitudes and unconsciously accepted self-beliefs that wield an irresistible and invisible control over our lives. This process operates beyond our awareness, below the threshold of consciousness. Its power is immense and immediate. It shapes our reactions, the way we respond to people and events. It can make us ill or it can heal. The underlying mechanism of this process, that manipulates us so easily as puppets on a string is simply suggestion and any suggestion to which we have become conditioned or unconsciously accepted continues to affect our well-being and behaviour, for better or worse, for health and well-being or illness and disease.
Our behaviour is shaped by our attitudes, beliefs and expectations and these contribute to the efficacy of suggestion.

Now, if you have ever tried to break an unwanted habit such as cigarette smoking or nail-biting for example (and who hasn’t) you may well be sceptical about such methods. You may even think that these techniques will not work for you because the habit is too longstanding or too ingrained. Or, because you have tried will-power and failed, you may even think ‘positive thinking’ is all so much hocus-pocus. If this is the case, there are two explanations; firstly, although it can work for some people, will-power is not particularly effective (as you may have found). Emile Coue, the French motivational psychologist famous for the phrase ‘every day in every way, I am getting better and better’ also wrote that when the Will and the Imagination are in conflict, the Imagination always wins. Which means that however much we try to use it, will-power is useless until we change our fundamental attitudes because it is our beliefs and expectations that nourish our imagination.

Secondly, if we believe something will not work and expect something to have no effect then we create a negative pattern of thought and behaviour which becomes what psychologists call a ‘self-fulfilling’ event, that is results will follow expectations. And if we think that something will fail then more likely than not it most certainly will fail, because we have set that ‘failure action’ in motion and because we fail it reinforces or strengthens the belief and so on. This creates a self-limiting and self-destructive vicious circle of continual ‘belief-failure’ that, once set in motion, will not change until and unless we recognise the pattern in our life and set about changing the way we think.

Try it now with this simple exercise and see for yourself just how powerful it is.

Belief maintained by visualisation and fuelled by expectation produces a successful outcome and that outcome can be any aim, any goal and any objective that we set ourselves.

The old dualism of ‘Mind’ and ‘Body’ is, it seems, proving to be a scientific heresy but this would come as no surprise to anyone familiar either with ‘New Age’ ideas in their various forms or with the underlying holistic approach of complementary therapies. Science is playing catching up with common sense, again! There is an increasing body of scientific evidence that supports what many have believed for some considerable time – that the way think can cause or affect physical symptoms and, conversely, that our physical condition reciprocates by influencing not only the way we think but also our behaviour. It is a two-way process but identifying which comes first is a ‘chicken and egg’ situation and the biological and psychological mechanisms involved in these processes are far from completely understood. However, it is not necessary to understand the nuts and bolts of a system to use it: How many of us really understand the complex internal workings of the ubiquitous desktop computer? We turn on the machine, wait for it to boot up, start a word-processing or spreadsheet application and away we go. If it breaks down we ask someone to fix it for us. Similarly, we are all capable of learning how to utilise the mind-body interaction for our personal benefit – whether it is to reduce anxiety and stress, to overcome fear (phobias or exam / test nerves, for example) to change unwanted patterns of behaviour or improve our personal effectiveness by learning new methods of communication, motivation and persuasion.

The methods and techniques we can use to effect the necessary changes in ourselves are drawn from an eclectic array of theoretical perspectives that encompasses ideas as diverse as Freud, Jung, Adler, Rogers, Crowley, R.A. Wilson, behaviourism and learning theory, yoga, meditation, visualisation, hypnosis and hypnotherapy, cognitive-behavioural therapy, neuro-linguistic programming, autogenic training, biofeedback, imagineering … whatever works has something to commend it as a valuable aid to insight or self-development.

The downside of this is that the strength of such an eclectic approach is also considered to be its inherent weakness – that without a single theoretical framework there is an apparent lack of unity and cohesion and it may therefore be difficult to see how the whole thing hangs together. Against this, the absence of any single, rigidly enforced, dogma simultaneously provides a unique freedom to experiment and explore while maintaining an ever-present sense of personal challenge. And it is these ingredients that make Trance4mation an intellectually challenging, physically stimulating and emotionally rewarding experience.