Update on changing one's actions

Posted by MikeJoyous 10 years, 10 months ago to Education
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Imagine that you want to do something differently. You find it very hard, maybe impossible. What can you do in that situation?
Well, my upcoming workshop is going to be about that very issue. The first step is to ask yourself what kind of feelings may be behind your difficulty. Imagine that what comes up is "helplessness" associated with feeling like a helpless child. What next? Ask your intuition where that helplessness may be contained within your body and, on a scale of 1 to 10, which number (with 10 being the highest) represents your experience of resistance associated with the helplessness. Then you tap at that spot, and the next spot suggested by your intuition, and you ask your intuition for more spots (first) and to be alert for a time when the number representing your resistance of the moment has gone down. For example, if your initial resistance associated with the helplessness is tied to the number 6, your intuition just points out different spots to tap or to press until eventually the number that comes up when you ask yourself that question is less than a 6, perhaps a 4. Keep on with this cycle (tap or press, ask for the new number) until eventually the number that comes up is a zero. I will help folks to do this in my upcoming workshop. To get one free look at this go to www.emofree.com. You can take a look at a free in-depth definition of how this works. My own way of doing this work is far simpler than Mr. Craig's, but I like the fact that many people have used his work to help others and make money doing so:) Once you come to a zero, use Patricia Carrington's "releasing" work to let go of the remaining "hangover" (my term) of emotionality. This also is covered in my upcoming workshop. If you still find it very hard to act, ask yourself if another feeling could be forming resistance to the action. Do the whole cycle again--as many times as new feelings pop up. I tend to feel like "Enough" after I go through this process 3-5 times. It takes as much as 5 minutes. Now ask yourself, on a scale of 1-10, how much resistance is left within you. If the answer is 5 or above, you have more work to do. If the answer is 4 or less, then you have to just *let* the impetus to act take hold of you. My experience is that, at this point, action takes place without supreme effort, almost automatically. I haven't yet tested this process on many different issues of mine, but I'm writing about it here to inspire those of you who have some psychological background to experiment with the process I laid out. Who knows? Maybe you may not even need my workshop!:)


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  • Posted by ShruginArgentina 10 years, 10 months ago
    IDEAS guide my actions.

    Of couse I have "feelings" but "helplessness" isn't one of them.

    Not now. Not ever.

    Perhaps you should peddle your "process" elsewhere,

    Yes, I am watching Atlas Shrugged II at this very moment and have drawn inspiration for my answer from it!

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    • Posted by 10 years, 10 months ago
      Actually, I haven't met anyone over the decades who, when he or she looked deeply into their psyches, discovered no helplessness ever. Theoretically it's possible if, for example, as a newborn child, your parents used LeBoyer's theories of eliminating excess sounds and touches, and as you grew up your parents made being ideal parents as a prime value in their lives. I haven't found anyone like that, but I always hope it will happen.
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      • Posted by Lucky 10 years, 10 months ago
        What is and where is this psyche and how many should I have? Is it something like or the same as a soul? Cannot claim to have any of those neither. I suggest it is a concept invented by the fraud Freud for the purpose of defrauding women with more money than sense.

        As a fan of Neil Diamond especially 'Red red wine', I recommend to whoever is down in the dumps-
        "But, fill me with the old familiar Juice,
        Methinks I might recover by-and-bye!"
        "And much as Wine has play'd the Infidel
        And robb'd me of my Robe of Honour---well,
        I often wonder what the Vintners buy
        One half so precious as the Goods they sell."
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        • Posted by 10 years, 10 months ago
          Lucky, have you ever actually read what Freud wrote? Many folks who call themselves "Objectivists" are down on Freud as a result of writings of Branden, but they have not read the original ideas that led Freud to his momentous conclusions. At a time when "sex" was a forbidden word, Freud dared to look into his own feelings and pursue the thoughts that ensued wherever they led. In that respect, he was clearly a first-hander, Lucky. He made quite a few errors, and Branden and others talked about them. But he was also a man of extreme good-will, trying to do his best while pioneering a new world! The "psyche" is the thing you use to think, to feel, to dream. to get yourself motivated to act to make your dreams real. The "soul" is the deepest part of the psyche, the part that contains your deepest beliefs and feelings, a part of you that sometimes feels "sacred," so important is it to knowing who you are. I read your Neil Diamond elegy to wine.I don't really understand how it is relevant to ordinary living. Care to explain?
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          • Posted by Lucky 10 years, 10 months ago
            Have read a little, impenetrable fog in the tradition of psycho-babble, post-modernism and deconstructionism, and now of Keynsianism and carbon alarmism.
            Freud's ideas have been extensively debunked. They are untestable. non-falsifiable and have no explanatory power.
            It is likely that he never made an honest statement in his professional life. He was clever enough to avoid making predictions, he just gave contrived explanations and billed. His work was particularly devastating to women suffering sexual abuse when he would claim the woman was a victim only of her own fantasies and 'sub-conscious' wishes.
            Sigmund Freud was a charlatan and fraud.

            There is a vast debunking literature:
            -Frederick Crews. essays in the New York Review of Books about 1995
            -http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/paper-CrewsFreud.html
            See -Alan Sokal. "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", for a debunking of deconstructionism if the title does not give it away.
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            • Posted by 10 years, 10 months ago
              One more thought, Lucky: as I recall the great psychologist George Weinberg wrote a book about Freud from a fairly sympathetic point of view. I don't recall the title this moment, but I'm sure you can find it. Weinberg is not an Objectivist. When I talked with him on the phone about it, he talked about Branden as if his interest in Objectivism were an oddity. On the other hand, he wrote a book about free will and his book "Self-Creation" is a real classic in the self-help literature, none of his books being at odds with Objectivism, as far as I could tell. It's so *easy* to find folks who debunk Freud, Lucky. Let's not forget that his work dominated American psychotherapy for many years. The folks who believed it were not stupid nor evil. They just had not thought about Freud from the viewpoint of a radical.
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            • Posted by 10 years, 10 months ago
              Hi Lucky:) I won't get into an argument about Freud. I'll just say that it's wrong to make a character judgment of someone else based on what they wrote primarily if a person has not read the original works of that person. Many are the folks who "debunked" Rand, but were totally wrong about it for one reason or another. You'd never know they were wrong, though, unless you had read Rand's works themselves. I certainly don't agree with much that Freud said, but I never questioned his good intentions. Why not actually do some reading of the introductory lectures, Lucky? At present, all you can say, logically, is that other people you respect (if you do) feel that Freud was a charlatan. Do you want to be content saying that?
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              • Posted by Lucky 10 years, 10 months ago
                Do I want to read more of Freud? No thanks, my first serious contact was at U, at that time many people believed, or at least taught it. Freud and Jung and their schools gave no insight but set us back. They gave a few words useful in novels but not in science.
                Regarding helplessness, the last decades have moved from discipline to therapy as consultants are better at marketing which indulges and sympathizes rather than getting the victim (or attention seeker) to straighten themselves out.
                you may like the following that I found on the net, your tradition perhaps, from Rabbi Katz of Westbury NY:

                "A man came to minyan this morning
                With two youngsters;
                He was in his forties;
                They were in their early teens.

                To myself I thought it was perhaps
                The week before the boy's Bar Mitzvah;
                Or maybe it was the father's turn to help make a minyan
                And he had dragged along his son and daughter.

                But towards the end of the service,
                All three rose to recite the Kaddish
                And the Rabbi called them over and chanted the El Malae -
                The man, for his wife, the children, of 13 and 14
                For their Mother.

                Once again, coming to minyan
                Has taught me a lesson:
                Do not feel so sorry for yourself;
                There are others who've got it worse."
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                • Posted by 10 years, 10 months ago
                  Lucky,
                  I don't agree about Freud having no value.He discovered a new world in the subconscious.
                  About your Jewish thought: why was it worse for them to go to the minyan? What relevance is that to learning about how to overcome past feelings that hold one down?
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                  • Posted by Lucky 10 years, 10 months ago
                    Point 1- The subconscious- does a fantasy become real if someone believes it? (No need to quote Peter Pan).
                    Point 2- Read the story again, the message is to anyone who thinks they are hard done by, the father and two children are worse off than you so stop grumbling. Past feelings hold no one down, the wallowing in the present of grudges do the holding down.
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                    • Posted by 10 years, 10 months ago
                      Lucky, if I ask you who was the second president of the US, where within you is that answer located?

                      If you believe that feelings hold no one down, then do you also believe that the tons of books about everything from psychology to self-help are all BS?
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  • Posted by ShruginArgentina 10 years, 10 months ago
    Hi Mike,

    Have you ever considered attending a workshop on how to write an inelligible (readable) post?
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    • Posted by 10 years, 10 months ago
      You could not read my posts? Do you have, then, any serious questions about that which you did understand?
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      • Posted by ShruginArgentina 10 years, 10 months ago
        You post is one huge paragraph and is, basically, unreadable.

        Frankly, I don't see why anyone who lives by the principles of Objectivism would teel helpless or want to participate in a workshop to deal with that emotion.


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        • Posted by 10 years, 10 months ago
          Good point about having separate paragraphs. I insisted that my subscribers on my list self-esteem-self-help always follow that method of writing. A shame that I forgot:(
          Tomorrow I'll look at my post again. If anyone else has a similar comment, I'll rewrite it from that perspective.
          For that matter, if *you* really want me to do so, I'll gladly rewrite the post to make it more readable.
          Concerning feeling helpless, I think it's important to distinguish between a person's conscious philosophical convictions as opposed to what he has integrated on the deepest emotional and somatic levels. I am an Objectivist, but I have felt helpless way too often as I grew up, resulting in much depression. But let's get even more personal. I at one time believed in God, a Jewish God, with all my heart. Eventually, when a friend introduced me to Rand's philosophy, and I actually had the privilege of hearing Ms. Rand speak at an NBI lecture, I realized that, since I was committed to reason at bottom, I had to be an atheist. But knowing that did not somehow erase the yearning inside for there to be a wise beneficent God who would help me when I felt miserable. A person's conscious convictions form only *one* part of who he is. One needs to look deeper than a person's conscious philosophy to know who that person is.
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          • Posted by ShruginArgentina 10 years, 10 months ago
            Good point about having separate paragraphs.

            I insisted that my subscribers on my list self-esteem-self-help always follow that method of writing. A shame that I forgot:(

            Tomorrow I'll look at my post again. If anyone else has a similar comment, I'll rewrite it from that perspective.

            For that matter, if *you* really want me to do so, I'll gladly rewrite the post to make it more readable.

            Concerning feeling helpless, I think it's important to distinguish between a person's conscious philosophical convictions as opposed to what he has integrated on the deepest emotional and somatic levels.

            I am an Objectivist, but I have felt helpless way too often as I grew up, resulting in much depression.

            But let's get even more personal. I at one time believed in God, a Jewish God, with all my heart.

            Eventually, when a friend introduced me to Rand's philosophy, and I actually had the privilege of hearing Ms. Rand speak at an NBI lecture, I realized that, since I was committed to reason at bottom, I had to be an atheist. But knowing that did not somehow erase the yearning inside for there to be a wise beneficent God who would help me when I felt miserable. A person's conscious convictions form only *one* part of who he is.

            One needs to look deeper than a person's conscious philosophy to know who that person is.

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            • Posted by 10 years, 10 months ago
              Yep, I'm used to just indenting for a new paragraph. I followed that mode here and, of course, it did not work. In the future, I'll definitely just skip 1 line to form a new paragraph.

              Thanks, by the way, for making this clear to me, when you created many small paragraphs out of my last post:)
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  • Posted by Zenphamy 10 years, 10 months ago
    I was going to do something, then I started counting and tapping - next thing I knew, I forgot what I was going to do.

    Am I cured?
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    • Posted by 10 years, 10 months ago
      Well, at least you remembered that you counted and tapped:) I dunno. How come you are making fun of this process? After all, you are not familiar with it. Why not simply ask for more information?
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      • Posted by Zenphamy 10 years, 10 months ago
        Sorry, I'm a bit of a radical Objectivist, I don't ask for information, I go look for knowledge about objective reality and I shy away from simplistic approaches offered to me to solve some imagined problem such as helplessness.

        Men of the mind trading value for value don't suffer from most of the 'syndromes' popularized by those with 'easy' answers for problems they can't even imagine having.

        A=A and KYFHO
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        • Posted by 10 years, 10 months ago
          Helplessness was only one example of what this is about. Do you ever refrain from acting due to fear? Do you overact because of anger? Do you, in fact, ever see things biased or prejudiced because of emotionality?

          I'm an Objectivist also. So what? Being an Objectivist does not guarantee that a person won't have psychological problems. You know, Ayn Rand had her share of psychological problems, when you think of her "excommunicating" one friend after another for supposed betrayals.

          "Simple" is not the same as "simplistic." Do you really really understand what I talked about in my last post? If it was "unreadable," doesn't that mean you did not understand it since you could not read it?

          You seem to equate "Objectivist" with "superman" in the sense of not having psychological problems. Or am I mistaken about this?? If I am mistaken, please tell me where I am wrong.
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          • Posted by Zenphamy 10 years, 10 months ago
            I don't wish to personally insult you, but you are not an Objectivist and by all appearances, have little understanding of objectivism.

            Helplessness, fear, anger, biased or prejudiced because of emotionality - those are all emotions or emotional responses engendered in one's mind. If acted upon or 'treated' as you offer, you have bypassed one of the prime tenets of objectivism - that being to compare those emotions to the objectively real environment and your own inter-actons with it in a rational analysis.

            Unreadable? Don't know where you got that.

            AR having psychological problems - I think you're paraphrasing from one of her many detractors.

            Objectivist equates to superman, not having psychological problems - nonsense. Objectivist reject letting emotions rule their lives, the decisions, their actions, and their happiness. Altruism is an emotion and arguably one of the most evil life motivators.

            If you're mistaken, I'm not here to teach you or anyone else. Do your own work.

            KYFHO
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            • Posted by 10 years, 10 months ago
              Well, as I understand it, according to you, an Objectivist rejects letting emotions rule their decisions, actions or their happiness. You then say altruism is an emotion and an evil motivator.
              Do I understand you correctly?
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