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A student of mine gave me access to a course he bought that teaches psychiatrists to reframe the client’s story so it hurts less, or maybe doesn’t hurt at all.
Reframing sounds really simple: look at what is happening or what happened from a different angle, with different eyes.
The most important element of reframing is to step out of your persona, step out of your ego, step out of who you consider yourself to be.
Who you consider yourself to be, as in self-importance, so indignity won’t be part of your new picture.
We call that ‘who you consider yourself to be’ your Precious I in this work. And that Precious I, and its sensitivity to insults is the reason for most of the upset, misery, and gloom and doom in the world.
To the Precious I everything feels personal. Things happen to it, things are done to it.
You consider yourself your Precious I, but rare is the person where the two I’s are even close. Or even related.
You are neither as important, nor as mighty as your Precious I wants you to believe. And even if you see it, you prefer to behave like you are your Precious I.
And when I ask you to step outside of yourself, to look at the world from a different vantage point, you conveniently walk there, instead of leaving your Precious I behind…
Unless you paid for a therapist session, you are hardly ever willing to accept a different view of what happened, because for the Precious I the world is flat. Fixed. One way. And the Precious I is sure of it.
Everything you say about yourself that follows the formula ‘I am…’ or ‘I should…’ and about the world ‘it IS’, ‘it should’ reflects that fixed view of reality that is not reality at all.
It is the hardest thing for a human to consider that what they see as reality isn’t…
What you see as reality is a combination of some facts and a lot of what you said about the facts. Said in your head…
And rarely do two people say the same thing about the same facts.
Yesterday I had a call with a student who volunteered to be a sounding board for me.
I started the conversation with describing him the way the sky looked from my window. It was just before dawn, when the sky was bursting with wild colors. I was gushing. He was disgusted.
He felt that I suckered him into a conversation that is sure to be a waste of his precious time.
I needed to take him out of his Precious I vantage point… so he can see that spending a minute on the sky and how it looks can be useful… given what I wanted to discuss.
Most people, the world, doesn’t know, doesn’t care that what they do offends… at the drop of a hat.
They may notice, but have no idea what pissed you off. And surely have no idea how to get you back on their side… even if they wanted to.
And that is why Jean Paul Sartre said ‘hell is other people’. Sigmund Freud went further saying:
Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks. In order to bear it we cannot dispense with palliative measures.
It’s not just other people who cause us pains, it is everything.
But why and how?
Humans, as a species, are word-people.
When something happens, or when they see/hear something, the human brain immediately interprets the signals with words. Immediately. Faster than a speeding bullet. So the words and the sensory input becomes conscious exactly at the same time as the words.
No thinking happens. NONE.
You don’t add those words to reality… the brain adds automatically. You cannot be held responsible for what the words say, how the words distort reality.
The work of a human would start after all that. Or more accurately worded: it WOULD start after that, if the human didn’t necessarily believe the automatic interpretation. Or if the human didn’t want to be miserable.
My readers, to my dismay, LOVE to be miserable… How do I know? They don’t think anything could change it.
When it comes to humans, largely there are two groups. One group is 1000 strong, the other is eight billion strong.
The only difference between the two groups is this: a person in one group can and habitually steps out from behind their own eyeballs, and takes another look at what is in front of them.
A person in the other group can’t or won’t. They may talk about it… but they are still talking from behind their eyeballs.
Therapists. Teachers. Gurus. Healers.
One of the reasons muscletests are so unreliable…
…because if and when you test and you are behind your eyeballs, your opinions move your muscles, not the truth.
I remember some 15 years ago David Hawkins really impressed me, because during an interview he giggled a lot. I thought that was an indication that he found humor in what he saw. At the time I couldn’t see it that he found SUPERIORITY and condescending… because he never stepped out from behind his eyeballs. NEVER.
So, obviously, the challenge is to step out from behind our eyeballs, and take another look at reality.
Can an ordinary person do it? Can a very smart person do it?
I say that unless the capacity is open, a DNA capacity, you can’t…
I call the capacity the Driftwood…
…because without it you are like driftwood, other driftwood (people, circumstances) wedge you in, and you can only see the world through your own eyes.
And that is the tragedy… if you have been getting what I am saying: whatever you see from behind your own eyeballs is colored and distorted to be fixed… And causing what Freud is talking about. What Sartre is talking about. What you are experiencing.
Now, would it help if I turned on the capacity for you?
I have done that, and it didn’t help. Why?
Because capacity is a potential… only YOU can make it real by actually doing what there is to do: move your eyes out of your head, or more accurately, grow another head… and move it to different spots so what you’ll see will be different. Or even more accurately, when you look from a different angle, the automatic words will be different, not the same old, same old.
So you grew a whole brain, an innocent brain away from your original, for the few seconds it takes to look again.
I have a ‘famous’ saying: ‘it ain’t necessarily so‘ that has helped me a lot… while it did nothing for others. Why? Because if your eyes and brain remain at the same place, you cannot see anything different.
If you move to another spot, same eyes, same brain: you cannot see anything different.
So what happens when you do that… same eyes, same brain.
In my experience that is when you use ‘positive thinking’ bs.
Meaning: whatever bothered you before is still bothering you now, but you tried to ameliorate, to make better the blow, that she isn’t good enough…
My client’s father said: ‘you didn’t run fast enough‘. Her ‘positive thinking’ ‘reframe’ was ‘I was lucky to have a dad who cared enough to push me to do the very best I can.‘
Let me vomit… It is still about her… there is no different view, there is a lie instead.
Positive thinking is a methodology that teaches you to lie.
So in addition to what you already had, you now added ‘I am a liar’ to your self-image… Congratulations.
To make this learning possible, you need to do this first poorly, and then, hopefully correctly.
If this is the Achilles Heel of humanity, then there is nothing that can be more important to a person who prefers to be happy, peaceful, and productive in life.
The better one gets at this, the less upset, the less bad emotions, the less stupidity… pondering… suffering.
And yes, you get stupid when you are upset…
The framework I invented to let you learn and practice is the challenge format.
I call it Creativity Challenge, because to be creative you need to leave your head… you need to go beyond what’s in your head.
It’s quite simple, albeit not easy.
You pick a ‘truth’ that upsets you. Either in the past, in the present, or in the future.
And then do three steps:
- what are the facts
- what did the words say about it
- And what is something you can say after you looked at the facts from a different vantage point.
I’ll provide the activation of the Driftwood capacity ongoingly…
Just like I provided The Sight capacity when we were doing the Validation Challenge before.
YOU email me what you saw… the facts, the words, and the new words…
If you miss a day: I forgive you. If you need to miss more than a day, you’ll let me know, or I pull you from the challenge.
Why? Because just like the Universe, I need to see that you mean business.
This is the real meaning of the Charlie Munger ditty: To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. The world is not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of. undeserving people
We think it is the work, or the skills, or the inner state that makes us deserving. But in my experience they may matter but won’t make you deserving.
What makes you deserving is that you keep on plugging away at what you say you committed to… even when it looks hopeless. Even when it’s hard. Even when you are busy, or it’s Easter, or you have house guests, or whatever stupid thoughts you have that say: it’s not worth it.
Me, just like the Universe, are unforgiving about that.
Many or you now see why you haven’t been getting what you want.
And many of you see the fraud in what other teachers teach: just place an order and the Universe will deliver in the Universe’s time… Bullshit.
Anyway, the driftwood capacity activation is my gift to you. Every 2-3 days…
Why am I doing this? After all each activation would earn me $25 per person… if I charged for it?
True. And I would probably have one, maybe two people in the challenge.
Until and unless you see the results, you can’t even imagine them… so you won’t be inspired to pay for it.
When will you see results? Some will experience results earlier than others, some never will.
The difference is simple but significant.
If your payoff from being upset and a victim excuses you from having to take responsibility for your actions, for your words, for your attitude… ultimately for your results.
So if the payoff feels bigger than living a life with grace and ease, you’ll choose being upset and a victim.
I have both kinds of clients…
The stronger the hate of the anger, hate, misery you experience, the more likely that you will actually experience, through your work in the challenge, grace and ease.
If you are lukewarm, I don’t think you should join the challenge. Creativity uses you your dislike as fuel, uses your emotions that jerk you around as jet fuel.
OK, here is the link to sign up. The first seven days is free… so if you don’t actually start to do the work right away, I’ll pull you from the challenge. You can re-apply if you change your mind.
Sign up to the reframing Challenge
