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We are in the middle of Passover. Passover or Pesach is a Jewish holiday, celebrating braking out of the prison of slavery. Being a slave how it has always been, how it is, the fixed mindset…
The process of reframing, and thus the Reframing Challenge is a PrisonBreak program. It is designed to take you from the misery of slavery to the joy of freedom. Please give it respect by treating it as that, not as MY good idea…
The work in the Reframing Challenge is to transform any troubling experience into joyful, or at least neutral with words. Not by calling something different, like in positive thinking, but by actually seeing a different reality by looking at facts differently, from a different place…
A troubling experience is where you get angry, or anxious, or resistant, or any of the unpleasant emotions.
Humans don’t react to what happened, they react to what they say about what happened. The words.
Transformation is a phenomenon when nothing else changes except the words, and yet everything changes. What you see changes, what you feel changes, what you’ll do changes.
There is nothing physical in transformation, even it a million stupid memes show before and after pictures of women…
There is another element of transformation… before the whole picture seemingly changes, you need to go through phases. So it is a process…
Life, reality is a process, to get from A to B you need to go through A1, A2, A3… phases.
And so it is with reframing. You start with the words you said that made you troubled… and start massaging what you say by looking at it differently, using your intellectual capabilities to move yourself further away, left or right, or above… so you CAN see different
Depending on your rigidity, depending on your emotional flexibility, through phases you can get to that joyful or neutral place.
Although she comes from an untrue, and maybe even unhealthy place, Esther Hicks Emotional Guidance Scale is really useful here… even if, my guess, most adherents to Esther Hicks’ stuff will think the method positive thinking.
But positive thinking, affirmations are lies… Reframing is telling the truth… as far as you can SEE it.
If you are astute enough to see that everything looks different from different vantage points, then telling the truth will be natural for you. If you aren’t… then that is the first thing you need to learn through experimenting… maybe even starting with physical things… Looking at them from different angles and see that what you see changes.
Things don’t actually change… while what you see changes.
I am going to re-teach Esther’s method… the gradual reframing, because it is useful.
But in addition to not being astute enough yet, there is another issue that unless it is solved, this whole method cannot work for you.
The sticking point… your racket and your life script
If you have an unresolved incident in your past, then you’ll repeat it with different actors, until you resolve it, or die…
Most people can’t see that they are repeating the same incident… a lack of astuteness… here again.
If you can go back to your first unpleasant memory, it’s great. If you can’t… just find an unpleasant memory.
Here comes the past that needs astuteness:
- Get the bare facts…
- And get the emotion you got left with.
Here are two of MY stories:
My mom and I are going really fast somewhere. She is too fast. She stops and says: You are heavy and leaves me in the street.
I feel worthless. I feel unloved. yeah, I feel less than dirt.
My nanny tells my mother that I was violated. My mother looks at me and makes a face of disgust and says a word I don’t understand.
I feel dirty. I feel unlovable. And I feel alone.
The art is to be exact. That is why you need astuteness.
Here are a few more stories:
He wanted to go to the McDonald’s. So he stopped. The parents continued walking, leaving him on the street corner.
He felt terrified.
She wanted to eat the Tootsie Rolls that were meant for Trick or treaters. Father said: the candy is not for you.
She felt excluded.
He wanted to go outside to play with the boys. The mother held him back.
He felt not included. Not equal. Not free.
She won a running race of toddlers. She was proud of herself. Later she bragged to her father. Her father didn’t share the joy.
She felt that she is not enough, that she is no good.
I have more if you want…
Now, until you actually manage to see the skeleton of your story, this script is running your life.
J, the last story’s she… She went and bought an artwork for her husband. Now look if you can see what will happen next, based on the script…
.
.
.
Yeah, if you guessed that the husband didn’t appreciate the gift, you are astute enough to work on another person’s story.
Working on your own story is harder… but it is a good start to see the script in someone else’s life.
So how do you TRANSFORM that original story. You know you tranformed it because it, mostly, disappears?
You start playing with the words…
Your original story had words… and the words created the emotions.
All emotions are created by words. Different words create different emotions. Because words create what you see… The same facts can be interpreted as sad, tragic, comic, lovely, joyful, happy, lucky. The exact same facts. Only the words change.
So reframing is working with the only thing that separates humans from animals: the words… And working with them in a way that you get the life you want, not the life your DEFAULT words give you.
So I promised to briefly teach you Esther Hick’s gradual method through my first story when my mother left me in the street.
Remember, I was devastated. That is the fixed attitude I have about everything that is not honky dory. Devastated…
So the words go from:
1. I am heavy
2. I am not worth keeping
3. baaah, I am less than dirt
4. She was in a hurry
5. So I can just wait here and see what happens
6. I didn’t really enjoy being dragged, so this is better
7. I was still close to home, so eventually I was valued enough to be taken home
8. yes, I eventually turned out… I enjoy my own company and life is better for me because this happened. I am a strong independent person not overly relying on being taken anywhere…
So what did I do? I came up with words that gradually took me from ‘there is much wrong with me!’ to joy where I am proud of myself.
I didn’t try to improve, sweet-talk, positive think what happened…
I took my attention away from the shock of having been left on the street, and climbed out of this bottomless pit.
So if life has been giving you experiences that make you feel the same, your original experience hasn’t been reframed and resolved.
And that is your work first. Without that I can’t promise you anything.
With regards to Esther… I could not find her actually doing the work publicly, like I have heard her, maybe read in her book? I can’t tell.
If you want to learn it… I need to warn you: Esther became very blunt in her later years… but there are a ton of videos on youtube about the emotional guidance scale and its use…
- So your first job is to tackle your ‘default’ life script… and then, once you are done with that, to
- learn the skill of crank up your emotional level, so you can get free of bad feelings fast…
You don’t know, but 90% of all bad feelings disappear once you effectively resolve your original incident.
Really. That is why I have very few bad emotions… not because I have some magical ability that you don’t.
Esther Hicks… I don’t hate her, in fact I have compassion for her. She is an unhappy angry resentful wretch… I’ve been there…
I bet she doesn’t have anyone who can work with her like a coach… and doing the work alone is not easy.
I am thinking of doing two workshops. One for tackling completing the original incident… and the second to demonstrate how the progressive reframing, the process, is done.
Resolve your original incidentClick here to register
