Have you ever felt really miserable, worried or anxious about something or someone?
That kind of feeling that stays with you, like a festering wound, whatever else you’re doing and stops you enjoying your present moment? What do you do when you’ve done all you can to help a situation but maybe a conversation or a memory of something is still looming there large as life?
I had one of those times recently myself here in Oxfordshire, with someone I was concerned about in my personal life, who I’d had a highly emotional telephone conversation with.
And it was really playing on my mind and dampening my spirits.
And it struck me that I could help myself get a handle on this, as if I was my own client, and do some hypnotherapy and NLP on me.
The advice I’m about to give you is exactly what I did for myself about that phone call in my garden near Witney and it changed my feelings instantly, making them less intense and far easier to deal with. I was able to put the things that had been worrying me to the back of my mind and get on and enjoy what I was doing.
Try these techniques for yourself and notice how you can run your own mind differently.
I did some NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) on myself, changing the way I was running my mind and thoughts.
I’ll use the example of my telephone conversation to explain what to do. You can use it to change feelings about anything that’s happened in your life.
When I thought about that ‘phone call it was like being in my own movie and I could see the garden I was in, pacing back and forth, as I talked on the phone. I could also ‘see’ the other person I was talking to, in my imagination, as if they were in the garden with me and not just on the phone. There was no border round my picture, it was large as life, with colour, movement and sound. And very intense.
So I took the colour out of my movie, made it black and white, put a red nose on the other person, froze it so it was no longer a moving picture, took the sound right down and then zoomed it further away so that I was looking at a small picture in the distance rather than a moving, up-close scene. If it helps, you can also add a funny sound track to your movie.
The idea is to change the way you’ve been seeing the memory. Is it in colour? Moving? Is there a border round it or does it just blend out? Is there sound? Are you actually in the movie or watching it?
However you’ve been seeing it, play around with it and change it and notice how differently you feel.
I also took notice of where physically my negative feelings of this remembered incident had been and what they had been doing. For me, it had been a hot, whooshing feeling going up from my heart and then spinning round and round.
The aim here is to physically change what you’re feeling. So I imagined that whooshing going calmly down the other way, in the opposite direction and cooling right down.
And then try some self-hypnosis, picturing exactly how you’d like to feel in the future around that situation or person.
Make this movie as big and bold and colourful as you like.
With both changing the way I saw that old movie and changing my physical feelings I was instantly calmer and the memory of the phone call was further away.
So much so that I was later able to call that person back up to try to help them sort themselves out further. And I would have been very reluctant to do that if the images of that first phone call had still been as strong.
I’ve used these techniques many times with clients at my Beautiful Spaces hypnotherapy clinics in Witney and Bampton and they’ve found themselves feeling very differently about previously troublesome memories.
Remember, it’s your own mind and your own wonderful life and you really, truly can begin to change how you’re running it.