Patterns of Physical Transformation

That may sound mystical until you relate it to real life. Stress creates tight muscles and tight muscles are stressful. Chronically tight muscles create stiffness and difficulty in moving. Those things are stressful. Poor movement, besides being a hassle, stifles brain activity and makes it more difficult for the blood to circulate. These processes are familiar mechanisms for pathologies like arthritis, high blood pressure, dementia and many more. The essential insight here is that none of these things are even as good as normal should be. What do you suppose the progression is like when your physical processes begin to function in the range of better than normal? Most people need to spend considerable time thinking about what this feels like. Run your patterns of stress backwards. Feel the muscles softening. Notice your mood improving. Find out how life is getting easier. Feel what more energy, vitality, alertness and peacefulness does to your body. Check out how the improving efficiency gracefulness, power, and intense comfort throughout your entire body transform your mental and emotional functioning. Does this seem like something worth going for? Or are you content to have only all the normal pains, dysfunctions, and bad attitudes that people tell you are all that you should expect?

Our techniques of communicating with the unconscious are usually quite gentle. The level of appropriate stimulation is the level that the unconscious mind responds to at that time. If you are standing on a railroad track, and the train is roaring towards you from behind, if I insist on whispering softly to you the information that you need to know," get off the track", no good will come of it. In those kinds of situations it is appropriate to shout loudly. If, however, you decide that because shouting may be essential, sometimes then you will shout to everyone at all times, you will discover that your only friends are nearly deaf. The same is true with hands-on work. Hard techniques are appropriate, even wonderfully necessary, only in those circumstances where you need to get the attention of an unconscious mind that is overwhelmed, distracted, or has become desensitized, for whatever reason. Similarly extremely gentle techniques may be exquisitely effective except when they are not blatant enough to be noticed clearly and responded to. We've made an extensive study of various hands-on techniques. Most of them, of course, are taught as things to do to the person. Frequently they are taught as the only thing to do to everyone. When you start noticing how differently people respond from each other and from one part to another within the same person, it becomes obviously ludicrous to just inflict the same procedure over and over regardless. Everything we do is customized to how this person is responding at this moment. Therefore, it's really useful that we have a huge assortment of tools and techniques and the ability to make things up if what we're doing isn't working yet.

The key to working in this way is the ability to go first. In order to really be effective, the secret is, change yourself in just the way that you want your client to change. What is involved is learning how to regulate your own neurology. Humans are naturally affected by each other. Emotional states are obviously contagious. Someone who is depressed tends to be depressing. Someone who is delighted tends to make you feel delight. If someone is actively depressing in the presence of someone who is delighted, typically, the one who has the stronger emotional state, and who is more persistent at generating that state, will begin to change the other persons state. Usually, of course, these kinds of things occur unconsciously. But, when you begin to consciously choose what states you want to be in, with someone else, then you can choose to be relentless. You also have the opportunity to practice, and develop how powerfully you exude the state.

In general, most people are too tense. So, exuding a state which is intensely relaxed and comfortable is frequently useful. You get to find out how well you exude a state, by noticing how much the other person responds. In order to do this, you have to develop the skills of noticing how specifically someone configures their body differently with different states. It also helps to notice differences between more, and less, intense experiences of the same state. What changes can you observe, from the outside, when someone goes from feeling good, to absolutely euphoric? Then the question is," what do you have to do to make that shift happen?"