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Can you create your experience of life?

Morty Lefkoe — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 23:36:05 +0000

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I’m beginning to think that the ability to dissolve our “occurrings” is almost as important to living a happy and successful life as the ability to eliminate beliefs.

Late last year I wrote several posts about the important distinction between reality and how reality occurs for us. Few people are aware of this distinction and even fewer are able to continually make this distinction throughout the day and then dissolve all their “occurrings.”

Let me briefly explain what I mean by the distinction between reality and how it “occurs” for us for those of you who haven’t read my earlier posts (see December 15, 22, 29, 2009) or seen my video explanation (http://occurringcourse.com/how-occurring-works/). An example of “reality” is losing your job. One possible “occurring” for that reality is a sense of victimization, a sense of disaster. This occurring would result in feelings of despair and helplessness. A different occurring might be: Being fired is an opportunity to discover what I really want to do with my life and then do it. This occurring would result in feeling challenged and excited. Neither occurring is the same as the literal event.

Earlier this year I offered a tele-seminar during which I taught 20 participants how to easily and continuously make the distinction between reality and how it occurs for us. They also learned how to quickly dissolve how reality was occurring for them, so that they were left with nothing but reality.

How we experience our lives moment-to-moment is largely the result of how events and people occur for us. So the ability to dissolve that occurring gives us the power to create our experience of life. To make this clear, let me quote some of the participants in my current course who are mastering the art of dissolving their occurrings. Here’s one:

I’ve also noticed that I no longer feel the need to defend my position when criticized or when faced with someone whose point of view is different from my own. I can listen to what is being said, without feeling as if one person is wrong and the other is right. The dissolving [of my occurrings] is instantaneous in most of these situations. I feel as if this makes it possible for me to genuinely learn from the other person’s perspective, where in the past, I’d have shut out what he or she had to say, focusing only on defending my point of view.

Here’s another:

One very positive thing to report: When I [dissolve my occurring] … the effect is very profound. I feel very relaxed. My thinking is clearer. … Using the occurring process to identify what’s going on helps a great deal. I feel more energetic and clear-headed. I feel more present and “in the moment.”

And finally:

Petty arguments are decreasing because I am dissolving the occurring before it gets blown out of proportion. As a result I am feeling more confident and calmer throughout the day. I am also pointing out the reality in situations my oldest son is going through and he is beginning to grasp what I’m saying.

How you benefit from dissolving your occurring

There are several important advantages to being able to realize that how an event is occurring for you is the result of the meaning you are giving reality and is not reality itself, and then being able to dissolve the occurring.

First, because all negative feelings come from the meaning we have assigned meaningless events, by dissolving our occurring (meaning) we can totally eliminate negative feelings quickly on the spot.

As someone shared in my course:

Some things are dissolving either instantly or very quickly; I’ve noticed that more and more, that pleasantly calm, neutral feeling is becoming my default setting.

Second, because how reality occurs for us is how we think reality really is, it determines our behavior. If we think someone is being nasty to us, uncaring, out to hurt us, etc., that occurring will lead us to be defensive and angry with that person. And that will usually result in arguments and other types of unpleasantness. Dissolving the occurring will dissolve the ground from which arguments grow. Distinguishing between the meaning you are giving someone’s behavior and the behavior itself will enhance your relationships with people

As someone else shared in my course:

I am noticing that I am able to look at reality without any filter, which has enhanced my relationships with my husband and sons.

Another bonus is that when my husband says something that “hurt” in the past it is no longer “hurtful” because I do the distinguishing before I respond. This practice has nipped several potentially volatile situations in the bud.

Third, because it is easy to create positive meanings for events after you have dissolved the initial negative meaning (occurring), you are able to create positive emotions in your life almost at will.

We had to move recently and the event initially occurred to me as a problem: It would take us about a month to pack and another few weeks to unpack. I immediately realized that I could hold the move as a problem or a great opportunity. I choose the latter and, as a result, the event occurred to me as something very exciting and filled with opportunities.

As a result I did not resent the packing and unpacking. And after being in our new house for less than a week I realized that having to move was the best thing that could have happened to us because our new home is so much nicer than our old home.

Fourth, more often than not with a little practice, clearly distinguishing between reality and how it is occurring for you will put you into a state where you have the profound experience that anything is possible and that nothing is missing. This is the experience that results when you use my Who Am I Really? Process.

Fifth, because how reality occurs for us is how we think reality really is, our occurrings limit the possibilities that we are able to see. If you lose your job and that occurs for you as a disaster, as a serious problem, as unfair, etc., your feelings and the way you view “your” reality will make it difficult to find a solution. Looking only at the bare facts, namely you lost your job and now you need to find a way to make a living, you are more likely to be able to think clearly and discover possibilities you hadn’t seen before.

Sixth, and perhaps most importantly, you can easily dissolve the occurring of victimization, which is the biggest barrier we have to having our life be all that we want it to be. If I’m a victim of someone or something, then I can’t be responsible for my life. And if that’s the case, why even try?

At present I am only able to teach about occurring in a tele-seminar. My goal is to figure out how to turn it into a CD course someday, but at present I don’t know how to do that. But five years ago I had no idea how to help people eliminate beliefs on-line and on DVDs. And now over 60,000 have.

Please share below any comments you have on my thoughts on the value of distinguishing reality from how reality occurs for us and how to dissolve those occurrings.

These weekly blog posts also exist as podcasts. Sign up for the RSS feed or at iTunes to get the podcasts sent to you weekly.

If you haven’t yet eliminated at least one of your limiting self-esteem beliefs using the Lefkoe Belief Process, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/free where you can eliminate one limiting belief free.

To purchase a DVD program that I guarantee to help you significantly improve your confidence and also eliminate the major day-to-day problems that most people face, check out http://recreateyourlife.com/store/natural-confidence.php.

What should I do to get what I want?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 21:09:03 +0000

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Thank you very much for the overwhelming response to my request last week for blog topics. The questions that seem to have universal appeal I will answer in my weekly blog. Comments and questions that deal with specific personal issues I will respond to directly as soon as possible.

This week I will answer a question I hear frequently in various forms: What should I do to get what I want?

To begin with, there is no single “right” way to accomplish anything. What works for some people, won’t necessarily work for others. And what is effective today, won’t necessarily be effective tomorrow.

Personal qualities determine success

One common technique people use to figure out how to achieve their goals is to copy the behavior of successful people. Unfortunately, more often than not that technique doesn’t work. Why?

Because successful people are successful because of who they are, not merely what they do. Obviously they do things, but their doing is a function of their being, not a function of “rules for success.”

So what “are” successful people? In Success Built to Last, by Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery, and Mark Thompson, a must-read book about what is in common among over 200 “enduringly successful people,” the authors offer a definition of success based on what these people told them: “ … a life and work that brings personal fulfillment and lasting relationships and makes a difference in the world in which they live.”

I like what the book’s authors say about the conventional definition of success: “Folks who chase a fantastic but vain hope for fame, wealth, and power—for its own sake—may even achieve it, only to become miserable and pathetic people. … we think that the current definition of success is a potentially toxic prescription for your life and work. It is a description that makes you feel more like a failure than a success if it’s the standard against which all meaning in your life is measured.”

Let me quote a few more passages from this book that describe these enduringly successful people so you can discover who these people are, rather than what they do.

These people “insist that success may never come without a compelling personal commitment to something you care about and would be willing to do, with or without counting on wealth, fame, power, or public acceptance as an outcome.”

“What you do must matter deeply to you …. It’s something that you’re so passionate about that you lose all track of time when you do it. … In fact, you could not be paid to not do it.”

Another essential element is “a highly developed sense of accountability, audacity, passion, and responsible optimism. … Steve Jobs told us in an interview back before his famous ad campaign: Enduringly successful people ‘think different.’” (Emphasis added.)

They welcome failure

One of the most important qualities of these enduringly successful people is that they “drone on endlessly about learning from their mistakes. … Every experience teaches something. They don’t use a weakness or a setback to distrust themselves. … The question is not whether or not they won this round, but what do they do with the feedback. … [They] find it irresistible to try, fail, improve; they try again, fail again, and get even better.” (Emphasis added.)

Although these people probably worked more hours a day than most people are willing to, they were not successful because they worked harder than others or even because they knew better than others what to do. They operated out of their passion and commitment to make a difference. They didn’t care what others thought. They courted failure as a way to learn what to do better the next time.

What these people have in common is an absence of the negative beliefs that would cause them to fear failure and need acceptance, personal qualities that stop most people. “They just tolerate the risks, feel the fear, take the brick-bats, learn from failure, and do what matters to them anyway.”

Implement what emerges

But, you might still be asking: What is their standard for deciding what to do? With their vision and commitment as a context, their actions are driven by their answer to the question: What behavior is appropriate to further my passion? They do whatever is appropriate at the moment, i.e., their behavior is a function of their vision and commitment, not something copied from others or from a list of “best practices.”

They take advantage of what emerges, moment by moment. You see, when you live your passion, you are always looking for how to manifest it in the world. As opportunities emerge, act on them. Some opportunities will prove fruitful. Build on them. Some won’t. Learn from them.

Are you willing to do what’s necessary?

Are you starting to get a sense that people who are successful over a long period of time are not like most people? If you really want to be like these people, here are a few tips. Are you committed enough to use them?

1. Get rid of any negative beliefs and conditionings that impair your confidence, that have you worry about what others think, that have you act to gain “their” approval, and that have you fear failure and rejection.

2. Get in touch with who you really are, namely, the consciousness that always was and always will be. In my terms, the creator of your creation. You can use my “Who Am I Really?” Process to help you experience this state, where you also will experience on a very deep level that life has “already turned out” and that material success is not required for true success.

3. Discover what you are passionate about. A book written by two friends of mine that should be helpful is The Passion Test, by Janet and Chris Attwood.

4. Have your life be about living your passion and making a contribution to others. Put more of your focus on the journey than on the destination.

5. Learn how to distinguish between reality and how reality “occurs” to you, and then dissolve your occurring. Because events as such have no meaning, they can never cause any feelings, including fear, the biggest roadblock to taking action. So learning how to dissolve your occurring and deal only with unvarnished reality will enable you to banish fear from your life. (See http://occurringcourse.com/how-occurring-works/ for more details on “occurring.”)

If you do all of this, who knows, you might be featured in the next edition of Success Built to Last.

Please share below any comments you have on my thoughts on what you should do to get what you want.

These weekly blog posts also exist as podcasts. Sign up for the RSS feed or at iTunes to get the podcasts sent to you weekly.

What topic do you want me to write on?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:20:17 +0000

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Every week I sit down at my computer and ask myself: What should I write about that would be useful for you, my readers?

I usually choose a topic based on

what I think you would like to learn,
what I think would be useful for you to learn,
my own experiences that I think you will find useful,
general things about TLM that I think will be useful, etc.

I also want my posts to be consistent with our mission: To significantly improve the quality of life on the planet by having people recreate their lives and live as the unlimited possibilities they are.

My posts average about 1200 words and are written over the course of 3-4 days. I usually write a draft on Thursday or Friday and then make at least 5-10 complete edits over the next few days, posting on Tuesday. I spend about two to three hours total each week writing my blog post, except on complicated subjects like last’s week post on emotional eating, when I spent about five hours.

This week I want to devote this space to asking you if there is any specific topic that you would like me to write about. What would you like to know that would make a real difference in your life? Obviously anything I write about will be in the framework of The Lefkoe Method.

To see what topics I’ve covered already, here is a link to a table of contents for all of my posts thus far. If you’ve just started visiting my blog, there are a lot of really interesting posts from the past couple of years that are worth reading. I’ve included links in case you missed any of them or would like to revisit any that look interesting to you. http://www.mortylefkoe.com/table-of-contents/

Please tell me in the comments section below what you would like me to write about in the future.

These weekly blog posts also exist as podcasts. Sign up for the RSS feed or at iTunes to get the podcasts sent to you weekly.

Would you like to eliminate the core beliefs that keep you from having all the success you desire? Click here. http://recreateyourlife.com/store/natural-confidence.php

How to stop emotional eating (and other compulsive behavior problems) for good

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 23:32:59 +0000

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When I first started helping clients whose major complaint was emotional eating—eating for emotional reasons when they really weren’t hungry—I assumed that the problem was caused by beliefs and conditioning, like most other behavioral or emotional problems.

But when all the beliefs and conditionings that appeared to be relevant had been eliminated, the problem usually was as bad as ever. At which point I went back to the drawing board.

I knew all about “classical” conditioning, in which a stimulus is conditioned to produce a behavioral or emotional response. So rejection or making a mistake can be conditioned to produce anxiety. Or being told what to do can be conditioned to produce anger. This type of conditioning was demonstrated by Pavlov’s dogs who were conditioned to salivate by the ringing of a bell. The Lefkoe Stimulus Process can easily de-condition this type of conditioning. But that type of conditioning didn’t seem relevant for emotional eating, which involves a behavior that seems compulsive.

There is another type of conditioning called “operant” conditioning. This type of conditioning is the result of rewarding or punishing a behavior. As a result you become conditioned to act in a certain way in order to achieve the “reward” or avoid the punishment. Merely desiring the reward results in the behavior.

In an earlier blog post about eating (October 13, 2009) I pointed out:

“… if every time you got upset as a child your mom gave you food to make you feel better, you could get conditioned to eat whenever you got upset in order to feel better.

“Or, if your parents continually rewarded you for special things you did as a child by giving you a special meal with the food you really liked, you could get conditioned to eat whenever you wanted to feel acknowledged for something you did.”

I finally realized that almost all emotional eating involves both types of conditioning.

So in order to help people with an emotional eating problem, I had to create a process that would easily, quickly, and permanently de-condition both “classical” and “operant” conditioning.

I started working on a process in 1997 and it took six revisions over the next 11 years before I finally had something that worked in most situations. I call it the Lefkoe De-conditioning Process (LDP) and I’ll describe how it works in a minute. The reason it took so long is that I wasn’t working with many individual clients and, even more importantly, the problems presented by the clients I did have didn’t need operant de-conditioning.

Then toward the end of last year a friend asked me to help him with his eating problem. I decided then to figure out how to permanently eliminate emotional eating, not just for him, but for others as well. So I worked with him and a few additional clients. Much to my surprise, in most cases there were very few beliefs involved. Their emotional eating was caused primarily by a combination of classical and operant conditioning. No wonder emotional eating has been so hard to stop and will power is so useless in the long run!

Consider this: first someone with an emotional eating problem conditions eating to produce emotional “rewards” (relieving anxiety or any other negative feeling, feeling loved, a sense of celebration, feeling calm, etc). In other words, the mere act of eating automatically results in emotional rewards. This classical conditioning would make it difficult enough to stop over-eating.

Then the problem is intensified by operant conditioning, where the behavior is conditioned to occur whenever there is a desire for the “reward.” In other words, merely desiring one of the emotional rewards (such as feeling loved, a sense of celebration, or feeling calm) will result in emotional eating, because you’ve learned that you’ll get this feeling each time you eat.

Behavior is conditioned by attributing need to a behavior that is not really needed. There is a shift from a behavior that occurred and then was arbitrarily rewarded, to a behavior that now occurs automatically and compulsively whenever you desire the reward (even if there is punishment following the behavior, such as gaining undesirable weight).

Operant conditioning is the emotional equivalent of a belief: You have the emotional sense that the behavior in question is the only way to get what you want. It’s like an emotional, rather than a cognitive, conclusion.

I now have four clients who say that their emotional eating has stopped completely as a result of all the de-conditioning they have done using the LDP.

One client reports that he hasn’t eaten except when he was actually hungry for over five months. And he doesn’t need to use will power; he just doesn’t feel like eating most of the time.

Another client wrote me:

“This is a terrific victory to not feeling compelled to eat all of the time. I actually have half bags of chips and cookies that I have had opened for several weeks—I have no desire for them now. It is wonderful.”

And another:

“I think about some really good homemade food in the fridge that I would normally pig out on and I just blow it off and think ‘Great. I’ll have that WHEN I AM HUNGRY.’ It is awesome to not be controlled by food.”

Here is a specific example from a client’s files that makes clear how this type of conditioning is created. One of the common emotional eating “sub-patterns” is “eating in order to experience love.” (Emotional eating is not a single problem, but the desire for 8-12 different emotional rewards, each of which lead to emotional eating.) This woman fed herself when she wasn’t feeling loved and wanted to feel loved.

As a child she frequently visited her grandmother, who always cooked a big meal for her and her family. As a little girl she experienced being loved by her grandmother when she ate everything on her plate.

So she got rewarded (she felt loved) when she ate. As a result she would feel loved whenever she ate. This is classical conditioning. And eating became conditioned so that she then compulsively ate whether she was hungry or not whenever she wanted to experience being loved. This is operant conditioning.

The Lefkoe De-conditioning Process includes what the Lefkoe Stimulus process does, namely it de-conditions stimuli so they no longer result in emotional responses. For example, eating will no longer produce positive emotional responses (other than satisfying hunger or enjoying the taste of food). In other words, eating will no longer produce the “rewards” it had produced in the past. In addition the LDP de-conditions the behavior so that merely desiring the emotional reward no longer automatically and compulsively leads to eating.

The essence of what makes the LDP so effective is having the client experience that she wanted the “reward” (e.g., feeling loved), not what got rewarded (e.g., eating). In other words, you want to get rid of loneliness or boredom, you don’t want to eat. It’s just that the eating produced that reward earlier in life. You want to numb your pain, you don’t want alcohol or drugs. It’s just that alcohol or drugs numbed you out earlier in life. You want attention, you don’t want to be sick. It’s just that being ill earlier in life got you attention. The client realizes that the reward is not contingent only on that particular behavior, but can be found in other ways.

When people use the Lefkoe De-conditioning Process to make these and other distinctions, both types of conditioning are de-conditioned. And the unwanted behavior stops. Permanently.

I’m really excited about these two breakthroughs. First, I developed a new theory that totally explains emotional eating: It is not a single problem but 8-12 different “rewards” that you eat to gain, and the emotional eating itself is caused both by classical and operant conditioning.

The second breakthrough is a single process that quickly, easily, and permanently de-conditions both conditionings.

If you’d like more information about how you can stop emotional eating or how the Lefkoe De-conditioning Process works, please contact me either at 415-884-0552 or morty (at) lefkoeinstitute.com.

Please share any comments you have on the Lefkoe De-conditioning Process and how it can help people with eating issues and other conditioning problems.

These weekly blog posts also exist as podcasts. Sign up for the RSS feed or at iTunes to get the podcasts sent to you weekly.

To purchase DVD programs that we guarantee to eliminate eight of the most common daily problems people face, go to http://recreateyourlife.com/store/.

Why am I afraid to express love?

Morty Lefkoe — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 00:51:22 +0000

Note: There is an email link embedded within this post, please visit this post to email it.

After posting on my blog a couple of weeks ago about how I felt totally safe to experience and express the love I felt for people at the Transformational Leadership Council meeting, but not most of the time away from TLC, I received the following comment:

If you are the creator of the Natural Confidence program and I’m assuming you removed all the beliefs and conditionings on that program, then how could you not feel as safe expressing your love with anyone you run into? Please explain. Thank you.

Here was my reply.

I’ve not only eliminated all the beliefs on that program, I’ve eliminated a couple of hundred more. But each issue or problem in our lives is caused by a different set of beliefs and conditionings.

And so while I’ve gotten rid of my depression and my neediness and my concern with the opinion of others, etc., I have still not handled every issue in my life. And not feeling safe to express love all the time is one of the issues I still have to work on.

And I plan to see what beliefs are causing that in the next week or so and getting this issue handled.

Thanks for asking.

Regards, Morty

I did work on this issue as I said I would and here is what I discovered.

I couldn’t find any relevant beliefs, but I did find two different types of conditioning.

Here’s how I identified the first one. There is some low level of anxiety when I feel people are “not there” when I talk to them, when I feel they are not “fully present,” or when I don’t feel fully accepted.

The source of this conditioning was how my mom frequently acted when I was a kid. She divorced when I was only three and struggled being a single mom with no money. As a result of her constant stress and anxiety, and her frequent hysterical outbursts, I had a sense that she wasn’t really “with me” much of the time we were together and frequently felt rejected.

Feeling that my mom was not fully present or was rejecting me when I was very young meant to me that she didn’t love me, which meant I could be abandoned, which meant I would die, which caused my the anxiety. So people not being fully present with me or withdrawn from me got conditioned to cause anxiety. I eliminated this conditioning with the Lefkoe Stimulus Process.

The second conditioning required me to use a different process, the Lefkoe De-conditioning Process. This conditioning arose as follows: Because I felt fear when it seemed my mother seemed to be withdrawn from me, I shut down my body and my feelings to keep from feeling anxiety in that situation. Because the anxiety diminished when I shut down, shutting down became a conditioned response.

In other words, when a behavior is rewarded (in this case, the anxiety stopped), the behavior gets conditioned. In order to not feel fear when I feel people are not fully present around me, or when I don’t feel safe around them for any reason, my body and emotions shut down. I eliminated this conditioning with the Lefkoe De-conditioning Process.

I think the issue is handled, but I’ll watch carefully over the next few weeks. If there are any traces of the old behavior pattern, I’ll look to see what beliefs or other conditioning might still exist. I am really looking forward to being able to “be myself” and experience and express my love for people without regard to how other people are acting.

For more details on the first type of conditioning please see two earlier blog posts, on 050509 and 032310.

Please share any comments you have on these thoughts on my difficulties experiencing and expressing love in certain types of situations and how I dealt with that problem.

These weekly blog posts also exist as podcasts. Sign up for the RSS feed or at iTunes to get the podcasts sent to you weekly.

To purchase DVD programs that we guarantee to eliminate eight of the most common daily problems people face, go to http://www.recreateyourlife.com/store.

Why we have negative emotions … and what to do about them

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 21:19:27 +0000

Note: There is an email link embedded within this post, please visit this post to email it.

For many years I had asked myself the questions: What is the real source of our negative emotions? Why do so many things cause fear in our lives that aren’t inherently scary? And why do some people experience negative emotions while other people don’t in similar situations?

About eight years ago I wrote a paper for myself on the source of negative emotions. Today’s post is a summary of that paper. I think you’ll find some fascinating material here and I’m excited to get your responses and start a conversation.

* * *

What is an emotion?

An emotion is the experiential, chemical, and neuro‑physiological response a conscious being has to a stimulus. (I am concerned here only with negative emotions in human beings.)

If specific emotions were created by specific stimuli, then a particular stimulus would produce the same emotion in every person. In fact, different people have varied emotional responses to the same stimulus.

Then what does cause emotions? Except for stimuli that are explicit threats to our physical survival, stimuli themselves do not have inherent meaning for adults. The meaning adults give to events is what triggers emotions. On the other hand, certain events can have inherent meaning for children.

A specific stimulus is a necessary condition for an emotion, but not a sufficient condition. An additional condition that has to be present is a meaning given to the meaningless stimulus—that entails either a threat to survival, or a sense of powerlessness or helplessness that is indirectly, but ultimately related to a threat to survival.

Thus for adults to experience a negative emotion, they require either (1) beliefs that cause a stimulus to be experienced as a threat to their survival or beliefs that produce a sense of powerlessness or helplessness; and/or, (2) conditioning, that occurred in childhood, that links a stimulus and an emotion together. (Phobias also are the result of conditioning, but that conditioning can occur later in life when there is a perceived threat to one’s survival.)

(If all negative emotions ultimately can be traced to a threat to one’s survival, then the ultimate source of negative emotions is the belief/perception that we are a separate creation, a thing, whose survival really is at stake. If that is the case, perhaps all positive emotions can be traced to a feeling of inclusiveness, wholeness, a lack of separation—to the recognition that who we really are is a non-dual consciousness whose survival can never be at stake.)

It is a child’s inherent dependency on others that makes it possible for him to directly experience a threat to his survival in the face of certain stimuli. Children also experience powerlessness and helplessness and these experiences are directly related to a sense that their survival is at stake.

The Cause of Specific Negative Emotions

Fear is our emotional response to something that we interpret to be a direct threat to our physical well‑being. All other negative emotions are the result of interpreting events as a threat to our mental/emotional well‑being. They are our response to something that is an indirect threat to our physical well‑being, namely, something that makes us feel powerless. Specifically, negative emotions other than fear are our response to something that is a threat to our efficacy, our “okayness,” our ability to act on our own behalf to do what is necessary to survive.

To summarize what we’ve seen thus far: the perception that something is a threat to our survival causes fear. The experience of powerlessness, the inability to take the actions necessary to survive, is the source of all the other “negative” emotions. (Guilt is the only exception, which is more directly related to fear, as explained below.)

Physical pain is a symptom of an underlying malfunction of the body. It is a sign of a dysfunctional physical/body state. It is a signal that there’s something wrong with the body, a potential threat to the survival of the body. Mental pain, which is experienced as negative emotion, is a signal there’s something wrong psychologically. It is a signal that we either are being threatened directly or that our efficacy (our ability to deal with threats) is being impaired, which results in a feeling of powerlessness.

Anger is the emotion we feel toward that which does something (or refrains from doing something) that results in our feeling powerless, helpless, and inefficacious.

Sadness, unhappiness, grief, and sorrow are emotions that result from feeling powerless in the face of not having (or not being able to have) what we want, or losing something we had.

Jealousy is the emotion we feel toward someone whom we experience as taking away from us something we want and we feel powerless to do anything about it.

Envy is the emotion we feel toward someone who has something we want—when we see ourselves as powerless to do anything to get it.

Shame is the emotion caused by a strong sense of embarrassment, unworthiness, or disgrace, which makes us feel we aren’t okay. If we aren’t okay, there is an implied impairment of our power to deal with possible threats to our survival.

Guilt is the emotion we feel as a result of a judgment we place on ourselves. When we feel guilty, we experience ourselves as “bad” because we don’t think, feel or do what we should have or could have thought, felt or done. This judgment makes us feel we aren’t okay. Guilt is a function of thinking we have done something bad.

If guilt requires the concept of bad, what is bad? For adults, beliefs determine which behaviors are good or bad. For a child, good consists of doing what parents want and approve of. Bad consists of not doing what parents want and approve of. Therefore, for a child, bad is usually associated with withdrawal of love, which, for a child, necessarily produces fear. Thus fear always underlies and is the foundation for guilt.

There is a difference between shame and guilt. Shame results from concluding: I am inherently flawed. Guilt results from concluding: I did something bad.

How fear occurs as a result of conditioned stimuli

The real cause of fear is always the perception that our physical survival is being threatened. The real cause of all other negative emotions, except guilt, is always the experience of powerlessness or inefficacy that is inherent in being a child. The real cause of guilt is the perception that our physical survival will be threatened because we are bad.

Let’s use this understanding of how emotions are caused to explain how certain stimuli directly cause emotions in children and how other, neutral stimuli become conditioned to cause emotions in adults.

When emotions are caused by conditioning, we have an emotion today whenever we are confronted with any stimuli that in the past we associated with the realcause of the emotion. Let me explain.

Pavlov’s experiments with dogs are the classic example of this conditioning process. When presented with food, the dogs salivated. Then a bell was rung just prior to presenting the dogs with food. After numerous presentations of the food with the bell, the bell was rung and no food was delivered. The dogs salivated anyway, because they had associated the bell with the food. In other words, a stimulus that normally would not produce a response does so because it becomes associated with a stimulus that inherently produces such a response.

In almost every instance of a stimulus that has been conditioned to produce fear, the stimulus itself did not cause fear in a child. The fear almost always was caused by the meaning the child gave to her parents’ behavior at the time the stimulus was present, namely, the parent’s behavior means the child will be rejected, which means it will be abandoned, which means it will die. Because children experience themselves as dependent on their parents for their literal survival, children inherently feel fear whenever their parents do anything that a child experiences as rejection or potential abandonment.

To show how childhood conditioning results in adult fear, let’s use as an example an adult who feels fear whenever he makes a mistake or even thinks about making a mistake. When did he first experience fear associated with making a mistake? Assume that as a child his parents usually got angry when he made a mistake (in other words, when he didn’t do what his parents wanted him to do). The anger (the parents’ response to his mistake) made him feel rejected, which to him meant he’d be abandoned, which to him meant he’d die. That perceived threat to his survival is the real source of the fear, not making a mistake. But because he almost always experienced fear whenever he made a mistake, making a mistake (a neutral stimulus) became conditioned to cause the fear.

Making a mistake didn’t initially cause the fear. The meaning the child read into the parents’ response is what really caused the fear. The child didn’t distinguish between what really caused the fear and an event that just happened to accompany what really caused the fear. Therefore the latter event became conditioned to cause the fear. Later in life, the conditioned event continues to cause fear even when the true cause of the fear is absent.

Phobias are the result of conditioning that can occur at any age. You can be conditioned to fear dogs, or heights, or even specific people. You had an experience (or observed someone having an experience with which you identified) with the stimulus that you interpreted to mean a physical threat to you. Now, even if the physical threat is absent, the stimulus produces the fear. Again, the neutral stimulus has been conditioned to produce the fear. It merely accompanied the fear earlier, just as Pavlov’s bell merely accompanied the food.

How the Stimuli for Anger Get Conditioned

Now let’s look at how childhood conditioning produces other emotions, where there is not a perceived threat to survival.

Let’s assume you experience anger whenever you are told what to do. Merely being told to do something does not inherently cause anger. Being told what to do has become conditioned to produce anger.

Imagine that as a child you experienced anger when you were told what to do. The real cause of the anger was not merely being told what to do. It was the powerlessness you felt because you had no ability to refuse. If you had been told what to do, but always had the option to negotiate and frequently ended up not having to do what you had been told to do, you would not have experienced anger when you were told what to do.

Being told what to do became conditioned to cause anger because you never distinguished between the real source of the anger—the powerlessness you felt when you couldn’t refuse your parent’s demands—and the demands themselves.

The same conditioning process occurs with all the other emotions, except guilt, which is more directly tied to a threat to one’s survival than to powerlessness.

Although this is far from the last word on a complicated issue, this theory does explain why fear and guilt are ultimately a function of a perceived threat to one’s survival, and why all other negative emotions are a function of powerlessness. Maybe our negative feelings won’t be quite as mysterious to us as they are now.

Please share any comments you have on these thoughts about our negative emotions.

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What I just learned will transform my life … and yours

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:21:12 +0000

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I’m writing this from New Mexico just before I leave my bi-annual meeting of the Transformational Leadership Council (TLC).

Jack Canfield, the co-author of the Chicken Soup books, created this organization for transformational leaders (workshop leaders, authors, owners of organizations dedicated to transformation, etc.) such as John Gray, New York Times best-selling authors Marci Shimoff and Lisa Nichols, Rev. Michael Beckwith, and about 100 more. It is a place where people who have committed their lives to empowering others get supported and nourished. I am honored to have been a founding member about five years ago.

The two five-day meetings each year are my most eagerly-awaited times of the year. I always leave nourished and filled with new ideas. I am devoting my post today to some of the more-important ideas I am taking away from this meeting.

Is it really important to have goals?

I have always had a problem with goals despite the fact that for years everyone has talked about why they were important (“How can you possibly get what you want if you don’t know what you want?”). I always thought it was more important to live out of my vision, what I am here on earth to do—than out of goals.

Here’s a metaphor that I’ve used to explain my problem with goals. Imagine that my vision was to go east. Then I decided that my first goal was to go from my home in San Francisco to New York. So I go to the airport to get my ticket to New York and I am so focused on getting that ticket that I never notice a non-stop flight directly to Europe.

In other words, there are so many ways to manifest one’s vision. Goals can limit your possibilities and keep you from seeing ones you never would have dreamed of. Remember my post last week about living out of questions instead of answers. Both answers and goals limit possibilities.

Paul Scheele, creator of the Paraliminal courses and co-founder of Learning Strategies, said something that validated my position about goals. He made the point that organizations (and individuals) need to stop living in the past and in the future, and start living in the present.

Your goals are a function of your already-existing beliefs that were formed in the past. Your strategies ultimately are a function of the meaning you’ve given your past experiences and the meaning you are giving your appraisal of the future. So both our goals and our strategies force us into living in the past and the future, and inhibit us from living in the present.

Living in the present enables you to focus on what is emerging. I liked Paul’s use of that word: emerging. It is what arises moment by moment when you are living in the present.

Have your actions directed by “divinity”

Joe Vitale made one the meeting’s best presentations about living from divinity, from source, from inspiration. He made the point that every thought you have is the result either of inspiration (a message from your “higher Self”) or from your programming (your beliefs and conditioning).

It can be difficult to tell the difference between thoughts that arise from inspiration and thoughts that are the result of programming. Yet the more you are able to erase the beliefs and conditionings, the more your inspirations will reach consciousness without being distorted by your beliefs and the more you will be able to recognize the difference between the two types of thoughts.

Joe said that he generally knows the difference by the passion and excitement that accompanies his inspiration.

Joe said one other thing that I really liked: What is especially important is to act immediately on those inspirations. If you get a message from the divine and ignore it, it is worthless. Listen for those messages and allow them to move you to action … without delay. Stopping too long to judge your inspirations will kill them.

During a discussion of Joe’s presentation at breakfast one morning Paul pointed out that all judgment is the result of prior programming. To translate that observation into terms I’ve been using: Our judgments show up as the meaning we give to aspects of our lives, which in turn determines how events occur for us. And the major determinant for the judgments and meanings we give events are the beliefs and conditionings we have at the time. This explains how two people can have such different judgments of the same events.

During this conversation, I realized that the Lefkoe Occurring Process enables us to dissolve the meaning and the judgments and be left in the present, where we can more easily observe our inspirations and notice what is emerging.

Carry your safety with you

I saw Jack at breakfast the final day and told him that one of the things I love most about TLC meetings is that I am able to fully experience and express the profound love I have for people. I can hug, kiss, and verbally tell people how much I love them. I don’t feel nearly as safe elsewhere, except with a few very close friends.

Jack asked me why I could experience and express that love at TLC but not elsewhere. I said that I don’t feel as safe most of the time. Then Jack shared something about himself that was my most valuable piece of information of the meeting: As much as he also loves being at TLC, he feels safe to experience and express his love wherever he is because he carries his safety inside of him; he doesn’t wait for the circumstances to create safety for him.

I knew immediately that that was true and from now on it is incumbent on me to create my experience of safety and not wait for something or somebody outside of me to create it. I made a commitment to him and myself to fully express my love whenever I feel it. And to create the experience of safety so that I am able to feel it.

Please share any comments you have on these thoughts from my TLC meeting this past week.

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What do you want a lot of that will hurt you when you get it?

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 21:51:09 +0000

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What do you desperately desire, that the more you get, the harder it will be to achieve your goals in life?

Answers.

Let me explain.

It seems that nothing would make most of us happier than getting the answer to our questions, such as how to improve our relationships, how to make more money, and how to get anything else we want in life.

But answers are a type of belief. They are a solution to a problem, the way to do or get something.

And like all beliefs, answers are “a truth,” not “the truth.” Like all beliefs, answers are limiting, whereas questions are constantly pointing us in the right direction. In fact, answers actually prevent learning and change. Questions make them possible. Why? …

Learning and changing are relatively easy—when we don’t think we already have the answers. Most children naturally and effortlessly acquire such complicated skills as learning how to speak and read. For children, learning is a not a difficult task.

As we grow older something happens in most of us that severely hinders our learning: we think we already know the truth—we already have the answer.

To make this assertion real, consider this:

What do you ask a lot of when you don’t know how to do something? … You ask questions, right?

What happens to the questions when you discover how to do it? … They stop, don’t they?

If you think you already know the right way to do something, how open are you to learning a better way? … You aren’t, are you?

The history of corporate icons, such as GM and Lehman Brothers, is filled with stories of companies that thought they knew how to succeed, that were convinced they had the answer for how to succeed—and that failed while still proclaiming they were doing the right thing.

You see there is no “right” way to do anything at all times under all conditions. There is only the best strategy for the moment. And as circumstances change, the best way to deal with them changes also.

That gives us a clue to an alternative for “answers.” Instead of trying to find the “right” way to do or achieve anything, look for the best way at the moment. And then keep asking the same question regularly. If your reality doesn’t change much, the best way of dealing with it probably won’t change much either. But when reality changes enough, the best way of dealing with it will change, and the old answer will no longer be a good one.

This is why in a world that is changing rapidly strategies developed early in the year at a corporate retreat usually become inappropriate long before the end of the year. The same principle is true for individuals who are constantly looking for answers for how to achieve their goals. What worked yesterday or what worked for someone else, won’t necessarily work today or for you.

Don’t ever settle for the “answer.” Always hold your answers as working hypotheses, subject to constant checking and actual revisions when necessary. Live out of questions and observe what emerges. I promise you will be more successful than if you operate out of answers derived from what worked for you yesterday or what worked for someone else.

Please share any comments you have on these thoughts on why answers prevent new learning and actually can inhibit our ability to get what we want in life.

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How to eliminate suffering and get enlightened

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:01:45 +0000

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There are two fundamentally different ways in which we can experience ourselves.

First, the way most of us usually experience ourselves: as a creation—a separate entity distinct from other entities, whose survival is always at stake. Some people call this the ego.

Second, as the creator of that creation—as consciousness, as Self, as non-dual awareness, as that which has always existed and always will exist.

The creation is experienced as an entity that is either “good enough” or “not good enough.” The creator, consciousness, Self is not experienced as someThing; rather it is a state of consciousness in which one experiences oneself as whole and complete, with nothing missing. On the other hand, because the creation is something specific, there is always something it is not, in other words, there is always something missing.

What is enlightenment?

Enlightenment consists of distinguishing yourself and then experiencing (as distinct from understanding) that you already are the creator, Self, consciousness—not merely the creation—it’s just that most people haven’t experienced it yet.

Therefore, transformation or enlightenment is not a place to get to; you are already there. And transformation or enlightenment is nothing more than (continually) creating that experience for yourself.

Why we need self-esteem

If we are going to experience ourselves as a creation, we need a high level of self-esteem. Why? Because when we experience ourselves as someThing whose survival is always at stake, we need to believe I’m able to survive (good enough, important, capable), and worthy of surviving. (Nathaniel Branden was the first person I know to point this out.) And a high level of self-esteem is more conducive to our survival than a low level of self-esteem.

But when you distinguish yourself as the creator of the creation (which you can easily experience with the “Who Am I Really?” Process), then a paradox occurs: you no longer need a high level of self-esteem (because your survival is no longer in question) and you experience yourself as whole and complete, as okay just the way you are, with nothing missing, anything is possible, and no limitations—which “feels like” a high level of self-esteem.

Although it is possible to change the creation (by eliminating our beliefs about ourselves, which changes how we act and feel)—the very fact of experiencing ourselves as a creation will necessarily result in experiencing something missing, some limitations, and, as the Buddha said: some degree of suffering.

Some suffering seems to be inherent in the experience of ourselves as a creation, an entity whose survival is always at stake. Let me explain why.

If some things are good for us (conducive to our survival), then other things are bad for us (a threat to our survival). And when we encounter anything that we consider to be a threat to our survival, we feel anxiety and suffer. Depending on our beliefs and who we think are, we can be threatened by people who are angry at us, not being liked by people, making mistakes, not reaching our goals—in other words, by anything that we consider “bad.”

In other words, when anything we consider ourselves to be (a good parent, a hard worker, a sexy person) is threatened, we feel anxiety because we think who we are is in danger of extinction.

When we experience ourselves as a creation with a low level of self-esteem, our lives become about acquiring self-esteem. We create survival strategies—which are substitutes for self-esteem—that run our lives, such as having people think well of us, taking care of others, or doing things perfectly. We think these survival strategies will make us good enough or important. Unfortunately, it’s an endless quest because they never really work, although they can ameliorate anxiety for the moment.

The Lefkoe Method has two purposes

This is why The Lefkoe Method has a two-fold purpose: to help you change your creation (for example, from not good enough to good enough) … and also to facilitate you to distinguish and then experience yourself as the creator of the creation.

As long as you have human form you probably will experience that that form’s survival is always at stake. But it is possible to transcend that experience and distinguish yourself as the creator at any time. In that transcendent state, you experience that you are the space in which reality and time show up, that you always were and always will be, and that survival is never an issue.

So although it is possible to minimize suffering by changing the creation (eliminating beliefs that lead to dysfunctional behavior and feelings), as long as you experience yourself as a creation, suffering is always lurking just around the corner. The best way to relieve suffering is to create yourself as the creator, as Self, as non-dual awareness.

An alternative method

There seems to be a second method that I’ve been exploring recently: to detach oneself from the dualistic world in which we live—to dissolve the meaning we impose on meaningless reality—and face reality stripped bare of all meaning. When the meaning is gone, anxiety and suffering will be gone too.

Suffering and any other unpleasant emotion are the result of adding the meaning: “bad for me” (as distinct from good for me)—to a meaningless event. That meaning causes the suffering. Human beings are always creating meaning because we need to know: good or bad for my survival.

So there appears to be two ways to relieve suffering: to experience yourself as the creator—as distinct from the creation, or to act very un-creation-like and dissolve all the meaning from events, to live totally in the moment. The Lefkoe Occurring Process was designed to do just that.

Please share any comments you have on these thoughts on enlightenment and how to relieve suffering.

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You Create Your Experience of Reality

Morty Lefkoe — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:28:19 +0000

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When you realize that you never saw your beliefs in the world, that you only saw events that had no inherent meaning, it becomes clear that you create your beliefs—and, ultimately, reality as you experience it. Thus, everything we say is “out there”—other than what we sense (in other words, what we touch, see, hear, smell, or taste)—is a distinction we create that exists only in our mind.

Creation is the act of making distinctions

For example, you walk down the street and think you actually see “men” and “women,” when you actually only perceive what we have defined as individual human beings. You describe these human beings as “men” or “women,” but you have never actually seen “men” or “women”; they are only abstractions you have distinguished and imposed on reality. If you were to arbitrarily distinguish people into those taller and those shorter than six feet, you would eventually walk down the street and think you are seeing “shorties” and “tallies” as clearly as you now see men and women.

In Alternate Realities, Lawrence LeShan gives a simple example:

Consider how we make classes of things. “Surely,” we say, “we do not create classes. We take them as we find them ‘out there,’ male and female, animal, vegetable, and mineral. . . . We are not creating anything. We are observing things and learning their relationships.” Why then, asked one philosopher, has no one made a class of red, juicy, edible things and included meat and cherries in it? Or a class of tall, dark-haired men and women with no earlobes?

It becomes clear, as we look at LeShan’s example, that we help create and maintain the reality we perceive and react to. So nothing is until you make it so. But once you do, it must be. You can no longer not see men and women. (I once had the following printed on a t-shirt: “It isn’t until it is, and then it must be.” Can you imagine me trying to explain what I meant by that phrase to everyone who read it and asked me?)

Here is a vivid example. In The Experts Speak by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky, hundreds of experts are cited who were limited in their ability to see anything outside their existing beliefs. The following is just one of the beliefs that was generally accepted as “the truth” and that determined the believer’s behavior at the time.

Cerf and Navasky tell of how

in the 1850s, a Hungarian doctor and professor of obstetrics, Ignaz Semmelweis, ordered his interns at the Viennese Lying-In Hospital to wash their hands after performing autopsies and before examining new mothers. The death rate plummeted from 22 out of 200 to two out of 200, prompting the following reaction from one of Europe’s most respected medical practitioners:

It may be that it [Semmelweis’s procedure] does contain a few good principles, but its scrupulous application has presented such difficulties that it would be necessary, in Paris for instance, to place in quarantine the personnel of a hospital the great part of a year, and that, moreover, to obtain results that remain entirely problematical.” (Dr. Charles Dubois, Parisian obstetrician, in a memo to the French Academy, on September 23, 1858.)

Semmeiweis’ superiors shared Dubois’ opinion; when the Hungarian physician insisted on defending his theories, they forced him to resign his post on the faculty.

Today this example seems ridiculous. Doesn’t everyone know that proper hygiene is a lifesaving factor in hospitals? We tend to view this as an objective reality—as a fact. But Dubois and his colleagues were operating out of a different worldview, from a different set of beliefs. Semmelweis’s theory did not fit with their beliefs about hospital care, and therefore it was not and could not be the truth for them.

The only thing that is “true” is that which you make true by definition. You create reality (truth) by making arbitrary distinctions out of nothing. Whatever you distinguish becomes real (true) by the very fact of your having made the distinction. The distinction brings something into existence. It also serves as the definition of what has been brought into existence. Our world is—but only because we said so. We are, by our very nature, conscious beings who distinguish, which means beings who create our perception of “reality.”

I want to emphasize that I am not saying we create our physical reality. Maybe we do and maybe we don’t; I’m not sure. I am saying we create our perception of physical reality, and most people don’t ever make that distinction. Getting fired or having a spouse leave us are facts in reality; the events actually do exist. That they are a disaster or an opportunity for something better is a function of our beliefs and our occurrings. So when I say we create our reality, I am saying we create our experience of reality and we can change it.

Once you have created a belief, you have created a reality (for you) in which your belief is “the truth.” (I am…. People are…. Life is….) And your life becomes consistent with that belief. You have constant evidence that the belief is true. You have a hard time even imagining possible behavior that is not consistent with your belief. It is difficult to eliminate or change the belief because you feel that you actually perceived it existing in the world. So your behavior continues to be consistent with your belief, even if it is dysfunctional and you try to change it.

When You Eliminate a Belief You Change Your Reality and Create New Possibilities

Because “things” only exist as a result of distinctions you make, when you dissolve or eliminate the distinction, that reality disappears. The following exercise demonstrates my point.

Let’s distinguish a two-dimensional figure with three straight sides from every other possible figure and call it a triangle. (A definition is nothing more than how you describe a specific distinction. It’s the “nature” of the distinction.) Now let’s change the figure by adding one more side and making it a four-sided figure with equal angles. Notice you no longer have a triangle. You now have a figure we have defined as a rectangle. The new figure no longer fits the definition of a triangle. You might say that the triangle has disappeared. It doesn’t exist.

From this illustration we learn that when the unique attributes of a “thing” are changed—when the distinction that makes it unique from other “things” is changed—that specific “thing” disappears.

This principle explains what makes a belief disappear during the Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP). In the LBP you identify a specific belief, which is a conviction you have that your way of viewing the world is “the truth,” as distinguished from all other views, which are not “the truth”—they’re false. You then transform a statement that you consider to be “the truth” into a statement that you consider to be “a truth?’ Once you do that, the statement is no longer a belief. It has become merely one possible interpretation—one of many possible ways of defining reality. Thus, the belief no longer exists. It has disappeared! And when the belief is gone, your reality has changed. New possibilities appear that weren’t there before.

Conventional Psychotherapy

Most therapies assume that there is an objective world “out there” that the client is having trouble dealing with. Therefore, the conventional role of therapy is to help people cope better with that objective world. The LBP, on the other hand, assumes that there is no “reality” (for you) independent from your beliefs. Thus, altering your beliefs not only changes your behavior, your feelings, and how you perceive the world, it literally changes the world in which you function.

Because we create the world as we experience it, we can change it at will.

Do you have any suggestions or comments on these thoughts on how your beliefs create your experience of reality?

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