Is There An Effective Anxiety Treatment?
Have you ever experienced anxiety? If you haven’t yet, the odds are good that you will at some point in your life. According to MedicineNet, anxiety is definitely a pretty common thing! In the United States, more than 60 million people will suffer from anxiety at a certain point in their lives and more than three million will have a panic disorder in the course of their lifetime. Over four million people experience general anxiety each year. Panic attacks typically begin during teenage years, from 15 to 19. Millions of men suffer from approach anxiety. (Emphasis in original.) (http://anxietybuzz.com/how-many-people-have-anxiety/) If [...]
Why Do We Need To Create Meaning?
Why do we usually make up a meaning for events that have no inherent meaning? And how does that automatic, unconscious meaning-making process create problems for us? Why we need to create meaning As a human being, your survival is conditional—it is not guaranteed. In other words, there are some things that help insure your survival and some things that threaten your survival. As a very young child, having loving, caring parents makes us feel our survival is insured; having parents who do not love or care about us (or who we feel do not love or care about us) [...]
Why we have negative emotions … and what to do about them
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, [...]
How to eliminate suffering and get enlightened
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 [...]
How to get rid of your fears
I want to deeply thank the hundreds of you who shared intimate details about how your lives have been run by your fears and anger. Your stories were unbelievably honest and incredibly moving. They reminded me of how I described my own life in my journal years ago, just before I created the Lefkoe Belief Process (originally called the Decision Maker Process) and in the early months after I created it, before I had eliminated many beliefs. Here are some excepts from my journal in the mid-1980s: During the past few weeks I have been more and more upset, afraid, [...]
It worked. Brilliantly.
Remember last December I wrote that I was about to have a breakthrough? Well, I did. On February 16, 2010 nineteen people and I began the Lefkoe Freedom Experiment (LFE). Before we started I promised the participants: “You will learn how to transform the way you experience your life. No matter what the circumstances. Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.” Actually, I had never taught anyone to do that before, but I like to promise things I’ve never done before. That’s the exciting part: Figuring out how to do things after I’ve promised to do them. The LFE [...]
Getting Rid of Beliefs is Not Enough
Because many emotions are caused by beliefs, getting rid of the relevant beliefs can frequently eradicate negative emotions. For example, the belief that “Dogs are dangerous” will result in an emotion of fear when confronting a dog. The belief “People can't be trusted” will result in a feeling of suspicion around people. When the beliefs are eliminated, the emotions usually will be also. There are, however, emotions in adults that appear to be caused by something in addition to beliefs. Getting rid of beliefs is not enough. Let me explain the source of these negative emotions, such as [...]
How the Mind Determines Athletic Success
In order to make this blog post personally valuable to you, I'd like to start by asking you a couple of questions. First, whatever sport you play, how often do you play up to your potential, in other words, if you rate your best performance a 10, how often do you play at a 10? ... The next question I'd like you to answer is: If you can play at a 10 sometimes, why can't you do it more frequently? You obviously have the physical skills and ability or you wouldn't have been able to do it that one [...]
How To Find The Beliefs That Cause Various Problems
Getting rid of a limiting belief with the Lefkoe Belief Process (LBP) is not particularly difficult. We can train people to do that in a weekend. And we can create an on-line process or a DVD that will eliminate a specific belief. The trickiest aspect of the LBP is identifying all the relevant beliefs that cause a given problem. Getting rid of the beliefs is actually easier than finding them. That’s why we can put together programs that eliminate specific problems when we already know what beliefs (and conditionings) cause those problems for most people. So far we have created [...]
