Overcome Shyness and Hidden Blocks to Self-Respect

This article has insights that are a good preparation for the January/February webinar that begins next Wednesday, the 15th:

Emotional Healing Begins in the Present Moment

The Buddha said:  “You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” (A thought worthy of daily repetition.)

In my experience over 40 years practicing Lucid Heart Therapy & Life Coaching, I have found that everyone’s problems have their root in a lack of self love, and that the obstacle to self love is hypnotic in nature. But what does that mean?

I’d like to discuss a specific hypnotic quality, hallucination, that we create to cause unnecessary suffering and to block self appreciation. It’s the way we develop and maintain shyness and lack of self-respect, so it’s important to understand how it works.

In a stage hypnosis event, when people accept the suggestion that they see a dog on an empty floor or see their naked body even when they are fully clothed, they are hallucinating the suggested content — a sign of a deep trance state.

What has to happen for a trance to take hold of our mind?

In order to be convinced the person must hallucinate two things. The subject is not merely hallucinating the dog or the naked body (seeing what is not there is termed a positive hallucination), but they must be not seeing the empty floor or their clothes (not seeing what is there is termed a negative hallucination). It is important to note that the hypnotist doesn’t have to tell the subject to do the negative hallucination. The subject does it automatically. Since this crucial action is unmentioned it can go unnoticed.

The same is true for stuck emotional states. We stay stuck because we are not noticing something we are doing!

Have you ever felt stuck saying your were shy? Or afraid? Or angry? We get stuck in such negative states because we positively hallucinate that the state appears “out of nowhere” — it’s “just the way we are.” The feeling state is so powerful it magnetizes and absorbs our focus so that we do not recognize how we create it. We overlook what preceded it.

Nothing comes from nowhere without a cause – but we often overlook the cause.

The state is truly happening — we feel what we feel. But since we experience it so vividly, negatively hallucinating the cause, we believe it is a causeless state. The truth of it’s existence reinforces the belief that the state is a true commentary about us — I am a shy person, etc. We could state the belief in this way, “I feel it, it just is, therefore it is true about me.”

I asked a client recently, who kept saying he was a shy person, if he knew what he did to feel shy. He didn’t – he was “just” immediately shy in the company of others. I asked him to consider — could he feel shy if he didn’t first judge himself to be not good enough in some way? Could he feel shy without imagining (hallucinating) the other person judging him? And could he feel shy, if the other person did judge (people judge), but he didn’t accept the judgment? Could he feel shy without believing that rejection was an intolerable event?

He easily recognized that his thoughts conformed to the thoughts I guessed at. He saw that he was not “just a shy person,” — shy “immediately out of nowhere” but that to “be a shy person” he had to believe the thoughts (hurtful hypnotic suggestions) that he wasn’t good enough, that other people negative judgments of him were always true, and that rejection was intolerable.

Once he saw that the shyness wasn’t natural and wasn’t arising out of nowhere because “that was just the way he was,” he let go of his concern. As he recognized that the shyness was merely a product of negative thinking of questionable validity, he started to easily hallucinate enjoying himself around other people — even joking about being rejected!

A simple practice for overcoming shyness

Practice watching your mind and catching the thought process that precedes your stuck emotional state. First, affirm, “This state is not “just the way I am.” Then simply ask, “What do I have to believe to feel this way.” “Why believe that?”

You may also want to check out the Mp3 Stress Relief, Rejuvenation & Empowerment to banish your stress.

Good luck!