Oprah Doesn't Get It

I am late-ish with the post because I have been v. busy with John Morgan Seminars. I'm booking our weight-loss & smoking cessation seminars around the country. T'is the season to get healthy!

What about Oprah? you ask. Well. I was reading O Magazine about her weight. Again with the weight. No matter what other accomplishments, it is her lifelong challenge. [Side note here: A couple years ago, I was actually heavier than Oprah. It gave me a kick into gear. Really? I'm bigger than Oprah? How can this be? Oh, it be. But not anymore.]

This is what I notice: there is no attention paid to the subconscious, or Other-Than-Conscious, as Dave Dobson calls it. It's the part of us that drives our behaviour. Wouldn't you want to get in rapport with that part of you? Wouldn't you want to work WITH your subconscious instead of trying to strong arm it with "willpower." Dave used to say that it was like holding a beach ball under water. Eventually, it will pop back up. What if every part of you was in alignment for your highest and best good? What if all parts of you--your beliefs, your body, your feelings were all congruently working together? Wouldn't it be nice to stop fighting with yourself?


We could hallucinate all sorts of reasons WHY Oprah is fat again. She has. Reasons can keep us stuck where we are. As long as she fights her body, she will continue the struggle. John says that 95% of the women in his programs come up to him and say, "I hate my body." If you had someone in your life that you were openly hostile to and more than that, told anyone who would listen how much you detested that person, how receptive would your enemy be to a request? That's what's going on with your body when you hate it and fight with it and create a weight struggle.

So here's my prescription for Oprah:

Perhaps she'll get this part: acceptance. Really, it's very Eckhart Tolle. And John is a huge Eckhart fan. My wish for Oprah is that she finds some peace within herself, and that she discovers a new, easier way not to lose weight, but to create balance, harmony, and health for the new year.

Pattern Interrupts

Dave Dobson used to say that everything is patterns. We have productive ones & less-than-productive ones. Useful & non-useful. Bruce Lipton says that for the first 2 years of life, our brain waves are predominantly delta waves--that v. deep, unconscious state. It's a time when we soak up learning--and patterns, at a rapid rate. Eric Jensen says in Brain-based Learning that the brain needs to feel safe before it can really learn. Credit that to the only part of our brain that is fully formed at birth: the amygdala [uh-MIG-duh-la] It records everything.

Which brings us back to Dave: the primary concern of the unconscious mind (Other-Than-Conscious, as he called it) is to keep us safe. Patterns develop as a safety mechanism. And then we run them like a computer runs a program. OR:

They run us.

What do you do when you become aware of a pattern that you find less than elegant? Dave said there are no good or bad patterns. They all had a purpose at one point in time. All you need to do is to update the pattern. John Morgan says that awareness is the first step in creating a wedge between stimulus & response (pattern). And then you do something to interrupt the pattern. When I was training with Doug O'Brien in Ericksonian hypnosis, he used a v. simple pattern interrupt. He would say, Do you golf?

I have been looking at the pattern of how I make decisions. Or, to be more accurate, how I don't make decisions. I have created a sense of urgency where there needn't be one. It's something that I'm becoming aware of. It's something I need to update.

Perhaps I should take up golf.

New Years Rezzies

T'is the season to stop an old habit or start a new one tomorrow, isn't it?

It's right up there with birthdays that end in a zero.

I woke up this a.m. with the Goo Goo Dolls in my head singing Jalfreda. Yeah, and for you fans out there, you're thinking, Whaaaa? That's not a Goo Goo Dolls song. And you would be right, because it's not "Jalfreda", the name of some gal from the Norse. John Rezzie is actually singing Yeah, I'm fadin'. But there I am in the car singing at the top of my lungs, Jalfreda! Because I didn't hear the whole thing. I misinterpreted. But now I have more information, I've updated the file, as Dave Dobson likes to say. And I'm singin' Yeah, I'm fadin'....

Which brings me to this thought:
Sometimes we don't have all the information or we misinterpret. Often it's on an Other-Than-Conscious level so that our OTC mind links up something from an event and that's WHY we have a behaviour, habit or pattern. The problem with WHY is that the mind will come up with a million reasons and then our conscious mind gets into a loop of excuses or justifications. Or we give up.

*sigh*

This time last year I was fat. FAT. There are lots of reasons I could give. I was even asked by someone, Why did you let yourself go? Really, there's no good way to ask that. And certainly not more than once. Because what it really means is Why are you so fat? Of course, nothing has meaning and everything has the meaning we give it. Still. That's how I interprelated it.

I don't know how heavy I was because I got to that point where I didn't want to know. You know? But I stopped buying number sizes when my size 16's got too tight and I transitioned to stretchy XL's. And when I was heading into the XXL's, I decided I needed to do something. So I listened to my labyrinth CD every night with the intention not to lose weight, but to be healthy. And to pay attention to what my body needed from me: mentally, emotionally, physically, spiritually.

There are a few changes I made specifically in terms of diet, exercise, etc. that I'll save for my next post. Most importantly is that I didn't do it through willpower, I went to the source: the OTC. I bypassed the conscious mind and communicated and updated and worked with my OTC mind. It makes it so much easier when you have the cooperation of the part of you that guides your patterns in the first place. THANKS, Dave.

And now John Morgan has a new CD I Love My Body, which I've written about before. This is what I'm listening to to keep me a size M, size 10.

I've Decided to Take up Smoking

What a ridiculous thing to say! But it's funny because it's not. I've been thinking a lot about smoking behaviour and what prompts a person to start...or decide to stop....it's not like other decisions we might make, like what to cook for dinner or if we should buy that new pair of jeans or get the puppy or pot-bellied pig at the fair. It seems to me to be a more other-than-conscious (OTC) response for coping or dealing with stress. Or perhaps it's a response to wanting to fit in with a herd--to be one of the cool people. I remember in one of my trainings with Doug O'Brien, he was doing a smoking therapy on a guy and he asked him what appealed to him about smoking. One of the responses was "it's part of my bad-boy image." And Doug said, "Yeah...'cause that's really important when you're 43 years old."
And I also understand the addictive qualities of it and the chemical responses in the brain; it's sending dopamine to the pre-frontal cortex. But there are other ways to do that as well--exercise, for one. Who said that??? But whatever the reasons, for whatever behaviour, there's always a way to meet the needs of the OTC in a more healthy manner...because shift happens...just like the bumper sticker says. Happy Saturday! :-) H.