Complimentary Strategy-Focus Call with Caitriona or Michele

The Buddhist system of practice—let’s call it a curriculum for living an integrated life—may be one of the ultimate Personal Development vehicles of all time, an infinitely adaptable road map for personal congruity, [...]]]>  .. people are asking

Four week class in Santa Monica with Caitriona starting May 15

Complimentary Strategy-Focus Call with Caitriona or Michele

The Buddhist system of practice—let’s call it a curriculum for living an integrated life—may be one of the ultimate Personal Development vehicles of all time, an infinitely adaptable road map for personal congruity, freedom, creative expression, and social responsibility.

Michele and I have spent most of our adult lives, until very recently, immersed in Buddhist training, study, and teaching. The challenge, as with any discipline that is truly effective, is to stay unconditionally open, to not confuse values with beliefs, to not get stuck in the vehicle when it is no longer moving in the direction you need to go.

The great thing about the two-and-a-half millennia history of the “Buddha-Dharma” tradition is that it has reinvented itself countless times to address the ever-changing circumstances in which it has found itself.

The question for anyone using a dynamic system for personal transformation—especially when it is time-honored, and steeped in tradition—is how can you learn to utilize it to continue thinking ‘outside the box’ ever more effectively? How can you use it so that it makes a real difference in how you live your life, and how you make a positive difference in the lives of others.

The answer, as it has always been for a chameleon-like system like Buddhism, that has thrived for centuries in numerous cultures outside its place of origin on the Indian subcontinent, is to absorb, assimilate, adapt, and adopt elements from its new cultural environments.

What does that look like in 21st century North America? For Michele and myself it always meant continuing to explore ideas and tools drawn from progressive systems—neuro-science, radical politics, psychology, deep-ecology, and the arts—to keep testing, questioning, finding what works best for ourselves, our clients, and our students. These days that mostly shows up in our using our skills as NLP and Hypnosis Master trainers and practitioners to help create the kinds of transformation that our clients are asking for.

When I first met my teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, twenty five years ago, we joked together about ‘graduating from Buddhism’, meaning that it’s important to keep on moving, testing, questioning, going deeper. It’s not that we drop anything, we assimilate and move forward into deeper integration, deeper understanding.

Sometimes Michele and I say that we’re post-Buddhist; but how can you be post something that doesn’t really let you stand in a singular identification with it?

Where we stand now is in how we describe what we do—”Mentoring Conscious Entrepreneurs and Individuals for Effective Leadership Skills, Authentic Personal Power, and Dynamic Success.” ..  Mindset + Action → Results

If you’re not yet on out list, perhaps you’d like to add your name in the box to the right..

We have recently taken on a new mentor/business coach. Aside from the fact that we’re so [...]]]>  .. These are a few thoughts following on from the email we sent out today.

If you’re not yet on out list, perhaps you’d like to add your name in the box to the right..

We have recently taken on a new mentor/business coach. Aside from the fact that we’re so ready to use some powerful new input and to be held accountable in ways that stretch us and move us forward, we are also simply doing what we ask our clients to do .. to invest in yourself.

Even the Dalai Lama still has teachers. The best athletes, the most successful business people, public speakers, people in leadership roles, people in politics .. all have coaches, teachers, mentors and guides.

The issue is simply whether you want to continue doing the same old things in the same way, or whether you enjoy change, challenge, and learning new things that help you do what you do more effectively, with greater satisfaction, while providing even greater benefit to more people. We love learning new things, by the way; and we also love having fun, and delivering benefit and value to others while seeing then transform their lives in empowered ways. Those are our top three favorite things.

 Naturally there are some people who are entirely content with where they are at. And of course, that’s fine. There’s nothing actually wrong with that, unless it’s masking resignation, or fear; or one of the many other possible things that keep you stuck.

If you are actually working towards a goal of any sort, the chances are that you can use some help. We’re just wired that way as human beings. We do better by collaborating. There are more ideas, more solutions, more clarity from two people engaged in solution-based thinking than there is if those individuals are working alone. Mentoring is more than that however. What we provide helps you install an entirely new mindset, permanently eliminate limiting beliefs, old decisions, and negative emotions .. and a whole lot more.

If we sound like we’re tooting our own horn, it’s because we are so passionate and confident about the results our clients and students are getting now through this work .

(check out the homepage for testimonials)

Did you ever hear someone criticized with the words “They’re so unconscious”? What does that mean? Maybe they kept repeating the same dumb mistakes over and over, making the same bad choices, never doing anything to change those self-defeating habits.

Perhaps you have said it of yourself, “I can’t believe I did that, I was [...]]]>

Did you ever hear someone criticized with the words “They’re so unconscious”? What does that mean? Maybe they kept repeating the same dumb mistakes over and over, making the same bad choices, never doing anything to change those self-defeating habits.

Perhaps you have said it of yourself, “I can’t believe I did that, I was completely unconscious.” Of course, you don’t mean you were completely unconscious. You weren’t falling to the floor in a stupor. But you were unconscious of certain things, and that led you to behave inappropriately. Paradoxically, it may be that you were out of touch with your natural unconscious ability to sail through that particular situation. Because when you are fully in touch with your unconscious abilities, you are congruent with yourself, with your unconscious mind. You coast on autopilot, you are aware, efficient. You are ‘in the zone.’ It’s no longer a struggle to be aware. All your skills, learned or otherwise, kick in automatically.

So, to be ‘unconscious’ in the derogatory sense, actually means to be out of touch with your unconscious mind.

THE NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND

Every day we glimpse a world just beyond our reach. You catch sight of it, then lose it again; you feel it, intuit it, or you glean it through inferences. Dreams are just one of the windows onto that overlapping universe we call the unconscious. So are hunches, premonitions, and amazing mysteries – like knowing who is calling you before you pick up the phone; or stumbling spontaneously onto an unlikely solution to a problem that’s been bugging you for ages; or dreaming a chemical formula that wins you the Nobel prize (someone actually did this!).

Defining the Unconscious Mind is very simple. It is everything you are not consciously aware of at any given moment. While your Conscious Mind is everything that you are currently aware of. Consciousness is like a small speck, floating in the vast ocean of the unconscious.

Since the unconscious mind consists of everything you are presently unaware of, one of its jobs is to filter out extraneous information, irrelevant memories, and the myriad body functions we could never manage consciously. It is amazingly efficient at doing it.

When you do become aware of something, it enters your conscious mind. As long as you have recollection of it, it remains there, and as long as it remains, you have choices about how to respond. When you are unconscious of something, you have no choice. You are like a machine programmed to respond by repeating the same thing over and over.

Often this can be useful. For example, we learn to ride a bicycle once, and the unconscious ability to do so remains for life. However the same applies to bad habits, negative emotions, self-defeating attitudes and beliefs, and a whole array of things that signal that you may be out of whack with your unconscious. For example, you may have a negative self-limiting belief about yourself based on something that happened years ago. The belief fits you no better than the toddler’s clothes you discarded when you were three. But you still go around with it. You may even know why you have that belief. But it doesn’t help. Knowing why is not enough to change the way the belief plays out in your life. That old belief, along with the frustrations and regrets it brings, may lead you to feel that you are engaged in an endless exhausting fight with yourself. Or you may be unaware of it, until the mediocre results you are getting in life, despite your knowing that you are capable of so much more, become too much to bear.

THE LANGUAGE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

Here’s a road map to help you recognize how you unconscious mind makes itself known to you. There are four areas in which it plays out, signaling that you are in balance, congruent with your unconscious mind, or otherwise:

1. Emotional states: Are you dominated by negative states; anger, depression, fear, resentment, boredom?
   Or is your life dominated by love, joy, excitement, creativity, inventiveness, curiosity, humor, interest?
2. Habits and Actions: Do you do the things that give you the deepest satisfaction now and for the future? Do you avoid the difficult, procrastinate, indulge in addictive behaviors?
   Or do you find it easy to engage in life, in work and with relationships, find balance between work and play, drop things that don’t work well right away, while persisting with things that are difficult for as long as you need, while continuously learning to trust your ability to know the difference?
3. What do you attract into your life? Are you disappointed by the same old lousy opportunities presenting themselves, people who let you down, situations that are never as good as you hoped?
   Or do things continually exceed expectations? Are you in awe of some of the people who come into your life, and grateful for the opportunities that continually present themselves?
4. How do you make meaning of it all? Your belief-system is central. It is both the cause and the outcome of how you responded to the other questions above. How do you make sense of it all? Do you live in a limited universe, a nasty cut-throat world that is always bringing out the worst in everybody?
   Or do you live in a universe of endless possibility and abundance, filled with solutions, beauty, creative expression beyond limits? There is evidence enough to support either side of this. Which side do you come down on?

RAPID LANGUAGE LEARNING

TWO CLUES FOR FLUENCY IN LANGUAGE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

These four indicators above can give you a clear idea of how well you are in balance with yourself, with your unconscious mind.

Here are a couple of simple tools to help you make some changes.

 1. Mindful Recollection and Meditation

Belief systems are like photographs, they represent reality, they are not reality in themselves. Start by looking at your beliefs. They are intertwined with your perceptions and with the meanings you give to your experience.  Start by listing, tracking, paying attention to them. How do your negative, limiting beliefs coming to the surface? Are you judgmental of yourself and others? Do you say, “I am not .. smart enough, connected enough, young or old enough etc.” and dismiss the possibilities that present themselves to you? Do you see the glass a s half empty? In order to change it is first necessary to discover what is blocking you from doing so.

I won’t go into the benefits of meditation and mindfulness in the ways they are often taught. However, I do want to say that cultivating a reflective process, whether it is silent contemplation, writing a journal that focuses on the limiting beliefs that come to the surface each day, or having a conversation with a friend or mentor, is one of the best ongoing practices for deep transformation that you can have.

If you do have experience of mindfulness, Vipassana, or Zen sitting meditation, use it to be fully attentive to how negative beliefs bubble to the surface. They are usually accompanied by emotions. Don’t disassociate from the emotion in the usual way. Hone in to let the emotions you experience help you identify and illuminate the limiting beliefs they are associated with. There are certain techniques that can take you further, that can help you break the old patterns forever. For now, just learn to have more awareness of how, and when, those negative beliefs come into conscious. You may be surprised at the power it will begin to give you to make changes.

2. I Feel it in My Bones

I went to the racetrack with a friend who hardly ever gambled even though, as it turned out that day, she picked the winning horse for all six races. She said it scared her. I asked her how she knew which horse to pick. She said she felt it in her bones. When I asked what she meant she said that she had strange sensations in her rib-cage, lower back, and in her right hip. When she saw the name of the horse the sensations changed. She said it was as clear as if a bell had sounded.

Just as having awareness of a landscape means drawing in every detail with your eyes; or hearing a symphony means taking in every detail with your ears; so, being aware of the inner world of intuition and awareness, means tuning in to every proprioceptive signal from your body. Landscapes and symphonies benefit from that approach too, by the way.

How, exactly, that can give you the name of the winning horse, is another matter. Though many serially successful gamblers report a similar process. In the game of life, those who win by playing well, by living full, satisfying, productive, generous lives, usually do the same. Some say you can’t learn such skill. But that’s not true. There are too many stories of people who have turned their lives around from mediocre to extraordinary, from flat to fulfilling.

So ask yourself, and keep asking, “What am I feeling here? In my bones, in my heart, in my gut, even in my thinking. Never let it be said of you that you are ‘unconscious’. Let your unconscious mind be at the forefront of your awareness. Become friends with it. Learn all the ways to navigate that vast universe of your Unconscious Mind.

]]> http://www.manzanitavillage.org/listen-to-your-unconscious-mind/4677/feed/ 10 http://www.manzanitavillage.org/listen-to-your-unconscious-mind/4677/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ManzanitaVillageAndTheFiveChanges/~3/9wsecsMNV98/ http://www.manzanitavillage.org/the-reason-you-cant-concentrate/4636/#comments Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:14:31 +0000 Michele Benzamin-Miki http://www.manzanitavillage.org/?p=4636 Many people say that it’s hard to focus, hard to concentrate the mind. Most people are only fully present in their thoughts and actions for a tiny portion of each day. They can sustain deliberate awareness for a few seconds and then it begins to dissipate. It is one of the seven wonders of my [...]]]> Many people say that it’s hard to focus, hard to concentrate the mind. Most people are only fully present in their thoughts and actions for a tiny portion of each day. They can sustain deliberate awareness for a few seconds and then it begins to dissipate. It is one of the seven wonders of my world as a Meditation Teacher and Mindset Coach over many years, that we can still function as well as we do, given how lacking in focus, and how unconscious most of us are, most of the time.

How often have you been lost in thoughts while performing some everyday task completely unconsciously? How many times have you driven your car, lost in fantasy, arriving at your destination with no memory of how you got there. You are on unconscious autopilot, driving by default.

Just like your ability to drive on autopilot, the daydream that you were so wrapped up in, comes from the depths of your unconscious mind, generating images so vivid, so loaded with symbolism, that it captured your conscious mind completely, convincing you, for as long as it lasted, that it was as real as the road you were driving on.

Then there are times when you are triggered, often by something so small and insignificant that you are surprised by the intensity of your reaction .. fear, anger, resentment, remorse. You lose it, and find yourself flaring up in an apparently uncontrollable emotional rant, asking yourself only much later, “What was that about?” Or not, asking, as the case may be..

Then there are those moments of intuition, brilliance, and creativity, that emerge, apparently from nowhere. What is that about?

It’s simple. It was your unconscious mind surfacing for a moment to demand that you pay attention, or to offer you a gift of your imagination.

Making friends with your Unconscious Mind

On the mysterious level of unconscious mind you do know what that flare up was about; and you are fully aware of the road you are driving on. To the degree you are ‘in touch’ with your unconscious, your spirit, your intuition .. call it what you will, you do have some conscious awareness of the subterranean workings of your unconscious.

If you choose to learn to be familiar with the surges of energy and information, intuition and creativity that emerge unconscious and apparently spontaneously, you can ask, “What part of me believes this?” or “Why does this trigger such a strong reaction in me?” or “What unexpected brilliance is this idea, image, or forgotten memory suggesting to me?” You can have your Unconscious walk beside your Conscious mind, like a guide .. like a friend.

The Work, which means perhaps, the work we all do; we who choose to engage in an embodied and considered life; is about becoming friends with your Unconscious.  The Unconscious Mind is everything you are not conscious of now, everything you have forgotten, everything you have yearned for, feared, delighted in, understood deeply. The sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system determines the function of the body and the emotion, they are how your Unconscious mind shows itself. To be friends with you Unconscious mind means simply to be open. It’s not that it’s mysterious, just that it is hidden. But like any friend with whom you are on good terms, it tends to show more and more of itself to you, so long as remain on good terms with it.

In NLP we call it ‘congruence’, when the conscious and the unconscious mind are congruent with each other, when you are acting and living according to you core values. Or as Plotinus defined it nearly two thousand years ago, “The truth isn’t your mind in agreement with some external fact, it is your mind in agreement with itself.”

The unconscious manifests itself through a language of symbols, images and dreams. When you are incongruent, out of touch, it shows up as addictions, compulsive behaviours, overpowering emotions, depression, rage, stuck mental states, or anxieties that tangle you in fear and worst-case-scenarios.

Many people are aware of their Unconscious only in those abrupt moments when it erupts, like a friend you have ignored who turns on you.

It is a strange and powerful friend that can drive you insane, produce a masterpiece, get you out of a tight spot, miraculously intuit the right words to say in an awkward situation, or, on the other hand, say the very worst possible thing. Like a secret desire, it can be ignored for years, only to erupt uncontrollably. It can produce experiences, sensations, pleasures, or aguish completely outside the range of anything you have ever experienced before; and then transform your life by making that experience commonplace.

As long as you remain out of balance, out of congruency, at arm’s length from your Unconscious; as long as out of habit or fear; you remain a stranger to the hidden wealth of unconscious impulses it will remain impossible to concentrate and focus. Even if you tough it out it will be a sham. Once you are congruent, once you are in agreement with yourself, it is as easy as breathing on a spring morning.

Michele Benzamin-Miki trains people to use the tools and mindset of NLP, a powerful and direct way to step into your own best capacity for living a congruent and creative life.

Next NLP training Aril 2^nd – 15^th   www.nlpAlchemy.com

Expression of negative emotions and states of mind is the result of disowning something that is opposite and quite powerful and positive, such as Creativity, Congruence, Love.

This the third  of four audio posts  from a retreat given in Oakland California February [...]]]> Carl Jung regarded our Shadow as everything disowned in us that is powerful.

Expression of negative emotions and states of mind is the result of disowning something that is opposite and quite powerful and positive, such as Creativity, Congruence, Love.

This the third  of four audio posts  from a retreat given in Oakland California February 2012

A talk and Guided Meditation on developing Positive Learning States, Joy, Peace, Kind heartedness, Compassion, Energy, and Resourcefulness.

DO NOT USE WHILE DRIVING

This the second  of four audio posts  from a retreat given in Oakland California February [...]]]> A powerfully beneficial tool for solutio- based thinking, problem-solving, accessing unconscious resources and opening up to possibilities.

A talk and Guided Meditation on developing Positive Learning States, Joy, Peace, Kind heartedness, Compassion, Energy, and Resourcefulness.

DO NOT USE WHILE DRIVING

This the second  of four audio posts  from a retreat given in Oakland California February 2012