When certain events or people are able to consistently bother us, get to us, or slow us down, it’s usually due to a few thought and feeling patterns we picked up when we were young. All of us develop our own versions of these few patterns and discovering the specifics of what yours have been, is a gigantic leap towards discovering the true indestructible you that can more easily meet and transform any challenge.
Discovering the true indestructible you is mostly about finding out who you are not: finding the fake ideas about who you are that you somehow bought into over the years.
Once you discover who you are not and experiment with not trying to be that all the time, then who you really are can more easily show up in your experience. Assigning words to who you really are, or in other words, filling in the blank to the question: “Who I am is __________”, is the beginning of creating more ideas about who you are that can easily take your attention away from simply staying open to experience it. So even though I am using the term “The True Indestructible You”, I encourage you to resist giving words to who you really are before simply experiencing it.
Simply 1) discovering who you are not, 2) not trying to always be it anymore and, 3) staying open to what happens next, can help you experience more of what we could call “who you really are” beyond the fake ideas that have been in the way.
Here is a simple, six step process I recently developed to help us take step 1 and discover who we are not.
Step 1) Think of the first person in your life that played the role of the main other person in your life. This is usually your Mom or Dad or another person who’s role was to take care of you most of the time when you were a baby and small child. With this person in mind, answer the following three questions:
A) Who did I have to be in order to survive with this person?
B) Who did I have to be in order to get this person’s attention?
C) Who did I have to be to get this person’s love?
Step 2) Answer this question with that person in mind:
What were the steps I had to take to try to be all this? List out the first three to five steps in order:
Step 3) Answer this question:
What did I decide was probably true about myself, other people and the world because of trying to be this? List the top three to five things.
Step 4) Answer this question by filling in the blank:
What have I been most afraid of because if this experience? Please fill in the blank to the following phrase:
“The thing I have been most afraid of is being trapped in a situation where ____________________.”
Step 5) Answer this question, allowing yourself to feel the feelings as much as possible:
If anything were possible, how would I rather feel instead of this?
Step 6) Run the “Prison Break Swish Pattern” to free your attention from your old patterns. This is a version of an NLP pattern called the swish pattern which I’ve updated to apply to these limiting thought and feeling patterns.
A) Close your eyes and picture your main other person out in front of you
B) Now picture yourself in front of them
C) Now picture your thought feeling patterns that you discovered through answering the questions above surrounding both you and the other person. Imagine this is any way that this makes sense to you. There is no right or wrong way to do this.
D) Now picture the most powerful energy you can imagine bursting through the other person, bursting through you and then bursting through the thought and emotion patterns shattering them into oblivion. As you do this, allow yourself to feel all the feelings you described in step 6 as much as possible. Run this nine more times.
How does this feel? Did it radically shift your experience in a positive way? If so, you can experiment with doing step six a few more times. Each time you do this, you are reversing your old limiting patterns and creating new pathways for your attention to come back to notice who you really are now.
-Andy
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