Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctor's week show where I show you how bad States of mind, difficult life issues. Aren't pathological, but rather signs of personal growth trying to happen. All right, let's get into it. Greetings people. How are you? I want to talk to you today about how we deal with our problems. The way
Speaker 1 00:00:39 Most of us do it is upside down, inside, out, and all confused. A problem is actually an unseen process of positive change. Trying to come forward. Problems contain gold. You just don't see it while they're happening, decoding and processing them. Not only heals, but transforms your life too. Now, bad States of mind make you feel like hell depressed, anxious, lonely, hopeless, frustrated. Self-critical obsessive, all bad stuff you don't want. Right? So there's no debate that these States of mind are bad. The mistaken notion is that there States a state of mind is fixed and static. It doesn't go anywhere. It doesn't move or evolve. If it's negative, like depression, anxiety, or pain, it's a problem sitting there making you unhappy and you wish it would just go away. You say I'm depressed as if depressed is this immovable force that just takes over and has no purpose or larger context associated with it.
Speaker 1 00:02:06 You don't view it as having any potential to go anywhere to unfold, to transform into anything meaningful. You see it simply as a painful negative state of mind. You think of it as a meaningless mood that has power over you. Not as an important process you're in. Maybe you even get a psychiatric diagnosis. Then you can say, I was diagnosed with depression as if the depression is some kind of thing in you. You can even create a permanent identity out of it. This is all part of the commonly accepted idea that trouble in your life is something purely negative. That needs to be eliminated right away. It can't possibly lead to something positive. So we need to a way to get rid of it. Pronto, instant gratification, the quickest fix possible. The logical response of a healthcare practitioner is to try to change your bad state mind into a good one.
Speaker 1 00:03:16 Most doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and even spiritual teachers have a very specific idea of what this good state of mind is. And it's thought of as the solution to your problem, I call these desired States of mind, preferred States. We're all chasing after them. We spend our time days hoping to get into one of these desired frames of mind. For example, a psychic interests preferred state for his patients simply to be symptom free. He might say, you depressed here, take this pill and it will get rid of the bad feeling for a psychologist using a popular method called cognitive behavioral therapy. The preferred state is to be able to be objective about your thoughts, think rationally and stay disentangled from negative thinking. She might say something like identify the negative thoughts that make you feel depressed and counter them with rational, positive thoughts and energy alternative to this is called dialectical behavioral therapy, which helps you be more objective about your emotions.
Speaker 1 00:04:39 A therapist using this technique may teach you cheerleading type statements to say to yourself, like I can still feel good about myself, even though someone else's annoyed with me or I can stand it. If I don't get what I want or need for a motivational guru, the preferred state, it's one of abundant, positive energy combined with decisive action. I might show you how to tap into your personal power so you can take charge of a situation that's weighing you down and go for your goals. First spiritual teacher, the preferred state of mind is blissful, loving, and peaceful. She may share ancient wisdom with you and teach you techniques for calming your mind and gaining insight about yourself. Lots of folks, practice yoga or meditation, which helps them get into a relaxed centered state of mind. Other people use positive self-talk that helps them deal with negative thoughts and feelings.
Speaker 1 00:05:47 I know some folks who go for extreme fitness and a few who joined the military to learn physical and mental toughness as a way to deal with what life throws at them. So there are lots of different preferred States of mind. People strive after each preferred state is a different way of being tough and hard. Yeah, calm and blissful, revved up and determined, compassionate, and caring, uh, rational and objective and so on their ideals of how to be. And the idea is that if you can be this way, you'll be able to get around your problems, or at least they won't bother you so much. Now maybe you're thinking about what's wrong with all that. Aren't they just different ways to deal with what's. Yes, totally. They all all aim at a state change by helping you get into a different frame of mind. This can give you temporary relief and help you deal with things better, but that's totally different from actually processing and transforming problem.
Speaker 1 00:07:02 You'll see the specific method isn't important. It's the context it's used in that matters. The same methods used in psychology to help folks are used an advertising to brainwash people. Well, the aim, not the method is what we need to focus on. The aim isn't to get you into any particular state of mind is to help you transform your problem by discovering its meaning and message. Unfortunately, a nice state of mind, won't do this for you. It can help you temporarily override and manage it, but it can't transform it. You can get distanced from what's bothering you, but you're still in the dark as to its meaning and purpose. It's transformative message for your life. And what's the meaning and purpose. I can't say there's no, no general meaning or purpose of a certain kind of problem. There's only your unique process to explore and unfold, but just getting into a great state of mind, isn't going to do that for you.
Speaker 1 00:08:15 As soon as your preferred state wears off, the problem will return whether it's medication or determination, spiritual beliefs or positive self-talk people usually use these interventions to get around their problems, not to process and transform them while all these methods are beneficial. In a sense they're really just different kinds of pills. Now there's nothing wrong with that. We need these methods to make us feel better, but there's some, I think even more powerful, transformative and magical, you can tap into something that has the potential to transform your whole life. Not just make you feel better in the moment. What I'm referring to is the fact that was certain tools you can hack into your problem, discover its purpose and meaning in your life and use this awareness to transform it from pain and suffering to personal power and liberation. So how do I do this?
Speaker 1 00:09:22 Instead of trying to reduce symptoms like most methods, do I amplify them? I know it sounds crazy, but let me explain. Amplification is the process of increasing the magnitude of a signal. For example, to see tiny objects, we magnify our vision, using a microscope to see far away objects. We use a telescope. If you want to play loud guitar, you plug it into an amplifier. Without these amplification techniques, certain information doesn't appear to our senses. We wouldn't know for example, that cells exist or how old the universe is or what it feels like to rock a 1957 Gibson Les Paul guitar plugged into a 1968 Marshall hundred watt amp like heaven. Amplifying signals changes them from remote events. We don't perceive into conscious perceptions to amplify a problem. I increase the symptoms in a safe way, explore the experience and follow the process until it organically reveals its meaning and message.
Speaker 1 00:10:43 But it's not something where you can just be smart and figure it out. You have to go through an experiential process instead of just trying to get the person into a good state of mind or just suppressing or bypassing the problem. I go directly into it. Exaggerated, bring out all the underlying details and allow it to awaken them to a new understanding and way of being without amplifying one's experience of a problem. We have no idea what lies hidden within it. Your troubles are signposts guides to realizing vitally important changes. You need to make changes. You might not even know need to happen hidden within the very issue you want to get rid of is the Holy grail of your life in this moment. So when you try to zap away your bad state of mind without getting its message, you're throwing away vital information in the trash lies the treasure.
Speaker 1 00:11:52 What feels bad and wrong is actually your teacher pressing you to wake up and learn something new. It's Horton. To know how to get yourself into a positive state of mind, but over time, it's essential to process your negative States of mind to discover what they are telling you. Otherwise you'll keep bouncing back and forth between suffering and leaf or worse yet you'll cut off a part of who you are by completely repressing your process. Strange as it sounds, what's messing up your life is the solution to your life. It's not a pathology to just try it again. Get rid of your problem is trying to wake you up to become a more conscious human being. But you have to do the work. Let me give you an example. I had a client, a 40 year old man who worked at a finance company, come to me for help with his anger issues.
Speaker 1 00:12:55 If someone didn't give him what he wanted, either at work or with his wife or with his friends, he lose it. Flip out, yell and scream foam at the mouth and destroy the situation. He had lost friends. His wife was on the verge of leaving him and nobody liked him at his job. He had hair trigger emotions and would react to even the slightest thing. The most recent was that his wife over salted his dinner and he had a shit fit. He was probably a terror to live with. I asked him, and if he ever gets physical with anyone and he said, no lucky for that, the two standard approaches to his problem would be to teach him to relax, breathe, think before he speaks and all that, or to do some talk therapy to explore why not getting what he wants makes him so mad.
Speaker 1 00:13:53 Amazingly, he had tried both of these things. He said his anger just overpowers his attempts to breathe and calm down. When I asked him about talk therapy, he had trouble conveying to me what his therapist had told him, who knows maybe they didn't click, but he gave me the impression that it wasn't helpful for him to just understand his problem because it was so viscerally potent. He described it as quote, an angry bear that takes over. Now he didn't view his anger as a problem in the sense that we need to just get rid of it. I didn't see it as a meaningless pathological symptom, but rather as a meaningful expression of something we needed to uncover. So yeah, instead of focusing on how we can reduce or eliminate his anger, I told to go ahead and express whatever anger he was feeling right then.
Speaker 1 00:14:56 And there, he was like what I said, yeah, man, get pissed off. Give my punching bag a few smashes. He hesitated for a while, but then he stood up and hit it a few times. Do it again. I said, smash bang, great. Do it some more. He looked at me and smiled and then started pounding on it after a minute or so. The whole thing took off like crazy. He pounded the crap out of it. He was sweating, yelling, jumping up and down. It went on for about five minutes. Then he stopped, looked at me for a second and broke down crying. I waited for him to compose himself and asked him what had happened. He said that by going all the way into his anger, in a therapy setting, a light went off in his mind. Suddenly he felt like his child self throwing a tantrum because his father wouldn't pay attention to him.
Speaker 1 00:16:08 He said that as an adult, whenever someone doesn't give him what he needs, it feels like he's being denied, ignored, overlooked, abandoned. He said the whole thing came together in a flash for the remainder of the session. And a lot of subsequent ones. We worked on his relationship to his father. After a while his whole anger problem disappeared. It had been a message to him. A communication of something that he now woke up about. Can you follow what happened? We didn't try to reduce his symptoms. We amplified them in order to find out what they were conveying. And the information came to him organically. Sometimes I do have to help people understand their experiences, but the meat of the process comes from within the person. The real authentic answers come out of your experience, not from ideas you have or what someone else tells you on one level.
Speaker 1 00:17:18 You're problem is a problem, but on a deeper level, it's a process it's trying to wake you up to something you may not even know. You need to be aware of. It could be something you've never even considered before. This is why going into problems amplifying and exploring them is so important. Psychiatry, psychology, and a lot of personal growth. And even spiritual systems view a problem as something wrong, inferior, even evil. And the methodologies tend to aim at reducing or getting rid of, or just managing this awful thing, which is frequently referred to as a disease or an illness. Well, it's not a disease and it doesn't mean something is wrong with you. It means you have a process of growth and expansion. Surprise symptoms is okay. If you need to find some ground in Europe or you need a break, but doing this over the longterm means you're throwing away the essential information and signs of your process.
Speaker 1 00:18:34 Then you have nothing to do. Go on. So instead of thinking of your problem as something to get rid of, or to just manage view as the doorway into your personal growth and transformation, speaking of doorways into change and growth, Mike guitar is one of my most reliable entry points into my process. After a few minutes of playing, my state of mind starts to shift and I enter into a flow of feelings visions. As soon as you stop your internal dialogue, a whole other world opens up music is the great silencer. It can turn you into an empty vessel. A mindless mind allows new perceptions and awareness to come in, but stopping inner chatter is easier, said than done all spiritual traditions have techniques for trying to do this. Yes. From meditation to prayer, to vision quests, to whirling and spinning to fasting. People have been altering their States of mind for thousands of years.
Speaker 1 00:19:46 If you want to connect with your deeper self, where you can find solutions and directions for your life, or even go further and connect with that, which lies beyond yourself, I have to get past the constant inner dialogue that upholds your reality. Albert Einstein said you can't solve a problem by using the same kind of thinking that created the problem. In other words, you're not going to transform your core issues by tweaking things here, here and there. While remaining basically the exact same person. You have to become a new person with a new awareness. Every time I pick up the guitar or sit down at the piano or get out a pad of paper and dream up some lyrics, I become new person in some small way. My state of mind and body get altered and I experienced something that's new for me, an awareness, uh, uh, an idea, a perspective and understanding a feeling, an insight or an experience that I haven't had before. After I write a song. I'm not the same person I was before I wrote it. I mean, yeah, I'm still me, doc Z, but something has shifted. The colors are different. The weather has changed. I don't move through life. Exactly the same. See you next time. Stay aware.
Speaker 0 00:21:23 You can follow me on social media at Dr. Wig, and you can sign up on the mailing list at doctors, wake.com, where you'll receive discounts on private coaching events and merchandise starting in 2021 weekly personal growth tips and lots more be well.
