Speaker 1 00:00:03 Welcome to the doctors, which 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.
Speaker 1 00:00:27 Hey people Dr. Z here, how are you? I hope all is well. I've got some really cool stuff to share with you today. Don't do this exercise while you're driving, operating machinery or doing anything that requires your full attention today. We're going into an exercise. That's based on the idea that every human quality can be used either positively or negatively. In other words, consciously or unconsciously, for example, you can use your strength to stand up for your feelings or for someone else's feelings, but you could also use it to abuse somewhat. So strength in itself is neither good, nor bad. It's neutral. It all depends on how you use it, how conscious you are of it in yourself. The same is true for every human quality. You can be emotional to share your true feelings, or you could also oppress someone with your emotions. You can be rational to figure out the correct answer to something, but you could also be rational in a way to avoid your feelings.
Speaker 1 00:01:45 You can be intelligent to do good in the world or to do bad in the world or say, you're a cautious person. This can protect you from a lot of problems, but it could also cut you off from really experiencing life. The quality itself doesn't determine how it's used you do. And why is knowing this important, besides the obvious that if you're interested in growing, changing healing and transforming, you strive to be conscious of your process. There's another really interesting element here. This dual yin-yang nature of human qualities means that when we have a negative experience, either within ourselves or in relationship to another person or the world, the negative aspect, isn't the most important part. Of course, it's Sox, and you want to get rid of it, but it's only the negative expression of a human quality. That quality when made conscious transforms into a positive expression, the quality is what's important. Not its expression. In the whole reason we have negative experiences is to push us into our processes in order to wake us up to something, by making the bad things we experience conscious. When you make them conscious, they become a liberating power. This is what my song medicine gun is about.
Speaker 1 00:03:35 The poison in your life contains the exact medicine you need. The poison is just the wake. The F up aspect of your process is designed to get your attention, but you have to process it. The things you experienced aren't meaningless and they aren't static, even though they might feel like they are they're meaningful processes, and you have to explore their poison in order to discover how they contain the medicine you need. Now, how does this look in practice? It means that your problems are simply the negative expression of a meaningful positive process. And your job is to hunt for the human quality behind the negative expression and integrate it in a conscious way. Here are a few examples that will give you a sense of what we're about to do. One of my clients, a highly emotional and dramatic young woman, who at times felt plagued by her own emotionality complained that her father didn't show any emotion at all.
Speaker 1 00:04:46 I asked her a strange question. I said, can you describe an imaginary friend who has a positive version of your father's negative quality? Of course she had no idea what I meant. She asked how being unemotional could possibly be something positive. So I gave her an example. I said, what about someone who's unemotional solid and grounded in a time of crisis and danger? I mean, do you want your airline pilot freaking out when there's a problem? She nodded understanding what I meant and agree to try to imagine a friend who's unemotional in a positive way. She closed her eyes and searched her mind. It took her a while, but she finally said, okay, my friend is a no drama kind of gal. She doesn't let feelings get in her way. I said, fantastic. Tell me more about this. No drama gal. She said, I don't know.
Speaker 1 00:05:51 She's a bad-ass. She doesn't get her feelings hurt. I guess she's more like a man. Then I had her play act, this imaginary friend, a woman unencumbered by emotions. And she had a powerful experience. At first. She was super judgmental of it, but after exploring it further, she had an experience of being able to detach from her own dramas, which was something she could rarely do. The result was that being unemotional when used consciously was really helpful for her next, we addressed her relationship problem with her dad, no matter how much she had tried to get him to show his feelings. He wouldn't. And after the session, he still wouldn't. He also refused to come with her to therapy. You can try to change someone, but as you know, it doesn't really work, but she grew immensely by gaining access to a more centered grounded part of herself.
Speaker 1 00:06:57 This at least helped her to feel a bit better with her dad because she was less affected by him and by her own dramas in general. Now she had more choice and awareness of when to fully go into her strong emotions and when to moderate them, she befriended her father's negative quality and transformed it into a positive process. Another client, a man in his early twenties described himself as lazy. He came to me because he kept getting fired from jobs. He also wanted my help to deal with his frequent headaches. He'd done all the medical tests, which came out negative. And his doctor said it was from stress. He was on some pain killers, but he wanted to get off them. I decided to help him with his headaches first because physical experiences are a direct road into your process. Whereas getting fired from jobs might have a lot of different elements to figure out.
Speaker 1 00:08:01 He described his headaches as quote, pounding and throbbing. They seriously interfered with his everyday life. And he said, he felt like he was getting addicted to the painkillers. I asked him to describe an imaginary friend with a positive version of this negative experience. Like my previous client. He wasn't quite sure what I meant. So I asked him how the act of pounding and throbbing could be useful in some way. I said, forget about your headaches for a moment and just imagine a person who pounds, what kind of pounding would he or she do? It took them a while to grok what I was asking of him. But eventually he came up with something. He said, quote, I guess he could pound in a nail.
Speaker 1 00:08:57 I said, great. What's the energetic quality of pounding in a nail? How would you describe it? He said, insistent relentless. Then I had him describe an imaginary friend who's insistent and relentless. He said, my friend is totally relentless in everything. He does. He pounds through everything and never gives up, nothing stops him. Then I had him play act this friend, and he got really into the experience of pounding and pushing his way through things. Luckily, I have a giant punching bag in my office and he went crazy on it. At one point, I told him to take it easy because he had bloody knuckles, but he just kept going smiling the whole time afterwards. I asked him how he could use this energy in his life. And to him, it was obvious. He felt like killing his laziness and getting to work. He said he gets fired from jobs because he slacks off until they discover him.
Speaker 1 00:10:07 And then they toss him out. So the first thing he needed to pound through and not give up on was finding a new job and then working hard at it. After a while, he did find a new job, which he managed to not get asked from. And a few months later, his headaches almost totally went away from then on whenever he got one, he'd asked himself how he's being lazy and passive and he'd force himself into his energetic, pounding self. Did you follow that? The unconscious negative expression of pounding happened in his headaches. He experienced the conscious positive expression when he became someone who purposely pounds through obstacles and never gives up the negatives in your life. Your symptoms and problems are expressions of unconscious ways of being that need to be processed. Making them conscious, transforms them from negatives to positives. Okay, let's begin. Choose a problem to work on and meditate on your experience of it. Put your awareness on it and observe yourself.
Speaker 1 00:12:12 Now amplify what you feel. So it becomes clearer to you, make it more intense and all pervading. If it's a pain, imagine it's worse. If it's a feeling of being oppressed exaggerated, if it's a feeling of being judged, pretend it's way worse than it is, whatever you're suffering from, make it more. And don't worry about the fact that it seems like we're making your issue worse. We're not. If you want to change something, you have to first become fully aware of what it is you're going to change amplifying. It is how to do this. It brings out all the details and makes them clear. Then you'll be able to transform it.
Speaker 1 00:13:48 Now I want you to hone in on the core essence, the basic quality of the thing or the agent that's bothering you to do this. You have to temporarily forget about all your interpretations of, and reactions to and judgments of your issue. Put it all aside for the moment, strip out everything. But the essence of your experience via simpleton go to the lowest animal level and identify your core experience of the problem. Remember my clients for the woman, the core quality that bothered her was the lack of emotion of her father for the man. It was the pounding of his headache.
Speaker 1 00:14:39 Okay? Identify the basic quality of what's being done to you either internally or externally to you experience your problem as something or someone being cold and unemotional to you like my client did or something pounding on you. Like my other client experienced, perhaps you feel like the victim of some kind of power or roughness or insensitivity or abrasiveness or pressuring or threatening or frantic hurriedness. You might experience your problem. And an even more visceral way, like being the victim of a cutting quality or something that rips tears, burns, squeezes cramps, or oppresses you with its heavy weight. Maybe you feel bothered by something that spins or shakes. You see, these are basic ground qualities of the more complex phenomenon you normally identify as your problem. For example, you'd usually say that what's making you suffer is a feeling of being abandoned or manipulated or judged or criticized or pushed around or scared or abused or having the ground taken from under you and so on. But within these complex experiences is a more basic experience name. The quality of this experience. That's victimizing you.
Speaker 1 00:17:07 Now we're going to transform this unconscious negative quality into a conscious positive one to do this. I want you to describe an imaginary friend who embodies a positive version of the quality that's victimizing you alternately. It might be someone you actually know that works too. This requires a bit of creativity, and I know you can do it. Just trust your imagination and play around with it until you find what feels right. There are no right or wrong answers in this. So have fun with the process and just see what happens. For example, say you feel hurt by the negative way. Your inner critic analyzes you. Then you might say, my friend is incredibly brilliant with his analyses. And this example, the core quality, the essence is the skill of analyzing, not how it's used. We've simply identified a more conscious, constructive way to be analytical or maybe you're depressed.
Speaker 1 00:18:23 And it feels like a heavy Boulder you're dragging around. Then you might say, my friend is a heavyweight. No one can budge him. He stands his ground. The essence is the heaviness, the weight, the solidity, not its negative manifestation. We've simply translated the heaviness into something we can consciously use in a positive way or say you feel hurt by someone's cutting comments. Then you might say, my friend is incredibly cutting. He cuts right through the BS and gets to the point. The essence is the cutting. Not how it victimized. You are you with me. We're drawing the raw essence out of the negative quality that's bothering you and making it conscious so that you can integrate it in a useful way. Go ahead and see what kind of friend you can dream up. Describe him or her with this great quality.
Speaker 1 00:20:13 Now play act. This friend. Start by visualizing what he or she looks like study everything. Here's a her face hair, body clothes, posture, movements, and expressions. Let it unfold into an inner movie.
Speaker 1 00:21:18 Now feel into your imaginary friend. Feel deeply into how it would be to be this person. How does it feel to experience and express this positive quality?
Speaker 1 00:22:18 Now stand up and walk around. Like this friend walks, experienced them in your whole body. Turn off the podcast and turn it back on again. When you're ready,
Speaker 1 00:22:48 Now put it all together and totally embody this way of being see, feel, move, and even speak like this friend would play, act him or her being and living this great quality. Turn off the podcast and turn it on again. When you're ready.
Speaker 1 00:23:25 All right. Here's some questions for you to help you go further. Turn the podcast on and off as much as you need to take your time to go through these questions. How does this way of being provide a solution to your problem? What stops you from being this way? All the time is it's an inner or outer critic, a fear of how you'll look in the world, or is it simply something new for you that you'll grow into
Speaker 1 00:25:02 How can you apply this way of being to your inner life, your relationships, your work, and your spirituality.
Speaker 1 00:25:57 Great work. You've just learned how to be friend, your problem maker and use it to transform a difficult issue. You did this by observing and amplifying how you experience your issue, identifying its core quality, imagining a friend with a positive version of this quality play, acting the friend by seeing feeling moving and speaking like he or she does. And then contemplating how this new way of being can provide a solution to your problem, as well as help you in other areas of your life. If you feel like it, you can listen to some bonus material where I share some of my client's experiences doing this exercise. That's up next.
Speaker 1 00:26:58 Here's some more of my client's experiences, befriending the core quality in their problem in order to transform it. A 26 year old woman who struggled to feel motivated in life felt plagued by her inner critic. It bashed her 24 hours a day telling her what a worthless human being she is. She said it felt like it had her in a BICE grip. She described her imaginary friend as powerful unrelenting with a steel grip. She play act to the friend, an experienced her own steel power that not only connected her to her motivation in life, but also equipped her to tell her critic to shut the F up a 40 year old man who felt overworked, but didn't know how to get out from under his responsibilities came to me for help. He described the feeling of his problem as being controlled by a drill Sergeant.
Speaker 1 00:28:04 He described his imaginary friend as a drill Sergeant who gets the job done every time when he play acted, the friend, it actually gave him energy and he realized he can get all his work done. His problem. Wasn't actually being overworked, but rather not occupying the energy of the drill. Sergeant who grabs each job and just finishes it. Instead. He spent a lot of time in victim complaining mode, feeling victimized by his responsibilities. Instead of owning them had made him feel oppressed. Now he could seize the day, uh, 34 year old man suffered from low back pain. He describes it as a cutting stabbing sensation. He felt when he moved in a certain way, he described his imaginary friend as someone who stabs and cuts through things. I asked him what the friend stabs and cuts through. And he said the BS. Then we worked to identify what BS in his life. He needed to cut through. Turns out he was in a relationship with a man who he didn't really want to be with, but was afraid to hurt his feelings. The cutter friend said, cut the crap, leave this guy. He's bad for you. He'll survive that night. My client broke up with his boyfriend and I swear on Jimmy Hendrix's grave. His back problem went away the next morning. See you next time. Stay aware.
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