From Stress to Success: 10 Steps to a Relaxed and Happy Life: a unique mind and body plan. Xandria Williams
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exploring it. Jennifer was told to run the phrase ‘Being stupid means…’. When she did she came up again with several everyday things at the start such as not being clever, not being bright, not being able to do things. Then she found herself saying ‘… my husband won’t love me’.
As she said this she looked first surprised, and then as if the pennies were beginning to drop. During the discussion that ensued it soon became clear to her that she was afraid she would lose her husband if she could not keep up with him. He had started in a junior position in the company for which he worked but had been promoted several times and had a lot of responsibility. His work now involved some international travel and the responsibility of entertaining a number of clients. Jennifer felt he had had the chance to grow and expand his horizons while she had been cooped up at home with three children. If she couldn’t do all the tasks allotted to her then, how, she wondered subconsciously, could he expect her to go on being worthy of being his wife? Once she realized this she had the start in her plan to deal with the situation.
None of this had come up during logical discussion. It took this technique to unearth the deeper fear. Now you see what a useful tool this ‘running a phrase’ can be.
You may find you get several different bits of information. Keep going with the one phrase until you have a large number of responses. Then choose the one that seems a little disconnected, as we did above, shape a phrase around that and run it. You may then take one of these responses and run a third phrase, and so on.
When that is complete go back to another of the original completions. In Jennifer’s case we ran ‘Being stupid means…’ until we had milked it dry. We then followed up on ‘… I’ll be in trouble’ by running the phrase ‘Being in trouble means…’ and got a variety of phrases and then ‘… my husband will leave me’.
Clearly this was a major fear for Jennifer and dominated much of her thinking. She was encouraged to talk it over with him. When she did she found this was far from his thinking, that in fact he found his home with its quiet domesticity and basic values a relief and haven after corporate life.
One thing I can guarantee, provided that you relax completely into the process and allow your subconscious to speak, when you run a phrase you will be surprised at the results. They will certainly help you in your bid to become more relaxed and calm. They will almost certainly change your life for the better in other ways too as you learn more about yourself and your reactions.
We will consider another example. James was at university and finding the whole situation stressful. He ran the phrase ‘A reason university is stressful is …’ and got a number of completions such as ‘… there’s lots of new stuff I have to learn’, ‘… there are all those tests I have to swot for’, ‘… the other boys speak better than I do and they laugh at me’. All these were fairly standard reasons for feeling stressed. Then he came up with ‘… Dad resents me’.
He then ran the phrase ‘Dad resents me because …’ and got completions that included ‘… I’m not working’, ‘… he has to support me’, ‘… he thinks I’m not good enough’. It was this last one that really hit home. He said that he thought his father was proud of him going to university and impressed that he had got a place. Yet deep down there was this fear that his father thought he was not good enough, not good enough to pass his exams and obtain a degree. Eventually he recognized that this was, in fact, his Ultimate Negative Belief, discussed in the chapter on Affirmations.
Here is a clear example of the way your mind works. If you try to analyse the situation logically to find out why you are stressed you will almost certainly run into all the logical and practical reasons, the obvious ones. When you let the subconscious mind throw up the information it has you can learn a lot more.
Use this technique of running a phrase whenever you are asked to in this book. You can also use it at other times, times of your choice and under any circumstance. For instance, if you are getting angry in a particular situation run ‘The reason I’m angry is …’. ‘Another reason I’m angry is …’. Note the slight change in wording for the second and subsequent repeats of the original phrase.
Or you may be sitting around with friends enjoying a chat, then feel yourself getting anxious. Run the phrase ‘A reason I’m getting anxious is …’, ‘Another reason I’m getting anxious is …’.
Remember, as a wonderful book called the Course of Miracles (Foundation for Inner Peace, 1975) says ‘You are never upset for the reason you think’. This technique of running a phrase is an excellent way of finding out the real reason you are upset. Use it at every possible opportunity.
THE Emotional Aspects of Stress
Your feelings of stress are a product of the way you think. When you think things are going to be bad, difficult and stressful then you experience fear, worry and stress. When you think they are going to be good, exciting and fruitful you feel happy, expectant and fortunate. These diametrically opposite results are the consequence of diametrically opposite ways of thinking. So let’s consider the way you think.
The title of this section, creative thought, may seem to imply that there is non-creative thought as well as creative thought – not so. All your thoughts are creative, one way or another, and your thoughts create your reality.
People think in different ways. Some people think only, or largely, in words, some people think only, or mainly, in pictures and others think only with their feelings. Most of us, however, think in all three modes, even if one mode does predominate, and the combination of all three gives you your total ‘thought’. For our present purposes we will use ‘thought’ to cover all three modes of experience.
If your thoughts create your reality and part of your reality is the experience of stress then it should be possible to change the experience of stress by changing your thoughts. This is the concept we are going to explore.
Good and bad days
Consider some of the good and bad days you have had. On a bad day you might wake up late, you trip getting out of bed, run the cold instead of the hot tap in the shower, burn the toast, find the milk is sour and mutter to yourself that this is going to be an awful day. After that it probably will be.
On a good day you may find everything goes right. The clothes you want to wear are all clean, the sun shines, you catch your bus and get to work exactly on time and decide that this is going to be a great day. And it probably will be.
How does this come about? There are two possibilities. Either you focus your attention on the things that fall within your expectations and, consciously and subconsciously, ignore or filter out those that don’t, or, by your focus of attention and expectation, by the subtle messages you give out, maybe even by the sheer power of your thoughts, you actually change the way things happen.
Filtering
The first of these two possibilities involves filtering the input you receive from the world around you and the events happening in your life. In this way if you expect it to be a good day you will focus your attention on the good and positive things that happen; if you expect it to be a bad day you will focus on the problems and setbacks that occur.
You may insist you do not filter, that you see the world rationally and objectively, as it is. However, if you are willing to open your mind and see past your normal mode of thinking you may be in for some surprises.
You filter the world in which you live in a number of ways and the ways in which you do this can have a great bearing on the amount of stress you experience.