1.  SHAKE THE SHAMAN’S RATTLE---placebo power.

You are hard-wired to find pattern and meaning---wonderful skills that keep you alive, as it did all of your ancient ancestors.  “Deer come here to drink this time of year.”  “That mushroom is tasty, that one will make you very sick.”  Luckily for you, they were great scientists, using the same test-observe-retest paradigm that modern scientists use.  Maybe their technique wasn’t quite as elaborate, but the results they obtained were eminently more useful than most of those coming out of our universities.

But they sometimes made mistakes, like when they assumed that the rattle-shaking shaman at the time of the winter solstice, stopped the sun from going further down toward the horizon.  Sure enough, the sun stopped sinking and began to rise again.  They made the mistake of assuming that the shaman was responsible because they confused association with causality.

Hugely important that you be very clear about the difference between association and causality. The rattle-shaking shaman was associated with changing the direction of the sun, but in no way caused that change.  But people back then would have no way to know that, so I’ve often wondered what very brave, very foolhardy person was the first to stop the ritual.  You might even find a few rituals of your own if you looked carefully at your life.  I wonder what would happen if you stopped shaking your rattle?

On the other hand, although the shaman’s rattle may not be what caused the sun to stop moving lower and lower toward the horizon and disappearing forever, his ability to do so in the eyes of the tribe gave him and his rattle great power and the ability to “heal“ the sick.  The self-healing abilities of the human body were mobilized by the mask and rattle---a great example of the placebo effect.

So, use the placebo effect to your advantage.  Use your imagination.  Here is one simple way, and there are many others among the ELEMENTS.  Buy sugar pills and a particularly attractive pill box.  If anxious, label it RELAX.  If depressed. HAPPY.  If tired, ENERGIZE, etc.  And take a pill as needed.  Don’t worry, your brain and body will react even though another part knows that they are only sugar pills.  The labeling and your intent gives them power and the brain responds, just like the shaman’s rattle.

I guess you could actually create a very nice, noisy rattle to use, but friends, neighbors and coworkers might not take well to your conversion to shaman-hood.

WHAT I FOUND

2.  CREATING ANCHORS

You can deliberately shift your emotions by using anchors.  For instance you might want to anchor a feeling of peace and contentment. To begin you can either lie down or sit up with eyes open or closed as seems best.  Imagine a time in the past when you were feeling particularly peaceful and content.  Remember the setting and the reason for the good feelings.  Spend a few moments getting the feelings back.  When the feelings are strong connect them to a word or phrase, such as CONTENTMENT.  Repeat the sequence a few times until you have a strong connection between the feelings and CONTENTMENT. The word then becomes your anchor for feeling peaceful and content.  During the next few days, stop every once in a while and reinforce the connection.

You can anchor any emotion this way, and then use the anchor deliberately to shift your emotions.  If situations make you anxious, create an anchor for RELAX.  Lie down and remember a time when you were feeling particularly relaxed.  Connect the feeling of relaxation to RELAX.  Repeat the process until the connection is strong.  As with CONTENTMENT, during the next couple of days, stop what you are doing a few times and reinforce the connection.  If you have trouble making the connection between RELAX and relaxation use the very long, very detailed, very effective, relaxation program in the next section.

Now, the next time you begin to feel anxious you’ll be ready with your anchor.  You’ll find that you need to catch the beginning of the emotion you want to replace with your anchor.  If you wait until the emotion is full blown it will be harder to shift.

WHAT I FOUND

3.  FOLLOW THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD

A good way to find out more about an emotion that is bothering you is to follow it back down memory lane.  Before you start, make sure the RELAX anchor you just created is strong.  To make sure, spend a moment now reinforcing the connection.  Look around you, feel your body, notice any sounds---and create a pleasant feeling of peace and relaxation.  Reinforce the connection between being relaxed and grounded in your “now”, with RELAX.  Reinforce the anchor a few times, so that you can easily return to your present after you’ve explored your past.

Pick an emotion you want to explore and remember the most recent time when you experienced it.  Then use RELAX to bring yourself back to the present.  Then go a little further back in time, and so on, each time using RELAX  to return to the present---feeling peaceful, relaxation and solidly grounded in your “now”.  You may find the original source of the emotion, you may not.  Either way, you will be systematically decreasing the power of the emotion to influence your life.

It really doesn’t matter if the memories are accurate or not.  The effect will be the same.  And if you have trouble remembering times in the past, make them up.  Your brain doesn’t care.  You make them up all the time anyway.

WHAT I FOUND

4.  MORE TRAVELS DOWN THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD

You can also use this technique to change bad habits, attitudes you don’t like, prejudices, etc. First pick a better alternative to your usual reaction.  Then, as you follow the bad habit, or whatever, down memory lane, each time you find a reaction you don’t like, substitute your alternative.  Play it out in your imagination as if it were the reaction you actually had back then. Do this a few times a day for a week or so, as needed.

Then move your new reaction into the future.  Imagine situations that usually evoke the reaction you don’t like, and react with your alternative instead.

WHAT I FOUND

5.  COMPETENCE AS NEEDED

Remember a time when you were particularly competent.  Bring back what was going on.  Feel the competence you felt back then.  Make the feeling stronger---and anchor that experience and feeling with the word COMPETENCE.  Repeat in the morning as you wake up and as you go to sleep until the association is strong.

Now whenever needed, use COMPETENCE to evoke competence.

WHAT I FOUND

6.  ANCHORING BETA AND ALPHA

If you are solidly in the here and now, grounded, your brain wave frequencies are rapid, and called BETA.  As you begin to use your imagination and drift from the here and now, the frequency of the brain waves slow and move toward ALPHA.  And in deep meditation they slow down even more and become THETA and then DELTA.  Opening and closing your eyes tend to move you back and forth between BETA and ALPHA, but you can easily be in BETA with your eyes closed and ALPHA with your eyes open.

Before you do the next adventure you need a strong anchor to bring you back to your here and now---back to BETA.  This will be a reinforcement of the grounding you did in an earlier adventure.  Look around the room, feel your body, listen to the sounds around you---place yourself solidly in the here and now---and anchor the here and now with BETA.  Close your eyes---imagine a flower---let the image or touch or smell develop---and then anchor the changed level of consciousness to ALPHA.  Open your eyes and use BETA to return to the solid world of now.  Close your eyes---remember something from your past---let it develop.  Again anchor it with ALPHA.   Open your eyes and use BETA solidly to return to NOW.

Much creative work is done in ALPHA such as when you are playing the piano or painting a rose, or imagining a new theory.  BETA is needed when you drive a car.  Spend the next week deliberately moving back and forth between BETA and ALPHA.  Notice how your experience of the world changes, and how people react differently to you depending upon which state you are in.  When does one pattern work better than the other?

WHAT I FOUND

7.  EXPLORING CONSCIOUSNESS

This adventure may not be for everyone.  It is critical that you have done the previous exercise because unless you can solidly return to BETA, you’ll feel fuzzy and look spacey to your friends.  You’ll naturally return to BETA in a short while, but it’s better to do so deliberately by using your BETA anchor

Lie down, close your eyes and watch as you drift into sleep.  It’s easiest at first if you are sleepy. Notice the changes as you move from BETA to ALPHA and maybe even into THETA.  You’ll likely fall asleep a few times at first---losing awareness of what you are doing.  A trick you can use to help keep a tenuous hold over your conscious awareness is put your upper arm flat on the bed and  raise your hand and forearm off the bed pointed toward the ceiling.  They will fall down as you drift into sleep, which will wake you up to try again.  You‘ll gradually get better at maintaining your conscious awareness as your brain waves slow, and different parts of your brain become active.  Soon you won’t need the trick anymore.

In my explorations, it took a while to keep my conscious awareness active as I moved through the slowing brain waves.  As I got better, I found that there seemed to be a number of levels of consciousness as the brain waves slowed.  And then I hit a memory barrier.  My awareness continued past the barrier, but I couldn’t hold the memory and bring it back to BETA.  Maybe I’ll learn to bring back what happens on the other side of the barrier, maybe not.  What you find may be entirely different.

WHAT I FOUND

8.  MIND MELD PEOPLE

Sit in a public place, move into ALPHA, and mind meld with the people going by.  That is, use your imagination and send a part of yourself to experience how it is to be them.  When they go around the corner, bring back the part of yourself you sent out.  Do the same with the next person that comes by.  After a little practice, you’ll be surprised how easy it is.  And how different people are.

Of course if you are a materialist it’s only good, clean, fantasy fun.

WHAT I FOUND

9.  MIND MELD ROCKS AND TREES

Move into ALPHA, and as you stand in front of a rock, tree or whatever, feel its unique aliveness and vitality.  Notice how each has its own feel and personality.  Then throw your consciousness into it and experience reality from its perspective.  Whether what you experience has any validity is of course highly debatable, but what is not debatable is the fun and expansion of consciousness that this will give you.

Spend the week communing with nature, but it’s probably best not to let those around you know what you are doing.

WHAT I FOUND

10.  CRYSTAL CLEARING YOUR MIND

This old bioenergenics exercise is great for clearing your head and freshening your consciousness---and making sure that you are solidly in BETA.  I have no idea why it works. Maybe just placebo.

Sit or stand and more your head and neck down toward your chest, and then back up to vertical. Repeat three times.

Move your head and neck back toward your back and then to vertical three times.

Now three times back and forth to the right, toward your right shoulder

And now three times toward your left shoulder.

Now swivel your head around and around clockwise for three rotations.

And now swivel your head counter-clockwise three times.

Now look at your hands. Look at the room. And notice the increased brightness of your awareness.

You might want to always do this exercise after you’re played around with levels of consciousness, to make sure you are solidly back to BETA.

WHAT I FOUND

11.  FINDING A PEACEFUL, HAPPY PLACE

Carefully look around your house, or wherever you live, and find a spot that feels particularly happy and peaceful to you.  Take time to make sure it’s the right spot, and keep trying until you are sure that you have found it.  Then make the spot even more powerful by associating it with moments in your life when you have felt particularly happy, peaceful and creative.  Bring back the feelings until they are strong and let the feelings flow from you to give the spot even more power.  Go to your special place whenever you feel stressed or unhappy, or just want a quiet time to think, dream and create.

You might invite your Wise Friend from the next ELEMENT to come visit.

WHAT I FOUND

12.  MEET YOUR WISE FRIEND

Your millions of associative matrices have an immense store of skill and knowledge.  As an aid to accessing that knowledge and skill, create a Wise Friend that you can consult at any time. You can create him or her in any way you like.  You might want to picture him/her in your mind, or draw him/her.  Perhaps give him/her a name.  Make up an impressive history, full of advanced degrees and a long life, full of experience and success.  And, whenever you need help with a problem, or just want a chat, your Wise Friend will be there.

WHAT I FOUND

13.  WORKSHOP AND GAME ROOM

Create a special room in your mind where you can explore, solve problems and have fun.  The room will be an excellent additional way to access your immense store of knowledge and wisdom. You can put any kind of furniture you like in the room.  Have windows or not.  I would suggest a powerful computer and a large screen to help solve problems, go on wonderful fantasy trips, or try out new belief systems and roles. You might want to have assistants or friends in the room with you, or your Wise Friend.  You might also want to connect your computer and the screen to a truly amazing master computer that can provide support to whatever project or problem you may have.  And perhaps create a very comfortable place to sit as you use the marvelous tools in the room.  You can go to the room whenever you have a problem that needs solving, or would just like to see what you can create.

There are no limitations in your room to what you can be or do.

WHAT I FOUND

14. GOLDEN LANTERNS BY THE POND

Imagine walking through a bright red gate

Following a dark gravel path

The sound of wind and water

Fragrant flowers and damp earth

Dark shadows falling from the pine and cedar

Pebble stream and falls of rock

To a tea house on a lily pond.

Golden lanterns and many colored flags hang from the eaves

Moving slowly in the breeze.

So beautiful and quiet

A different world.

You sit down at one of the tables overlooking the pond.

And a small girl brings cookies and tea.

“We welcome you to the House of Golden Lanterns.

The cookies and tea are very special and will deeply rejuvenate your mind and body.”

She leaves and you slowly eat the nourishing cookies and drink the refreshing tea.

Spend as much time as you like at the tea house.

She will bring more cookies and tea whenever you like.

And when you are ready

Return to your everyday world

Relaxed and refreshed.

WHAT I FOUND

The rest of the book can be found at:  http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/15779