Success or failure in your work and relationships is dependent on how you manage your feelings. The trouble is, precious few of us stop to think about what we're feeling. Our attention is drawn instead to activity around us while our unnoticed inner state initiates most of our behavior. In other words, our reflexive reactions are largely motivated by feelings to which we pay little attention. This is not a recipe for success.
If I were to ask you, “What are you feeling right now?” would you know? Unless you're in the middle of an emotional event, chances are your answer would be, “I have no idea.” Roget's Thesaurus includes more than 3,000 words related to emotion, yet most of us are intimidated by our personal psychology because it's invisible and uncontrollable. So, we avoid thinking about how we feel, while at the same time, we can't stop thinking about how we feel. That's quite an interesting paradox.
So how do we begin to bring our feelings into our conscious awareness? And then how do we allow them to evaporate? You're holding the answer in your hands.
MIND TO MATTER
Do you ever feel overwhelmed by uncomfortable emotions? As if they have consumed you? Everyone has experienced this at one time or another. Because feelings are perceived as unseen and uncontrollable, they can seem like scary ghosts chasing us no matter how much we want them gone. Yet when we give form to our feelings, they suddenly have boundaries. When emotions are measurable, the mind accepts them rather than ignoring them.
What is the color of love? How heavy is sadness? What is the size of anger or the density of pain? Goodbye, Hurt and Pain will help you imagine the form and function of your feelings by looking through an organic lens. Mother Nature is a great teacher with the awe-inspiring workings of the Universe. We, too, are created with life's inherent sense of order and urge to thrive. Since our bodies are a reflection of Nature, we can use the natural world as a metaphor to solve our problems. As early as 1452, men studied birds closely in order to understand flight; the Wright brothers gained insight from observing pigeons when designing the first airplane.7 This concept is now a scientific discipline called biomimicry, which comes from the Greek words bios for “life” and mimesis “to imitate.” Similarly, Goodbye, Hurt and Pain uses Nature as metaphor to comprehend emotions better.
Physics is one of the oldest explored natural sciences—the study of matter and its motion through space and time, along with related concepts of energy and force. In general, physics helps us understand how the universe behaves. Goodbye, Hurt and Pain uses processes in physics as metaphors to give shape and movement to invisible emotions, similar to the way scientists imagined invisible forces like gravity, electricity, and electromagnetism even before their existence was proven. As feelings take form, the rational brain engages with matters of the heart, and our emotions become manageable in ways we've not considered until now.
Emotions predictably expand and contract, and throughout this book we'll look at how taming big, uncomfortable, invisible feelings and memories can help you gain an exhilarating sense of emotional mastery. Once you know how to dial in to your feelings, your native emotional intelligence begins to respond much like a self-cleaning oven, problem-solver, and success magnet. And results come quickly. You will find yourself resolving deep-rooted problems and manifesting your dreams at speeds as fast as Google search results. Again, the answers originate outside the logical mind.
You'll learn how emotions work—and how to have yours working effortlessly for you—through recent neuroscientific findings and compelling real-life stories. You will also have an opportunity to practice ramping up your own emotional intelligence through Practice It Yourself sections at the end of each chapter.
HOW I CAME TO THESE METHODS: THE STORY OF RIM
It's 1998, the phone rings, and it's my client Ellie, checking in to see if I've reopened my psychotherapy practice as planned. It's no surprise that she's calling because her work is unfinished; she's the only client I had referred to another therapist before I left on a family sabbatical to Australia. We talk, and as I hang up, I hear a voice say: “If you go back to doing what you used to do, you'll get sick.” I stop in my tracks and wonder: “Who said that?” It definitely wasn't my client, and it certainly wasn't my conscious mind. If this is my intuition speaking, it's a total surprise! Ah, I remember that's how true intuition works—it drops in without preceding thought or emotion.
This turning point in my career took me places I never expected. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, I was setting out on an adventure, moving toward something new and exciting, something I didn't know and to which I was strongly drawn. It turns out I was on a quest to discover an inventive way of working with feelings. And discover it I did.
When I began exploring a new way of processing emotions, I set aside expectations of what I believed possible and impossible. Rather, I decided to let clients show their capacities without limits. I have been amazed at the results. In fact, the speed of remarkable change in the real-life stories shared in these pages can seem almost too rapid to be believed. I and others have witnessed it time and time again. Their stories lend credence to the immense inner resilience in all of us. This evidence convincingly shows that we have a reliable system capable of processing life's experiences of pain and doubt more quickly and effectively than we previously thought. Our natural curiosity and joy can be felt more easily than we have ever considered. We just need to understand the inner code.
For the past twenty years I have been using the techniques you'll find in this book and training facilitators around the world to use them as well. We have all been continually astonished at how well they work—and how quickly. RIM student Steve Torneten received this note from a local real estate agent who had volunteered for a practice session: “I'm not sure what you did, but I've had six properties go under contract since then—about $995K of commissions. Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Similarly, another student Stephanie did a practice session with her fitness trainer. He was so grateful for his results, he gave her twelve free sessions.
The RIM in the RIM Method stands for Regenerating Images in Memory (RIM®), and the real-life stories of client experiences in this book have been guided by myself or certified facilitators I have trained. Although every story is authentic, client identities are protected, and their narratives have been condensed to only the critical moments in their RIM experiences.
RIM introduces a new paradigm or novel view of how our emotional system works. Turning away from the idea that painful experiences and feelings fracture or permanently damage you, RIM works on the principle that you have an emotional operating system that organically knows how to deepen positive feelings and dissolve painful ones. Given this inherent internal resourcefulness, the process is client-generated and guided by inner sensation and imagination. The many stories you read in this book will grow your conscious and unconscious expectation of what's possible. As your belief expands, greater personal results become possible. You may decide to go on this adventure with a book club. Transformation is easier and more fun when shared.
Since RIM is nonlinear (not protocol or logic driven), your left brain may be frustrated because it's used to knowing what to expect. Although that's how the rational mind works, it's not the nature of the unconscious, which has a mind of its own.
To learn more about how RIM works, take a look at the Questions & Answers section at the back of the book. But there's more: your purchase of this book includes a gift of an audio meditation of a Practice It Yourself session, so you can bring the process alive in the comfort of your own home. Find this gift and others at www.GoodbyeHurtandPain.com.