Tools for Creating a Life You Love

Copyright © 2017 Colleen Ann Nilson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-5043-7346-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-7348-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-7347-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017901114

Balboa Press rev. date: 06/06/2017

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Looking Under The Hood — Getting To Know Yourself

Mindfulness

Visualization/Imagination

Meditation

Mindfulness Report – Thought Processing And Replacement

Working On A Dream

Flow

Confidence, Trust, And Faith

Love, The Power To Choose And Enthusiasm

Mindfully Connecting In Relationships

Conscious Connection With Divine Energy

References

About The Author

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank my family and the community where I grew up that gave me the foundation to build on. I am also grateful for my sons, daughters-in-law and grandchildren who teach me things every day. I also want to thank my friend and mentor AJ LoScalzo who has helped and supported me in my work in countless ways. Dr. Ron Frigault, also a friend and mentor, has helped me with the process of becoming a counselor and the writing of this book. Both AJ and Ron give me the experience of being in a relationship where I feel safe to be myself. They have encouraged and supported me along with many other friends and neighbors.

I am grateful to my clients for the opportunity to be a part of their healing process.

INTRODUCTION

A t one of my first presentations as a professional counselor a woman asked me if I thought people could really change. My answer was immediate, without thought, Yes, I said, if I didn’t believe that people could change I would not be in this profession. I would not have invested thousands of dollars and years of study to get a graduate degree in counseling psychology. Driving home after the lecture, I asked myself if I really believed that people could change and again, an immediate Yes came to my mind. The belief that people can change is not just a wish, a hope or a feeling. I witness change every day.

Does it take a miracle to change? It may seem like change sometimes requires a miracle. It takes effort to change, it may seem difficult, but difficult is not impossible. Desire, awareness, knowledge, insight and persistence are required if you want to change something about yourself or your life. When you look back over a time when you have made a change in your life, it sometimes looks and feels like a miracle.

Welcome to a process of change, healing and self-fulfillment. My process is a confluence of experiences, awarenesses, research, and learning that I have acquired in both my personal and professional lives. I have gathered these tools and insights over decades of doing my own work and while working with people in correctional facilities, veterans, my private counseling practice, 12-step groups, spiritual groups, friends and family. These tools have helped me and others to become more positive, creative, confident, effective, supportive, and loving people. They have helped me and others experience a richer, more fulfilling life. I know they are effective. They work whether you are working on small problems and minor changes like losing five pounds or when you are working on major life-altering changes like loss of a loved one, divorce or addictions. They are effective whether you are challenged by a cloudy day problem or a dark night of the soul challenge. Some aspects of these tools have been used for thousands of years and some are revised, updated versions of old ideas.

These tools require conscious self-observation with an intention of self-knowledge, self-improvement, and a willingness to alter any personal habits that limit your self-expression. These tools will facilitate the construction of nurturing, positive, compassionate relationships with people in all aspects of your life. This process requires a consistent practice of focusing your attention in the present moment to observe your thoughts and feelings, without judging or repressing, but to be willing to gather information and to gain insights about your inner self dialogue. You will be rewarded with improved confidence, joy, peace, personal power and fulfillment - regardless of your current circumstances.

Changing takes practice and patience. Practice includes being a diligent observer of your thoughts, consciously deciding what thoughts are helpful and what thoughts are harmful to your life experience. You are deciding to be willing to go through the process of changing your thoughts, behaviors and ultimately your life. It takes courage to listen to your deepest thoughts, to uncover and process past hurtful memories, to allow yourself to imagine the life you long for. It takes courage to develop in your imagination the essence of the person you want to be, to set targets to manifest a different life and purposeful work and to become the person you love, and who loves and supports other people in your life. This book is really a blueprint and procedure manual for a life-long process of learning, self-discovery and development.

The process of changing harmful, limiting habits and developing new habits requires a learning curve. Every new learning objective has a learning curve which is unique to each individual. For some individuals certain learning objectives have a learning curve that is a gentle incline that takes little effort, requires no particular courage and causes little or no frustration while the same learning objective for other individuals is steep, requires courage and the patience and persistence to overcome feelings of doubt and frustration. When progress seems to have come to a halt, you must ask yourself: What is the block? What am I afraid of? Do I doubt myself? Hopefully you continue to discover and turn over new thoughts and ideas and then look at the new thoughts and ideas from different perspectives. Can you imagine the idea as a reality and goal already achieved? How will you feel when you have accomplished your goal? Are you hopeful and excited about the possible changes in your life?

At times, it may seem as though you are not making any progress. New ideas will be germinating, growing and developing in your deep inner self (subconscious). You will be presented with a challenging situation that will pull the idea up and give you a chance to implement it as a tool. At that point you will be able to choose how to use the new idea as a tool for inspiration, communication, and creation. You will be able to make the tool your own. Over time you will be able to refine your skill with the tools you have gained and use them with greater precision, over and over again.

As you improve, the people around you also have the opportunity to improve. You will attract more positive people into your life. I subscribe to the belief that a high tide raises all boats. It can be your purpose to raise the vibration of your presences by changing your attitude and your intention in any given situation. When you choose to lift your attitude and intention to a higher level, the vibration and atmosphere of your family, community and the whole human race will also have the opportunity to improve. Welcome to the great adventure of creating a life you love.

Looking Under the Hood — Getting to Know Yourself

"When you want something,

all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it.

The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

J oseph Campbell, well-known author, teacher, and scholar of mythology taught us about The Hero’s Journey. If you are reading this book, something inside you has prompted you to search for something better, something more wonderful, to experience a life greater than the life you are currently living. You, my friend, have heard the hero’s call to adventure.

Your hero’s journey begins now. Throughout the journey you will meet not only dragons and evil wizards with whom you wage battle (your fears, limiting habits and false beliefs), you also will be given the guidance, the light sabers, the magical amulets and the armor (knowledge, love, and positive beliefs) you need to face these obstacles in order to change. Your soul will remain intact; you will fight your battles with integrity, honesty, and honor. You will journey inward to yourself to win the battle, to be your best self, to find your best life. The destination is your inner place of peace, calm, focused attention, and power. Refusing the call leads to its own set of problems: frustration, unsatisfying and painful relationships, sadness, and a lack of motivation, passion, love, and joy. You must take this journey yourself, no one can take this journey for you, but paradoxically, we all take this journey together. You are never alone. Others have faced loss, gain, temptation, salvation, death, resurrections and created happy and fulfilling lives. Though you are an individual, relationships with others are a critical factor of human life. What you are affects the whole, and the other individuals that are in your life affect you.

The thoughts, feelings, and memories that you are aware of are part of your conscious mind. It is impossible for your conscious mind to hold all of your memories, thoughts and experiences in the present moment. Your subconscious becomes the repository of the myriad thoughts, feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and memories of significant and seemingly insignificant experiences that you have had since infancy. The memories of smells, colors, words, sounds, places, and textures are stored with an emotional charge. The smell of baking cookies may be a pleasant comforting reminder of a safe time for one person while it may bring up a memory of grief for a mother lost too soon for another.

As a child you did not always get to choose your experiences or the people that populated your life. You may not have had a safe adult in your life to help you process and make sense of the situations and relationships you were experiencing. The unprocessed, not understood experiences get stored in the subconscious in a raw state. Even some of your processed experiences may have been processed with the assistance of someone that may not have been a wise emotional guide, such as a parent that was an alcoholic or a parent that was still affected by their own unprocessed emotional disturbances. The contents of your subconscious affects your perspective of the events in your life, your behaviors, feelings, attitudes, and beliefs. Through this process, this journey, you will bring parts of your subconscious into your consciousness, to process, to heal and to change where necessary to improve the quality of your life, removing blocks and harmful, limiting subconscious information and beliefs.

Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis, reminds us that throughout history philosophers and scholars have used analogies to understand the human mind. Plato used the symbol of a charioteer driving two horses. One horse is passion, the second horse is reason. One horse is white; the other chestnut. They are both horses, but they look very different.

Passion and reason do not always cooperate with each other nor do they always understand each other. When we think of passion we often think of romance and creativity. Passion lives under other names such as anxiety, fear, addiction, compulsiveness, and anger which describe some of our emotions that compete with reason.

The goal is to live a rich life, not afraid of your emotions, but having the courage to feel the full range of human emotion: love, grief, loss, compassion, joy, and longing for creative expression, but not to be controlled by emotion. To be a successful charioteer, you must keep both horses under control and going in the same direction, to set a goal you are passionate about and to use your intellect to accomplish the goal.

The first basic truth of Plato’s metaphor for yourself is that you have two parts - a thinking and a feeling part. At times you may be in your thinking mind and you see an image or hear a sound and all of a sudden you feel a wave of emotion flow through your body that can change your posture and mood, or you feel the scalding wetness of a tear in the corner of your eye, or the tightening of your fist before you strike out in anger. In some instances, the emotion is so strong that you blurt out words and you have no idea of their origin. You may jump up and grab someone or hit someone without consulting your thinking mind. This emotional impulse may be essential for survival when you grab a child before he runs into the street or when you jump out of the way of an oncoming danger.

The sudden emotion may be sexual arousal or attraction. This may be an ancient biological impulse to insure the survival of the species, an emotional need for bonding or a modern day addiction to pleasure seeking. The emotions of shame, guilt, embarrassment, disgust, self-doubt, and insecurity are psycho-social -- meaning they have their roots in your relationships and community.

It has been many decades since Sigmund Freud began his practice and much has been learned about the human psyche. Freud suggested that the human subconscious plays a major role in the development of your personality and the creation of your life. He suggested that our conscious mind is only the tip of the iceberg.

Freud described the mind as the Id (the animal, impulsive, needs meeting part of the mind), the Ego (the I/me, personal identity center of the mind), and the Super-conscious (the part of the mind that tells you when you are doing something wrong, but can also encourage and support you).

Using a driver and carriage to illustrate this concept, the Id, the wild part of the mind that needs to be tamed in order to be useful is the horse. The Ego, controlling the horse and deciding the course of the carriage, is the driver. The Super-conscious is your father or mother in the back seat telling the driver - you - what you are doing wrong. We all have these and many other aspects of ourselves that have developed over our lifetimes.

What are the different aspects of yourself that you have developed and nurtured over your life time? What about your inner child? Is he/she playful, creative and safe or is he/she anxious and fearful, lacking in confidence? Do you have an adult aspect that can be objective, calm and safe? Do you have a harsh critic, whose voice is a constant navigator? Do you have a caring compassionate mentor, an inner advocate who can encourage, support, and motivate you? Do you have a creative problem solver, who is calm but curious? Are you able to be a risk taker when a good opportunity comes along, or does your cautious security-seeker keep you from exploring possibilities?

These are a few of the possible facets of your personality. These aspects of your self can sometimes get out of balance and then hold you back or perhaps drive you to destruction.

What aspects of yourself currently have control? Perhaps your inner critic is abusive and makes you so anxious that you have a hard time learning or trying something new. Perhaps your inner child gets so restless that it becomes an unwise risk taker, thinking that you have nothing to lose when in reality you have much to lose.

You may not know or even recognize some of the aspects of yourself. There are subconscious aspects of yourself like computer programs that are constantly running but not showing up on your screen of conscious awareness. You may not realize that you can create, install, nurture and improve new aspects of yourself. Finding and strengthening existing, positive aspects of yourself or creating and installing new, positive aspects of yourself is possible and can be an exciting, rewarding adventure. I am going to share with you tools to help you uncover your subconscious thought patterns, change or correct the thought, emotion and behavior patterns that are limiting your experience of life, and create and install new, creative, productive thought, emotion and behavior patterns that will expand and improve the quality of your life.

Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis, 2006), a contemporary psychologist, suggests a new metaphor of an elephant and rider as a symbol for the human mind. The elephant, he believes, is our subconscious, while our conscious mind is the tiny rider trying to control the elephant.

Training an elephant must be a daunting task. They are large, powerful, and willful. I recently rescued a year-old black lab, Grace. She’s strong, smart, and willful. She had been running wild on the streets. I think she is capable of becoming a therapy dog but just getting her to settle down and follow commands has been difficult and frustrating. She is impulsive. Taking her for a walk on a leash was like a wrestling match. Every time she saw another dog, a rabbit, or a squirrel she would bolt, with my arm on the other end of the leash.

Grace and I attended dog training classes. I realized I had to get to know her, and she had to get to know me. I needed tools to communicate and train her. I needed to slow down and engage with her eye to eye. I needed to know precisely what I wanted and expected Grace to do. I needed to train myself as well as Grace.

Now, Grace and I are negotiating our learning curve. Although I’ve never trained an elephant, it seems to be a similar process.

Think about this: if your subconscious is like a powerful elephant, you need skills and tools 1) to get to know (your subconscious thought patterns, needs, wounds, fears, triggers and desires), to engage and to communicate with your friend, the elephant (your subconscious); 2) to learn what you subconsciously believe and expect of yourself (both positive and limiting) and of life; and 3) to train the elephant to cooperate with your conscious needs and desires. Your elephant is very powerful, but to get further down the road of life, your elephant must be properly trained.

Painting some word pictures is important and useful at this point. I want you to exercise your brain to imagine the sights, sounds and feelings of the different situations I am going to describe so that you can identify your own feelings and behaviors with that of the elephant and person relating with the elephant.

The first picture I want you to imagine is a wild, unmanageable elephant in a small village of thatched hut homes. The elephant is upset, perhaps hurt or even wounded. In its pain and fear the elephant has lost control, trampling houses, and destroying the village. The people who live in the village are terrified. Some of them are running away from the elephant, some are hiding, some are thinking about how they can stop the elephant.

Now, the elephant has created a catastrophe and is himself in danger. Have you ever damaged something precious with an impulsive act? Have you ever frightened or hurt people around you causing them to run or hide? Have you ever had others use force to get you under control? Or perhaps, you have been the person terrified and damaged by another person raging out of control.

The second picture is of a person who has befriended the elephant. This person has calmed