A client confided to me: “I keep forgetting to do what you told me – meditate on good memories and amplify good feelings.”
Do you feel like this sometimes? You know what to do to make your life better, but you keep forgetting. Yet, you never forget to run through your negative internal dialogues, access old hurts and amplify them, meditate on difficulties and personal limitations. So why not do the same with good feelings and good memories?
Long ago I had a friend who would say with a deep sign: “Sometimes I wash the dishes and then think, Oh, I nearly forgotten – Its probably time to have sex with my husband…Darn it! Another chore!” Yet, when they just got married, this “chore” was fun and exciting and they would dedicate a significant portion of time to it. How do we lose our dedication to fun and pleasure? They both still had two perfectly good bodies capable of producing an infinite variety of pleasant feelings. Yes, sure it would require more creativity and more dedication to keep it from becoming a chore, but the investment would bring them great reward.
On the other side, if you have somebody with an addiction, like smoking, they never forget about it. In Seattle people are forbidden to smoke inside office building or near them. So people who smoke
never forget to interrupt their work, go outside, often they have to ride an elevator down 20 something stores and then go and find a place to have a smoke while getting drenched in Seattle rain. This is dedication. What if we become obsessed with feeling pleasure, having fun and generally make life more enjoyable instead of seeing life as a series of chores or a performance that is
always judged?
Some people obsessively wash hands because they believe they may get sick. But they never think about the dangers of allowing feelings like anxiety, worries, fear run inside our bodies. It is not a metaphorical danger – those neurochemicals are toxic. And not many people realize that even though it may seems that they are motivating and help us stay on top of things, our bodies are not designed to have them circulating in our system for months and years.
What if we become obsessed with cleaning our mind from toxic emotions and do it obsessively? Think about it – when we go out we never forget to dress up. We never forget to put on a pair of pants or a skirt. Yet, we keep forgetting to spend a few moment to put ourselves in a resourceful and vibrant state of mind. As my mentor Dr. Richard Bandler says, “When you dress up in the morning, dress up your attitude”. I’ve been living by those words for the past two years and I can testify – the more you do it, the easier it becomes. And the more you try to have bad feelings with this kind of attitude, the more you feel like it is a waste of time.
Did you remember get dressed this morning? Now it is time to dress up your attitude!