Forgiveness… it is espoused by very nearly any program for personal growth or healing, whether scientific, religious, or new age.  The reason behind the effectiveness of forgiveness is not mystical, however.  The reason that forgiveness is so essential is simple:  True forgiveness involves releasing your hold on grudges that are constantly draining your mental energy.`

When you hold on to grudges, you are devoting mental energy to maintaining them and the emotions that you associate with them.  Since we’re talking about grudges here, this also means that emotions you are devoting your energy to holding on to are negative .  Think about it… you are intentionally causing yourself to feel bad feelings.  That doesn’t make sense, but if you allow your subconscious mind control, things don’t have to make sense.

1. Understand What Forgiveness Is

   True forgiveness begins with acknowledging and accepting responsibility for any emotions that you attach to an act.  “They” didn’t make you angry.  “They” did something, and you became angry.  The difference between the two is critical.  The first one assigns blame for the feeling, and responsibility to change that feeling, to the person who committed the act.  The second one brings it back to where it belongs: you.

   Forgiveness always comes from within, never from outside.  That is because outsiders have no control over the emotions, the feelings, inside of you.  The best they can do is inspire you to decide to change yourself.

2. Understand What Forgiveness Is Not

   Forgiveness is not justifying or forgetting.  It is not pretending like nothing happened, or letting actions go without consequence merely for the sake of “forgiveness”.

   Many people confuse forgiving an act with justifying the act.  When you justify an act, you search for reasons to show that the act was never bad, right from the beginning.  But that doesn’t fool your subconscious… it knows what you really feel, what you really believe, and so it will continue to hold negative emotions, though your consciousness may disguise them as feeling guilty either for having provoked the action, or for not having truly “forgiven” it.  Your consciousness is not fooled by false justification… and if you REALLY believe the act was completely, 100% justified, then you’ll have no forgiveness to grant.

   Forgetting and pretending nothing happened are actually the same thing… because you’re highly unlikely to ever truly forget.  Once you feel like an act has harmed you, your subconscious stores it away in patterns having to do with getting hurt, so that it can recognize similar situations in the future and act to avoid that hurt.  Thus, both of these things are false fronts, and do not contribute in positive ways to either you or the person who you want to forgive.

   Letting actions go without consequence is VERY commonly mistaken for forgiveness.  In reality, it’s one of the worst choices you can make.  If actions have no consequences attached, then the person committing those actions doesn’t learn anything from them.  If someone does something that hurts you, and there are NO bad consequences, they will do so again in the future in the same situation.  Now keep in mind, knowing that they hurt you may be a bad consequence for some people, but even then, that still requires that you let them know that they hurt you.  That means that without consequences for the action, not only did you get hurt, but the person who did it won’t even learn that they did something wrong.

3. Understand Why Forgiveness Is Important

   Negative emotions have a natural tendency to become entangled.  That means that when you attach negative emotions to an act, those emotions become entangled with any OTHER negative emotions you have tied to another act.  They become one interconnected mass, the total size of which grows with each new act to which you attach negative emotions.  The fact that they are entangled also means that as you add more to this mass, already existing emotions become harder to release, and new ones are more likely to stick.

   This entangled mass is what causes situations where one annoying but inconsequential act snowballs into massive amounts of negative emotions.  Basically, it catches onto the existing entanglement of negatives and rips the whole thing into your conscious awareness, but WITHOUT THE REASONS BEHIND THE WHOLE THING.  That is, all of your negative emotions that you have piled up get focused on this one, inconsequential thing, and so you completely overreact, out of all proportion to the “cause”.  Often, you won’t know, even later, WHY you did that… so you’ll come up with some sort of reason that half fits.

   All that energy that you are dumping into holding onto this entanglement of negatives is energy that could be spent to improve your current life, work for the future, deepen relationships, or any number of other things.  Because of inertia, though, you continue to spend that energy on anger, frustration, pain, and other bad things from past events.  If you were to consciously choose which thing to spend your energy on, what would you choose:  positive things in the present and future, or negative things from the past?

4. Take Action

   Letting the negative emotions attached to an act go is an intentional action.  You choose to stop devoting the energy to continue feeling the hurt.  You choose to untangle the negative emotions from the act you are forgiving from whatever other emotions onto which you are holding.  You acknowledge that the act hurt you, but that it is in the past, and that you’re only slowing yourself down by holding onto those emotions.

   Once you have let the emotions associated with an act go, you can make practical choices about how to respond to the action.  You can decide, in fact, if it’s worthy of a response other than to note it in passing.  Some acts may not be.  Others may require you to respond drastically.  With your sight cleared of all the negative filters from anger, pain, or whatever else, you can actually make these choices consciously and in an educated manner.  You will no longer feel the desire to simply strike out, to make someone else pay for your hurt.   That means that you can choose appropriate consequences, and actually let go of the attention you were giving to the act (this includes subconscious attention, which is actually the most dangerous kind, since it’s difficult to recognize as even being present, let alone the cause of stress and bad feelings).

Forgiveness can be a cascading event.  Forgiving one action removes some of the negative emotions from the entangled mass present in most of us.  As anyone who has untied a nasty knot can tell you, each thread you remove makes the rest easier to detangle.  You also learn the process, and become adjusted to it, making it even easier to do.  You may find that with a few conscious efforts at forgiving specific acts, it starts to become natural… though you will still find instances that require your conscious attention from time to time.

True forgiveness requires conscious acknowledgement of an event that hurt you and the negative emotions that you attach to it.  It requires that you acknowledge these feelings, and then let them go.  It requires you to take responsibility for the feelings that you associate with the act, because as long as you blame someone else for making you feel that way, you won’t be ABLE to let them go (how can you let feelings someone else controls go?).

But most importantly, true forgiveness opens up a huge amount of your life and energy that were closed off by those negative emotions.  It makes it FAR easier to be happy and at peace.  Those things you aren’t fogiving are anchors holding you back from the happiness, the joy, the life that you could be experiencing.

Get rid of your anchors.  Forgive someone today!

The power of words is multiplied as the spoken word multiplies… often having consequences far beyond what the speaker intended.

You’ve heard stories about, and maybe even been affected by, the power of gossip and rumors.  You probably have experience with someone letting something slip to someone they shouldn’t have, where it came back to bite you.  You’ve even heard of the power of “word of mouth” when it comes to advertising or gaining customers.  These are all some of the more obvious signs of the power of the spoken word.

The spoken word is of immense power.  Something you mention off-hand can completely alter the course of the life of someone who hears it… even someone who overhears it.  You might mention to your friend as you’re walking that you’re tired of having to deal with one of your vendors, and someone you’re passing by right at that moment may hear you and start a company to compete with that vendor, eventually becoming the biggest company in that industry… all because of your off-hand comment.

That is the power of the word with an individual.  But the REAL power of the spoken word is that it multiplies.  You tell one person something, and they pass on what they heard… which is NOT necessarily the same thing that you said.  This often happens whether you want it to or not.

What that means is that you really need to watch what you say.  People around you will remember what you say even after you’ve forgotten that you ever said it.  Not only that, but they will pass it on, either through actual words, or through the way their behavior is modified because your words altered their perceptions of whatever you were talking about.

Tying this back to a recent article of mine, 8 Ways To Show Your Husband You Love Him, one of the very common, very nasty examples of this is when one spouse goes into detail about the faults of the other with friends and family.  Many times, they even seem to enjoy getting as low as they can, reporting even things that are temporary or very private (ie “He’s insecure about his competency when it comes to his job”… that sort of thing is told with the expectation of privacy, and should not be passed along).  You can easily predict what this is going to do to the way the people hearing it view the object of the conversation.  This effect is, of course, even stronger when the words are repeated, first of all by the original speaker, and then afterward by those who hear it among themselves and others.

Every spoken word affects every person who hears it.  The amount it affects them is, to be honest, completely unpredictable to the speaker.  It might be something they dismiss immediately, which never even gets committed to long-term memory.  On the other hand, the smallest thing can trigger massive surges of thoughts and feelings in someone, for reasons the speaker may know nothing about.

It even affects the person doing the speaking.  Saying something makes you think about it, and makes you give a concept the extra attention necessary to break it into things that can be communicated in words.  That extra attention gives it more importance to your subconscious, as well as making you think about each of the individual components, not just the overall concept.  That can be either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what it is, and what your perception of that is.  In other words, if you are communicating your idea for a new business, and speaking about it causes you to break it down into components, which you then think about, that is probably a good thing… it clarifies your idea and makes it more concrete.  On the other hand, if what you are communicating is how your wife never does this or that, and you then break that down into details (even if it’s only in your mind, not communicated), then you are adding negative thoughts and emotions not only to your life in general at that point, but also to your overall perception of your wife, so that those thoughts and emotions weigh, however slightly, every time you think about your wife.

The moral of this story is to be very careful what you say.  Communication is a great thing, especially when it is both useful and effective.  Communicating negative things, however, unless it is a needed warning, usually has more of a net harm than benefit.  That is, warning someone of something negative that affects them is good.  Reporting something negative to someone who it doesn’t affect, however, generally causes more harm than good, as it makes you think more about those negative things yourself, thus emphasizing them in your perceptions, and possibly altering the listener’s perception of the object of your conversation in a negative, unnecessary, and quite possibly unjustified way.

As I said in the beginning, the power of words is multiplied as the spoken word multiplies… often having consequences far beyond what the speaker intended.

Steve Pavlina recently wrote an article on Achieving Peak Motivation through use of polarity.

In it, he writes:

Love polarization means you adopt the mindset of unconditional love for everything that exists.  You center your life around serving the highest good of all.  This commitment stems naturally from the decision to align yourself with the polarity of unconditional love.  Think of this as an outward flow of energy.  Your focus is on giving and on making a contribution.

Fear polarization means you become unconditionally self-centered, driven by greed, power, and lust.  Your commitment is to make your life the best it can possibly be, purely for your own self-gratification. Think of this as an inward flow of energy.  Your focus is on acquiring and absorbing all that life has to offer you.

While I don’t disagree with his two types of motivation, I disagree with his labels.  I think that what he is really describing is a positive (what he calls love) and negative (what he calls fear) aspect of the love polarity.  I think the real love and fear polarities go deeper than that, that they have a more fundamental difference than whether you love yourself most or all people equally.

When you orient yourself toward the love polarity, you look at things from the perspective of wanting to bring certain things INTO your life, whether it be love, money, or something else.  You are seeking an inflow of energy, of life, bringing things into yourself.  Your focus is on bringing the good things to you.

When you orient yourself toward the fear polarity, on the other hand, you are looking at things from the perspective of wanting to keep something OUT of your life.  This can be loneliness, or poverty, or any number of other things.  You are expending your energy outward, pushing things away (though you may be doing it by trying to bring certain other things into your life, your focus is on keeping the bad things away).

As Steve says when talking about polarities, love and fear can both be incredibly powerful motivators.  If you understand them, and use the power of conscious choice to make one a cornerstone of who you are, it can provide sustained high motivation in a way that little or nothing else can.  Choosing the one that conflicts with your natural tendencies (read subconsciously learned tendencies) is one of the most difficult decisions to make stick, but it can still be done, you just have to keep at it.

If you choose the love polarity, you can then choose within that polarity from the two aspects Steve presents.  If you choose the fear polarity, though I’m not certain that anyone would ever make that choice consciously, then there are probably similar positive and negative aspects, though I have chosen love, so I can’t be certain.  Either way, make the choice consciously… don’t leave it up to your subconscious, or you may not like the results.

You are who you choose to be.  That can be a difficult pill to swallow.  It means that you are responsible for yourself and everything that you do.  All the good parts about you, and all the bad, are of your own choosing, though you may not be specifically aware of the choice (or choices) that led to specific traits.

It is also difficult because it is difficult to accept the power that gives you.  If you have the power to control who you are, then anything you can no longer blame anyone else, including your parents, for whatever traits you don’t like about yourself.  If you can control how you react to any given situation, then any time in the past that you have responded poorly, it was 100% your fault.  That’s a very unpleasant concept, and makes it difficult to accept the power of conscious choice.  If you don’t accept it, then you can continue to deny the blame… though that doesn’t mean it belongs any less to you, you can at least deny it, even to yourself.

You’re making the choice of who you want to be already, whether you know it or not.  Your conscious mind makes the choices, but it can lie to itself, though not to your subconscious.  You can tell yourself that you want to be this way or that way, but not really mean it, down at the level where thoughts turn into concrete decisions and actions.  You may say you want to be generous, for example, but below that, you may have a fear of scarcity that keeps you from acting out what you say you want.

When you accept the conscious power of choice, you take the power from these lower layers, where such fears dwell, and bring it up into your awareness.  Now you can take those things that you say you want to be and consciously examine them to determine if that really is who you want to be, rather than something you think you should be because others tell you so.  If it’s truly who you want to be, then you can take it from just words, and turn it into a decision, and embed that decision in the bedrock of who you are.

How long it takes to do that depends on how truly you have let go of the concept of powerlessness.  When you have truly let it go, and completely understand and accept that you are who you choose to be, change, even drastic change, can be nearly instant (referring to a change in who you are, not what you are… changes to your physical body will still take time, though quite possibly considerably less, since you will not be conflicted and fighting yourself).  If you are just beginning, it may take several times making the decision to add or remove a trait to really embed it deeply.

Once you accept this power, it also leads you to the knowledge and acceptance that all of your emotions come from inside you, too.  You choose which emotions to feel, and how strongly, though often your choice may not be “I’m going to be extraordinarily happy right now”, but something more like “Those circumstances will no longer bring anger or pain”.  That’s not to say that you can’t make decisions about how to feel and make them instant, but it takes more work, more energy, and therefore is not as common.

After you’ve accepted the power of conscious choice, and experienced it for a while, you are almost certain to be more at peace.  In fact, it’s hard to NOT have that as your default state.  After all, if who you are, what you do, how you feel and react, if everything about you is your choice, what is there to be conflicted about?  You may lose your peace from time to time, when you slip and give up your conscious choice, letting your subconscious back into control, but as soon as you return to conscious awareness of choice, your peace will return.

Incidentally, when you have this state of conscious awareness of choice as your normal state, other people will notice.  People may turn to you for leadership, since they can see that you have it together.  They may come to you with questions and problems, some of which you may wonder why they thought you could help.  They are likely to give you trust, often trust far beyond what they should give someone they know to the extent they know you… you may find strangers telling you things they would be better off keeping to themselves.  Most of all, they will see you as someone they should emulate, which can bring positive or negative responses.

Acceptance of that awareness, the power of conscious choice, is good for you and good for others.  It can bring peace and harmony to you, as well as improving your ability to make choose the path that is best for you in any number of circumstances (the best for you in the sense that it fits who you are the best, not in the sense that it brings the most gain to you in the eyes of the outside world).   It shows other people that “people” can learn to respond to situations in the way they choose, rather than just letting their subconscious respond.  It shows them that ongoing, lasting peace is attainable by someone they know, not just some Tibetan monk chanting in a Buddhist temple.  It might even lead them to the knowledge that they, too, are who they choose to be.

Update:  On a personal note, I went through this process of realization and becoming aware the first time around ten years ago.  At the time, I had been suffering from severe clinical depression for years, though I had never been treated for it.  My depression caused me to sleep very little, until I was down to about 45 minutes per night, which causes all sorts of interesting experiences after a few days (or weeks).  It got to the point where I was hospitalized, and for the first time given medication to help (I think the medicine they gave me to let me sleep helped nearly as much as the anti-depressants).  I was given a month’s worth of Prozac, and that really helped… it pushed back the funk far enough that I could actually think clearly.  It was at this point that I began (I still have slips) to acknowledge control of my own thoughts, feelings, and actions.  Since then, I have had one major backslide into depression (which was around seven years ago), where I needed medicine to help.  Again, I only needed one month’s worth of aid from the pills, and I got my mind straightened back out.  Since then I have had a few slips, including one just the other day, but now they only last hours.  I have taken ownership enough that it has changed my subconscious mind’s natural reaction to bad things, where instead of dwelling on them, I consider them and let them go.  I can’t even begin to accurately describe how much of a difference that makes… it’s an absolutely amazing change.

Most people can barely find a moment’s peace in their hectic lives, yet others, who accomplish the same amount, simply radiate peace at all times.  There is a simple but difficult step that will move you from the former group toward the latter.

It is hard to find peace.  There are few, if any, people who will deny that.  There is a reason why it is hard to find peace… and that’s because you lose the peace in your seeking.  Peace is inside you, in your heart and in your mind.  By seeking peace, you are looking at it as outside of you.  Since it is, in reality, inside you, you will never find it by seeking it.

Yet those people mentioned in the first paragraph have “found” peace.  They did so by learning that it was inside themselves, and giving up seeking it.  You have control of virtually everything inside you, and can have more or less of it.  Yet when you move it outside of yourself, you lose control of it.  This is true for peace, happiness, sadness, anger… even mental focus and creativity.  As soon as you make it something other than you, you lose the ability to control when you will have it and how much of it you will have.

When you seek for something to bring you happiness, you are, by that very act, placing the happiness outside of yourself.  You’re saying “If only I had that, I would be happy”.  When you say that, you are wrong.  Even if you are happy when you have “that”, by tying your happiness to “that”, you allow someone else to take it away by taking away “that”.

It works similarly with anger.  When you allow something outside of you make you angry, you are giving up control of something internal.  Others can control you by doing whatever it is that makes you angry.  You can take that control back by understanding that it is truly your choice to allow them to make you angry, that if you merely reframe the situation, it would not make you angry at all, and therefore it is not the situation that is making you angry, it is your perception of it, thus taking control back for yourself.

When you look inside yourself, to who you truly are, and accept that true self, you can have peace and happiness at will.  All you have to do is turn back to the you that is inside, rather than the outside persona that you assume for the benefit of others.  Any time you turn away from that internal self, and seek validation from outside yourself, you are giving up control of your own internal self.  You are giving it to people or circumstances outside yourself, allowing them to decide whether you are at peace, sad, happy, angry, focused or distracted.

To move from always seeking and never finding to never seeking and always having, take control back for yourself.  Understand that everything that you do, and everything that you feel, is inside you.  Everything is your own choice… and if everything is your own choice, then all the power to choose who you are is yours, too.  You are that which you choose to be.

Remember that…

You are that which you choose to be.

While schools teach many useful things, there are some things they regrettably do not.  It is good to know science, history, and mathematics, and English is essential for those of us who live in the United States, but one of the most important things of all for any male to learn is left in the dust.  One of the most important things to learn as a boy is how to be a man.

The first place that you learn what it means to be a man is your father, and you learn more by his example than by his words, though you DO still learn from his words.  That puts children whose father never “grew up” mentally and emotionally at a serious disadvantage.  If the person from whom you are learning to be an adult still acts like a child, then that is what you will learn.

That means that if you are a father, you need to be especially careful, because your children, and your sons in particular, are going to be watching you.  They will learn from what you do, learning what is right and what is wrong, what is acceptable and what is not, so it is essential that you make sure that you behave the way you want them to learn to behave.  It is also essential that you spend time with them, to give them the opportunity to learn from you.

So what happens to children who do not have a father from whom to learn?  They must find someone else to teach them.  Unfortunately, children have no way of knowing who is a good choice and who is a bad choice, so they will mostly simply find whoever is most convenient.  That’s one reason that mentoring programs are such a great thing… they can provide a good example to learn from.

With all of the above said, what is it that distinguishes a man from a boy?  What can you look at to say whether someone is a good man?  Most importantly of all, for the males reading this, what can you look at inside yourself, and what can you learn, in order to be that good man?   Here is a list of the core attributes of a man:

1. Honor

   This is the core, the all encompassing attribute of what it means to be a man.  It includes all of the other attributes, blended into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.  Honor means you tell the truth, even when it hurts.  Honor means you take care of your responsibilities.  Honor means you live up to any committment you make, even when it’s hard.  Honor means taking care of those weaker than you.  Honor means all of these things and more… and you know it when you see it, whether in a person you meet or in a character in a movie (think Leonidas in 300).  Maintaining your honor is essential to being a man, but part of maintaining your honor is knowing which of its components is more important when they are in conflict.

2. Integrity

   Integrity is all about truth.  That means being truthful everywhere and to everyone, including yourself.  It means don’t pretend to be something or someone that you are not.  It means accepting the truth of who you are, and if you don’t like it, accepting the responsibility of changing it, not just acting like it’s not even there.  A man of integrity is true to himself, true to others, and true to his word.  He doesn’t need to swear an oath or make a promise, because his yes means yes and his no means no.

3. Responsibility

   Responsibility is another essential component.  A man must take responsibility for his own choices, both to himself and to others.  That means that you cannot blame others for things you do, or the way you are, because they can only influence you to the extent that you choose to allow them.  If you accept responsibility for something, it is up to you to make sure it is done, and to accept the blame if it is not, regardless of why it is not.  If you cannot be sure that you can do it, then do not say that you will.

4. Respect

   A man gives respect to those around him until they show that they are not worthy of it.  And even then, he gives them the opportunity to earn it back.  All interactions with others should be done inside the framework of respect… even if someone has shown that their behavior is not worthy of respect, you can respect their knowledge and/or expertise in whatever areas they have it.  Also keep in mind that regardless of whether someone is worthy of your respect or not, you should still treat them with respect… just be aware of it in your expectations of them and their behavior.

5. Faithfulness

   Responsibility is about following through on what you say you will do.  Faithfulness is about following through on the things that you should be doing whether or not you have said you will.  Faithfulness is about going the extra mile to do the right thing in the right way, even if it means going beyond what you said you would do.  Faithfulness is what comes after responsibility… when you don’t just do things because you said you would and you feel like you’re stuck with it now, but instead do them because they are the right thing to do.

6. Compassion

   Compassion is one of the primary things that differentiates man from animal, and man from machine.  When you feel that other people are individuals, with their own worth, and their own value, worthy of your help, your work, and your consideration on their own merit, then you have compassion.  Compassion isn’t feeling sorry for people, it’s feeling that they are worthy of your time and effort, and then giving it to them.  You shouldn’t just feel compassion for those in worse situations than you, you should feel it for everyone.  Everyone should be worthy of your time and effort when they need help with something.

7. Strength

   Strength is another part of being a man that is commonly misunderstood.  Strength isn’t about not admitting your weaknesses (or mistakes), it’s not about not having or showing emotions, and it’s not about how much weight you can lift.  Strength is about following through on all of the things above.  Strength is doing what you should be doing, regardless of how hard it is or how you feel about it.  It actually shows far more strength to admit your weaknesses and mistakes, and then do something about them (I cannot emphasize that enough… admitting weaknesses and mistakes may be hard, but the real sign of strength is that you then do something to fix, or compensate for, them), than it does to try to hide them or pretend they don’t exist.

That’s what it takes to be a man instead of an adult boy.  Every male has it in them to do the things listed above, and every male will fail at each of them at some point.  The difference is that for a man, the failure is the exception, not the rule, and when they fail at one of them, they pick themselves back up and get back to it.

Do you have bad dreams, whether nightmares of being chased or just those really intense, weird dreams that leave you more drained than before you went to sleep?  There’s a really simple process that, when done regularly, will very nearly eradicate such dreams, leaving you sleeping like a baby.

As you probably already know, dreams are generally related in some way to events that happened or things you thought about during the day.  While your mind is at rest, your subconscious starts bringing up all these little things from the day that didn’t quite get taken care of, and the conscious mind, since you are sleeping, tries to piece all these small, mostly unrelated, things together into something coherent.  Since most of the stuff is not particularly related, trying to force it into something coherent can leave you with those really weird dreams.

Nightmares generally come about when one of those things that you didn’t finish during the day is particularly intense and you perceive it in a negative manner.  That could be something like financial worries, or feelings of being stuck, or fear of being rejected.  Pretty much any thoughts that are emotionally charged in a negative way can cause bad dreams.

The intensity of your dreams is generally determined by the intensity of the emotions that you associated with the things that you didn’t resolve during the day.  If a really negatively charged event happens, or if you are feeling very strongly negative about something, you can have some very intense nightmares.  Losing your job, or fearing that you are likely to do so, can result in some nasty dreams.  So can having a relationship end, or the belief that it will.  Anything that is that strongly charged with negative emotions can leave you in bad shape when it comes to dreaming.

So, now that you know where bad dreams come from, what can you do about it?  Well, it’s actually very simple, although not always easy, to do.   And it only takes about fifteen minutes.

The process is simple.  Start off by finding a comfortable and quiet spot where you can be by yourself about fifteen minutes (the time it takes can vary depending on you and how intense your day was) before you go to bed.  Make sure that the lights aren’t too bright, although you don’t really want it dark either… light about equivalent to a 40 watt bulb works well for most people.  When finding this spot, try to avoid it being your bed, and in fact, try to find some place you can sit, rather than lay down.

Once you have your spot, let your mind start to drift.  Do NOT try to control what you think about… don’t actively TRY to think about the events from the day, just let any thoughts that come up float about until they leave on their own.  The same goes for emotions that come up… let them come up, float around, and drift off on their own.  What you are doing is allowing your subconscious to bring up all the things it needs to bring up, but while you are awake, instead of asleep.  This allows you to deal with them in a way that actually makes sense, instead of trying to piece them together into some sort of story line.

Let this continue until the flow of thoughts, feelings, and images slows down, hopefully even coming to a stop, where you reach internal quiet.  If you reach this point, you will find that you have more peace throughout your life, not just more peaceful sleep.  Even if you don’t quite reach the point of quiet, though, you’ll still have dealt with much of the stuff that would generally cause your bad dreams.  You DO need to keep at it until your thoughts slow, though, because the surface, shallow stuff will come out first, and what you need to get rid of is the deeper stuff that only comes up once all the little stuff is dealt with.

This process will generally take about fifteen minutes, but the time can vary.  If you do it regularly, especially if you do it more than just before bed, the time necessary can drop considerably.  On the other hand, if you had a really eventful and stressful day, it may take longer, as you have more things to deal with.  Just keep at it until your thoughts slow or stop.

One last thing… this has to be some place that you feel safe and unlikely to be interrupted.  Interruptions can cause you to have to start all over again, even if it’s from someone you love, like your wife or child, as they interrupt the flow of thoughts.  You also likely won’t relax enough if you expect to be interrupted, even if it doesn’t actually happen.  Same goes for feeling safe… if you don’t feel safe, you won’t relax enough to let the stuff start flowing.

If you do this every day, you will essentially never have nightmares again.  You’ll also find that you get better sleep, and likely even need less of it.  You’ll feel better rested and more focused.  With all of that waiting for you, and only costing fifteen minutes of your time, what are you waiting for?

The Law Of Attraction, or LOA, essentially says that whatever your dominant thoughts are about, more of that thing will manifest in your life.  One of the common examples is having an “abundance mindset”, or to use a better known phrase, seeing the world as your oyster, waiting for you to pluck out the pearl.  What’s interesting about the LOA is that it actually works.

So why do some people use mysterious, unexplainable terms to describe a process that has a simple, common sense explanation?  Because it sells.  If you explain something, even something new and useful, to a person in terms so simple that they feel like it’s common sense, they won’t tell anyone else about it.  Why not?  Because they don’t want the other person to think, or worse yet say, “Duh, everybody knows that.”

On the other hand, if you DO use mysterious, unexplainable terms, they will tell all KINDS of people, because they think it makes them sound like they know something special, that they are knowledgeable in an area where most people are not.  This make them feel special and smart, which is a good thing to make someone feel if you want to sell them something (ask anyone who knows anything at all about marketing).

How does this apply to this article?  Well, there are sources out there, like The Secret, whose logo appears above, that explain the LOA in the way mentioned above.  They use terms like “universal intelligence” (meaning a single awareness that encompasses all of existence) or “secret teachers”, intending to instill exactly the feelings I mentioned.

There is an easier, non-mystical explanation of the LOA.  If you think about something more, you become more aware of it, or things that affect it, around you.  Have you ever noticed that right after you or someone close to you buys a new car, you start seeing a lot more of those cars around you?   Or, more applicable to the topic, have you noticed that when something is on your mind, like you think maybe your significant other is cheating, that you notice all sorts of things related to that thought?

When we think about something, we are telling our subconscious that it is important, and should be brought to our attention.  The more we think about it, the more we are reinforcing this message, giving whatever it is more and more priority in terms of having it and things related to it brought to our conscious awareness from the jumble of constant input from reality.  It becomes more and more likely to get past the filters that the subconscious has in place to keep our conscious awareness from being flooded and overwhelmed.

Since more things about the thought or related to the thought are coming to our attention,we perceive things in a way that is colored by that thought that keeps coming up.  This means that if you have been thinking, as in the example above, that your wife is cheating, when you smell a new perfume on her, you may perceive it as being an attempt to impress “the other man”.  If you hadn’t been thinking that, you might instead think “Oh, she smells good.  I’ll have to ask her to wear this one more often.”  That’s a pretty huge difference.

So what happens when you start perceiving things through the lens of whatever thought has been dominant lately?  It changes which actions seem to make the most sense, which ones are better suited to achieving your goals, be they conscious or subconscious.  Again from the example above, the choices which bring you toward the subconscious goal of “don’t get hurt”, which nearly everyone has,  are very different when you don’t trust your spouse.  This obviously affects which choices you make, thus affecting your actions, and bringing about the manifestation of your most dominant thoughts, as the LOA says will happen.

So, to summarize, when you think about something more often, you are telling your subconscious to alert you to things related to it.  As it does so, this affects your perception of the situations around you.  This changing perception, in turn, causes certain choices to look more appealing, making you more likely to make those choices and take the actions associated with them.  Taking these actions then brings about the manifestation of your originating thought.

What this boils down to is that the LOA is real, actually works, and you can make use of that in the way that the people who use mystical terms teach.  It WILL work, because it’s still the same process, just as pushing the power button will turn on your TV, whether you think that’s because it flips an electrical switch or because it prods a little hamster inside to start running on its wheel.  It doesn’t really matter what explanation you use, if you follow the same process, you get the same results.

But if you want people to spread the word, use mysterious and unexplainable terms to describe that process.  (D’oh!  I guess that means nobody is going to spread the word for me!

People have all different ideas about pain.  There is a well known phrase, especially among bodybuilders, that says “No pain, no gain”.  That concept is not only incorrect, it can be dangerous.  Some people associate pain with growth, as in growing pains, but the truth is that the pain that is associated with growth is usually a result of trying to grow too much too fast.

Pain is a warning that we are doing something that is going to require healing.  The degree of pain is determined by the amount of healing that our subconscious predicts it is going to require.  These predictions are not always accurate… for example, paper cuts hurt far beyond the amount of healing that is going to be necessary.  Pain can range from a mild discomfort for something that just needs a bit of down time to disabling, where you cannot function properly, to incapacitating, where your subconscious actually shuts down your consciousness due to the severity (by the way, although I appreciate this function, saving me from experiencing the most excruciating pain, I find it disturbing that my subconscious can shut down my conscious mind).

When you can refer to it as “pain” rather than pain, a mild discomfort can be merely a sign of strenuous activity.  This is essentially your subconscious saying “Okay, we’re doing something, putting out effort, and we’re capable of doing it, but we’re going to need to rest to restore the energy we’re using”.  This can be a good thing, depending on the circumstances.  It is a positive sign when working out, for instance, or when you sink a lot of energy into a new project.  You end up, as long as you don’t push it too far, with that “good tired” feeling, where you’re satisfied that you have accomplished something worthwhile.

When pain goes beyond that mild discomfort to something more severe, however, that is your subconscious telling you that need to stop because you are inflicting damage, not just using up energy.  This is true whether it’s physical pain or emotional pain (emotional pain contains pretty much all negative emotions… depression, anger, sadness, etc.).  If you are working out, and you start feeling sharp pain, that means that you need to stop right when you feel it, not push through it, as you’re no longer building, but tearing down… you might be hurting your joint, tearing a muscle too much, or something else, but you need to stop.  The same goes for emotional pain.  If you start feeling depressed, for example, it means that you’re doing something that is inflicting damage to your self.  You need to stop, clear your mind, take a bit of quiet time for yourself, and figure out what exactly it is that you’re doing that’s causing the injury, so you can stop doing it and find another way to get to where you were trying to go with the action that is bringing you pain.

If you are severely depressed a lot of the time, then you probably have both old injuries (which can be healed), and currently existing patterns of behavior which are causing it.  The same goes for anger, hatred, fear, or other negative emotions.  They are caused by your own behavior or thought patterns, though they may, and likely do, appear to come from outside.  This is because you can only be mentally affected by outside factors to the extent you allow it.  For instance, if someone always finds ways to bring up your weight, and it makes you depressed, that is because you are allowing that person’s words to shape your own self image.  You do not have to do this… your self image is your own to shape as you desire.  If you find yourself feeling negative emotions due to other people, make sure you take a look at how much you are allowing other people to define your own image of who you are… who you are inside, which is again affected by who you are outside only to the extent you allow it to be.

The truth about pain is that it’s a wake-up notice from your subconscious.  Sharp pain, or long lasting dull aches, are a warning that you need to stop and evaluate what you are doing to find the problem.  Once you find the problem, you can go to work on correcting it.   Mental pain, which is what I know best how to heal, is almost always a factor of letting something other than you conscious mind determine who you perceive yourself to be.  This is most often either mistaking what you do for who you are or allowing what you think other people think about you (which is at best an educated guess, as even what they say they think may not be what they really think) to determine who you think you are.  If you can take the time to change those two behaviors, most negative emotions (or mental pain) will dry up and go away.