Natural Urges and the Conscious Mind

I'd like to introduce you to 2 members of our family: Candy and Sandy. They're our gerbils!

We have a bit of a problem with them. They chew away the plastic door to their cage, then they can escape, as Candy did in the middle of the night, and scared the life out of me scuttling around under my bed! I thought we had rats!

They are very busy animals. In between sleeping, they work, chewing and burrowing. When you put even strong tape on the door, they chew through that too! The only way to deal with the problem is to keep them supplied with other things to chew, like toilet roll middles and their favourite: egg boxes. If only we ate more eggs!

Us humans are different. We may have urges to behave in certain ways, but because we can think things through, we can resist doing that which is 'wrong', but it isn't always easy. Sometimes we have to replace one habit with another. If we feel restless and are constantly looking for activity, like Candy and Sandy, we can decide to focus our energy on something productive (like chewing egg boxes!) or we can choose to do something destructive (like chewing doors!). (Or maybe Candy and Sandy really do know about the door leading to freedom!)

But it isn't that simple. Why would we ever choose the door rather than the delicious egg box? When we keep going back to the door, it's because we 'resonate' with it rather than the egg box! Why do we keep going back to chocolate, when trying to lose weight, rather than eating fruit? Because we resonate with it. The part of us that creates the resonance is our 'mind pollution', and can mostly be unconscious. Like an iceberg, the unconscious mind is unseen and not obvious, unless we know what to look for. Life gives us signals all the time. Whatever gives us emotional pain acts as a signal. This could be in the form of a person or situation that creates emotional pain, or that which comes from emotional pain, i.e. physical sensations and tensions or bad behavioural habits.

Beliefs are what we bring from the past to the present. Negative beliefs create fear and tension and make us resonate with destructive things. If we didn't have the tension, we wouldn't feel the need to 'chew the cage door'. In traditional psychotherapy, the purpose would be to make the unconscious beliefs conscious, then work on letting them go.

However, getting rid of the tension is much easier than you think, if you are willing to be open to the possibility that 'energy therapies' work. You don't have to identify all your self destructive beliefs either! My favourite self help ones are 'Timeline Detachment Practice' (invented by me!), 'EFT' and 'Z point process', and for those who don't want self help, homeopathy. There's lots of free information and links on my website: http://www.stressalternatives.co.uk/.

Got to go! I've got two eggs left in that box. It's time to make pancakes!!