Adventures in consciousness

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Emotional Switching

Incredible feelings of energy since turning attention to this area. I'm two days into it and only doing one exercise within this realm.

Emotional switching.

The imperitive is to control emotional state. This doesn't mean to diminish emotions, it means to switch them at will. This ability is at the heart of NLP and hypnosis. To break state, jump to another emotional state. I was having enormous difficulty doing this. Hell, I was having great difficulty expressing emotional states!

Last year, I took acting classes (more on this later) and one of the most theraputic activites was doing some emotional switching. The instructor placed 4 pieces of paper in a square on the floor. Each square had an emotion. We said our monolog while the instructor directed us to jump to different squares and say the lines with that particular emotion. Only 7% of communication is in the actual words, the other 93% is body language and tonality.

What words are used to perform the emotional switching? It doesn't matter. Print out a list of emotions and say the mantra using everything you have to express the emotion. The exercise should give goose bumps or other physiological effects...that's how I know I'm doing it right.

Physical

Two weeks ago , I start the physical circuit. I brainstormed a lot of activities I could do.
The successful ones:
  • Walk every day 15-30 minutes
  • Facial movements (per Dr. Hyatt's non-book Energized Hypnosis)
  • Drink water (lbs/2 = oz)
  • Get a massage
Mixed results:
  • Limit alcohol to weekends only - working about 50% of time
  • Eat a salad every day - getting about 50% coverage
  • Work out with a core ball - settled for using the core ball as my desk chair
Didn't even bother:
  • Detox/fast for 3 days
  • Stop drinking caffeine
Had some emotional and social sticking points over the last two weeks. The issues were not related to the physical activities. If anything, the physical activities lessened the severity and allowed a certain amount of solace.

Spiral Method

Concentrate on the Leary circuits for a period of time. Focus on the circuit at hand and don't concern self with other circuits. This is not to say don't do anything with the other circuits, just don't get hung up on issues they are presenting while on the current circuit. Attempt to concentrate on developing habits within the circuit while also experimenting with trying something new. The spiral will bring another opportunity to incorporate a habit.

  1. Goals for the circuit.

  2. Brainstorm activities for the circuit.

  3. Prioritize for the current cycle

Make haste slowly. Don't do too much at once, but do something every day.