Reprogramming Yourself
Being able to reprogram ourselves is a very important skill to have. If you can reprogram yourself then you can choose who you want to be and set out to make it so. It is particularly useful when you discover some automatic behavior; either a thought or action, that is causing you to suffer.
Later I will share a fantastic story of deliberate and difficult inner change that I underwent which had a dramatic and noticeable effect in the outer world. It looks very much like a miracle. But first let's talk about the basics.
Old behaviors, ones that go way back, too many people think they cannot change them. This is just not so! How is it that you came to have the programming that you have? Unfortunately most people don't know, and worse they blame it on outside circumstances.
Be Selective About Your Entertainment
Certainly the outside world has done its share to program you. News, movies, magazines, books, advertising, other people have had a very strong influence on your life. This is one of the reasons it is so very important to be selective about what and who you give your focus to, especially early in your reprogramming efforts. You need to ask yourself, "When I focus on this TV program, when I listen to this person speak, do I feel good? Do I feel empowered, light hearted, happy, loving?" If not I suggest you turn your focus towards something that
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does feel good, which in effect will turn you away from them, at least until you have successfully reprogrammed your mind.
Repetition and is the key to reprogramming. If you study hypnosis, or marketing which involves hypnosis, you will find that repetition is a key element behind their success. It takes time and deliberate conscious effort to reprogram yourself. But the results are worth the effort.
Any skill we wish to develop requires repetition, or practice, for it to become a habit or automatic. The first few times you rode a bike you fell down frequently, but if you continued riding, falling down became such a rare thing that years could go by between falls.
I learned to roller-skate on the old fashioned 4 wheel skates. I had an aggressive style and skating technique, which relied heavily on stopping via the toe stops. When I changed to rollerblades I automatically tried to stop on the non-existent toe stops and fell on my face, twice. After that I decided I had to reprogram my body so that it would respond correctly to this new toy. Even though I could skate aggressively, and with style, I had to slow myself down and teach my body a new way of stopping. It took patience but within about 4 weeks time I was skating like crazy as if I had been on rollerblades for years and I wasn't falling.
Changing our psyche is a very similar process. Here are some of the key steps or elements involved:
Slow Down. While the changes are in progress we need to slow down and change our expectations of life and of ourselves. We will make mistakes, love yourself anyway. You need to be okay with mistakes that have already been made, but then be firm and stick with your reprogramming efforts.
Feel Your Feelings. We need to check in frequently to make sure we are still on track. Something that felt good at one time may not feel good at another time. We need to feel, and notice when something does not feel good and then notice our focus, notice our thoughts. What are we thinking, what are we feeling, how do they relate? Where is our focus? We need to notice what our automatic reaction is and become aware of the programming that is to be changed.
Meditation and Contemplation. Is meditation a habit for you? It really is necessary in some form or another. Is it a joy for you? It can be and will be if you are doing it correctly. It should be as important in your day as eating, sleeping, bathing and exercising (if you are leaving one of those items out put it back in!) You need to be so skilled at meditation that you can sit down in a moment of deep suffering and bring yourself back into balance, back to peace. This requires practice, repetitive, ongoing, daily practice. If you say you don't have time for meditation then what you are really saying is that you don't have time to have a good life.
Visualizations. We need to visualize the way we want to be and the way we want life to be. We need to script our response to life for specific situations that come up and tie it to the triggering events. I give an example of doing this in the story below. This takes only 30 seconds to 2 minutes to do but should be repeated as often as you can until the change registers in your response. Your scripted response should be loving, it should feel good to contemplate it.
Stop Negative Thinking. During your visualization time, if negative thoughts occur stop them and counter them. You need to become skilled at finding new ways to view the situation such that you feel better about it and can respond from a loving place. Practicing this when you feel good will make it easier to do when you feel bad.
RESULTS. When you get results, you need to remember them, re-live them, use them to re-inspire yourself in the future when you are feeling blue and when you feel like you are not making any progress.
Reprogramming Anger
This is an incident that happened to me in November of 2006. Being a teacher of spiritual growth it is doubly embarrassing to my ego when such dysfunctional programming surfaces in my personality. This is extra incentive to me to make necessary changes and as quickly as possible. Anger has been an issue for me all of my life. Even though I have worked on it for many years and have gotten past so much of it, I still find it haunts me. This incident marked a huge change in my automatic reactions and my understanding of how life responds to our thoughts.
It occurred in India, where I live part time. India has pushed me in ways I thought I would never be pushed and brought out a lot of judgment and anger that I thought I was over. The following is an edited version of a letter I wrote to a fellow researcher of truth who was suffering from anger…
Anger, like any emotion, begins in the mind. The actual occurrence of an angry outburst may seem to begin when something happens, but in reality it begins much sooner. Stresses, other emotions like frustration, not getting something that you want, will cause a person to become stressed such that one wrong situation results in an expression of anger. This gradual build up can be stopped by dealing with the weaker emotions that add up to make the anger happen. This requires that you pay more attention to ALL of your emotions and understand where they are coming from and to change your thinking along the way.
The way that you react to life, such as being angry, comes from past programming. Your karma, your personality, your subconscious, past programming are all ways of saying virtually the same thing. It is the result of responding to life in a certain way, repeatedly, until it becomes automatic. Hypnotherapy can help you find the root cause, but still the programming will be there. The solution is to reprogram yourself.
To reprogram yourself requires awareness. You need to pay special attention to those situations that make you angry. You need to recognize when you are not feeling good and strive to make yourself feel good through proper mental exercises. Contemplation and meditation are essential to this practice. Daily you must review your thinking, words and actions of the day and decide if they are serving you or disturbing you. Then you must deliberately program your mind to take a different course of thinking when similar events occur or begin to occur.
Road Rage
Recently (November 2006) I have been getting very angry at the dangerous Indian drivers. We just purchased a car two months ago and with our business workings I have been driving in India much more often and much further. I have ideas of what a safe and considerate driver should be based on my experiences in America and Australia. Indians are not like that. In some ways I like the freedom from over-regulation that Indians enjoy, but too many drivers drive very dangerously or without consideration of anyone else on the road. Coming only inches from being hit by a driver who is traveling in the opposite direction at very high speeds are common occurrences. Having someone cut a turn right in front of you with no time to stop is a common occurrence. People walking in the street, with no regard for their own safety, animals, large rocks and other objects, large potholes, all add to the stress.
Just one example of how this came to a head for me and made me begin to deal with it happened in early November of 2006. I was driving home from Kottayam (a 3 hour drive). I had three different drivers get in my way for no reason while I was trying to pass them. They were going slower than I wanted to go; I drive a safe but brisk speed. I had signaled with my horn as usual. And they responded by moving into the middle of the road preventing me from passing them. They had no apparent reason for doing this. There were no blockages on their side of the road. It was not a curve. There were no oncoming vehicles. What I was trying to do was usual and expected driving behavior there in India. I believed they were blocking me on purpose and I got quite angry. I began accumulating these offenses and thinking about pulling one of them over, yanking them out of their cars, and beating them in the street. I spent a fair amount of time thinking these kinds of thoughts, never really intending to do so. Also I was accumulating judgment about all of the other oncoming busses, trucks and even cars that were driving in my lane when there was plenty of room in their own lane. The anger in me built up.
Then it happened… I was passing a bus in a very safe manor on wide open road. I had nearly gotten past the bus when I heard it lightly hit the left rear bumper of my car. I went into a mad rage. If I had thought about it I would have known he did no damage to my car. He did not affect my course of driving at all. But all of that built up emotion enraged me. Somehow I grabbed the parking brake lever and pulled it up. I never use that, except for parking and starting out on a hill. I don't know why I pulled on it. That type of break locks into place. You have to push a button to release it. Because of the speed we were driving and not really understanding what I had just done I did not have the presence of mind to release the break. This caused me to spin my car and land on the side of the road in tall grass and weeds up against a hillside.
I got out of the car in a furious rage. I went to the bus driver's window, climbed up, reached in and smacked him in the face. I didn't slap him very hard, but it was insulting. Then I broke one of his windshield wipers off and threw it in the street. He got off the bus and I threatened to beat him. About twenty other men got off the bus and they were all threatening to beat me. I am sure they did not even know that the bus driver hit me. All they knew was that I spun my car and then smacked the driver for it and then continued to abuse him verbally. It was really crazy. Eventually my wife Shyni got me to calm down and we left. Thank God there was no real damage to our car or to us.
I had already been doing work to get over my anger at all of the people and cows who hang out in the road, and especially those who don't move even when honking the horn right next to them. I had done pretty well with keeping myself calm with them. I had been telling myself that, "Everyone has a right to use the road. These people are God too." And other things like that. It was working.
But it seemed that I just could not get over my judgment of the other drivers whose actions were dangerous and un-courteous. Well I wasn't trying either. I felt justified in my mind that their actions were wrong and that my ideas about driving were right. Until this event occurred. After that I realized that God was prodding me through that bus driver and all of the other drivers too. It became very clear because the bus driver really did nothing to me, nor did the other drivers. But my judgmental thinking made me slap a man, which hasn't happened to me in over 20 years. My anger nearly killed Shyni and me when I spun our car. And even after we were safely stopped, with no real harm to us or the vehicle, my anger nearly got me beaten by a mob of angry men from the bus.
In my life I have learned, more than once, and in more than one way, that if I expect the world to change, or even any single person or event to change, because I did not like it or because "I was right and they were wrong" that I would make myself miserable. And unless I catch each thought of judgment and criticism and change them, then those thoughts would slowly build up and eventually flare up in anger at some specific person or event that probably did not even deserve the anger that was heaped upon them.
It is a big job, but we must watch each and every thought and change the ones that do not serve us. Even if it is possible to evoke a change in the outer world, we must still let go of the judgment and go about changing it from a place of love and the sincere desire to be of help. I so wish I could change Indian drivers, but I cannot. There are millions of them. If I change one, or even fifty, still there will come another and another until I have wasted all of my energy, and still they will keep coming. We must use logic and reason to convince our minds to let go of its judgment, hatred and anger. We must come to recognize where our true safety lies and that is in God. There are no random events. Nothing happens in our reality that we have not earned or created with our energy.
So now when something I don't like happens on the road my practice is to remind myself, "Nothing really happened, I made it safely. God is watching out for me. Dear God, bless them with awareness of how it is they are driving and how dangerous it is. Help them to learn to drive safely." When I catch myself moving into judgment I remind myself about what happened and what could have happened. I remind myself of the power of my mind and stop my mind from creating violent revengeful thoughts.
The Miracle - This worked and very powerfully so…I made at least ten more long distance drives like that in India since that incident. Each time I was able to maintain this practice. Each time I kept my peace of mind. Before starting on a long journey I even paused in the driver's seat long enough to set my mind clearly on the thought process I wanted. I prayed for all the drivers on the road to drive safely while in my presence. I prayed for them to be aware and courteous. I reminded myself that I no longer needed to police them, not even in my mind; I gave that up to God.
It was a miracle! That is exactly how my drives have been since that time. I am sure those same crappy drivers are still on the road doing their same stupid things, but not while I was around. The real world changed as a result of changing my mind. This change persisted in every single drive I made since that time, which was many. The difference in driving experiences was so remarkable that every family member who has driven with me has noticed. Certainly they noticed how much calmer I was, but more than that they noticed that the outer world changed too.
Making that changed had a ripple effect in my psyche. I now calm down much quicker in other situations where anger is rising in me even if I feel justified in my perspective on a situation. We shall see what else Life has to reveal to me and in what other ways anger might try to find expression in my life, but for now I know a dramatic change has taken place within me and it is a welcome one.
One by one, piece by piece, we whittle away at our unwanted personality traits and develop new ones that serve us in ever more powerful ways.
Love and Blessings,
Michael Skowronski
P.S. That is not the only time the outer world changed as a result of my inner change. I will admit that was one of the more dramatic ones. I tell many more stories like it in my book Unforgettable: A Love and Spiritual Growth Story . These type of coincidences are (nearly) a daily experience for me. They probably do occur daily, but I still have further to go at being aware enough to notice them all.
