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By: Norman J. Baratt Website: http://www.revivebeingalive.com
If you want to improve the quality of your life, you must learn how to handle negative events recorded in your memory. If you do not, they will take a heavy toll on your health and on your ability to get things done. And you must also know how to enhance past positive experiences. The good news is that experiences need not remain in your mind as originally perceived. They can be restructured. The bad news is that very few people know how to do that. There are many techniques relating to the care and feeding of experiences, both past ones, and those yet to happen. One very effective method revolves around a concept called Experience Indexing. To understand how and why it works, you have to know how the brain stores information. To begin with, we are all a bunch of liars when it comes to storing experiences because the data that is stored does not represent what actually happened but only our perception of what happened. It has been established that the brain can only absorb five to nine bits of data at a time, yet it is constantly being bombarded with much more than it can actually handle. To avoid self-destruction, the brain filters the information, using deletion, distortion, and generalization, before letting in the data that most conforms to beliefs and values. So what gets stored is a very personalized version of the event, the gospel according to ourselves, a far cry from what actually happened. Since every memory is a fabrication anyway, in the sense that it does not represent actual reality but just what was perceived, why not restructure the experience in a manner that serves you better?The amazing thing is that our subconscious will accept, as true, any version of an event that is vividly imagined. The mental restructuring of an event can be approached in one of two ways: 1) by changing the storyline, or 2) by changing the setting. Storyline changes are limited only by your imagination. You own the copyright to the experience. You can change hats any time you want. You are the producer, the writer, the actor, and the director. Your ability to visualize has no limits. Change the ending. Change the characters. Change any part so that it comes out the way you want, with you as the hero. Make sure you play the new tape over and over in your mind, with as much feeling, emotion, and passion as you can muster. Setting refers to the framework or structure or stage upon which the story unfolds. When you make mental changes, you deal with the sights and sounds and touches and tastes and smells. For example, you can visualize the scene, as you view it on your mental screen, as closer, clearer, bigger, brighter. You can hear it louder or lower pitched or faster. You can feel it smoother. If applicable, the taste can be made sweeter, and so on. By increasing or decreasing the intensity of what you see, hear, touch, or taste, you can easily enhance the positive experiences or neutralize the negative ones. The results will amaze you. In actual practice, such changes are very easy to make, and rapid. For example, if you are working on a negative scene you want to neutralize, you can make it smaller and darker and further away and fuzzy, with muted colors, with barely audible sound, and so on. It will quickly lose its hold on you. Remember that you are also the Art Director, the Lighting Engineer, and the Set Builder of your internal production. If it is a positive experience you want to enhance, the same protocol is used. Kick up the size, the clarity, the closeness, the sound, the color, and so on. The key is to do it rapidly, again and again, until it takes hold. The more passion you can muster, the more successful you will be. The brain cannot tell the difference between an actual happening remembered or one that is changed and saturated with passion. Storyline and setting alterations can produce dramatic effects. But only up to a point, which leads us to a very good way to curb physical pain, such as a headache caused from mental pain or internal stress. Too much of a good thing can produce a reverse effect, and therein lies another way to neutralize negatives (the first being dulling the image by making it darker and fuzzy, etc.). For example, it you make a mental scene brighter and brighter, it will usually enhance the positive aspects, up to a complete whiteout, at which point the image will disappear or self-destruct. That is why many people neutralize negatives by increasing the intensity of the look or sound or touch or taste beyond the threshold of enhancement. Headaches, for example, are a good case in point. Instead of concentrating on dulling the pain, the objective becomes to mentally intensify the discomfort until it self-destructs. The surprising thing is that this idea of increasing to excess works more often than not. The reason is that it is virtually impossible not to think of something, because in order not to think of it, you first have to think of it. For example, if you are told not to think of the color blue do you notice that you immediately visualize the color blue? The rationale is that since you have to think of the pain of a headache in order to will it away, you might as well capitalize on that and use the pain as a method of ridding yourself of it. This 'increase to excess technique' works more often than not, for most people. The nice thing is that it gives you two ways to confront negative experiences. If you are not satisfied with the results of dulling the scene, then mentally increase the brightness until it self-destructs. The techniques described above constitute just a very small part of the enormous arsenal contained in the sites you can access by CLICKING HERE or on any of the links at the bottom of the page. About The Author: For more information on these sites, please CLICK HERE or on any of the links below. Centerpointe | Handwriting | Core Lore System | Sedona Method | Inner Talk | Flightwave System | Success DNA | Photo Reading | Dreams Alive | Think Right |