Excerpt
from The Voice: Overcome Negative Self-Talk and Discover Your Inner Wisdom
by Brian Alman MD and Stephen Montgomery MD
The Find Your Voice
Process
By Dr. Brian Alman and Stephen Montgomery,
Authors of The Voice: Overcome Negative Self-Talk
and
Discover Your Inner Wisdom
The Find Your Voice process is based on the knowledge I've gathered about personal transformation in my thirty-year counseling career. This knowledge was gathered not only from Dr. Erickson, but also from many other gifted teachers around the world; gathered not only from my own experience as a patient and therapist, but also from my studies of meditation, self-hypnosis, NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), The Secret, and many other methods of self-help and mind-body healing.
It has taken me years to make this process simple, quick, and effective.
Here's how to deal successfully with any physical or emotional challenge. Spend just a few minutes a day, and as often as needed, taking yourself through the following three steps:
Step 1: Experience Your Challenge
First, stop trying to get rid of your challenge; that never works and is even counter-productive - - the harder you try to fix yourself, the stronger your challenge becomes. Instead, begin to focus deliberately on the experience of your pain, craving, fear, sadness, and so forth. Let yourself become fully aware of all your difficult thoughts, feelings, and sensations - - everything that's part of your challenge. Then flow right into accepting your experience just as it is. And last, find some private way to express everything you're thinking and feeling - - go ahead and say it all to yourself, write it down, act it out in your imagination. When you go deep inside and experience your challenge thoroughly and wholeheartedly, you learn what it feels like to be in touch with your true, authentic self, and this begins to empower the voice of your inner wisdom.
Step 2: Judge Your Challenge
Next, you need to deal constructively with your Inner Judge, that self-critical voice in your head that's quick to blame you and punish you for your mistakes and imperfections- - even for being challenged at all. Poised in opposition to your true healing voice, your Inner Judge is the tireless voice of your social/family programming, and it's been drilled into you for so long that there's no getting rid of it. In fact, if you try to fight your Inner Judge, you only end up being more judgmental- - you are, in effect, judging your Judge- - and this only gives it energy. As in Step 1, the better way is to become aware of, to accept and to express your Inner Judge. Only by embracing your Inner Judge and working with it can you relax this controlling, overanalyzing, never-satisfied, endlessly adversarial part of your mind.
Step 3: Resolve Your Challenge
Finally, as you experience and engage positively with all your pain and negativity- - as you embrace all the thoughts, feelings, and self-criticisms that are driving your challenge- - you find yourself spontaneously developing a new and more loving relationship with yourself. This new perspective on yourself naturally quiets the many strident voices of your challenge clashing in your mind, and almost immediately you begin to hear your true, authentic voice, your deep intuition, your TruSage. This voice is the real source of your healing power- - it's where all your own best answers come from. And once you're able to listen to your voice, you quickly and effortlessly imagine creative ways to resolving your challenge. It's as if new ideas for health and happiness simply bubble up from your unconscious. And the more you listen, the more the craving, the pain, the fear- - whatever your challenge- - just dissolves away. It's really quite a miracle. And I don't use the world "miracle" very often.
That's all there is to it: 1-2-3. Each of the next three chapters will explain in detail how to accomplish these steps, offering a great many ideas, exercises, and techniques for getting in touch with your healing inner voice. In no time at all, you'll be moving quickly through the process, feeling confident that you can manage your challenge, instead of having it manage you.
The above is an excerpt from the book The Voice: Overcome Negative Self-Talk and Discover Your Inner Wisdom by Dr. Brian Alman and Stephen Montgomery. The above excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book for accuracy.
Copyright © 2010 Dr. Brian Alman and Stephen Montgomery, author of The Voice: Overcome Negative Self-Talk and Discover Your Inner Wisdom.