Twenty years ago, I discovered the real route to inner peace.
It wasn’t solving all my problems.
It wasn’t finding the love of my life.
It wasn’t eliminating health challenges.
It wasn’t moving into my dream home.
And it definitely wasn’t winning the Powerball billion-dollar lottery.
Inner peace arrived when I gave myself a 21-day challenge and used two specific skills to get there.
A Miraculous Outcome of these Two Skills for one Family
I worked with a family in which one adult daughter had been living in various psychiatric hospitals for many years. The parents. Long divorced, and their other daughter and her partner worked with me for twelve hours using these skills. This is what they discovered that amazed them:
1. First, I taught them to calm themselves with Brai-breathing so that all blaming and shaming of the hospitalized family member disappeared and was replaced with empathy.
2. Second, we looked at all the frightening stories that each of them told about the daughter/sister who was so ill, and they turned around every story that triggered their own feelings of hopelessness, guild and despair.
3. Third, the next time they visited the hospital, they were amazed to see how well the patient was doing. Instead of angry outbursts, she was calm. Instead of being in her head during most of the visit without engaging appropriately, she was warm to each of them. This marvelous experience was totally different from what they had seen for years.
4. Fourth, as the family continued to practice Brain-breathing and The 4 Questions every day, the visits improved so much that they were able to take their daughter to a restaurant for lunch, which had been impossible for years.
A Marvelous Result for a Couple when only one partner used these Two Skills:
We’ve all been programmed to believe many things based on our families and our education. One of the big misconceptions is that to solve a problem in a family, both parents need to enter therapy or coaching. We also have been trained to believe that couples counseling, which requires both partners working with a counselor, is the best option. But my evidence from the last twenty-five years is the opposite.
· One partner committed to learning a new way of thinking, listening, speaking, and acting moves mountains
· One partner who has learned to motivate and inspire the other partner has immense power to turn the marriage around, 180 degrees.
· It only takes one of you to create a new life for you, your partner, your children, your family, or your company.
These two skills changed my life forever!
Brain-Breathing©: The Fastest Pattern Interrupt I Know
WHY IT WORKS
Brain-Breathing© works because it interrupts unconscious patterns, the automatic thoughts, emotions, and reactions that quietly run your life.
A pattern interrupt breaks a habitual mental or emotional loop and creates a moment of consciousness, a pause where change becomes possible for us.
Most of us live on autopilot at different points in our day when we do things that don’t require our full attention.
When we drive to or from somewhere that we visit regularly.
When we do our normal errands that don’t require our full attention
When we get bored doing something, even listening to a friend or lover.
When a pattern is interrupted, the unconscious mind briefly loses its next instruction.
And in that moment, peace can be installed instead of panic if we learn how to program our brains.
So practice Brain-breathing© every day, each time you notice you’re less than peaceful:
If you prefer calm to chaos
If you prefer clarity to a cluttered mind.
If you need serenity instead of stress
That requires waking ourselves up during the day when we’ve slipped into automatic:
But to stop the old loop of fear, anger, and sadness, the three negative human emotions that can affect each of us and that knock some of us off our feet, you need a second skill that replaces the old loop of grief with the ability to feel joy again.
The 4 Questions of Inquiry© retrain our brain to stop making up miserable stories, stop believing them, and start clearing out the cobwebs and corpses we’ve carried around for too long.
The 21-day challenge is designed to show you how to exit the old routine and stop chasing the fear, anger, and sadness like a puppy chasing its tail.
Inner peace doesn’t arrive when life gets easier.
It arrives when your nervous system learns a new pattern.
The 4 Questions of Inquiry are based on the questions in The Work of Byron Katie, in which we learn that we tell ourselves “Stories” and that we tell them again and again, feeling worse and worse each time.
Tragically, the original “story” is usually false and is based on limiting beliefs that we have been taught, so they’re not even our stories; they are part of the programming we received as children or teens. By learning this skill, we can turn the Stories around, once and for all.
I have been offering these questions to clients for 20 years with a different twist from Katie’s. By making certain adjustments to their thinking using this tool, many of my clients discovered that they quickly move beyond their old Stories fast and are never troubled by them again.
In my case, within 3 weeks, I eliminated the old habit of paying attention to stories that appeared in my mind about hopelessness, danger, worries that weren’t real, and you have that ability, too, if you follow these instructions every day until you no longer are troubled by these negative addictive thoughts. Then, like me and so many of my clients, you can finally enjoy a life that is both peaceful and powerful.
“What this process of The 4 Questions does is to eliminate the previous programming that has traveled with the person for as long as it has. By eliminating the programming consciously or unconsciously, it eliminates the need for the program to continue, thereby freeing the person from that particular program, regardless of its origin. When Susan Allan teaches this system of inquiry, it replaces the programming of suffering with the program of mental health, which allows the person to be free.” Rev. Bernard Goodman for Heartspace® Solutions
THE 4 QUESTIONS OF INQUIRY EXERCISE
The Story
Think of a situation that triggers pain for you. It may be about love, money, health, family, etc. Can you simplify this situation into a brief one-sentence “Story” that you realize you tell yourself again and again? Every time we tell the Story, we feel worse. Every time we tell it, we feel more hopeless, more angry, or more depressed!
Stories like these will seem familiar to many of us:
My boyfriend should love me unconditionally!!
My boss should respect me!
I’ll never be wealthy!
Everything is hopeless!
Pick one story that you tell yourself and edit that “Story” into 1 sentence. Using this as your “Story”, do the 4 Questions AND the Turnaround
Ask each of these questions:
1. Is it true?
2. What evidence do you have that it’s true?
For most people, this question is the most difficult because we’re used to believing that our feelings are real, which they are not. We’re also used to guessing about other people’s thoughts and feelings, and thinking that’s real, too, and it’s not. This question requires you to provide the kind of proof a witness offers in court: On dd/mm/yy Bob said, “I don’t love you.” And one week later, Bob said, “I don’t love you, and I want to break up.” If those words were said in anger during an argument, you need to state that, too, because it has a strong effect on the truth or lack of truth in the statement.
3. How do you feel when you have that thought? The answer to this question must be limited to 3 words that describe your emotions, such as heartbroken, sad, scared, worried, angry, etc.
4. How would you feel without that thought? The answer to this question must be limited to 3 words that describe your emotions, such as relieved, surprised, relaxed, hopeful, etc.
Why controlling your negative stories rarely works: you can’t delete thoughts, you can only replace them with better thoughts and that is the beauty of The Turnaround
What if you discovered evidence that negative emotions give rise to more negative emotions? When you feel sad, it brings forth situations that trigger more sadness because most happy, successful people will stay far away. What would you do if you learned that your thoughts about your life created more of the same?
Now that you know the basics of Brain-breathing and The 4 Questions, two techniques that allow you to return to peace in the face of any situation, will you practice them all the time so that you begin to generate a life that is more peaceful and in which you have true power?
TURNAROUND: Transforming your story into a new story that is more peaceful and more powerful:
A. Add a “not”, “isn’t”, “doesn’t”, or other “negative” word to your original story.
Example: “My daughter hates me” to “My daughter doesn’t hate me”. Remember that you need to work Question 2, look for evidence that she hates you, find none, and then, and only then, is this turnaround an option.
B. Remove the “not”, “isn’t”, doesn’t”, or other “negative” words from your story.
Example: “I don’t enjoy my career” to “Once I learn to talk to my boss about getting a raise and he agrees based on my performance, I will enjoy aspects of my career.”
C. Switch the subject of the sentence with the object of the sentence. Example: “He doesn’t love me” can often become “I don’t love him” when we learn to see the facts.
Why we use the 4 Questions of Inquiry
The scientific evidence presented in the film “What the Bleep Do We Know” offers that evidence:
“There is no ‘out there’ independent of what’s going on ‘in there’” explained Fred Alan Wolf, a physicist, writer, and lecturer on theoretical physics, quantum physics, and consciousness, and the author of ten books.
“Heroin uses the same receptors on our cells as ANY emotion. Therefore, humans can be addicted to any emotion. Our minds literally create our body; bombarding the cell when it’s dividing or produces a sister cell.”
Dr. Joseph Dispenza, Doctor of Chiropractic with a specialty in neurology, neurophysiology, and brain function.
The power of these two skills is simple and proven.
They work.
Everyone I have taught them to, from age four to eighty-four, has learned to use them. And in every case, when these skills are practiced, life changes.
If you consciously interrupt just one habitual thought today, you will already be more peaceful than most of your past self. Each day you release even one negative story that is not true, you step higher on the ladder from suffering to peace.
So here is my invitation to you.
Commit to one small suffering interrupt each day for the next twenty-one days and watch how that ripple grows.
Email me your questions.
Please email me for the PDF of both of these exercises included in the 21-Day New Year's Challenge that Creates PEACE!
Email me your breakthroughs.
Email me your wins.
I read them myself.
I respond to every email myself
We will celebrate them!
Inner peace grows when it is practiced, noticed, and shared.