Take Control of Your Thinking

How to take control of your thinking and is it an essential part of developing and managing our lives? 

Huna is a Rocket Fuel

The processes in Huna are fast and brilliant, high-speed healing processes. A client does describe them to me as rocket fuel. She goes into the Huna process, and within seconds, minutes, whatever she's dealing with, it's done. And the system, there's a change in her system.

So if Huna is rocket fuel, why don't we use that? Well, yeah, it is rocket fuel, and using the tools and techniques and processes that I often teach is a brilliant way of quickly solving things going on for you.

But thinking about your thinking and taking control of it is a powerful way of ensuring that whatever it is you've had to heal, it doesn't crop up again. That's what we're in. We're talking about today, and it's how to stop a repetition of old stories and old patterns.

People who feel secure and fulfilled in themselves, that's what they do. It's one of the ways of feeling safe and fulfilled in yourself; heal up what needs to heal. Then, pay attention to your thinking and how you might be creating situations for yourself to know what's going on.

Stephen Covey, brilliant, brilliant writer, wrote about taking control of the things you can control and understanding what you do have power in your life and taking control of that. Understanding what you can influence in your life, influencing where you can, and letting go of the rest. Because he understood that one of the things you do have control of, should you so choose to adopt tools and techniques for taking control. That is your thinking.

Serenity Prayer, which Alcoholics Anonymous adopted, and the various anonymous organizations by a guide surnamed Naeba, the original prayer was, "Give me the courage to change what needs to be altered, the serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other."

So again, it's about our thinking. It's about understanding what we can control, understanding what we can't, knowing the difference, and only working where we can change things only where we have control.

Four E's

So how do you do that then? What are the models that you can use for doing that? For me, one of the most valuable models is what I call the four E's. I've talked about this in quite a few other videos, but I wanted to focus on this time.

The four E's are Event, Evaluation, Emotion, and Expression. So, we have an event, something happens, and we are permanently evaluating our experience. We do this all the time. Everything that's happening to us at a very unconscious level, we are evaluating our experience.

We evaluate our experience based on the filters, the deep psychological filters that we have, beliefs about ourselves, beliefs about how life is organized, the world is, or the world around us is organized. We evaluate based on spiritual beliefs. We evaluate based on how our physical bodies feeling at any given time. People who have life-challenging illnesses will evaluate differently than fit and healthy people and bounce around the place.

There are many filters at a deep psychological level that will influence how we evaluate an emotion, how we evaluate, or how we evaluate an event based upon how we will evaluate our experience. Depending on how we assess our experience, that will then impact the emotion that arises.

If I have an experience, and I'm feeling good about things, then the emotion that will arise will be joyful, or bouncy, or whatever. But if we have an experience, and we evaluate it negatively, then what's going to happen is the emotions will be negative. They tend to be fear, or anger or frustration, or unhappiness.

Therefore, the way we interpret and filter all that information into our behavior, the way we express ourselves in the world will be influenced by these two main things - the evaluation and the emotion that bubbles up, depending on how we evaluate the event.

That experience, then that expression influences the next time around. Take an example- When I was at school, I was bullied. I've talked a lot about this. One of the bullying things that they did to me was they would put me into Coventry. Coventry is an old expression for when you don't talk to somebody, you exclude them, and you don't speak to them. This happened to me quite a lot over the ten years that I was at boarding school.

I was at all girl's schools. My experience of being with girls, and then with women, because of this experience that I had had because that was what happened to me quite frequently, I would evaluate groups of women, the emotion that would come up would be either fear or insecurity. Because in my experience, groups of women would be mean to me would be unkind, putting me in Coventry, bullying me.

Therefore, every time that I came to a new group of women, I would go in there with the mindset that this was not a good place to be, that this would be insecure that they would do something that would bully me they would put me into Coventry. Because of that evaluation, because that, that prejudgments on my part, a couple of things happen. One was that for years, I hated hanging out with women because I was terrified at some level that they would put me into Coventry.

It's taken years of healing work on my part to change that experience. So, that now mostly, when I go to groups of women, I feel okay, composed I'm, and feel good about myself. Particularly if I feel I have a position of authority or a position of knowledge, or something to share because I love, I love sharing what I know, or where I'm kind of, you know, gray-haired, wise old girl. That's good because I can be confident and I can be there.

When I go into groups where I don't have that kind of role, that kind of position, that's when the old experience can come up and bite me in the bum. This happened recently in a group I was in. I felt it was a new group of women that I joined. It was a Facebook group.

I felt pretty disconnected. I couldn't understand why I would feel disconnected. It had lots going for it. It was a small group. It was integral in an intimate group. The facilitator well managed it, everything going for it. But something in me felt disconnected.

It was the only time I started to explore that I realized that what was going on was this old pattern of assuming that women would put me into a silent place, or disconnect from me or leave me out of all these experiences I'd had, which was the way that I judged these women. The emotion is not strong compared before because I've done a lot of healing work, but it was still there.

Therefore, every time I went into this group, I would prejudge their reaction to me. I wouldn't see. I would completely delete the fact that they were very welcoming. I would completely delete the fact that they would ask my opinion. I couldn't see it at all.

Thinking Changes Your Experience

When I was thinking about this disconnection and talking with my coach about it, I realized what the background to it was, did some healing work. The last time I went to that group, I was really surprised because they were welcoming. They said, Hi. They asked me for information. I shared something. They were grateful, completely different experience. It is because what I have done with the healing work was to change the evaluation and the emotion, and therefore to change my experience in this group.

That's how this cycle plays out. The healing work helps with changing the cycle. But there are other things that we can do as well. Do the healing work, change our beliefs about ourselves based which are usually based on experiences we've had in the past, often in childhood, not always in childhood, but often in childhood. But another piece that we can do is to listen to the language that we use with ourselves.

When I was with a group of ladies, I was using language around disconnection, not feeling part of it. I've noticed my language and started to change it. I changed my thinking from, "Oh, how disconnected I feel in this group," to "What can I do, that would make me feel more connected with this group," slight language change. Still, it changes the whole feeling, it changes the emotion, and it changes the experience.

So listening to our language - our could coulda, shoulda, woulda, particularly the shoulda, and the woulda. You know, I should do this. It puts a lot of pressure on us. It sort of lights up our imposter syndrome, perfectionism, inner critic, and all those other little inner voices that we have gone when we start shooting ourselves. Or when we start coding, I could have done that, but I didn't know there's almost a blame attached to it.

Listen to the language that we use with ourselves. Listen to how often we give the inner critic free rein. "You're not good enough. You're too stupid. You can't do this. You don't know how to do this. What? Who are you to go into a group of strange woman women and try and connect with them"—those inner critic voices.

Now, there's a lot you can do with the inner critic. One of the things is to understand its role, what's the inner critic trying to do for you. Very often, our inner critic is trying to keep us safe. It's trying to help stop us from being bullied or whatever the previous experiences very often that's part of its job. But what happens is it kind of gets flipped around. And what we then get is negative self-talk going on in our heads rather than something that's loving and feels like it's safe.

Acknowledge Your Inner Critic

"Hi, inner critic! I know you're there. Thank you for being there. Thank you for suggesting that maybe I need to pay attention to something but today, I'm just going to do it anyway. Just just just park yourself. But thank you for being there". Acknowledge your inner critic.

Some people make fun of their inner critics. I have had a client who made an inner critic a knitted puppet, or you could do a little Pinocchio drawing. Negotiate with your inner critic. Negotiate with your in a perfectionist because, as I say, most of the time, the job they're originally set out to do was helping you keep you safe.

But that was then, and this is now, and we have changed a lot from childhood. All those patterns, which were supposed to keep us safe and possibly did once upon a time they're no longer needed. They're no longer less necessary. Understand how that's playing out.

Tips to Break The Cycle

There are a couple of tips that you can use to help break this cycle. The first one is focusing on what you do have control of. The second one is being aware of this cycle, this event evaluation and then how that expresses itself in our behavior.

Another one is listening to the language that we use with ourselves and starting to understand where our inner critic or perfectionist and those kinds of characters come from. What was their original job, and how can we work with them to understand the job they once did? They don't need to do that job anymore and what they're doing is more an undermining behavior.

If you have any questions, please do get in touch and book a call in my diary, secretartofhuna.com/diary. We can talk about it and see if I'm the right person to help you. 

Content Disclaimer

The information contained above is provided for information purposes only. The contents of this article are not intended to amount to advice and you should not rely on any of the contents of this article. Professional advice should be obtained before taking or refraining from taking any action as a result of the contents of this article. Jane P. Lewis disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on any of the contents of this article. 

Copyright  © Jane P Lewis 2021