I had a mind altering experience back in 1983 when I was enrolled in a course that was created by est founder Werner Erhard called The Six Day. I was 30 years old, fiffteen pounds overweight, living in an abusive relationship, estranged from my ex husband and sons, and scared of everything. The reason I took the course was so that I could have a breakthrough or in today’s terms a Transformational Shift. The course was designed to challenge you physically, mentally and emotionally. At the time confusion and fear where my best friends. The physical portion of the course was my biggest enmity. Every morning we got up early and went for a mile run up rocky terrain. I was always lagging behind until the man in his 60’s who had a triple by pass surgery went sailing past me. I realized then that my conversation about,”I can’t do that”, had just been smashed to smithereens. I had also enrolled in the weight loss program, and was learning how to tie knots for the ropes course. The mornings we went to the classroom and learned about life in the transformative arena, and in the afternoons we prepared for the day we would do the ropes course.We were broken up in to small groups of six, and we were given a series of mental and physical challenges to perform, and on the fifth day, we hiked to the cliffs where individually we would go on a zipline between two cliff points, tyrolean traversing, and rappelling down the side of a 100 foot cliff face. I knew we had learned to tie the ropes, because our vary lives depended on getting it exactly perfect. We were told at the beginning of the course, that listening and following the rules, and telling the truth on our medical release forms, was a matter of life or death. One of the participants in an earlier course, lied on her medical form about her heart. She had a massive heart attack and died, right in the middle of the tyrolean traverse. Her teammates waited all night for her to be brought back in. My biggest fear at the time was falling to my death, and rappelling became my own particular nightmare. I could not stop the chattering in my mind that was constantly telling me what I could and couldn’t do. When it was my turn to rappel, I remember my knees shaking so hard and my heart thumping so loudly, and the voice in my head screaming incessantly,, that I completely forgot what I was supposed to do. Over the din of my own thinking, I heard a very loud voice say;
Straighten your legs, and walk backwards over the edge, or get off the mountain if you cannot follow directions!
I then realized that I had been walking backwards with my knees bent. It was at that moment that I “woke up”. This was the kick in the pants that saved my life. Clarity entered my mind and my innate wisdom kicked in and said
if you keep doing things your way you are going to kill yourself.
So with straight legs, a thumping heart and sweaty palms I backed over the cliff and into my life. About 3/4 of the way down I pushed back from the rock face, and continued like that to the bottom. I noticed that the voices in my head were finally silent and I was soaring with joy and enthusiasm, so much so that when I reached the bottom, I heard myself say; ” Can I do that again”
I love going to the movies, and never a more thought provoking, and mind messing movie than the one Leonardo DiCaprio did in, “Inception”. Jamie Smart quotes what Leonardo’s character Cobb says about how dreams work and the nature of reality.
Now in a dream, our mind continuously does this..we create and perceive our world simultaneously…and our mind does this so well that we don’t even know that it is happening.
And also,
In your waking experience of reality, Your mind continuously creates and perceives a world simultaneously so that you don’t feel your mind doing the creating.
When I was 16 years old, I was going to school in Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania. It was a lovely town about forty five minutes north of Philadelphia. We had some of the biggest snow storms I can ever remember. It was Christmas time, and It had snowed recently, and I had stayed a few extra days before going home to Long Island. My group of friends had decided to go sledding, and I agreed. The sleds were very big and could hold up to five teens on it. I remember getting on one and screaming all the way to the bottom of Church Hill. As everyone was climbing back up, I found myself lagging behind. Suddenly a shout from the top of the hill “look out”, and in front of me was a sled barreling down on me. I had just reached a small rise in the hill and my knees were slightly bent when all of a sudden I was airborn. I remember going round and round and round. In that moment I was utterly at peace with nothing on my mind, and the biggest surprise was that I had no fear. I was floating in the air and for a moment I was totally aware of creating my universe. I was one with everything. It was not till I fell back to earth that I “made up”, being scared and embarrassed. I knew my experience would not make sense so I maunufactured an altered sense of reality. One that everyone could relate to. This was happening at a level I was only vaguely conscious of at the time. Later looking back on it I see how I created all of it. It is now with a deeper clarity of understanding do I see that I live in the feeling of my thinking, and not the feeling of my circumstances.
In conclusion I would like to say that having Clarity of Mind and Clarity of Understanding will allow a deeper Clarity of Connection with all my future Clients. I know now that the minute I get caught up in my habitual thinking I just need to realize that it is not real, and has no power over me, unless I give it life. To be able to be present for my clients with a clear mind, so that I can connect with them as deeply and authentically as possible by risking being vulnerable in allowing my true self to show up, and listening from my heart, and asking the powerful questions that will lead them to a clearer understanding of themselves is why I love this work, and will continue to serve others for the rest of my life.
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