Step 2 – Change Your Perception and the Experience Changes

You can easily change your perception when you recognize the fact that you made it up in the first instance based on your beliefs and past experiences. In a relaxed state with your eyes closed, create a mental image in your mind of a negative experience you wish to neutralize.

Neutrally observe yourself experiencing the specific event, how it started, how you felt, where it took place, why it was negative for you and how you reacted. As you continue to neutrally observe the scene unfolding through to its end, see how your beliefs about life and yourself made you perceive the experience as negative.

Life is supposed to be a wonderful collection of always new experiences but we too often focus on the negative experiences of our past and so live our life in their presence and create our future in their shadow. Each of your experiences have taken place only once but you may have re-lived them a thousand times in your mind, thereby giving them a thousand times more power than they are due; a thousand more places in your life than they are due; and a thousand more strings to pull you with than they are due.

Ultimately, negative experiences can be transformed into positive lessons and so can become the ticket to your success rather than the excess baggage that prevents it.

In 1993, Paramount Pictures released Searching for Bobby Fischer, which depicts Joshua Waitzkin’s early chess success as he embarks on a journey to win his first National chess championship. This movie had the effect of weakening his love for the game as well as the learning process.

His passion for learning was rejuvenated, however, after years of meditation, and reading philosophy and psychology. With this rekindling of the learning process, Waitzkin took up the martial art Tai Chi Chuan at the age of 21 and made rapid progress, winning the 2004 push hands world championship at the age of 27.

Each time we see the need to let go of something – a bad habit that drags us down, an unsatisfactory relationship, a career choice that can’t complete us in the way we dreamed it would, or maybe unrealistic expectations of ours about others that eventually spoil our partnerships with them – whatever it may be: what is it that’s actually happened in these moments of honest self-examination? See if this simple answer doesn’t describe our situation:

Aren’t we being “asked” to give up an existing relationship in order to make room in our lives for something higher? Of course we are. Then why is it so hard to act on our intuition? After all, who doesn’t want a life that’s better, brighter, and truer?