More than Just Sex (13 page)

Closing your eyes isn’t going to help, and neither is playing music.

The source of your fear is in your mind not on the screen.

So, what’s the quickest way to take the pain away?

First, recognize that unless it is actually happening right NOW (in which case reading this at the same time would be an odd choice) then whatever is scaring you is not real. It might feel real, but it is just as much a construct in your mind, as the movie is the construct in the creative minds of the studio bosses that made it. Those thoughts are just thoughts. The first thing to do that will instantly take the scary ‘strings’ out of the movie is to realize that it is just that: a movie and all fake. The blood is fake and the lead actress was paid two million dollars to scream like that. It’s not real. As soon as you shatter your own suspension of disbelief, that emotional impact disappears in a heartbeat, too.

The second step is not to drown out your response with something else but to
simply turn it off
. If you turn it off, you automatically go back to being OK. Being OK is, in fact, your default setting. You don’t need to do anything to be OK. OK is what happens when you do less, not more. You weren’t scared before you went to the movies, were you? Turn it off, and in a heartbeat you go right back to your natural default setting of being absolutely fine.

How cool will it be when you can do that for yourself in your mind? When you can switch off your mental movies and just enjoy being OK.

This is where your inner robust confidence starts, from your own innate wellbeing and sense of self. It’s also where I completely fall out with the whole positive-thinking and ‘motivation’ movement.

Now, I am all for being positive, and totally believe that we create, manifest, attract (call it what you will) what we deserve into our lives. But, I have also learned this:

We do not need to DO anything to be happy. Happiness and confidence are what happens when we do less, not more; when we try easier not harder; when we stay out of our own way for long enough we tend to do great.

To be read in your best Scottish accent…

It’s time to let yourself GOOOW!!! Get Out Of Own Way.

What would happen if you saw the hot girl at the bar but had no negative scary thoughts in your head? You’d be fine, right? How many times have you had ‘nothing to say’ then thought of tons to say as soon as she’s walked away?

No amount of positive affirmations, chants, rituals, self-help books or psychological tips and tricks can ‘make’ you happy. If you allow yourself to ‘be’ then you are already happy. It’s much, much easier than you think.

Headwork

Who would you be if you weren’t worried? Who would you be if you weren’t caught up and pulled out of shape by the random limiting thoughts in your head?

You’d still be you, right? But you’d be a first-class, confident, relaxed and happier version of you. In fact, you’d be that naturally confident guy that you’ve always wanted to be. Who knew that you were really
him
already on the inside, and that all you had to do was less not more? Now you know how. Being happy, relaxed and confident is always about doing less, not more. It’s what automatically happens when you stop hurting yourself by engaging with your thinking and the movies created by your thoughts in your mind.

Now I’d like you to do a little exercise. Read this next section, and then close your eyes. I want to show you something, but you have to close your eyes to see it, because what I want to show you is on the inside. It’s something that’s been there all along, but you’ll never have noticed it before.

Disengage from your thoughts

Set a timer for two minutes. It can be the one on your phone for ease but just set a timer providing it’s safe to do so. (In fact if it’s not safe to close your eyes it’s probably not safe to read either so for heaven’s sake concentrate on what you’re supposed to be doing before you miss your exit, spill your coffee or both…) OK, if you can, close your eyes and just allow your thoughts to come to mind. This is not the
time to go through your to-do list – this is the time to create some quiet still space and allow thoughts to come to mind.

The first thing you will probably notice is how many thoughts you have, one after another, thought, thought, thought… The next thing you’ll notice is that they are usually just random nonsense and then a few repeats. Alternatively, there may be one thought that you just cannot get out of your head:
your
horror movie, if you like. And, of course, you know what happens next. If you engage with the thought, then it will affect you. There is nothing you can do to distract yourself, and trying to do so would be about as useful as trying to laugh your way through a nightmare. It’s just not going to work or make any difference whatsoever. But remember what I said: unless that thing is actually happening now, then it is just a thought movie; just a construct that your mind is playing on the screen of your own awareness.

In fact, those three components are essential for all your subjective experiences: Mind, Awareness (or consciousness) and Thought.

To continue our movie analogy, think of your Mind as being like the projector or the ‘source’. Think of your Awareness as being like the screen, the thing that allows you to see what is going on. After all, if you didn’t have a screen, then even if the movie were being projected, you wouldn’t be able to see it. And if you didn’t have the movie (Thought) then there would be nothing to project, nothing to be aware of and nothing to which to react, or be affected by.

The first thing that usually happens when people start exploring themselves from this perspective is that they turn their awareness or screen resolution all the way up and realize that they are even more flawed, messed up or in need of help than they ever realized. That might have been your experience with the two-minute thought exercise – thoughts coming thick and fast, with more of a sense of clutter than enlightenment.

At the opposite ends of the spectrum you have bliss. They say that ignorance is bliss and enlightenment is bliss. The problem is that most of us live in the crappy bit in the middle! Don’t worry, though, you are heading in the right direction and much faster than you think… literally, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve had the scary DVD in your collection for 20 years or 20 minutes you can throw it out just as quickly.

Now close your eyes again, and once again allow thoughts to come to your mind, but this time just notice whether you think in pictures or sounds or a bit of both. Give yourself the full two minutes to relax into it and notice what comes up for you. The content is totally unimportant. Remember we are not concerned with the plot of the movie, only that you are running a movie at all. We all think differently, so however you do it is just what
you
do. After all, it’s only you that we are concerned with here.

How far away is the screen of your inner awareness? Does it feel like you are right in the front row as you watch your own thinking? How big is the screen? Is it in colour or black and white? What about the sound – is it surround sound
and all consuming, or does it sound like a little nagging voice somewhere inside your head? Is it your voice or someone else that you can hear? Don’t let yourself be guided by me, though. Notice exactly how you do it for yourself. Do thoughts come one after another or all at once? Do they all come from the same place or different directions?

As I said, whatever happens is totally fine and does not mean anything other than that’s how you do your thinking. I just want you to become aware of that for now. You see, it doesn’t matter if you have your eyes closed and have turned your awareness inward like you have done just now, or whether you are going about your daily life blissfully (or not), unaware of all the thoughts that are running inside your mind all the time; running totally subconsciously, and pulling you this way and that without you even being aware of it. Events on the outside triggering thousands of different movies on the inside. Just like when you see a hot girl, and before you know it you are feeling anxious and too self-conscious to walk over to her and say ‘hi’. How did you get from relaxed to scared so quickly? Something must have happened… thoughts!

But how did you manage it when nothing has actually happened? After all, you’ve not even left your seat. Without you being aware of it, your unconscious mind has been running all these thoughts to try to ‘help’ you to be prepared for what it projects will happen next. Your brain is so powerful and always trying to help you, although sometimes it does that in ways that prevent you from even behaving like yourself.

I hope you are beginning to see where I am going with this now. If you are being pulled out of shape by your unconscious mind movies, which you were not even aware of until just a few minutes ago, then you now know that drowning out those unconscious thoughts by ‘doing’ something is utterly useless. Now you will be able to see exactly why you have found yourself where you have been until now: sitting at the bar, looking at the cute girl, terrified to even say ‘hi’. If she was ugly, would you have the same problem? Thought not, literally!

Is it time to switch those movies off yet? Have you had enough of your brain trying to ‘help’ and ‘protect’ you? One thing is for sure: those are not the movies that Tony Pike has in his collection. I’m sure he has plenty of others (most of them X-rated) from his hedonistic adventures, but the self-doubt collectors’ box set is not among them.

TAKE YOUR SEAT IN THE BACK ROW

OK, that is enough talking about it. Let’s get on with making some really powerful changes. Actually, in truth, you have already started.

This exercise is far more powerful than you think, as soon as you take it to the next stage and begin to let go of those thoughts as they come to your mind. But before you do it for the first time, let me be completely clear. What I want you to do is allow those random subconscious thoughts to come to mind then acknowledge them as a ‘thought’ about a ‘thing’. Simply that, a thought, there is no
meaning to it; it is just a thought, and there is also no ‘to do’ either.

For example, if when you close your eyes one of your thoughts is that you have run out of milk, then that is just a thought about milk. It doesn’t mean anything, and doesn’t mean that you need to remember to get some on the way home. It is just a thought about milk – nothing more and nothing less. Acknowledge it as a thought about a thing and just let it go. Get used to thinking to yourself, ‘It’s just a thought’ because it only ever is ‘just a thought’. It only has the meaning that you attach to it and can only be as powerful as you make it. It’s just a thought… now let it go.

You will be amazed at the difference this makes in your life. For me, it has been the single biggest transformative tool I have ever come across. When I learned it, I was in a very dark place. It was approaching the 10th anniversary of my dad’s death and I was really struggling. This technique, and the principles behind it, is so powerful it has been used to get people off crack cocaine, to end inner-city gang culture, and to reform serial offenders and career criminals. All habits can be changed; human behaviour is a product of your state of mind at the time, and your state of mind, as we know, is a direct result of the quality of your thinking. If it can work in such extreme environments, then do you think it has a chance with your limiting beliefs around speaking to the G.o.D. at the bar? Too right!

I want you to find a relatively quiet space and set that timer again, but this time for a full 15 minutes. Close your eyes and allow thoughts to come to mind. It will most likely be the same random stuff as before but, as they come,
just acknowledge them one by one as just thoughts about a thing and let them go. Do this for the full 15 minutes and repeat it once a day every day for at least three to five days. While there is no firm rule on how this works, it almost always takes the following form. First you will notice that your thoughts begin to show up a bit farther away in your mind’s eye when you do the exercise. As if you are moving further back in the cinema each time you do it, which of course, at a really basic level, makes the thoughts much less powerful. You’ll know yourself that if you go to an event and get stuck in the seat right at the back or in the top tier of the terraces, the impact of the events is diminished greatly the further away you get from the action. I went to a concert recently, and the seats were so far back that they didn’t have a row number, they had a postcode!

Next you will notice (and this usually comes after a couple of days) that you are not reacting in quite the same way as you used to. You are not getting pulled out of shape so easily, and are not so quick to react. In my own experience, it was almost as if I could see the path that I would have taken previously, but now I could take a very different route, which obviously took me to a very different place.

SHiT THINKING IS NOT IN CHARGE NOW