To fly in your social, work or creative life means to be able to fulfil your potential, to allow your creativity to flower, exploiting your uniqueness as an individual. But if you want to go into a field, spread your arms and leap into the sky – well you would plummet and die – or would you?
Let me explain. If you want to fly in business, or in your social or creative life, to fly means to be able to fulfil your potential, to allow your creativity to flower, to exploit your own uniqueness as an individual, to enjoy the freedom of feeling fulfilled and successful.
On the other hand if you want to go up onto the roof, spread your arms and leap into the sky – well you would plummet and die – or would you? Well of course you would, unless you do it virtually with a video game in which case you would feel nothing and experience nothing of the experience of flying. But there is another way that you can fully experience the feeling of flying alone through the air, with the wind in your face, the ground clearly visible below and no machinery between you and the elements – I will tell you more about that later!
What holds you back from taking that leap off the roof is belief, the belief that you would fall. And it is a pretty good belief to have. Imagination is a very powerful thing. If I asked you to walk along a 9 inch by 20-foot plank on the ground you would have no problem walking along it would you. But picture that same plank securely fixed between the roofs of two buildings, say 200 feet in the air, with you at one end, a very big drop in the middle and safety at the other – would you still feel so good about crossing it? Maybe you would imagine yourself slipping, plummeting to the hard earth below. What if I placed a stack of banknotes at the far end, would that help to overcome your imaginary limitations?
Your Imagination Can Really Hold You BackYour imagination may well be creating a barrier to your success in your every day life too. Because of the way we were brought up, the lives we lead, we are all subject to working in the same old ways, thinking along the same old paths and struggling with similar problems. We are all the product of our environment and our upbringing, all unique and individual but all constrained by our ingrained habits. Such habits can seriously hold you back.
I often work with people who have phobias, addictive behaviours, or problems with anger or drugs. All of these behaviours are related to fear in some way, usually a fear of failure. It is often said that in order to really change your life you have to take risks and these behaviours are all habitual ways of thinking that prevent failure because they prevent people from taking risks - from trying to make changes they might fail at.
People create their own barriers to success, the things that hold you back and prevent your from accessing and using your confidence, your inner strength. Because these barriers are created in the imagination, they can be dissolved using the imagination too – yes I am talking about self-hypnosis. Just five minutes a day, over about two weeks will have you thinking, creating and behaving like you have never done before.
And what about that leap from the rooftop, arms outstretched into the sky, the feeling of wind across your face, the ability to skim the rooftops, dive bomb the pedestrians and even peek in through people’s windows? Well you can do that too, using the powerful imagination that will be unlocked by self-hypnosis. But rest assured, neither you, nor anyone else can convince you through hypnosis to actually take to the roof and leap to your death. For various reason it just can’t happen.
Try this. Sit in a comfortable chair, feet flat on the floor and hands in your lap, eyes open. Now close them and using your imagination, pretend that you can’t open them. Pretend that they are really heavy or glued closed. Pretend that the more you try to open them, the more you struggle the more stuck they get. You can convince your imagination that they are completely stuck. Of course another more logical part of your mind knows that you are just pretending but we are not interested in that part for now. So stick with the pretence and ignore the logical part of your mind for now.
Okay, so stop struggling to open them because there is no point struggling, your imagination is too powerful, so relax. Allow this relaxation to flow down through your body and allow it to feel heavier and heavier with each breath that you breathe out. Image all the tension flowing down through your body and out through your feet, as you feel heavier with each breath that you breathe out.
Now pretend that you can feel the sun shining on your face. Pretend that your face is getting warmer as with each breath that your breath out you feel heavier and heavier. Feel the warmth of the sun on your face. A slight breeze wafting about you. Picture the sun in your minds eye, warming you. Feel the warmth. You feel heavy and calm and relaxed.
Give it about ten minutes, then remember that you can open your eyes because it is just your imagination. Open your eyes. You will probably feel nice and relaxed.
This is a little taste of hypnosis and it is a short step from there to imagining yourself flying through the air and feeling the breeze, the stomach churning drops and cold air of the stratosphere. Or, to standing in front of an audience giving a speech without fear, or making that crucial sale. This exercise will work for most people but it is beyond the scope of this article to go further and look at other techniques of which there are plenty. Take a look at my website www.free-hypnosis.co.uk for loads more ideas that you can put into practice straight away.
So what’s the use of imagining making the sale, or of not being afraid of heights if you are not actually doing it? Well when we access this illogical side of our wholeness we are begin to make some wonderful changes. We start to change our programming, putting positive and solution focussed ideas in our imagination instead of self-limiting and self-defeating ones. We feed our imagination so that it grows and becomes more creative and stronger. We are rehearsing for success instead of failure and allowing our creative juices to flow unfettered. When we do this we come to believe that possibilities are endless and we become unlimited by our illogical fears of failure.
