Your Christmas Present: A Mind Training Tool

Your Life I want you to imagine that your life is like a house and the rooms in the house represent your experiences in different areas of life. Maybe money, relationships, health, emotions, family, the mind etc. The only thing that is preventing you from getting into these rooms is a great big barrel of water that sits directly in the doorway of each of the rooms. Now the only way into the room is by you doing something. Hint: moving the barrel. You only have your hands to do so and the only thing that you can do with the barrel is take the lid on and off. So what are you going to do? Obviously shouting and screaming at it is not going to move it; neither will wishing the barrel wasn't there - because at this moment it simply is - that's the current reality. Perhaps you can run at it and try to shove it out of the way, but you soon find using physical force will not budge it an inch. As you may have already realised the only way to move this barrel is to open up the lid and begin to splash the water out. Do this for long enough and the barrel will become light enough to move. Once this has happened you will be able to push the barrel out of the way and move in and out of the room with ease and no resistance whenever you want. So this is the way it is with success. It is possible but first you have to put the work in to get to the point of being able to do it... and the work is letting go of any emotional resistance and baggage (the water in the barrel, if you hadn't got there already) that prevents you from doing it. Once there is a clear doorway into the room nothing is stopping you from having what you want whenever you want it. It is the feelings and emotions of an individual that are the main reason for either their success or failure in any given area - and this includes physical and emotional health, financial abundance, satisfying relationships and anything else you can come up with. People who concentrate on changing negative thoughts to be positive have a long, tiresome, uphill battle ahead of them. It's not that we don't need to have positive thoughts. It's just that if our emotional disposition is negative, we will always get negative thoughts. We will continually be doing this process. It’s more effective to target the emotion. Take care of the emotions and thoughts change to positive remarkably quickly. Due to people’s lack of knowing how to let go of or release emotions that they have accumulated over the years they become like the barrel of water. Full of blocked emotional energy and stuck between where they are and where they want to be. Looking a Little Deeper In life there are 4 ways that people deal with emotions.

The first is to suppress them, to bury them so deep that the person simply denies that they are there.
The second is to avoid them, they recognise that they’re there but avoid them at all costs, by sleeping in, eating too much, drinking, drugs, T.V, entertainment highs etc.
The third is to express them. This is what most therapists are into. You just find someone and talk about your feelings, whether it is to your family, friends, a therapist, a stranger - who knows. This is also for the most part totally ineffective. It's OK once or twice to talk to someone, perhaps to realise that you are not the only one who has problems, but beyond that, people who always want to express their emotions are either playing the 'poor me' card or trying to justify their feelings to themselves and others.
The fourth way and the only truly effective way of dealing with emotions is to simply let them go, to release them (splashing water out of the barrel). How long this takes depends on your capacity for self-honesty, the techniques you use and the degree that you value what you want over the drama of emotionally laden stories, thoughts, wants and beliefs that are in opposition to what you actually want.

Your Present: The ‘How To Do It’ Part Think of a time when you felt frustrated, angry, resentful or had another emotion which was hassling you. Recall that time as best you can and in as much detail as you can. Invite the feelings to come on. You want to experience the feelings as much as you can, because you are about to discover that you are the one in control of your emotions, not the other way around. And now, locate the feeling in your body, is it in your chest, stomach, head, hands…where is it? And what colour is that feeling? Ok, now you’re ready…imagine a big window or door on top of that feeling and open it right up, nice and wide, and as you do see that sensation and colour leaving through the door or window, get a sense of it just floating away, or falling to the ground…let the feeling go just as easy as a child lets go of a balloon at a circus, let it go, it wants to leave anyway, so let it go. Just imagine it leaving, floating away from you. Now how do you feel? Better? Lighter? At the end of the day there are always going to be things that upset us, it’s a part of life. But now you have a technique to determine how you are going to respond to that upset. Will you be a victim of it, or take control and rise above it, the choice is now yours. This process was taken from Larry Cranes - ‘The Abundance Book'