Designing Your Heart's
Desire: The Releasing Strategy
Copyright © by Sharon Marshall Cameron
All Rights Reserved
Designing Your Heart's Desire: The Releasing Strategy
Copyright © by Sharon Marshall Cameron
All Rights Reserved
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Chapter 1
Birth of a Strategy for Change
The Releasing Strategy is part of a system for life change that my husband, Clark Cameron, and I have developed and have been working with since 1980. We have called our process Response Therapy: The Cameron Method because we use it to change responses that are creating negative attitudes running people's lives. We also acknowledge our use of ideomotor or biofeedback responses to identify the inner mind causes of those attitudes.
In The Cameron Method, we uncover the specific reasons for blocks or limits directly from your inner mind and then lead you through the release of those negative assumptions or beliefs. In other words, as in a friendly computer program, you can delete the negative and keep the good. You get an intensely personal look at, and are able to get control of, the often hidden forces that have been running your life.
The Releasing Strategy is the tool we use to change the negative inner assumptions in The Cameron Method. We have presently trained a very few people to be facilitators using the total process. Since we can only work with a relatively small portion of the people who could benefit from it, I have been moved, or rather driven, to write this book for anyone who will take the time to read about it and apply The Releasing Strategy as I teach it here.
I will not go in depth into the full process of Response Therapy: The Cameron Method, as it is much more involved than it sounds. We are creating computer programs to remove blocks in specific goal areas such as sports performance and sales, and eventually will provide in-depth analysis. The presence of a therapist or facilitator (or computer) who is not caught up in your feelings and emotions can be crucial to the success of the analysis portion of the process.
We have found you don't always have to know exactly what caused the negative thought or attitude in order to get rid of it. The reasons, or at least the more obvious justifications, will pop into your head when you ask "Why?" in your own mind. For example, you might ask, "Why am I so angry with my mother?" What will come up is the justification for that anger. "She just nagged at me again." Note the again and you will get a clue that the deeper basis is your belief that she always nags me. Perhaps she hurt your feelings when she nagged you over being late, being messy, being inconsiderate, or even not loving her enough.
With this book, my goal is to share with you The Releasing Strategy for creating inner change, so you can have this powerful, useful tool to control and improve your own day-to-day responses. If you follow the instructions in this book you will gain a lifelong technique for controlling the contents of your inner mind. With it, you can do a better job of controlling the outer life you are producing. You can truly design your real heart's desire.
To help you understand The Releasing Strategy and The Cameron Method, I must include a little background on my relationship with my husband and how we happened to develop the method. It is an unusual story in itself.
Born and raised in Ohio, by 1978, I was newly divorced, and a resident of Atlanta, Georgia with my three children, then aged 16, 13, and 9. We lived in a large suburban home with a half-acre, woods and stream behind. This was and still is typical of many homes in Atlanta.
I was enjoying my new independence, and was working at the Unity Church there. I had been very much involved in psycho-spiritual studies for many years. These studies had now led to my teaching a class at the church on Creating Your Own Reality.
In December, 1978, a man named Clark Cameron came to Atlanta from San Francisco on a promotional tour. He "happened" to call Unity, and I "happened" to answer the phone. He asked what was going on at the church that night, and found that only my class was meeting. He came to the class, we met, we got together and later married. Our lives and the lives of quite a few other people have been changed because of it.
Clark is an interesting and brilliant person. He is a scientist, scholar, inventor and a thinker who has often been many years ahead of his time. At times that last characteristic has not made for the most comfortable life, nor always being easily understood. When we met he had developed the psychological system using the inner mind accessing technology of what has become Response Therapy: The Cameron Method.
This uses what we call the Response Monitor, or Response Indicator when we use it with a computer. It is a weight on a line, or a pendulum. Using it we can get coded responses from the inner mind of a client while he or she holds it by the fingertips. It is a feedback device we use to monitor the inner mind, hence that name. Clark learned this accessing method from David Cheek, M.D., Gyn., a renowned clinical hypnotherapist, then practicing in San Francisco, since retired.
The Indicator signals are a form of ideomotor response, meaning a motor response based on an impulse from the inner mind. With his partner, clinical psychologist Leslie LeCron, now deceased, Cheek had written a landmark book on hypnotherapy called Clinical Hypnotherapy (Grune & Stratton, N.Y., l968). In their book, they extensively document the use and effectiveness of ideomotor responses.
More recently, clinical psychologist Ernest Rossi has collaborated with David in writing an in-depth overview of the latter's 40 years of clinical hypnotherapy, and use of ideomotor responses. This newer book is called Mind-Body Therapy (W. W. Norton, N.Y., 1988). And David himself has just published his own life's work update, Hypnosis: the Application of Ideomotor Techniques (Allyn & Bacon, Boston, 1994).
Clark added an immensely important new dimension to the use of the Indicator. He used it to measure the percentage of inner mind positive as well as negative feelings about specific individuals, ideas or experiences. This procedure can also be used to measure the percentage of fear you have of anything or anyone.
In Atlanta, we conducted a workshop we called Breakthrough. In it we used the Indicator to determine the status of negative emotions or blocks, then used a visualization process of forgiveness to clear the inner mind of them.
We might have kept on doing those workshops indefinitely if we hadn't decided to attend an est seminar. Clark had worked with many est graduates in San Francisco and had been very successful helping them get "unstuck" from continuing problems. Est (Erhard Seminar Training now called The Forum) was then the most successful consciousness seminar in the country. We felt they must be doing something right. We decided to attend because we felt we could learn how to communicate better about our own workshop .
At est we both had to let go of our initial negative reactions to their processes. We felt that their conscious mind rhetoric was unnecessary, since we had a better way of accessing and changing the inner mind. Once we accepted the fact that we were attending their seminar and not ours, however, we mostly enjoyed the two weekends.
It was at the "graduation" session that we were appalled to realize that the same leaders who had been in effect hypnotizing the group for two weekends were directly using that influence to sell graduate seminars. We looked at each other in agreement as Clark said, "Let's get out of the seminar business."
We had both realized that high pressure selling was necessary to sell seminars to the public, and neither of us wanted to do it. We believed in our workshop, but we believed more that it was unethical to manipulate another person's consciousness. So there we were, with an effective group process, and not willing to do what we felt was needed to sell it.
Clark later used his visualization process in his audiocassette album called Permanent Weight Loss. It was published in 1982 by the Nightingale-Conant Corporation, the world's largest publisher of audiocassette albums. It was their first publication of any visualization process, and they referred to it as "audio-imaging."
In 1994, they published the new album of the same name that we co-authored, based on this book, that uses The Releasing Strategy to release overweight programming. Clark continues to be the speaker on the album. It was the first national exposure for the new verbal process.
The basis of The Releasing Strategy was brought to us in a strange way. One day a young man called and asked if he could come see us. I don't know how he had heard of us, but he was the inspired agent who would put us in touch with the then missing element of Response Therapy: The Cameron Method, and what has become the theme of this book.
After our initial get-acquainted conversation, he confessed he didn't really know why he was there. He said he felt guided to come see us. We were polite, and as we continued to chat with him he mentioned a "Doc" Lindwall, and his work. When he learned we had never heard of Doc Lindwall, he smiled and said, "Oh, that must be why I'm here."
Lindwall was a chiropractor and Concept Therapist in Atlanta. He was working with muscle testing and intuition to help ascertain patient's needs. He had been moved to have patients say releasing phrases and had found it had helped them greatly. Our visiting friend couldn't tell us anything so simple however, and if he had we probably wouldn't have made the connections we later did. He simply said, "You have to meet this man."
We ended up spending the Fourth of July weekend alone with "Doc" and his wife Ruth at their retreat in the Georgia mountains. He demonstrated his use of releasing phrases on both of us. We were impressed and immediately wondered if it could work to change the precise emotional programming obtained with our accessing method.
The visualization process Clark had developed was exceptionally good, but it depended on the client's ability to visualize, and took time. Releasing, on the other hand, works immediately and is much simpler to use.
My contribution at this point was that we should use the words, belief, perception, and judgment in The Releasing Strategy because that's how the programming initially gets in there. You have a belief, based on a perception, and then you make a judgment that becomes part of your inner mindset. With this new approach, we now had the final element of what has become The Releasing Strategy and The Cameron Method.
No longer needing a workshop format or visualization to help people handle their underlying problems, I started working with individuals. Using the Indicator to access their inner beliefs and blocks, I then used The Releasing Strategy to change them. I worked out of our home at first, then out of two separate offices of doctor friends who were supportive of the work.
At this point, we had a wonderful, effective therapy and no name for it. One of my clients told me of an excellent counselor and professional astrologer, named David Railey, in Atlanta. I had read of him in previous years when he was featured in newspaper articles. He had gained an outstanding reputation and had many clients using his services to assist them with business and the stock market.
I felt that if David were to be aware of what I did, he would be a source of referrals. I made an appointment to share our process with him. I still have the tape of that meeting.
There was a strange electricity in the air as we met and talked about the process, and he told me he was good with names and felt he could come up with the right name for it. Shortly, he smiled and asked, "Why not call it Response Therapy: The Cameron Method?" And we did!
When David made his suggestion, there was no sound in the room other than our voices, but when played back, there was a crackling-like static on the recording of it. It sounds like the electricity we felt in the air around us. It was a very exciting moment.
After a few years of our working in Atlanta, Clark went to Los Angeles to help his mother and aunt (both in their late eighties) to move into a nursing home. He had always talked of eventually moving back to California. While he was there again, a meeting with the president of a company led him to work individually with their salesmen to increase sales and corporate teamwork and reduce turnover. They were so happy with the results that the management referred him to sister companies and I flew out to work with him.
He decided in short order that it was time to relocate in California. He had also been talking about translating our process into an interactive computer program. I had always rejected this idea as I felt that so much of what was accomplished was through the intuition of the therapist or facilitator.
However, now we both felt led to be in California, closer to Silicon Valley where we could find the people with the expertise to accomplish computerizing the process. Many people could benefit rather than just the handfuls we could reach individually.
We established a practice in San Jose in the Silicon Valley in 1985. Since then, we have had a therapy practice that has hardly ever been too busy because we have regularly gone through clients so fast. They have come mostly from word of mouth referrals, and working in two or three hour sessions, have finished the process usually within 5 to 10 meetings. We have also accomplished the process in an intensive weekend with an individual couple to transform their relationship. We call this process Recoupling. We have also provided the intensives to busy executives who prefer to put the necessary hours into a short time span. When I say finish the process, I mean we get their inner minds clear of the negative beliefs and blocks about everyone and everything important to them. No, they do not lose their memory. They simply lose the negative energies and limits that have been holding them back in any life area.
This has been accomplished for many people who had previously been in all kinds of therapy or self-development efforts, as well as for people who have had no previous work.
If you would like to prove for yourself that The Releasing Strategy works to change your own feelings and reactions when you use it, please refer to Chapter 16 on fears. In that chapter, I give a demonstration that you can use with yourself and a friend. You can physically prove the reaction.
Until the computer programs are generally available, I want to share with you what you can accomplish on your own, without a facilitator of any kind. Since we have dealt with so many different kinds of problems over the years, I can lead you in this book with The Releasing Strategy to overcome many of your own life challenges.
In the following chapters, I will teach you how to let go of the negatives that may be holding you back in important areas of your life. Come along with me and discover that the most exciting adventures of life can begin when you gain control of your own mind and emotional reactions, and find the freedom that results.
Chapters V-XVII are not available on-line but are part of the book which can be ordered here:
Designing Your Heart's Desire: The Releasing Strategy for Personal Power and Peace of Mind
By Sharon Marshall Cameron
soft cover
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