Designing Your Heart's Desire: The Releasing Strategy
Copyright © by Sharon Marshall Cameron
All Rights Reserved
Chapter 2
The Mind Lever
The Releasing Strategy is a tool you can use to lift out and let go of blocks and limits in your mind. It is deceptively simple, but then so is a lever. So, you might say, Releasing is a lever to lift off the weights that are dragging you down, or holding you back, in any area of life.
Releasing is simply saying, preferably out loud, a statement of acceptance that a particular belief or judgment is no longer true for you. I say "no longer", because the statement is tied to a negative belief you have had that is causing you problems. We believe it is the first really new and effective consciousness-changing process in many years. It is neither an affirmation nor a visualization process.
In some systems of thought, Releasing might be classified as a denial of a negative. As we use it, is much more than a simple denial. It has become part of a whole new system for changing the inner mind.
Having this fabulous technique has been somewhat of a frustrating experience. I have found over and over, as I have worked with individuals, that TheReleasing Strategy works. It is a powerful verbal method to free your mind from the negative influences that seem to bombard both from without and within and I unreasonably expect everyone to understand that it works and to use it.
However, in this world, I have found that even though you may understand consciously that something is useful, or works for other people, you can resist or not see its usefulness for you. If you do that, of course, you won't use it.
For me it has too often been like having diamonds and gold in my hands and not being able to show them to anyone, or finding that they are invisible after all.
I also believe that we have discovered something powerful that will have as high an impact on consciousness techniques as the discovery of affirmations. The Releasing Strategy is one of the world's best-kept-secret weapons you can have in playing the game of life.
Affirmations, or positive statements of belief, have been used a long time and many books have been written about using them. They were first publicized widely in this country by the French pharmacist Emil Coué in the 1920's, creating a popular fad of the day and becoming one of the underpinnings of most "positive thinking" philosophies.
As Coué promoted it, people could create a better life by repeating. "Every day, in every way I am getting better andbetter"- or, "My life is getting better and better," etc.
The use of a statement of belief, or affirmation, is an attempt to implant that belief in the inner mind. In hypnosis this type of learning is called an imprint. We will discuss imprints in more detail later.
An affirmation usually must be repeated over and over and can work if there isn't too much resistance to it in the inner mind. However, if there is that resistance, it is like rain falling on your mental roof. It simply bounces off as if it hadn't even been said; it is as if the subconscious replies "baloney" (or worse) to each affirmation.
In our experience, there are at least two reasons why affirmations do not always work as well as they should. First, they always go against your real beliefs. You affirm something to be true about yourself or your life that is currently not so. (Otherwise, why would you be affirming it?)
You do not see athletes repeating, "I am healthy!" unless they happen to be injured or sick; nor do you find even the greatest devotees of Positive Self-Talk repeating each morning, "The sun is rising! The sun is rising!" in an effort to raise the sun. (Of course, we might do that if we believed the sun wasn't going to rise!)
The second reason affirmations may not work is that we all seem to believe negative thoughts more eagerly than we do positive ones. Possibly from a lifetime of disappointment, we expect to fail, to lose, to have pain, to lose love, satisfaction, justice or good.
That is called being "realistic." It is certainly understandable that when you experience more loss than gain in life, you may accept the belief that "that's the way it is - and ever more shall be."
The very reasons you can have so much trouble with affirmations, however, are the same reasons why The Releasing Strategy works! It is like the reverse of an affirmation. If you can say it, simply SAY IT, and it hits the belief squarely, you can remove a problem or judgment with one statement.
The technique works as though you are holding your belief tightly in your hand, then put your arm out and let it go! It's rather like dropping it through a trap door.
You may have to say it in different ways, since the inner self may have the idea implanted in different ways, but you won't have to repeat the very same statement as you would an affirmation. With The Releasing Strategy, you can actually remove the stumbling blocks and limits from your inner mind.
We often have people ask why you don't have to affirm the positive after you have released the negative beliefs. It seems that if you have negative opinions about anything in your inner mind, you also have an underlying base of positive about it. To put it in spiritual terms, our true nature is love, not fear.
In working with clients, we have found that there are basically two emotions: love and fear. Love is what underlies all the positive emotions - joy, goodness, loyalty, friendship, beauty, light and progress in humanity.
Fear is the emotion behind pain, sorrow, hate, anger, attack, darkness and devolving of the soul. It generates two basic responses: fight or flight. Fight is the attack side of fear. No sane person will attack anything or anyone unless they believe they are defending themselves or someone or something they believe in. You must believe in the attack, also.
The other outcome is the flight response. This is obviously fear. Attack is seldom recognized as a fear response, but it is as fearful as a cornered animal is fearful.
Even when you consider an attack on a small country by a more powerful one, like the Iraqi attack on Kuwait, if you look more closely you will find the fear. Saddam Hussein was very much in debt from his war on Iran, and was afraid he would lose power if he had to take responsibility for the economy of his country, and the loans he had to repay to Kuwait as well as others. It seemed a sensible response to him, I'm sure, to the threat of his loss.
The world runs on varying degrees of these fear responses: anger, guilt, sorrow, pain, resentment, and criticism. Wherever someone or something should be different, in our belief, we attack them or ourselves over that variance in our perception.
Speaking of "should," I'd like to point out that only unhappiness comes from your "shoulds" or "shouldn't haves." If you believe something or someone in your life should have been different, or behaved differently, you can rail against your experience, impotently, or seek revenge, which, alas, will not restore any previous status quo. We experience our true helplessness as we do this. The hard fact is, if we, or they, or it could have been different, then we or they, or it would have been.
However, if it was as it was, then it could not have been different! My husband Clark loves to say "History does not disclose its alternatives." So how do we get ourselves so upset about it all? Easily, mightily, and eternally. We, as the human race, carry on this way and progress in spite of ourselves.
The cause of this progress may be that we do have the ability, and occasionally the willingness, to learn from our mistakes. But we learn from our mistakes, not our regrets or should-have-beens.
Edison is quoted as saying when asked how he could keep working when he had failed thousands of times to invent the electric light, "I have found thousands of ways not to do it." If he had thought he "should have" invented it by then, he would certainly have stymied himself long before he accomplished his goal.
To change inner mind negatives in Response Therapy, we use several types of Releasing introductions or prefaces. Our general favorite, and the most powerful, is:
I release my belief, perception and judgment that …
We use this as the operational phrase prefacing a negative belief that we have obtained from a client's inner mind. For example, I may ask you to repeat after me, "I release my belief, perception and judgment that my father really loved my brother more than me."
We have worded the statement to correspond to the way you, the client, inserted the unhelpful program in the first place. You had a belief, based on your perception at some point in time, and then you judged the perception to be negative, or harmful in some way, and especially - true.
The Bible is very clear in Jesus' instruction to "judge not, lest you be judged." As a species though, we seem to be addicted to it. We busily judge events, situations, and people as either good or bad, and immediately put them accordingly into our subconscious data banks. The negative beliefs seldom end up helping us, and often do hurt us as we project them out into our current and future relationships and actions.
Other Releasing Statements from Response Therapy are these:
I release all need or desire to …
(This gets to the motivational basis of an inner mind program.)
… feel he hates me.
… feel upset about my father.
… keep hating my brother.
And there is the other motivational release:
I release all unwillingness to …
… forgive my father.
… change my habits.
Finally, the release for the bottom line of all negatives is directed squarely at fear:
I release all fear …
… that my father didn't love me as much as he loved my brother.
…that I am unlovable.
These statements are deceptively simple. As you run into a negative belief and try to say the statement, I suggest you will find that they are not as easy to say as they seem.
We constantly have clients choke up, prove unable to hear the statement they are supposed to repeat, and/or say the statement with a 180 degree twist to change it without consciously realizing it. They may say, for instance, "I release my belief, perception and judgment that my father didn'tlove my brother more than me."
In this book, you can learn to use The Releasing Strategy with your own negative thoughts, and free yourself for a happier existence with other people, with yourself, and with your life.
So, let's get started this moment. First, repeat aloud…
I release my belief, perception and judgment …
… that changing my inner beliefs can't be so simple!
I release all unwillingness …
… to become a stronger, better, healthier, happier person
using The Releasing Strategy.
I release all fear …
… of letting go of negative inner beliefs.
I release all fear …
… of changing.
Say these statements aloud correctly and you're on your way! If you find you don't want to repeat these statements aloud, you have a wonderful opportunity to learn something important about yourself.
Ask yourself: How do I benefit from believing I can't change my inner mind so easily? How does it help me to be unwilling to become a happier person? Then, after you have the reasons that float up to justify your position - pry them out with your mind lever by Releasing those too!
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
....................................................................................................$12.95 Add
to Cart
![[Home]](../image/home.gif)
© Copyright 1997-2000 The Cameron
Group, All Rights Reserved.