Self-Conditioning For Successful Living |
| Waking in the morning to a new day, some people treat life as a bracing opportunity. They are the lucky ones. Others come to consciousness reluctantly. "Ugh! Another day..." they groan. They drift in the sagging sadness of emotional doldrums. Can we stand it? What can we do about it? We may have tried the tonics advertised in the newspapers. We may have seen our doctor and despairingly asked him to prescribe a pen-hill to keep us going. But nothing has worked as we hoped it would. It is not only defeatism we need to deal with at the day's dawn. True enough, many of us are the mercy of our depressive feelings. But others suffer from an incorrigible shyness, an unwillingness to present themselves to the world for fear they will be exposed as the foolish ones they believe themselves to be. Yet others are in a dilemma of indecisiveness no matter what they do. They cannot get beyond their futile hesitations. They cannot bring their purpose to a sticking point where they can take positive action. And again, there are those who are at the mercy of their tensions. Their blood pressure soars because every small problem becomes a battle. Yet they do not ease up because the fear to ease up is to invite defeat. These are everyday human dilemmas crippling many people in our society. Is there a drugless way through? It seems ironical that in the West, proud of our Einstein, our Freud and our Jung, should have to look to the Russian scientist Pavlov for the origins of this great discovery we call self-conditioning. Strange, too, that this great discovery should be an outcome and adaptation of Pavlov's original experiments with animals in the field of the conditioned reflex. For a start, western psychologists tended to look upon the Russian Psychology of Behaviourism as a comparative backwater in the knowledge of how the mind works. Russia similarly looked on at Western Freudianism as something which could endanger morals and society. Mature thought has now seen that these two approaches, one behaviourist, the other analytic, are complementary and can be used as an aid to each other. In particular, it is seen that self-conditioning as adapted from Pavlov's original ideas by, for instance, the American Professor Hornell Hart, offers us the possibility of getting a fresh hold on ourselves by working on the unconscious mind through the use of conditioned reflex. "But", you ask, "how do I use this self-conditioning to lift me right now out of my miserable depression, indecisiveness, tension or shyness?" I will describe the process step by step. Decide what your problems are. Decide, too, the state of mind you wish to put in place of your problems. It is not good enough to want to be lifted out of your depression or shyness without deciding carefully on the new sort of home you want for your emotional energies. If you are depressed, hesitant, inferior, you must be quite sure what state of mind you are set on enjoying in place of your depression, hesitancy and inferiority. If you are shy, is it that you want to be the life and soul of the party? If you are depressed and feel God-forsaken, what are the emotions you would like to put in their place? Once you have firmly decided not only the moods you wish to forsake, but the positive ways of thought you wish to enjoy instead of your present daily diet of unhappy thought and feeling, then here is the next step. Create a formula. The formula must consist of three parts: (i) The state from which you wish to be free. (ii) The signal of free yourself. (iii) The state of mind and emotion with which you wish to replace your former state. Let me illustrate. If your days are full of depression and low spirits, you might create a formula something like this: (i) "Whenever I tend to fall into depression, defeatism or despair... (ii) THAT IS THE SIGNAL for me instead.... (iii) To be aware of my own great worth and to enjoy stability, lightness of heart, competence and ability. An alternative might run in terms like this: (i) "Whenever I am tense, anxious or afraid... (ii) THAT IS THE SIGNAL for me instead... (iii) To be aware that the Almighty is helping me, that life is meant to be good, and that every day I am becoming stronger, more stable and happier." It is possible that you can improve on these formulas. If you try to write one of your own, remember it must be brief, pointed, crystal clear, positive and without any hesitation. And it must contain the three stages, including the signal to change. Memorise your formula well. This is most important. You must know the formula by heart, so that even when you are perfectly passive and relaxed you can quiet, slowly repeat it without having to disturb yourself. There is a special reason for this. The strength of this technique lies in the fact that self-conditioning is a communication with the unconscious mind. The effective of self-conditioning depends on our feeding into the unconscious mind the programme we wish it to work out. The unconscious mind is simple enough to accept the instructions given to it. But the difficulty has always been to get these instructions past the barrier of the conscious mind to that part of us which works beyond consciousness. Now we have the answer to this problem. (a) We relax ourselves to the point where the conscious mind yields up its dominance over the personality. (b) Then we feed our programme into the unconscious mind. And (c) We take care that the formula we use contains the signal to change which employs the all-important factor of the conditioned reflex. That is the reason why it is so important that we memorise well the formula we have devised. It is only as we perform the technique faithfully that it will work. Every night when you go to bed and are about to fall asleep, go through the process of relaxing your muscles, your body, your mind. Then as soon as you are so passive that you are about to fall asleep, repeat your formula slowly, passively, thoughtfully. Repeat it twice, and then allow yourself to go fast asleep. Every day, as soon as you wake in the morning, before you try to collect your thoughts for a new day and while you are still in a half sleeping condition, repeat the formula again twice, in complete relaxation. Then, having wakened yourself up thoroughly, get out of bed and start the day. A happy feature of this technique is that it takes very little time before the effects of it are felt. The medicine does its work quickly. Many people feel different in a few hours. With others it may take two or three days. If you do not experience an alteration in your moods and behaviour in three days, you may be sure that you are not fulfilling the rules of the game. Question yourself carefully. Does my formula say precisely what it should? Is it crystal clear? Does it contain the signal to change? Is the second part affirmative? Am I perfectly relaxed and sleepy when I use the formula? Check up on these points. Make sure you are not demanding anything silly or impossible of yourself. Then with persistence you will meet with gratifying results. Because the technique is so powerful, and because we mostly tend to shy away from new and untried experiences, you may come across difficulties you had not expected. My own personal testimony, and that of many people who have tried this remarkable technique of self-conditioning, is that it is so effective that one wants to use words like "outstanding" or even "miraculous". Try it for yourself. Make a sincere and faithful experiment. You will be surprised at the change you experience.
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with warm regards
Harish Sati
Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU)
Maidan Garhi, New Delhi-110068
(M) + 91 - 9990646343 | (E-mail) Harish.sati@gmail.com
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