By Steve Wells
What is happiness? Your values are your current definition of life happiness. Live your life according to your values and you will be happy. You will be meeting all of your current internal criteria for happiness and success.
The problem? We have been hard-wired to respond emotionally to many different things at the same time. We may have for example learnt that speaking in public is a way of getting recognition but also that it is a way of experiencing potential rejection. So we take two steps forward and two steps back. Our success is a “Yes – No”. Part of us is saying yes to success and part of us is saying no.
There are so many things in life like this, where we have learnt to associate BOTH pleasure and pain to them. The world of duality is such a pain when it is inside us, giving us little jolts of pain each time we think about moving forward to improve our lives, and giving us little bursts of pleasure every time we think about doing something else, even things which we KNOW intellectually we will feel bad about afterwards…
This yes-no conflict abounds in the wider society. It is so easy, for example, to find an opposite for every success injunction. Do it now? What about looking before you leap? Give 110 percent? What about your life balance? Delay your gratification for a greater reward later? But how about a bird in the hand?
How does this affect us personally? You want to make a difference in the world? What about the effects this might have on your family? You want to do something great? What about having a lazy day with friends at the beach instead?
Sometimes it feels like internal civil war! And it is. We are progressively giving ourselves little jolts of electricity and little injections of good and bad drugs (little squirts of pleasure and pain) every time we think either about moving in a new direction or even when we think about staying put. These pleasure-pain connections have been hard-wired into our nervous system by our past experiences with pleasure and pain.
Want to act against your internal emotional programming? Lots of luck! Pretty soon you’ll be feeling a lot of pain. This is why willpower doesn’t last; it can’t compete with the strong emotional messages coming from our unconscious.
What to do?
The outside world will not change for you until your inner world does. We need to settle down the war inside us and treat our pleasure and pain attachments before we’ll be able to move forward with more clarity and certainty.
As strange as it may seem, the way forward when you have a strong internal push-pull is to treat your attachment to BOTH sides. Don’t just try to treat your addiction to daytime television or computer games and not your desire to work harder. Treat both parts, as both parts represent underlying values of yours which are trying to express. If you make one side win, then the other side has to lose. And since part of you wants that, then you get to lose either way.
What we are after here is a way that everyone can win. This is where all parts of you can be accepted, where you can get what you really want, where the way forward for you is a "Yes-Yes", or what I call 100% YES!
100% YES! is a state where you know that what you are doing is good for you on all levels, where all parts of you are working together to give you the best of all worlds. It’s where you discover your true passion, the stuff you really love to do, and you are able to go for it. To get there, you need to release the fear and false programming that tells you that you can’t do it or have it or be it. Strange as this may seem, this is a journey of accepting all parts of yourself, and getting them to work together for your greater good…
Experience 100% YES in a live workshop
We have workshops coming up soon in Kuala Lumpur , Singapore and Sydney
Can’t make it to a live workshop?
The Values Intensive “live” workshop DVD set will show you how to use tapping to align your values for success. Find out more at: http://www.eftdownunder.com/DVD.html
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