(This is Part 4 of a 4-part series. Make sure you check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)
The third way in which we are conditioned is by specific incidents.
What did you experience when you were young around health, fitness, and well-being? These experiences are extremely important because they shape the beliefs – or rather, the illusions – you now live by.
A woman who attended one of my workshops was having a really hard time kicking her sweet tooth to the curb. When we dug a little deeper, she revealed that her family had a longstanding tradition of sitting down together each evening to talk about their days. And this nightly ritual always involved eating something sweet – like ice cream, cake, or chocolate.
Now as a grown adult, it doesn’t seem to matter how much she learns about the negative impact of sugar on her health, it’s not enough to override the emotional pleasure she has for eating sweets with her family. She is living out her health blueprint, as all of us do.
Instead of throwing more scary statistics at her, I helped her identify and revise her old health blueprint, which was no longer serving her current health goals. Today she reports that “sweets no longer control me,” and jokes that besides the birth of her son, it’s the biggest miracle she’s ever experienced!
Steps for Change: Specific Incidents
- Awareness: Consider a specific emotional incident you experienced around health, fitness, and well-being when you were young.
- Understanding: Write down how this incident may have affected your current health.
- Disassociation: Can you see that this way of being is only what you learned and isn’t you? Can you see that you have a choice in the present moment to be different?
- Reconditioning: Declare out loud: “I release my non-supportive health experiences from the past to create a new future.”
I really encourage you to invest the time to do this exercise (as well as the verbal programming one from Part 2 and the modeling one from Part 3). Your health, vitality and energy may depend on it!
Now I want to hear from you. What’s one thing that you experienced around health, fitness, or wellness growing up? Please leave me a comment below and remember, you have a choice to think and act differently going forward. How liberating!
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