wanna get it right this time III - Psych-K

On Friday night my husband came how all revved up by an interesting talk he had heard on NPR on the way home, all about "dead ideas." (Turned out it was a talk by an author on book tour, I tracked down the book that was being promoted, it's The Tyranny of Dead Ideas).

The book is about economics, and the dead ideas are things like You Company Should Take Care of You and The Kids Will Earn More than We Do. But the reason my husband was jazzed up about it is, he felt the concept could apply to all parts of life. "We should think about what dead ideas we have in our lives, so we can get rid of them. It would be a good exercise."

Indeed, how to purge my mind (including subconscious), body, and spirit of old, outdated and negative thinking has been something I've been thinking about lately as part of my quest to shrink my fibroids and get pregnant. I wrote previously about getting excited by the idea of cleaning out thought patterns that are no longer serving me. The way I had tried to do that was with hypnosis, but unfortunately after a couple of attempts it didn't feel like it was working for me. But I kept thinking I wanted to find another way to work on this. I've been reading the classic You Can Heal Your Life and have created affirmation cards that are now all over my house, but somehow that didn't feel like enough. I kept thinking about what it said in the hypnosis book, about the need to get to your subconscious mind where the negative beliefs have lodged themselves.

The other day I decided to get a session of Body Talk (another alternative therapy I am a fan of) as a gift for a friend in another state who hasn't been feeling well. I looked up the practitioners in her area, and one of them showed on her site that she also did something called Psych-K. I read the description and said "I have to try that!"

Unfortunately it seems that not that many people do Psych-K. There are only a few people in my state listed in the practitioner list on the official website. However, I also did some googling and discovered that not all the practitioners are listed on the site. Even so, the closest person I could find was an hour away -- and I live in a major metropolitan area, and in California where people go for this kind of thing!

My appointment was today. The practitioner I worked with, Theresa Wiles, was an incredibly warm and supportive person. The session focused on getting yourself aligned with various affirmations -- so in other words, getting rid of the dead ideas by overwriting them with positive ones.

After briefly asking me my purpose for coming and some other background questions, we jumped in. The process involves identifying which positive ideas you are not in alignment with, using muscle testing, and then "resetting" them by holding your arms and legs in certain positions while meditating on them. (Yes I know sounds a bit woo-woo, but since I had done muscle testing before when doing NAET this felt a lot more comfortable to me than trying to go under hypnosis. In fact, really Psych-K is for emotions what NAET is for allergies...)

We started by clearing some of the basic concepts such as "I love myself" and "I deeply appreciate and accept myself." Then most of the ones we worked on were, interestingly, from the "grief and loss" section of her concept list -- such as ""As I forgive, so am I forgiven", "I can feel the sunshine even when the clouds are overhead" and "Everyone, including me, is doing the best they can." We also did some special ones that she came up with for me, including "I have all the time I need to conceive this baby," "I release my need to be perfect", and "I welcome changes in my life."

All in all I did 25 concepts -- not bad for an hour and a half. We were clipping right through them. It was rather tiring I have to say, and for the rest of the day I have been not as focused as usual and I'm going to go to sleep early. But I guess it makes sense to be tired if you are rewiring your brain!

Although it's not strictly necessary, I'm going to make affirmation cards with these 25 statements to keep me thinking about them.

I'm not sure how I'll be able to "prove" whether this was helpful or not, but it felt helpful to take time to really focus on these ideas and how I think about life. It definitely felt much more satisfying than the hypnosis.