Experience "Metaphoria"
Remarkable self-directed, neural plasticity

1) Changes created from repetition and struggle

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The most common (and more challenging) method of change, is the repetition of new behaviors daily, over and over again, for around 30 days, until they eventually become new habits.

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You may be familiar with this experience when you have tried to incorporate a new exercise routine into your life, such as going to the gym every day or going for a walk each morning.

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Did you manage to build any new habits in this way before? How challenging was it to do?

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This is known in psychology and neuroscience as "Top-down change", and works by changing your neural pathways using signals created using conscious effort, from the "top" of your brain.

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I´m sure you already know that energy chooses the path of least resistance, so this type of change works, because you continually redirect your thought energy away from the old pathways, in favor of sending them down the newly built roads instead.

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This can feel difficult because at first, those thoughts want to keep using the old roads and pathways, as they are faster and more established, and it may take time and effort to keep on redirecting that traffic into your new and preferred direction.

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If you are consistent and don´t give up, however, eventually, with lots of repetition, those new roads will get strong enough for the thoughts to flow well, and that energy will naturally choose the new road over the old.

This is the point when it finally becomes easy for you, and your new habit no longer needs that conscious effort to maintain.

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2) Rapid change from intense unconscious learning

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The second way that you can change your feelings, responses, thoughts, and habits is by effecting what psychologists call "bottom" up change.

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This is much more powerful and fast as it happens as a response to emotions. This happens when you activate your limbic system (in the lower part of the brain).

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The limbic system is responsible for your emotional responses.

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This type of change follows thoughts that have been supercharged with strong emotions. The emotions act as a power driver to covert the new roads (neural pathways) into instant superhighways. This type of change happens naturally, and more quickly, and is often driven unconsciously without much effort from us. It is like change just "happens", often without our control. 

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We start to behave differently simply because we "feel" like behaving differently. We naturally notice different things in our environment, new opportunities, or different possibilities, simply because we have re-calibrated our brain to look for these on an unconscious level. 

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You may have probably noticed this more in your life, with negative emotions rather than positive ones.

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For example, did you ever have a place that you loved to frequent (like a favorite restaurant) and then perhaps, one day, you may have experienced a negative emotion there (like a bad meal for example). Even though you may have previously loved going to that place, you suddenly find that you just don´t feel like going anymore, and will just naturally start to search out and choose to go to new places instead?

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When you think of that place, you can notice that the past "bad" experience is somehow glued to the way you imagine your experience will be in the future, should you go there again? In fact, if you were to go there again, you would probably spend your time actively looking for some signs of a negative experience being repeated once more.

 

(This is called confirmation bias, where our brain actively scans and seeks our environment only for any evidence that supports the things that we already believe to be true)

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3) Switching off the "words" by mastering mindfulness, meditation, or experiencing hypnosis

 

The third way you can de-hypnotize yourself and create positive life change is simply by learning to switch off the words in your mind.

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It is not the "thinking" that causes our problems, but the language and words themselves that act as "triggers" for certain feelings, behaviors, and states of mind or body.

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The "dialogue" we feed ourselves internally, is nothing more than a set of these word triggers that have been installed at some point in our life, as an emotional response to some of our previous life experiences.

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This is how meditations, mindfulness, and hypnosis are able to work so incredibly well because they absorb our full attention inside our senses or use our imagination to go into our internal visual imagery and emotions. (Internal imagery and our emotions come out of our instinctive and unconscious mind), whereas the language of words comes through the conscious.

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This switching off the trigger words held in the "chatter" in our brain, means that without the chatter, there are simply no more "triggers" to create our unwanted feelings, bad habits, and unhelpful responses. Without the words to maintain our feelings, we cannot "hold on" to any unwanted physical states of being.

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Being able to control the on/off switch for your internal "chatter" gives you a full sense of self-control and allows you to stop triggering yourself in an unhelpful way, whenever you want.

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This also takes a little time and practice and causes wonderful physical changes in the structure of your brain. (Shrinks the amygdala, brain´s alarm system, increases your brain density and grey matter, and fully integrates left and right brain neural activity to be more balanced and cohesive). 

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The beautiful side effects of these brain changes (caused by regular meditation, mindful awareness, and hypnosis) include improved memory and concentration, greater sensory acuity and perception, a much calmer and more peaceful bodily nervous response system, and more relaxed and controlled thoughts, with an ability to "step outside" of your thought stream for clarity and dissociation, whenever needed or desired.   

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4) Revelation, reframe, or regression in therapy 

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The fourth way that we can affect a rapid change is by "revelation" or a sudden shift in perspective. The problem with our inner language of "words" and the "trigger words" that we use in our mind is that, when we have used them a lot in our life, they tend to develop into phrases and "stories".

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These are like "sets" of dialogue that we tell ourselves, that can become dissociated from their original point of creation, their reason for existing, or from the symbolism, imagery, and emotion that originally lay underneath the creation of that story.

For example"I am no good at sport... I am always unlucky...I am not good enough.... I can´t handle it when..."

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The more we repeat these stories in our mind, or reaffirm them out of our mouths, out loud, the more dissociated they become from their original reason for existing and the emotional source of their creation. 

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The words themselves may eventually become so dissociated from their source that they begin to form our whole experience and dictate our behaviors on autopilot. The more dissociated they have become from the source, the more trouble we tend to have, trying to change them.  

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We may often end up just blindly believing in these stories, without questioning their origin or validity and we often don´t realize that we may be allowing them to run like faulty programming code in our brains. They simply become "problem trances" and operate like self-hypnotic suggestions that we continually and unhelpfully use on ourselves day after day. 

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Revelation and reframing work because it cuts straight through the internal chatter, to reconnect us with our own real reason for the "story´s" creation. Through the act of learning "why" we have that "story" and reconnecting with the real emotions underneath it, remembering it, and often reframing the experience differently, we get to break free from the "trigger" words that we have been using, so that we are free to replace our story with one that is more helpful and progressive.

New emotions set us free.

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Metaphoria creates powerful rapid change because it employs all four of these change techniques simultaneously.

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Using guided internally focused techniques (G.I.F.T.S.), deliberate trigger words, and very specialized clean language, we fire up your emotions and feelings in the limbic system, with a direct purpose, and we attach these in a fully intentional way, to whatever it is, that you want to change.

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By stimulating your right brain to integrate with the left and work with whatever is already there, inside of your mind, "symbolically" through your own internal sensory processing, rather than defaulting to the triggering "stories" of language, your mind can naturally and safely change itself in a way that will work best for the ecology of keeping you safe and protected within your real life. You can give yourself the changes you really want or discover the insights that you feel you need to experience, in order to overcome issues or achieve your life´s goals. 

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You are always in charge of the whole process yourself, and are in full control all the way through, as you are simply guided effectively through the "seas of rapid change" by this wonderful process.