Apparently, humans only use about twenty percent of their brains (and based on some of the decisions I’ve made in my lifetime I wonder if I’ve even been using that much, but I digress).

So Eddie Morra, the lead in the movie played by Bradley Cooper, stumbles upon the pills through a series of plot twists and begins taking them. And for the first half hour of the movie, we get to go on a ride with him (thanks to really cool directing, a la Neil Burger) as he morphs from an unsuccessful, depressed, pathetic struggling writer to a veritable superhuman.

And going on that ride with him was…amazing.

It was inspiring, and captivating, and liberating, and seduced me into the state I’ve been lucky enough to experience several other reality-bending, miraculous times in my life. The state in which I am limitless.

The state in which I do not have MS.

Yes, I absolutely believe that there is a frequency in which I can operate where MS simply is not. And I call this frequency “limitless”.

Yesterday, after the movie, I was living in that frequency for a good three or four hours before I went to sleep. And what I realized from the vantage point of that state is that I’ve been playing a really small game. This game I’ve been calling “healing”. The whole “I don’t want to be symptomatic anymore” game. That’s small potatoes. That’s shooting for the top of a four story building instead of aiming for the edge of the universe.

When I’m limitless

When I’m limitless, I don’t want to heal my MS. I don’t even want to be healthy. Because I already am.

And everything shifts, from the way I hold my body, to the thoughts I think, to the questions I ask myself. When I’m limitless, I don’t want to heal my MS because I don’t have MS.

Here’s what I know: I KNOW that the state of limitlessness is the state in which I am healthy. And so there is just one question worth asking, one thing worth doing, which is learning to maintain this state all the time. Because good diet and supplements and detoxification are critical to getting well, but they won’t be enough without the inner work. The inner work is the place where real alchemical magic can happen.

Watching the movie again (the good part, before he runs out of pills and it all goes to shit), that will work for a while. But eventually I’ll become immune to that. I wrote the word limitless all over my mirror, in my daughter’s washable markers. I have been saying “I am limitless” to myself throughout the day. That’s working. But those are just hacks. They won’t last forever, and that’s just the beginning.

Becoming limitless

Becoming limitless is a matter of will. It’s a matter of discipline. It’s a matter of examining your beliefs and eradicating the ones that don’t serve you. It’s a full-frontal attack on self-sabotaging thought patterns that most of us don’t even realize we’re having. But also, it’s incredibly, deceptively simple. Not necessarily easy, but simple. It’s just a simple shift. From one state to another.

Einstein said you cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. I know that I cannot heal my MS from the same state in which I cultivated it. I can’t think my way out of it. I can’t sit in a pile of anxiety and wonder how to not be symptomatic. Last night I was limitless. I had shifted states entirely. And it fuckin’ rocked my world.

What are you like when you’re limitless? When anything is possible for you? What do you notice about yourself? What do you notice in your body? What do you notice about the way you perceive the world?

If you can’t remember the last time you felt limitless, go see the movie. And make sure you associate into the experience of Eddie Morra while he’s riding the wave of his newfound brainpower (but make sure to jump off the train before he runs out and it all goes downhill for a while). And let me know how it goes.

Want more inspiration? Read We Are The Privileged or go to the main page to Get Inspired.

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The Chair of Despair

You see the chair in this picture? That’s the Chair of Despair. It was dubbed such by my friend Kiela, the owner of this aesthetically pleasing but unfortunate piece of furniture.

At first it was just a chair like any other, and hadn’t yet earned its esteemed title. But then Kiela began to notice that whenever she would sit in this chair long enough, everything would begin to feel less okay, and she would find herself thinking negative, limiting thoughts. Then she noticed that when she and her partner Tara would have conversations about their relationship, if Tara was sitting in the Chair of Despair inevitably the conversation would not go as well as if she were seated anywhere else in the room.

During one particular conversation, when things started to take a turn for the worse, she looked at Tara sitting there in the Chair of Despair and noticed that she was curled up in the fetal position, her knees pulled in toward her chest, her shoulders hunched over. You see, the thing about this chair is that it’s shaped in such a way that it’s not really possible for a person to comfortably sit up straight. So inevitably, those who sit in it quickly find themselves in an extreme slouch. And from the position of a slouch, the world seems different, because the way you hold your body effects what you think, feel, believe.

Structure not content

In the last installment of the Changing Your Beliefs series, Caught in a Bad Romance, we talked about how to revise a belief using content – stating the belief you want and then going about creating and gathering the evidence to prove the truth of the new belief for yourself. In this last installment of the series, we’ll focus on changing your beliefs using structure, not content.

Your neurosomatic position

The way you experience the world, and literally the way you can experience the world, is a function of the neurosomatic position you hold. What do I mean by this? Well let’s look at the word neurosomatic.

Neuro = the nervous system, through which information streams in from the external world, goes to the brain, is processed, and then sent back out to direct the muscles.

Somatic = the structure of your body – the way you hold yourself. For example, the tilt of your pelvis, the tonus of your lower back muscles.

The Default

Unless you’re a brain in a jar, neurosomatics effect you. You have a body and the way you organize your muscles and where your patterns of tension and relaxation are form the structure of how you experience the world. Which brings me to the point of this post – everyone has a baseline neurosomatic way of being – a perfect position that, when you’re in it, allows you to experience the world in the most effective and satisfying way possible. It is the optimized version of you that leads to radiant health and deep satisfaction.

This position is called your Default. It’s the way you are when you’ve let go of everything and you just are…the way you were born to be. Unfortunately, this baseline way of being is interrupted by the little and big traumas that all of us experience beginning as early as the womb. But when you’re able to tap back into that original perfection, that default way of being, you’re operating from a place where trauma is not.

In a way, rather than learning how to access it, we could say that you’re unlearning the things that inhibit it.

When I’m sitting in the fetal position in the Chair of Despair, my experience of the world will be vastly different than when I am standing with good posture. Different neurosomatics yield different results. Different neurosomatics yield different beliefs! If you want to change your beliefs, change your neurosomatic position.

Accessing your Default state is usually done with an experienced facilitator who can guide you into the state and teach you how to access it for yourself. This is one of the fundamental aspects of the work I do with my clients. There are also other ways to experience it and I’ll be expanding upon this in future posts.

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Photo by SpreePIX, Flickr

I’m a terrible singer. So bad that my own mother winces and begs for mercy when, for example, she happens to be present when I decide I simply MUST sing Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” My own mother! If that’s not proof I’m a bad singer, I don’t know what is.

I was not blessed, I believe, with good singing genes. I love to watch American Idol but I need Randy Jackson to tell me if someone was pitchy, because I have no clue, I can’t hear it. No one but my four-year-old daughter has ever said I have a good voice (but this coming from someone who wears hot pink tutus in public, so we know she can’t be trusted). Many have politely asked me to shut up. Some not so politely.

All the evidence in my entire life points to one undeniable TRUTH: I cannot sing well.

So is “I cannot sing well” a statement of fact, or a belief for which I’ve found a plethora of evidence to support, thereby placing it in the category of true?

It’s the latter! Which is great news, because it means I have the power to change it.

How to revise a belief

So what would I need to do to revise this belief? Because as much as it feels like irrefutable truth that I cannot sing well, and as sure as I am that if I uploaded a video of me singing along with Lady Gaga, you would undoubtedly agree, the fact is, this belief can be rewritten. And here’s the magic – all I need to do is ask myself the following question, answer it, and then take the necessary action:

What would need to be true in order for me to believe I am a good singer?

My answer:

1. I would need to take singing lessons, so I could learn how to sing correctly, breathing from my diaphragm, projecting my voice, learning how to stay on pitch, to hear the notes, all the details that good singers must learn and that I am, at present, completely clueless about. I would need to take lessons until I mastered all of these things and was confident that at the very least, I had the technical expertise to sing correctly, consistently.

Here Comes the Change

2. With this newfound confidence in my singing ability, I would go out into the world and belt Bad Romance every chance I got, setting my filters for compliments. In other words, rather than sorting for the evidence that I cannot sing, as I’ve been doing my entire life, I would begin to sort for the evidence that I have a good voice. I would remember every compliment that comes in and allow this new feedback to mold a different reality, a different Truth, a different belief.

Surely I will never have the pipes of Christina Aguilera, but I bet I would begin to notice that my mom wouldn’t be horrified anymore when I sang (my own mom!). And maybe I’d even be told that my voice was pretty good, once I did the work to learn how to actually use it.

As I begin collecting evidence from the external world that I can, in fact, sing, my belief would begin to change.

Simple, not easy

It’s that simple to change a belief, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. If I really were to commit to changing my belief that I cannot sing, I would need to put in a lot of work, effort, money, and attention on improving my voice. With my already packed schedule, it could take a couple years of singing lessons before I really had the skills to make a significant shift. But I could do it.

A challenge for you

So today, pick a belief you have that you’d like to change. What’s the belief you’d like to have instead of the one that’s currently there? Then, ask yourself the key question:

What would need to be true in order for me to believe (insert your desired belief here)?

Then answer it for yourself, and if you really want to change it, begin taking action. And please share what the belief is you’d like to change in the comments section. I would love to hear from you.

In Part 5, I’ll talk about how I’ve implemented this method to change my beliefs about my health, and how you can too. Because if you’ve got MS or another chronic illness, chances are high that you’re caught in a bad romance (sorry, couldn’t help myself) with a bunch of beliefs that are simply not serving you, and need to be kicked to the curb.

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Sat Jivan Singh Khalsa

Who is the healthiest person you can think of? Take a minute to feel the frequency and the presence of that person.

For me, that person is Sat Jivan Singh, the director of Kundalini Yoga East in New York City. He is, I would guess, in his sixties, though only his gray beard gives it away. There is, unlike others I know in their sixties, a palpable glow about him, a lightness and a vibrancy to his presence that makes me feel uplifted just being near him. He radiates happiness and joy, he is in pristine physical shape, as flexible as a spry gymnast with the endurance of a long-distance runner. He can break a 104-degree fever by simply wrapping two fingers around his big toe in just the right posture, flexing the exact right muscles. He is powerful and skilled and kind. For me, he is the picture of health.

What would it be like to be that healthy?

Did you just say something to yourself along the lines of “It would be amazing, but…”

Good! Ok, so what were the “buts”? Those buts are your beliefs about your health. Those buts are the beliefs that are keeping you from attaining that level of health for yourself.

So today, take some time to write down all those beliefs – all the reasons why you think you cannot be as healthy as the healthiest person you know. Go as deep as you can – ask yourself what belief is underneath each of the ones you write down. Keep going until you feel you’ve reached your core beliefs.

If your experience is anything like mine when you do this, you’ll feel both liberated and repelled by the truth of what you really think. You’ll see, in black and white (or blue and white, or red and white, depending on the color of the pen you use) how your beliefs are running counter to the results you want for your life.

This is the first step to changing your beliefs.

Let me know how it goes for you.

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The primary beliefs that we operate our lives by are acquired in our first six years. During that time, our brains are in a hypnogogic, dreamlike state, ideal for downloading massive amounts of information with no filters. In other words, from birth to age six, we’re sponges with feet.

As Dr. Bruce Lipton put it in my interview with him, we’re born like iPods shipped from the factory – our hard drive is empty and we go about recording and storing everything we are exposed to. With no filter for what we’re taking in, we download all of the judgments, likes, dislikes, behavior patterns and beliefs of those around us.

When we grow up, 90 percent of our daily actions and responses come from the reservoir of information we accumulated during these first years of our life. As adults, we primarily operate based on beliefs of our parents, our families, our schools, our culture, our science, our country. What we are capable of and what limits us is based on what other people told us when we were young.

Go to the Doctor!

Here’s the example Dr. Lipton gave in my interview with him:

“A child is growing up in a family and the first six years, every time anyone is sick in the family, what it hears is ‘We have to take so and so to the doctor.’ What is the child recording? The first thing the child is recording is this: That when I am sick, before I get better I must go to the doctor. So if you were able to heal yourself but you got this program, you wouldn’t engage your own self-healing until you did the first step of the program which is what? Go to the doctor.”

He continues:

We begin to acquire in the first six years that when it comes to health, you are not the professional. When it comes to health, the official understanding and belief system is going to be given to you by the doctor. So what that means is when you’re a child, the first thing you learn in your mind is if a doctor says this then it’s true. There’s no question in there as a child that says ‘OK, go to the doctor and then question what the doctor says.’ It just says, ‘No, go to the doctor.’

So the relevance is, then, whatever the doctor says becomes a true belief for you. And if the doctor says something positive that would be the equivalent of a placebo effect and if the doctor says something negative that is the equivalent of the nocebo effect.

Your Beliefs are Your Struggle

The power of the “nocebo” effect doesn’t just happen in our doctor’s offices though. It happens throughout the culture of MS, the culture of Western medicine, and our society at large. In other words, if our culture doesn’t believe it’s possible to heal from MS, if our culture doesn’t believe the individual has the power to heal themselves with methods outside the narrow paradigm of Western medicine, then neither will you, because you’ve downloaded its beliefs. The limiting and negative messages about your illness are effecting your ability to heal. Your struggle – your feelings of helplessness and doubt and fear – are the result of someone else’s beliefs, and they’re not serving you.

Which is great news, because it means that now all we have to do is change our beliefs so that they support our healing. This is where my attention has been lately, and this is what I’ll be discussing in the next few installments of this series.

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If you haven’t yet listened to my interview with Dr. Bruce Lipton, you can do so by signing up here.

If you want to understand the science behind how your thoughts effect your body, Bruce Lipton’s The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, & Miraclesis the book to read. I am working on getting an interview with Dr. Lipton, but in the meantime, this two-part video interview does a great job of explaining the basics.