What Kind of Questions Are You Asking?
By Dr. Gene Clerkin
In his private practice in the early 80's, Dr. Donald Epstein found that very gentle touches to specific areas along the spine could result in significant changes in a person's physiology. In addition, the people he treated had amazing shifts in their consciousness and transformation in their lives. Since his technique adopted ideas from a number of chiropractic theories, he called it Network Chiropractic. By monitoring results through his clients' reported outcomes, Epstein found that clients were not sustaining the shifts or changes that they'd experienced in his care. Consequently, he's been continually modifying and adding to the work he now calls Network Spinal Analysis.
One, if not the most significant developments in the evolution of Network Care has been the emergence of the spinal gateway. A gateway is a point where the areas of rapport or relative free energy contacted by the practitioner become more and more energetically sensitive. Practitioner contacts to these gateways assist the central nervous system in moving from stress physiology and defense posture toward one of adaptive self-assessment and reorganization. As the gateway develops, it becomes so energetically sensitive that a person will begin to respond well before an actual contact is made. If you observe Network practitioners working, you will notice them mindfully approaching the gateway from as far as a few feet away before making contact. These gateways even become sensitive to the thoughts of the practitioner and the person receiving care.
Over the last several years, I have read numerous texts and publications about the connection, power and influence of thoughts upon perception and outcomes. Deepak Chopra, Ekhart Tolle, Edgar Cayce, Catherine Ponder, Joseph Chilton Pearce and Louise Hay are just a few authors that come to mind when thinking about this work. While each author has a slightly different spin, I think they would all agree that whatever we focus upon in our lives tends to expand. Negative thoughts produce negative outcomes and positive thoughts produce a positive life experience. I'm sure we can all think of people that constantly focus upon the drama of their lives and continually create more of the same. Conversely, people who are positive most of the time seem to have an easy flow about their lives.
There is a direct correlation between our state of mind and the questions that we ask ourselves. For instance, if a person who was depressed took notice, s/he would find that questions like, “Why is this happening to me?” or “What's wrong with me?” were at the forefront of his or her thinking. While there are very few people who don't feel down or depressed at times, and I can't think of too many people who truly like feeling that way, how often do we actually consider changing the questions?
Network Care is classified into progressing levels of care offering different strategies to correlate with a person's state at any given time, and Epstein has classified the different states people experience in the healing process, and ultimately in their lives, into four seasons: Discover, Transform, Awaken and Integrate.
Questions in the Discover season, or state, might include, “Why me?” “Why doesn't this end?” “Why did s/he do this to me?” and “Why do I keep doing this?” Questions in the Transform season, or state, might include, “How can I express more of my courage?” “What's on the other side?” and “How can I resolve this?” Finally, in Awaken and beyond, the questions might include, “How can I express more love?” “How can I grow the gratitude?” “What is the gift in this?” and “How can I more fully express my soul?”
As a practitioner, it is extremely important that I'm mindful and aware of my own state because it completely affects a participant's ability to progress. Basically, I have to monitor the questions in my own head while I'm working. For instance, if I'm working with people in the Transform level, attempting to bring them into Awaken, my questions must hold the space for that transition. If I ask myself, “How can I fix this?” which is a Discover question, it would actually hinder their progress to the next level. I actually would want to be asking an Awaken question to help move them from Transform to Awaken. By the same token, if participants are asking themselves Discover questions while working in Transformation, that will inhibit their progress as well.
In fact, the questions that we ask ourselves all the time in our daily lives completely affect our states of mind and existence. You can try this out for yourself. Spend the day tomorrow monitoring how you feel and what questions you are asking in you mind. If you don't like where you are, try changing the questions. Write me and let me know how it goes, I'd love to hear your feedback
Light My Fire!
By Dr. Gene Clerkin
I really wasn't nervous about it at all, since many of my classmates had reported doing it years before. In fact, I didn't even think about it at all until Tony Robbins began to talk about it in detail. He said that your basic stove may get up to about six or even seven hundred degrees while the hot coals we were to walk on that evening could be anywhere from twelve to twenty four hundred degrees. That little tidbit of information caught my attention.
The seminar I was attending was called, “Unleash Your Power Within,” and it was directed toward breaking through the limitations we have that keep us from attaining our goals. The fire walk was really a metaphor for overcoming fears and perceived obstacles so that success, as defined by our goals, could be achieved. Hey, if you can walk on fire, what can't you do? The key to successfully making it across the course was to bring your self into, what Tony called, a “peak state”. It was also very important to remain focused, since failure to do so could result in burning your feet.
Throughout the weekend, we were asked to identify our goals and the limiting beliefs we have about achieving them; to develop strategies that create a different mindset and physisology to overcome those beliefs; and to create the ability to take ideas and convert them into action. I found it interesting that many of the concepts and strategies discussed were congruent to the types of ideas I share with my practice participants.
Most of us will, at least from time to time, have great ideas about what we want to do to achieve particular goals in our lives. Many times these goals never actually come to fruition. What's usually missing is the action step. The question then becomes, why or what is it that drives us to act? The answer is emotion. It's no coincidence that advertisements are directed toward eliciting our emotions. According to Robbins, researchers at the University of California found that monkeys could learn a task at an astoundingly greater rate when the pleasure centers of their brain were stimulated.
An easy way to achieve this peak emotional state is dancing to an upbeat song. Personally, I like to play the Jackson Five's, “I Want You Back” or Sublime's "Love is what I got", before I affirm my goals for the day and my life. The more we achieve peak states, the more ingrained they become in our systems and the easier it is to re-access them. It's important to note that while people often feel like victims to their feelings, you may choose this state at any moment once you have a strategy to achieve it. Simply put, if you're feeling depressed, put on your favorite song and dance.
Another important step in the Robbins' workshop was for us was to identify how our limiting beliefs have affected our lives up to now and how they would affect us in the future if we didn't change them. Two of the most common and basic limiting beliefs we have are “I'm not good enough” and “I can't be loved”. It's easy to see how these types of beliefs might hinder our ability to achieve life goals. In the workshop, we went through a process of intensely focusing on the effects our limiting beliefs have had for us and really feeling this in our bodies. It was very similar to the “Suffering” stage from Donald Epstein's “Twelve Stages of Healing”. Robbins called this process Creating Leverage for Change. In other words, we must have the impetus for wanting to create a shift in our lives or we probably won't make it happen.
As I went through this process, focusing more and more on the negative outcomes my limiting beliefs have created in my life, I began to experience intense pain in my back. Upon reaching the pinnacle of this feeling, I shifted my physiology back to a peak state and began to visualize exactly what I wanted without the constraints of limiting beliefs. This part was very similar to Epstein's stage four, “reclaiming our power”. I was actually able to clearly visualize my ideal future, something that has eluded me for a majority of my life.
The seminar was a great reminder that we can choose our thoughts, state of physiology and the outcome of our lives. Now whenever I feel a little overwhelmed, I just think back to the moment before I walked across those hot coals, bring myself back to that mindset and realize that I can do anything I decide to do.