Breaking The Habit Of Hurts And Hangups Volume 2

If you’ve lived with relationship challenges, money problems, health difficulties, fear (who hasn’t)  lack of direction, little or no contentment, shyness, trouble at work or school or in your business…basically whatever…Lester Levenson believed he’d created a programme that could change your life.

Warning…this is pretty looooooong.

So where did we leave off in volume 1 of this post?  Ah yes, I discovered I was a serial controller.  More later.

Lester believed your hurts, bad habits and hangups, your disappointments or troubles could be dissolved by using his techniques, regardless of whatever was going on in your life right now.

[success] The key to securing the happiness that is yours forever is to discover how to discharge the negative feelings you’ve accumulated. By discharging these negative feelings, you will not only increase the happiness in your life, but everything else will get better too.  Money, health, relationships, looks, you name it. ~ Lester Levenson[/success]

The programme that Lester devised is really pretty simple, it’s a method of enquiry that helps you to discover resistance or stress and get it out of your system.  The idea being that as we release feelings about the situations we experience, we’ll get to a place where we have abundance and imperturbability, a state of mind where those stuck feelings no longer cause our hurts or hangups…because they’re mostly gone.

Keeping it simple, there are three basic wants for us to look at as we begin using the release technique.

– Wanting Control

– Wanting Approval

– Wanting Security

The steps below and my experiences of them should help if you want to practice this technique. Practice makes this easier, trust me.

The steps to releasing are:

Notice what you are feeling when you think about a challenge you’re currently having, however big or small.

Example – I was working with someone who took for ever to respond to everything and I was getting progressively more annoyed.  So I began by asking myself if I was willing to let go of wanting to change things.

Okay, yes.

Then I needed to know which of the three wants was I feeling.  Ah yes, control.  I wanted what I wanted when I wanted it.  Told you, I discovered I was a serial controller.  And the situation you want to control is also controlling you.  Not a happy place.

I simply asked myself if I could let go of wanting to control this situation.

I did this maybe half a dozen times, and the feeling of wanting melted away.

Later that very same day, I got a response…and this was after three weeks of waiting!  Plus it was perfect news.

Decide that you can let go of what’s bothering you, even if it’s only in that moment.

Example – I’d committed to doing something that I was really uncomfortable about.  Did that feel lovely?  Not so much.  So I took a look at the basics and at the first enquiry, security came up.  I let go of wanting to feel safe, just in that moment.

Second time I thought about it, I became worried, wanting control came up.  So I let go of that.  See what I mean about the control thingy.

The thing is that until you can think about the issue, challenge, difficulty, whatever it is, and be unfazed by it, more releasing is necessary and sometimes a different basic want shows up.  It’s all good.

Feel “stuck”?   Let go of that stuck-feeling, or wanting to change it.

Funny how letting go of wanting to change things just feels so good.

Feeling stuck is often simply resistance to letting stuff go.  If  you’re willing to constantly release a feeling, eventually it runs out.  It’s like pulling tissues out of a box one after another, eventually, the box gets emptied.  Pretty cool stuff.

Release constantly, regardless of what you are doing or who you are with.

As I paid attention I found that  I wanted to control drivers who are too slow or too fast; squirrels that jump on the pool cage, because their cute little feet poke holes in it, so that the stingy things that I’m allergic to, can get in and sting me.  And all manner of other little issues, that I’ve mostly let go of.  I said mostly…not perfect here.

[success] I was letting go and undoing the hell I had created. By squaring all with love, trying to love rather than trying to be loved, and by taking responsibility for all that was happening to me; finding my subconscious thought and feeling and correcting it, I became freer and freer, happier and happier. – Lester Levenson[/success]

I can’t speak to whether Lester’s programme dissolves every habit of hurt, but I can speak to one of the most powerful experiences I had, when practicing his techniques.

Drumroll please, for the biggest and most significant experience I had in using Lester’s techniques, and the reason I wanted to share them with you.

Stuff happens in life.  Sometimes things happen when we’re really young, things that leave an ingrained impression on our little psyches.  Such was my experience with dentists.

Something happened, during my early dental visits as a child, that left me feeling terrified of dentists.  I hardly remember the circumstances.  We lived abroad for most of my young childhood where first class dentists were a rarity.

You can imagine the rest, although I have no particular conscious memory, other than I was left with a feeling of  flat out terror.

This feeling stuck with me to the degree that the only time you’d get me to visit a dentist was if I was in extreme pain.

So years of neglect would be followed by uncomfortable and expensive dental experiences….followed by more years of neglect.  I think you get the picture.

This terror was a defense mechanism, meant to protect me, but as it continued to live virtually unchecked in the depths of my subconscious it became a self-defeating, self-fulfilling prophecy.

Don’t think I didn’t try affirmations…if I even had the courage to think about dentists.  Don’t think I didn’t try the other techniques I picked up over the years.  And whilst it’s true I actually did my best to rarely think about dentists, I honestly did try to hustle that old terror out of the door.

The challenge was that my major operating system was infected with a virus that was at odds with any new programmes I tried to implant.

That childhood sensation of terror should have been felt and released.  You see kids doing this all the time.  One moment they’re heartbroken about something and the next it’s gone and they’re running around as happy as larks.

That’s what we’re supposed to do.

And then it happened.  Horrible, excruciating toothache.  Terror reared it’s ugly head…I knew a dental experience was inevitable.

So back to Lester’s techniques. I was done with terror ruling a part of my life.  Not remotely acceptable.

It was pretty clear that as a child I hadn’t felt safe at the dentist.  Sometimes as kids, at some unconscious level, it’s about the safety of our very soul.

So I let go of wanting to feel safe.  I know it sounds contrary…but if you want to feel safe…it’s because you don’t.   Much better to feel safe than want it.

I released the feeling of terror and wanting to feel safe every time the prospect of visiting the dentist popped into my head.

And as the good Lord is my witness, that terror began to fade.  It was almost unbelievable.  But the overwhelming, white knuckle, heart thumping fear that had consumed me for so many years, was hardly there at all.  I ended up having three root canals and I’m not going to tell you that apprehension didn’t join me in the dentist’s office, but terror was not my companion.  Amazing…after all these years.

I always knew that feeling was the secret to living a happy, fulfilled, abundant life and now I can add the releasing technique to keep moving along the path, so that the shadows of the past no longer have a stronghold in the present.

I wanted to remind you that you have no limits, except the ones in your mind and as you let go of them you’ll find you have so much more room for all the heartfelt things you desire, you’ll have more room to celebrate your life.

You can get Lester’s books at Amazon.  But he doesn’t have his programmes in them.

There are two ex-students of Lester who both have programmes, you can get started with their books here Larry Crane or Hale Dwoskin.  The full programmes of cd’s are pretty pricy, but I found one on E-bay, just in case anyone’s interested.

Oh and no, I don’t get paid for writing about this.  I just wanted to share because I found it to be such a great addition to living a purposeful life.

Encourage one another.

Love Elle
xoxo