Operation Emotional Freedom

If you know anyone suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, (PTSD), you need to send them this link.

The video from Gary Craig, the creator of The Emotional Freedom Technique, (EFT), is now available at the following website:
http://www.operation-emotionalfreedom.com/dvd.php

This powerful video documents the story of veterans suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, and how they are being helped by learning to use EFT to eliminate the symptoms of nightmares, flashbacks, rage, confusion, paranoid thoughts, alcohol and drug abuse, broken relationships and more. This movie began in 2008 with veterans volunteering to try this approach. These veterans and their families thought there was no help for the life threatening symptoms they had as a result of being in combat situations. The movie documents the results they got in five days of treatment and the benefits which lasted a full year later when they were interviewed for followup.

Please help spread the word about this low cost, highly effective, self-empowering tool for resolving the effects of a past trauma, whether the trauma was combat related or from any other situation. This tool and its powerful healing benefits are simply too important to be kept secret, or to be ignored.

You can also go to the EFT website, www.eftuniverse.com to learn more about the actual procedure and download a free manual which shows you how to perform EFT for yourself or a loved one. Please note that if someone has been in a combat situation, or any other severely traumatic situation, they may need to support of a therapist who is trained in EFT or other Energy Psychology, or Mind/Body energy techniques in order to benefit from this process.


Please help those who have served our country and sacrificed more than any of us can truly know, by helping to spread the word about this powerful tool which is transforming lives and healing the effects of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, (PTSD).

Dr. Michael Ryce - A New Beginning, and Guy Finley - Leaving Happy Valley

Last week and this week, the Mindshifters group watched a lecture by Dr. Michael Ryce titled A New Beginning: A lesson from A Course In Miracles, www.whyagain.com, and we listened to a story by Guy Finley about a woman who lived in "Happy Valley" and was trying to leave and "move on" with her life, www.guyfinley.com.

One of the essential messages from Dr. Ryce's talk was the idea that if I want things to be different in my life, I have to find a way to do things differently. Therefore, if I rely on the same processes of my thinking and logical mind which produced the situation I am in, I am not likely to find a result that is any different than what I have already produced. My unhappiness or discomfort in any moment is the result of what I have chosen to focus my awareness upon. If I keep focusing my awareness on the outside events and what others are saying and doing, and assume that these things are causing what I am feeling, then I am doomed to continue feeling the same kind of pain and discomfort.


Dr. Ryce relates that A Course In Miracles suggests that I decide "Today I will make no decisions by myself. I will make decisions with my life today, instead of my past." Then throughout the day I should tell myself the kind of day I want to have, and keep reminding myself of the kind of experience I want to have. Then when things begin to happen that don't seem to produce in me the kind of experience I want to have, it is suggested that I say to myself, "I have no question. I forgot what to decide." This will keep me from the pattern of automatic response based on my past experiences, which has produced discomfort and unhappiness within me, every time something like this has happened in my past.

It is also suggest that when I am unhappy or uncomfortable in any way that I say, "I hope I have been wrong." Because the Truth is that happiness does not depend on being right. Happiness depends on being Love! If I can get myself to realize that no matter how hard I have worked at proving that "I am right!", it has not led me to being happy, then I can begin to suspect that there may be another way to look at my situation.

Guy Finley tells the story of the woman who lives in Happy Valley and is no longer satisfied with her life. She decides to "move on". She tells her friends that she is going to leave Happy Valley and they tell her she can't because there are guards. She thinks this is silly because she has never seen any guards. She then realizes that she has never tried to leave before and so maybe that is why she never noticed any guards. She decides to think about this for a while and gives up the idea of leaving Happy Valley. But eventually she gets tired of all the tension, frustration, gossip, competition, anger, pride, and sadness which define her life in Happy Valley and once again decides she needs to leave and "move on".

When she finally tries to walk out of the valley, she is confronted by someone walking towards her from a distance. This scares her her and she decides to go back to her house and think it over. Eventually a number of years have passed and she has gone through several attempts to leave the valley and each time she did, the person confronted her sooner and sooner, until she finally saw that the person was actually someone who looked just like her. Finally she decided to confront the person face to face and when she did she realized it was just a mirror. She was relieved at first, but then scared again when she tried to walk around the mirror and it moved to be in front of her. Eventually she gave up trying to go around the mirror and went home.

After many attempts to sneak out of the valley and finding that the mirror was confronting her sooner and sooner each time she tried, she opened her door one day to leave and the mirror was in her doorway. She got so angry she threw a stone at the mirror and the mirror was not harmed at all. In fact, the stone bounced off and hit the woman. With great fear and frustration, she reached out to touch the mirror and when she did her finger passed right through the mirror. She instantly felt all manor of strange sensations - many of them were not comfortable. She wanted to run away again but there was nowhere left to run. So she pushed her finger further into the mirror, fighting back the fear and "pain" and realized that this mirror was a passageway to some other place.

With great fear and doubt she pushed forward and walked right into the mirror. Instantly she was transported to another place, outside of Happy Valley.

Guy Finley then talks about how the resistance we feel is greatest just before the moment of transformation. He discusses how we have been tricked into thinking that emotional pain is the same as physical pain and that the proper thing to do is avoid it, rather than sit with it and explore it. This simply leaves us in the same cycle as the woman who wanted to leave Happy Valley, repeating the same useless escape mechanisms over and over again. In truth, the resistance, emotional pain and discomfort we feel is the signal that something has come along to reveal to us something about ourselves which is keeping us from moving forward and knowing Life more completely. The Truth is that we can release those things within us which keep us from knowing Life more completely, only by accepting them as simply self-caused, by the process of avoiding and denying resistance.

We come from Love, we are made of Love, we are Love. Everything else is false.

Dr. Michael Ryce's lecture on "Healing Through Relationships"

This week we watched the first half of Dr. Ryce's lecture on the healing power of relationships. The lecture makes the point that relationships are not bad, broken, or diseased. Relationships are sacred tools which reveal to us what it is, inside each of us, that we have denied and suppressed. We deny and suppress things because they are painful or scary, and these are the things which will keep creating pain and fear in our lives until we own them, and dismantle them from our thought. Dr. Ryce suggests that the traditional purpose for relationships in our world has been to see how much stuff we can accumulate, and who can be proven to be "right". He offers that the way to begin using the healing power of relationships begins with adopting a new purpose for relationships; "I want to heal." This changes everything about how we approach relationships, and what we can learn from them.

Guy Finley states in his Seven Steps to Oneness program that: "Before we can change our experience of life, we must change our purpose for living."

This is a fundamental truth which arises from the awareness that we each create our own realities from the selective attention we place on the actuality of life which happens around us. When we choose a focus for our attention and we decide to set a goal or a purpose, that goal or purpose filters what we see, hear, and feel, and motivates our behavior in an attempt to accomplish that goal or purpose. Once we set a goal or purpose, it stays active in us until we achieve it or consciously cancel it. Therefore a goal or purpose can be driving our behavior, and experience, long after we have shifted our conscious awareness away from it and onto something else.

This makes it very important to consciously choose the purpose/goal we have for being in a relationship, and to frequently remind ourselves of that purpose/goal. When we do this with the understanding that we are creating our own experiences and our internal realities, and that no one else is causing any of our emotions, or thoughts, whether positive or negative, we can begin to make good use of the tool of relationship for healing those thoughts and emotions that "come up" within us that are less than Love. Dr. Ryce offers a tool for using relationships to heal at www.whyagain.com/commitment.php


We come from Love, we are made of Love, we are Love. Everything else is false.

Guy Finley's talk - Your New Authority Over Anything That Disturbs You!

Last night the Mindshifters group listened to the one hour audio lecture by Guy Finley, (www.guyfinley.com), before working on Reality Management worksheets. The purpose for this departure from our normal routine was that Dr. Ryce himself talks about how beneficial it is to hear the same message from a variety of different perspectives. If you hear about a new concept from several different sources and perspectives, it shortens the amount of time it takes you to integrate the material. It tends to produce more neural connections and can lead to more flashes of insight.

So with this in mind, we listened to Guy Finley discuss the ways in which everything that stimulates a disturbance in me is truly a gift. Every person, interaction, and situation which produces a disturbance in me is Revealing to me something about myself which I was unaware of, prior to the disturbance. He talks about the situation in which I am just having a wonderful day until someone gives me the wrong look, or criticizes me in some way. Then suddenly there is an irritable little person who erupts from me. I wasn't an irritable little person until that situation occurred. My immediate thought is that someone just put an irritable little person into me. I then blame the other person for what I am feeling, saying and doing.

The fact of the matter is that I had those irritable feelings and thoughts within me, long before the other person gave me the look, or criticized me. I was simply not aware of that irritation, because I had chosen to focus my awareness on other things. Just because I don't choose to focus my awareness on my frustration, irritation, anger, blame, guilt and shame, does not mean I don't have any of those thoughts, feelings and energies hiding in my mind/body energy system. And as Dr. Ryce so often points out, every dis-integrative energy in my energy system is wearing me down and will eventually cause physical dis-ease and eventually death, if it is not seen, acknowledged, and removed.

Guy Finley closed his talk with a description of how a disturbing event produces resistance within me, which could Reveal to me something about myself, which is keeping me from being in direct contact with all that I am. The key to this process is that I accept the Revelation and integrate the realization that I had this energy within me. The problem is that in our current culture and system, we are conditioned to reject the Revelation and lose the realization, but insisting that someone else or something else is responsible for the resistance we feel when we come into contact with a disturbance.

This is the heart of Dr. Ryce's Reality Management Worksheet, (www.whyagain.com) which steps a person through the process of identifying exactly how they are blaming someone or something else for the Reality they are creating in response to a disturbance in their lives. The worksheet helps a person reclaim their power, by taking responsibility for all that they are thinking and feeling, and by helping to uncover the hidden, deeper, projected parts of the mind, which are truly creating the discomfort.

Guy Finley states that with each disturbance we feel, the world is asking us, "Would you like to see what is keeping you from being closer to me?"

We come from Love, we are made of Love, we are Love. Everything else is false.

Dr. Michael Ryce Lecture: Did You Hear What I Think I Said?

The Mindshifters group spent the last two weeks watching the video lecture by Dr. Ryce about Response-Ability Communication. This lecture outlines a process of communicating which is built around Dr. Ryce's observations that we each create our own internal reality and that if we are in pain, we are in error. So this model for communicating is designed to allow me to let others know what reality I have created for myself, in a way which makes it clear that I know I have created this reality for myself. This means that I clearly transmit the message that I understand that no one else has done anything which created any discomfort in me.

This model of communication blends Dr. Ryce's awareness of how each of us creates our own pain and then projects that pain onto the image we create in our minds about the other people and situations around us, with solid communication skills which have been promoted by experts for centuries. The value of using a system like this is that it keeps me focused on the things I truly have control over, and this leaves me with the power to create change in my life.

The reason most of Dr. Ryce's lectures have such power is because, at some point in the process, they run counter to the way our traditional culture, or "common sense" would have us think or react. This lecture is no different. Most people think that effective communication is getting other people to agree with them, or believe what they believe, or to accept that what they did was wrong or somehow harmed us. The definition of communication which is given in this lecture is, "To accurately re-create the "reality" in my mind, in the mind of the person I am trying to communicate with." This can only be accomplished if it is known and agreed upon that I am completely responsible for everything that I think, feel, see and hear!

In this model of communication, when I tell the other person, "what I want", it is not about what I want from them or what I want them to change or do differently. In this model of communication when I tell someone "what I want", it is a statement of how I want things to change within me, which only I can do. It is followed by a request for support from the other person in my own process of changing the reality I am creating which is causing me pain.

When I realize that I am the only one who can cause my emotions and that any sense within me that another person has caused my emotions is simply a distraction driven by my fear about what I would have to look at within myself, I am opening a new door to limitless possibilities.

We come from Love, we are made of Love, we are Love. Everything else is false.