Archives: IQTuneUps

Use these words in a single sentence: turtle, automobile, carrot.

The sentence doesn’t have to make “that much sense”-just get it to where another person who reads the sentence would get some meaning out of it easily without straining to wonder what you were conveying.

Now, use these words in a single sentence: skipping, artichoke, kite, triangle.

Now, use these words in a single sentence: weather, heaven, today, mother, worms.

Ask yourself,Why is it so easy for my mind to do this kind of task?

Where is this creativity working in my daily life?

Where isn’t it working?

Is there some way that I can step aside more often and let this kind of process work for me?

How can I become more vigilant and become more aware of moments in my life when my creativity can be consciously brought to bear upon my experiences?

Can I make sense out of just about anything? Can I take any two events of my life and put them together in a sentence about me?

Take at least 30 seconds to practice each of the following “steps” in this exercise. Step one of this exercise WILL be uncomfortable. If it isn’t then, do it over until it does not feel good to do it. You should get at least a mild emotional negativity that is noticeable, before proceeding to the other steps.

Because of this “negativity” aspect of this exercise, you should be cautioned that if this exercise “strikes too close to home,” then you should not do this exercise. This is not meant to be a “heart wrenching” experience.

1. Pretend that a person you romantically love very much has just left you for another person. Imagine the actual first moment you find out. Use an actual person in your life for this experiment.

2. Now pretend that an hour has passed. Imagine yourself having subsided just a bit, but still quite upset.

3. Now pretend that a week has passed.

4. Now pretend that three years have passed and you are completely over it, and the loved one’s name can come up in conversation without a large negative emotion coming up.

5. Now pretend that still more years have passed, and you meet this person on the street, and you genuinely greet the person with the intent to enjoy the meeting as much as is possible without any hope of the two of you getting back together.

6. Now pretend that you are at the end of your life, and you look back on all that has happened to you-the heights and depths-the soaring, the scarring. See how all that has happened has “filled out” your life. Imagine yourself laughing with someone about this one negative incident in your life.

Ask yourself,If I can go through such a process in my imagination, in real life, if such a thing might happen to me, is there a way for me to speed this process up by consciously participating in it?

How long does this process take if the loss is much lesser in nature? Can I see all the steps in rapid succession for when, say, I drop my ice cream cone on the sidewalk or stub my toe or a friend snarls at me for no reason?

Is there a way to jump to the end of this kind of process by an act of will? Can I just “see where all this is going” and “just go there?” What is it about the passage of time that is so necessary to the process?

What is it that “quiets down” as the years pass, and what is it about time that facilitates this process?

What are the chances that at the end of my life the negativity I have endured will be found to be my strongest memories and my greatest character builders?

Can I rally around this concept during my coming trial? Can I enter an intellectual “eye of the storm” that is calm while all else is breaking loose?

Can I practice process like this during my easier, smaller challenges and thus build up my “maturation muscles” to handle more easily the processing of greater and more intense forms of grief?

The next time you speak to someone, pretend that both of you are a ventriloquist’s dummies and that someone is actually speaking for both of you with different voices, actions, etc.

Get into this. Continually place your attention on and return it to the concept of being a ventriloquist’s dummy and comparing it to your actual experiences while engaging in the conversation.

Note the smoothness of the conversation-how “practiced and rehearsed” it seems, or at least, how much each conversation would be applauded as such if seen in a television show.

Note how much of your partner’s words seem automated, canned, scripted, or part of a “knee jerk” pattern.

Ask yourself,Why do I “put up with” the lack of creative spontaneity in others and myself? Why do I “go with” most of my interchanges being a “fairly routine and predictable” event?

Am I a computer program that spits out whatever is “called for” by my environment?

If I could permanently live this reality that “one being is speaking through all”, would I give my permission for it to happen to me?

What is the value of such a reality if this were the actual case? How would such things as beauty, meaning, and value be altered if everyone understood this to be the case?

What would the long-term payoff be if I tried to at least consider this to be true more often in my life?

What would I think of The Great Ventriloquist if I knew that in actual fact there was one?

Pretend you are washing your face, without soap, as you sit here in front of your computer. Pretend you have your normal cleansing needs such as soap, washcloth, brush-whatever.

Like a mime, pick up the items you need, and proceed to “wash.”

Do a good job of it.

Ask yourself,What do my hands not know how to do NOW that they WOULD know how to do if I had real soap on my face or a real wash cloth in my hands? How badly did I do this without these “aids?”

What is the purpose of automating certain physical tasks? Why is it that “my” attention is not required?

Is there a payoff if I move back towards more conscious participation in such automated activities? Would some things I do get worse? What happens when I try to carefully write my signature?

What is a comfortable and natural relationship? Do I think a friend is someone that must be constantly attended to?

If all my daily life were as automatically done as when I wash my face, would I be happier?

Precisely controlled your eye movements.

Do this:

Stare at each letter in this sentence as you read it-trying to consciously note the movement of your eyeball in your eye socket as it jumps from letter to letter.

Note that you can see more than one letter at a time, and yet, you can “manually” adjust with pinpoint jumps the exact direction of your eyes’ target.

Focus on the central letter, X, in the group of letters below, and try to see how far away from that central letter you can still recognize the other letters in the group without losing your focus on the X.

eowpfjxmqXpfwtysmwo

Ask yourself,Is there an emotional payoff to consciously using my eyes in certain instances where I am presently using them in the automatic or unconscious mode?

What are the parts of my body that I am “ignoring” like this that I can easily bring my attention to during certain typical uses? Would there be a payoff for this?

How is it that my mind can “scan” to read more than one letter in a glance without my eyes having to “retarget?” Is there a psychological parallel to this? Do I “glance” at emotions, issues, concepts, and personalities without truly targeting them?

If I was with someone I love, and I did this technique while looking at him or her “from time to time,” what would that do to my “here and now” experiencing of that person?

Select someone who has negatively impacted your life. Now, pretend that this person is standing before you. Stand up, and tell this person everything you want to say. Really get into it. Wave your arms and do anything else you wish-even pretending to hit the person. If you do this successfully, you may find yourself swearing, crying, screaming, moaning, shaking, sweating, and/or laughing.

Do this for about five minutes.

Then, this is very very important, sit with eyes closed for at least five minutes with no intent to rethink this experiment-just letting the thoughts and emotions sort themselves out as you calm down. Don’t open your eyes until your emotions are back to “normal.”

Ask yourself,How is it that these emotions are “in there” somewhere and yet do not “manifest” in my life continually? Or, do they?

How do I feel, after this exercise, towards this person now? Is this difference in my feelings something I should seek more of? Should I do this exercise again?

Have I released anything? Do I feel “lighter”?

How many persons in my life could I put on a list as candidates for me to confront like this?

What would my life be like if, by pretending thus, I confronted everyone who has wronged me? What would happen to the emotional background of my life? What would happen to my general mood?

Even if nothing was really changed within, did I enjoy this exercise?

How would it feel to confront myself like this?

Take a simple memory from childhood that is largely negative in its emotional content. Don’t choose a tremendously traumatic experience. Pick something “light”.

Go over it once or twice-no more than that.

Now, in your mind, with your imagination, rewrite that “scene” from your past so that it is a completely different and happy moment in your life.

Whatever troubled you about that time, well, imagine that it just didn’t happen. Write whatever story you want, but the more realistic the better. Go over this story in your imagination, adding details where necessary, MANY times. Imagine the details, the emotions, the words, the actions-everything.

How many times? Do this until the original memory now has to compete with the “new memory” for validity. Do this until you are uncertain what actually happened. Do this until you are certain that the new memory is much more likely to be the true version. This takes anywhere from ten minutes to a few hours-depending on the person practicing the method, the intensity of the original experience, and the intensity of the effort put into the practice of the exercise.

Ask yourself,What is the nature of my memory that it can be erased or at least contested with a fabrication?

What is the likelihood that I have done and am steadily doing this right now? Do I put memories into my nervous system that are filtered, colored, changed or fabricated “on the fly” by my ever-changing values?

What is the value of holding a negative memory as something “sacred” that should remain untouched?

What is the longer-term payoff to practicing this technique whenever I have a negative experience that I want to “shake off”?

What is my moral and spiritual stance towards erasing memories? Does this stance serve my personal and spiritual growth?

If I could rid myself of major negative memories, would it be worth the effort and time?

What is the value of memory to me, if it is sometimes faulty or an unending source of discomfort?

How do I define myself? My memories? My actions? My knowledge? All this? Or none of this?

Pretend that everything you say to someone is being said by a parrot that is perched on your shoulders.

Pretend that this bird has been absolutely trained to automatically speak memorized lines according to the sounds it hears being spoken to it.

Ask yourself,What is the difference between the part of me that spontaneously creates verbal responses to others and this parrot?

What difference does it make to others if I “really” mean my words or am just “running a script”?

How often do I “parrot” my words that I have been “taught” to speak by my upbringing?

How can I mean every word I speak?

How amazing is my brain that it can perform so rapidly and error free in such an automatic way? Am I benefiting as much as I might from this obvious power I possess?

When I dream at night, how like the parrot are the characters in my dreams? Do my dream’s characters “mean” their words? Why are my automatically generated words different from the words spoken by dream characters?

How do I mean?

Why do I feel like I am the creator of my words when I have no proof of any sort that “I” consciously participated in their manifestation? Why does my mere “being there” when the words happen constitute authorship?

If a book, written entirely by a computer, were given to me by a friend who said it was a good book to read, what would my first reaction be to this? Is a “core self” necessary for me to believe that words have been authentically authored?

How often am I aware of my “core self” when I think, speak and act?

Say the following sentence, mentally, eyes closed, without moving your lips or tongue:

“Whose voice am I hearing right now-saying this sentence?”

Say this sentence mentally at least ten times, and mean these words as much as possible.

Intensely try to hear the “actual sound” of your inner voice-as if there was a small radio inside your head broadcasting those words.

Ask yourself,When I normally daydream or otherwise “re-enact” or “imagine” an experience, and I hear distinct voices inside my head, what is the nature of this illusion that I can actually feel like I hear the voices of others and myself? Does thinking of a sound ACTUALLY have anything in common with hearing outside sounds?

What does the mental voice, with which I normally speak to myself, sound like? How would it sound if I heard it aloud as if spoken by another person? Deep? High? Masculine/feminine? Emotional/deadpan?

If I mentally “hear” someone or something making a sound that is loud, how does this differ from the other mentally “heard” sounds? What makes me feel that this sound is “louder” than the others?

Who really is speaking these words, and what part of me “thinks” it is talking? And to whom does this part think it is talking?

Is “ego” a good term for the part of me that thinks it is doing the talking?

If something that I call “me” is listening to thoughts that this “me” thinks, then does this mean that I am something completely different from thoughts-am I an experiencer rather than that which is experienced?

What is the relationship between “me” and “my thoughts?” What could I possibly be other than my present and past thoughts?

Is there something subtler than thoughts? Is that the “real” me?

With your eyes closed, quickly draw at random a few, curvy, scribbled lines on a piece of blank paper.

Now open your eyes and steadfastly look at it, like you might look at a cloud, to see if you can find an image or partial image somewhere on the paper.

The whole set of lines does not have to be used-just a portion of it might “pop” and look like something.

After you’ve found one or more “things” on the paper, ask the below questions.

Ask yourself,What is it about my mind that it likes to think these few lines represent a real world object?

Why does this illusion immediately “stick” so well that I can quickly see this object again after turning my eyes away from it?

Why is it that others will see different images in these lines?

How has this mental ability to see patterns helped me in life, and how does it entrap me? What, in my daily life, am I “seeing” that simply is not there? How often is a coiled rope in a shadowy corner seen as a snake?

Was this pattern-discovery process a mental process that I can properly call a creative act?

How are real life social situations like this? Do I seek patterns that are not really there except that something inside me is “looking for it”?

What part of my everyday reactions to life are solely my creativity “at work” forming patterns only I can see?

When am I more likely to project meaning like this-during calmness or during a strong emotion?

If I were perfectly calm, would I see any “thing” existing at all? Are all perceptions merely my interpretations of “brain buzzings” due to a need to “make sense where there is only scribblings?”

How can I control my power to project? How can I use it for my well being?

Can I literally and largely change “my” world?