Everyone has a Wise Mind. Even people who have no interest in Wise Minds have one. Everyone can come up with a wise way of seeing something. If you ask people what their Wise Mind would say about their food or their habits or their family, they'd come up with something. It might be something like: "My Wise Mind tells me that I need more broccoli. I need more oranges. I need to take walks. I'm working too hard. I need to be more attentive to my wife. I know that everything is going to be okay. I'm feeling very wise."

       More advanced versions of this might be: "My Wise Mind is telling me that everything that's happening right now is leading me on my true path, and though it all seems very difficult, it has a positive outcome. It's leading me on my true path of service to humanity. It's just a matter of timing, and everything will work out for the highest good."

       So everyone has a Wise Mind, and it is here to serve us, to help us to ultimately transform darkness into light, resolve our problems and lighten our load. To this end, a special process has come through me over a period of time. It's based on the inner healing principle of "Experience-Release-Transform." It's a product of contemporary invention combined with the wisdom of the ages.

        This is a simple yet effective technique that you can use at any time. Based on both Eastern and Western thought, it can help you with fears, pain, negative thoughts, traumas, and much more.

What It's About

       The process has four or five steps - depending on how much you'd like to do with it. Each step has a reason and a purpose. Each leads to the next step. Here are the steps:

• Pay attention to what is going on inside. Describe your experience.
  
• Take a deep breath in, and breathe deeply into whatever you're experiencing. As you breathe out, disperse it. Break it up into tiny molecules, and release it. Do this as many times as you like.
• Ask your Wise Mind what it would like to tell you about this.
  
• Find a word or a phrase that symbolizes the healing and transformation of your experience or issue. Put your thumb together with your index finger, and say your word or phrase.
  
• A possible fifth step: Check to see how you feel, and see if there's anything else you need to pay attention to. See whatever else is needed here for your healing.

       This process can be used in or out of hypnotherapy, and it can be used by professionals and non-professionals alike. It can be used together with whatever else you're already doing, or it can be used instead of what you're doing now. You can use all of the steps together, or you can use one or two or three of the steps individually. Let's take a look at each one of these steps to see what's behind it, and let's see how the process can be used.

Step One: Pay Attention to What's Happening

       One of the greatest ways to heal and transform is first to fully explore and experience what is taking place in your life, especially what is taking place within you. Too often in our society we skip this step. "Go take this purple pill, and you'll obliterate your symptoms." This is what we're told time and time again. Suppress it, ignore it, remove it without looking at it. In Buddhist psychology, on the other hand, the idea is to first take a look at what's there. See how you might describe it. In paying attention to it, you might find that some emotions come up, and that's fine too. You might even find that simply in paying attention, the symptom goes away. You might find that something is taking place within you that you didn't even know was there. This can be a revelation. The Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, calls it "looking deeply." It's a necessary step to becoming free.

       It might be a tightness in the stomach. It might be a sadness in the heart. It might be constricted breathing. Stay with it, describe it, pay attention to it. Then you can first own it, and it can transform.

Step Two: Breathe Into It, and Exhale it Out

        You can take a long, slow breath in, and you imagine that you're breathing that breath directly into your experience of your issue. It might be a pain or a difficult thought or a deep old wound. Breathe into your experience of it. Then as you exhale, you imagine that the solidity of the issue changes, and you're breathing your issue out into the universe, breaking it up into tiny molecules, dispersing it, so it doesn't feel the same within you any longer.

       In yoga, many people breathe into the stiffness in the body while doing yoga postures. This can dissolve the tightness and create a new fluidity and flexibility in the body. The practice of breathing in yoga is called "pranayama." "Prana" is the very breath of life itself, the life force in the form of the breath. There is a saying in yoga that "Prana moves chitta." Chitta (or citta) in Sanskrit means "consciousness." And, of course, "prana" means "breath." So breath actually moves consciousness according to the Sanskrit texts. This means that breathing actually moves matter and thought or awareness. So when you breathe into an issue, you can dissolve it. And when you break it up into tiny molecules, you're changing the structure of the issue. It's simply not the same anymore. You're breaking it up and releasing it into the universe.

       In the movie "The Green Mile," Tom Hanks is a prison guard on death row in the Cold Mountain Penitentiary in the deep South in 1932. A prisoner there named John Coffey, played by Michael Clark Duncan, is incarcerated for a crime that he didn't commit. He's actually a healer. He can touch something and dissolve it with his touch. He did this one day with the prison guard, Tom Hanks' character, Paul. He touched him to dissolve his gallstones, and they went away. Afterward, John began to cough, and soon specks of particulate matter flew out of his mouth to be released into the universe. This is similar to the breathing technique that we're talking about in the Wise Mind Process. Break up the issue, and dissolve it into tiny pieces. Let it go.

Step Three: Ask Your Wise Mind What It Would Like to Tell You About This.

        The Wise Mind is very brilliant, and it's within everyone. The reason for its brilliance is that it's a part of the Infinite Wisdom of the Universe, an actual palpable force that exists in seed form within each being as a birthright. It simply needs to be tapped. Some people think they're tapping this force when they create nefarious and dark schemes. "The Devil made me do it." But this is not the case. The Wise forces are from another level of life, from the Light level, and they exist in potential in all beings. If you're a healing practitioner and you ask someone, "What would your Wise Mind tell you about this?" - you might well be amazed at what comes forth from inside of people.

        Joan's husband of fifteen years told her that he was in love with someone else, and was going to move out. He admitted all the lies he had been telling Joan for so long. She felt worthless, betrayed, and abandoned. After paying attention to her experience, breathing into it, and then breathing it out, she asked her Wise Mind what it wanted to tell her about this. Here's what her Wise Mind said:

Instead of feeling all alone, do art. Be with friends, and laugh. Have adventures, new beginnings. It wasn't your fault. You did everything you could. Change is good. You need to change, and it's okay. Trust yourself, and you'll trust what's trustworthy. It's okay to feel all your feelings, and it's okay to feel good too.

       This was actually monumental for her, as she hadn't seen any other options than feeling anger, loss and grief. The idea that she could have freedom and adventures and that change was good was something entirely new. This helped her to feel worthy and gave her hope. She said that she was unwilling to be a victim anymore. She knew that the reason she was experiencing this in her life was because she needed to wake up - and that she did!

Step Four: Find a Healing Word or Phrase, and Anchor It with Thumb and Index Finger

       This anchoring step owes its power to NLP or Neuro-Linguistic Programming. The premise is that if you do something (like touch a shoulder or finger) at the time of a positive experience, you can condition yourself or another to have a positive experience when you do the same thing again in another situation. This is taken from Pavlov's experiment in operant conditioning in which he had dogs salivate at the sound of a bell. You don't necessarily want to salivate, but you can create a positive response by linking the desired state with something like a touch or image.

       Anchoring is like pressing the "save" key on your computer. The act of touching the thumb together with the index finger is also like making the "okay" sign. In addition, it's called a "mudra" in yoga, in which the individual will of the finger touches the divine will of the thumb. What we're doing in the Wise Mind Process is to anchor in the healing with words and touch. It's really quite simple, and it can create powerful results.

       Joan, whose husband left her, liked the anchor word "release." She accompanied it with a visual of a bird flying away. The bird was not her husband; it was Joan in all her strength and inner power.

Step Five: Find Anything Else That Needs to be Done to Heal

       Check in and see if there's anything else to do. You can always do the Wise Mind Process over and over again. You can also add more to it:
Some ideas might be:

• Does the inner child need to be attended to?
  
• Is there still some discomfort in the body?
  
• Is there anything that needs to be communicated?
  
• Are there still some feelings that need to be felt and understood?
  
• Is it necessary to find any history or root cause?
  
• Anything else at all?
  

       If anything else comes up, you can do this again, as I've mentioned, and you can also add other approaches such as EFT tapping, inner child love, regression, or anything else that seems as if it would be helpful.

       You can do the Wise Mind process over again as many times as you'd like. You can do it in an office, in a car, in your house, with a mouse, in a box, with a fox, with a goat, on a boat - with Dr. Seuss or with yourself. Enjoy its power and see how it might help you overcome the challenges of life. It's amazingly simple, yet it works, and you can use it for all the issues of your life.