Consider a person living in Bucket Land.
It’s nicely bucket-shaped and it has whatever color you wish it to have, but it is a bucket.
Inside of Bucket Land, there’s a little prison and this person’s caught inside the
prison.
Looking outside of the prison, he sees all the wonderful things that are happening in
Bucket Land.
There are little lakes and there are people having picnics and it looks fun out there.
He doesn’t like it in prison, so he goes through what I would call traditional self-improvement
methods – self-hypnosis for example and some forms of meditation, and meditations
we’ll handle slightly differently when we get to the segment on that.
There are a million different methods, and he learned how to break out of his prison
and for a while he’s overjoyed.
He’s running around the prairies dancing away and having a wonderful time until one
day he hits something, some invisible barrier that he can’t quite understand.
He’s come to the edge of Bucket Land where the bucket is, so what does he do?
He turns to one side and walks around and for a while it’s fine because he’s constantly
exploring new things and life is full of joy, but eventually Bucket Land being finite, he
runs out of things to explore.
He knows everything.
Everything is usual.
Nothing is new, so really Bucket Land becomes a new prison for him.
He gets bored, frustrated, angry maybe, depressed.
I know no one here has ever felt these things, right?
He feels like his life’s going nowhere, like he’s walking around in circles because
he is, because he’s explored up to the limits of whatever map shall we say his mind’s
allowed him to have, and this is where he gets stuck in a very frustrating place because
any goal that you can conceive within Bucket Land is by definition limited to Bucket Land
because your conscious mind can only work with what’s around it.
The only time people leave Bucket Land in normal life is when something so dramatic
happens in their life that turns it upside down, which basically spills Bucket Land over
and forces them out, and for a while life is deeply unpleasant until they learn that
they’re now in Bathtub Land.
It’s much bigger but still has constraints.
Do you understand the metaphor so far?
What we’ll be doing here is we’ll be talking directly to that part of you that’s responsible
for creating Bucket Land as a safe environment, and then Bathtub Land around that and then
Swimming Pool Land around that, and you can carry on with larger vessels if you like around
that ad infinitum.
Whenever one type of reality, one way of being no longer serves you and you’ve outgrown
it, you can engage in a process that will relatively painlessly allow you to go to the
next stage in your personal transformation so that you can then go back to enjoying life’s
riches and so on but in a way that you cannot conceive of right now, because if you could
conceive of it right now then it wouldn’t be out there; it would still be in here.
Do you understand the dilemma that we face in the self-improvement industry?
Now if you’re working with a therapist, that’s a little easier to do because your
therapist is not in your Bucket Land because if he’s in your Bucket Land, he can’t
help you.
If they have the same issues as you, it’s going to be very difficult for them to help
you because they don’t have the insight of what it’s like to be outside of that.
So, what a good therapist will say is I’m sorry I can’t help you with that, but tell
me if you find somebody who can because I’ll join you; or if they stand outside of your
bucket enough, they can say oh, you’re just stuck in Bucket Land and let me help you out
of that.
That’s what a good therapist will do, whether it’s hypnotherapy or something else.
Do you understand the analogy?
The dilemma is when you’re doing it on yourself, you don’t have that external perspective,
or rather you don’t have access to it consciously, but given that your unconscious mind can create
the bucket – for your security by the way because it makes you feel safe, constrained
it for safety – you can have a chat with the same one that built Bucket Land so that
they can show you how to carve a hole in it and slowly and safely – that’s the important
part – explore what happens outside of it.
Do you understand that?
That’s kind of what happened in your example.
Someone took you outside of Bucket Land but life got a lot worse because you didn’t
have the coping skills for dealing with outside, so your dilemma was stay here in pain long
enough to figure out how this undiscovered country works, or go back in the bucket where
it’s safe.
I don’t know which choice you made and I don’t need to know, but the point is that
is the choice where people tend to say I give up, I’m going to what’s safe and they
become very small as people.
That’s not a judgment call on them by the way.
It is a natural phenomenon when you’re dealing with something that is overwhelming for you.
You go back to what you know and what is safe, and that’s absolutely appropriate.
What we’ll be focusing on here is how to explore that unknown so that it’s safe at
each step of the way.
It won’t always be comfortable by the way, but I’ll show you how to make that discomfort
safe and useful.
By the way, when I say I’ll show you how to make that safe and useful, it doesn’t
mean that you can only change to discomfort.
There are some things that will be amazing and you’ll just enjoy the ride all the way
through, and there are other things where you’ll have to go through a period of discomfort
because that’s part of where the learning comes from.
So, there will be a grab bag.
I’m not going to expect you to go home, bring your cat o’ nine tails and whip yourselves
into enlightenment.
That’s not this kind of school.
Does that address some of your concerns?
We’ll add more as we go along, so please keep the question in mind.
You had a second question as well.
Student: It’s in the same mind.
It seems to be part of my own nature that I always knew there’s this Bucket Land,
so I’m not as descriptive as you, so my tendencies seem to be I will go into unchartered
land even if I’m totally unprepared.
Everything is better than staying in the bucket and that’s not safe.
I will stay there until I’m totally burned out.
Igor: That’s exactly what we’ll be doing here.
We have five days to do some work together.
I have taught this process to some people in two very intense days, and to be fair at
the end of those two days we didn’t finish the entire program because their mind had
had enough and just switched off, but they got like 95% of it in those two days, and
this was someone who’s very, very used to making big changes fast.
So, we have to spread the same amount of time over five days and even then I fully expect
that some of you will decide I’ve had enough, I’m not going to do these more advanced
things just yet, I’m going to go back to the more basic things and just get used to
them.
We’ll give you all the exercises and you’ll still have those available to you once you’ve
built up other mechanisms to make it safe.
The reason I can’t guarantee all of you will have this massive breakthrough in here
is as follows.
Let’s imagine that I was a personal fitness trainer, and I took you into a gym or whatever
method of training we agreed on and for five days I put you through hell.
You lift weights, you run, you do press-ups until you’re sick – you know the good
healthy stuff that we all love, right?
After five days all of you would suddenly be as fit and as strong as an Olympic athlete,
wouldn’t you?
Why not?
Why wouldn’t you be as fit and as strong as an Olympic athlete?
I’m working you harder than one.
Why wouldn’t you be as strong or as fit?
It’s because your body requires time to adapt.
Your muscles don’t grow in seconds.
You have to go through a period of training them to what they can cope with.
Then your body goes oh my goodness, I better grow a little bit more and you grow a little
bit more.
That takes a bit of time.
Then you go back and you do some more work at a higher level of intensity, and it goes
oh, I better grow some more.
It’s an incremental process, but if you understand that process you can grow at the
rate that your body needed to grow rather than at some externally imposed rate.
At this seminar here, we have a slight dilemma because I have material to teach you or to
show you, but your mind – working with the analogy of the muscle – will only be able
to grow at the rate that it can grow, which is right for you as an individual, which means
at some point you’re going to have to take a timeout.
You’re going to have to take a pause and just say I’ll listen to the exercise and
I’ll record it and I’ll use it at some point, but not yet.
I’m not doing it now.
Even if you did all the exercises all the way through, you may still not get the entire
results yet because it takes time to build up the mental strength required.
Has anyone here ever done meditation?
Hands up.
Let me ask you more interestingly.
Has anyone here ever tried meditation and gave up because it was just impossible to
do?
It’s hard, boring, frustrating – name whatever negative epitaph you want to put
onto that.
You see an experienced meditator sitting there for 10 hours a day going oh that’s just
so good, and you’re doing it for two seconds and saying this is so bad.
You have a differently sized mental muscle.
They persevered long enough to build that muscle through sheer brute force.
In the old school of weight training, you keep lifting that bar until you can’t lift
it.
Oh, I can’t lift it.
Oh, I put my back out.
Oh, I’ll try again.
Eventually your body adapts but it’s a very painful way of doing it.
We’re going to do a progressive version so you’ll say oh, this weight is easy.
I’m bored with this weight, so I’ll go with another weight.
You’re going to be incrementally increasing your mental capacities to cope with the intensity
of the work you’ll be doing here.
That means something.
That means that for those who have larger problems, you’re going to take longer to
build up more muscle to deal with them, unless already your life experiences have built those
particular muscles, in which case you’ll be able to run with it as well.
I’m not saying this to discourage you.
I’m actually saying this to encourage you.
The larger the issues that you’re facing – and this is particularly true of you at
home – the smaller the steps need to be at the beginning because you don’t have
very much mental energy and strength left for other tasks.
Most of your energy is used containing the problem.
The more you build strength with what you’ve got left over, the more of that problem you
can start cycling out, which means your resources start growing and growing.
Along with your resources, because you’re using that mental muscle, you get mentally
stronger as well, so you have more resources and more strength, which means that you can
cope with more and more and more as time goes by.
There’s one piece of advice I’ll give all of you, especially those of you who are
doing this at home.
Don’t rush.
Don’t seek to be at the end straightaway.
Nirvana will wait for you.
It’s in no hurry, nor should you be.
You’re better off working consistently and systematically and knowing where you’re
going each step of the way - and you will by the end of this program by the way - and
then letting your mind teach you how to progress, than trying to be at the end straightaway
and ruining it all by having a very unstable platform and ultimately ending up in the middle
of Bathtub Land in a very scary place.
Maybe even at the drain where the spiders are crawling around and being afraid you’re
going to be sucked down into Water Tank Land – I don’t know.
Do you get the idea?
You may have noticed I’m doing a lot of emphasizing around the idea of safety here.
That’s because I know where you’re going.
You’ll enjoy it and it will be great fun, but I need to warn you not to be in a rush
to do anything.
Just let your mind work at your pace because those safety mechanisms inside your mind are
there for a reason.
If you’re a reasonably stable human being – which most of us are – it will only
release those safety mechanisms to the extent that it knows you can cope with it, which
means you have other ways of dealing with whatever it’s protecting you from.
The only people that don’t have that are people who have much larger issues like schizophrenia,
psychosis and so on.
Personally – and this will be a medical disclaimer here – I’m not going to make
any comments in terms of whether or not it can work for it.
I believe the process that we’ll use here can work for that also, and I’ll explain
why when we get to some of the mindfulness practices and so on but I have no medical
evidence for it, so I’m not making a claim for that.
It’s very important you understand that there’s a difference between what I believe,
what I anticipate from my experiences and so on, and the complete absence of research
on that point.
You understand that there’s a difference between the two, right?
So, we’re coming back to the idea of mental stability again.
We’re always going to come back to the same point.
We have two separate but importantly intertwined tasks to perform over the next five days.
One task is to ground you, to keep you in reality, to keep you safe.
That builds one type of mental muscle.
Over a long period of time, those kind of practices, a lot of research has shown, can
make wonderful transformations in your life, but it requires a lot of time and a lot of
practice.
To speed things up, we’re going to do other exercises and other practices that will help
you fly; hence, the medical disclaimer here.
If you’re already borderline, like a psychotic can’t tell the difference between one reality
and another reality – that’s part of what psychosis is about – if you have problems
with that, flying is not where you need to go first, it’s grounding.
If you fly too high, then the old Icarus legend comes in.
You may get a little bit burned by the sun.
You need to be able to learn to fly and ground, fly and ground and that way you have the option
of the fastest safest route to discovering what Bathtub Land is all about.
Does that make sense?