How to Change Your Mood FAST

Have you ever been unfocused before an exam, when you really needed to concentrate instead?

Or have you ever been really nervous before giving a lecture, when instead you needed to be confident?

Or perhaps you’ve been down in the dumps when you needed to be ‘on’ and positive at a social event?

We’ve all had the experience of wanting or needing, for one reason or another, to be in a different mood that the one we were actually in. Most of us just give in, accept our moods, and do the best we can. But there is a quick, easy way to shift your mood when you must, or even just when you choose to. No drugs, no pills, no cost, no side effects!

It’s really simple. It’s easy, too. It’s called ‘anchoring’ a positive emotional state.

In his wonderful online Encyclopedia of NLP ( http://nlpuniversitypress.com/indexA.html)”, Robert Dilts says:

“...“anchoring” refers to the process of associating an internal response with some environmental or mental trigger, so that the response may be quickly, and sometimes covertly, reaccessed.”

If you’re American and have ever heard the first notes of The Star Spangled Banner, and noticed that your right hand flew to cover your heart, even before you were aware of what it was doing, you have experienced a powerful anchor. (If you’re not American, perhaps you’ve seen this and puzzled over it.) If you smell a particular cooking smell and are instantly back in, say, your grandmother’s kitchen, you’ve experienced an anchor. If your partner has ever said, “We need to talk” and you’ve felt icy fingers of fear crawl up your back, you’ve experienced an anchor.

In a famous experiment, Pavlov used this stimulus-response conditioning to get dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. He rang a bell and then gave them food so often that they associated the food with the sound of the bell, anticipating the food so well that they began to salivate just from the sound, even when no food was present.

All of these examples show that a trigger, a stimulus, can instantly and automatically result in a response. Most of these anchors, that is, trigger-response pairs, were set unconsciously (at least, unconsciously by us!). But what if you could set one intentionally?

You can! You can set an anchor to stimulate a positive emotion whenever you need it. Now, with a little advance preparation, you can turn lack of focus into concentration, or a case of nerves into confidence, or feeling low into feeling good. It just takes a little advance preparation.

Before you need the anchor, in a quiet place at any convenient time, do the following:

1) Pick an anchor. I generally recommend hand positions that you don’t normally use (like touching the thumb and pinkie of your non-dominant hand), for a couple of reasons:
- you can do them anywhere, any time
- they’re unobtrusive
- they take a minimum of effort
- they’re uncontaminated by other feelings

2) Think of a specific time and place when you really felt the way you’re choosing to feel. Make it really real for yourself by graphically imagining the scene:

- seeing what you saw around you at the time, looking out through your own eyes at the time
- hearing what you heard, no matter how faint
smelling any smells that were associated with the time and place that you left how you choose to feel now
- touching something in the scene
- feeling all the feelings that go with the flood of emotion. Really notice where those feelings are in your body.

3) When you are completely associated into the positive state that you’re choosing, especially feeling the internal feelings strongly, then set your anchor (touch your thumb to your pinkie).

4) Relax for a minute or so, distracting yourself with something else.

5) Repeat steps 2 – 4 several times.

6) Test the anchor by using it (touching your thumb to your pinkie). The feelings that you intentionally associated with the anchor should flood your body. If not, repeat steps 2 – 4 again until the using the anchor creates your chosen feelings/emotional state.

Then you have “anchored the resource state” so it’s available to you whenever you need it, say before an exam, a lecture or a social event. Just touch your anchor and go!

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

In response to my article on “What stops you from claiming your intuition?” (below), a member of this blog wrote back, taking me to task for not mentioning the heart in intuition. While I still believe that higher perception, which is to say, the clairsenses (clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, clairolfaction and clairgustation, corresponding to sight, hearing, feeling, smell and taste, respectively), can operate without the heart, I agree that the heart also perceives truth and enhances the meaning of what is learned through the clairsenses. And it looks to me like the back of the heart chakra is one’s connection to the universe, the Divine, God (or pick our own word here).

In her book, Hands of Light, Barbara Brennan says that each chakra opens both to the front and the back, and that a healthy chakra opens out like a cone in each direction. (For more about the location and meanings of the chakras, see my website, http://www.888-4-hollis.com/services.htm.) The energy in each cone rotates according to the right hand rule, with the thumb pointed at the chakra, that is, point your thumb at your chakra, curve the fingers as if you were making a fist, and that is the direction in which an open chakra’s energy rotates. This means that the two cones of energy emanating (front and back) from one chakra rotate in opposite directions.

You can open a chakra, including your heart chakra simply by visualizing a circle of energy rotating in the appropriate direction, about 6 inches in diameter at about 1 inch away from your skin. I know it works, because I’ve watched pendulums move in accordance with this visualization, when done by me or by others.

In case you’d rather learn to open your heart with a short (about 4 minutes) guided meditation, I’ve included one here (or you may need to cut and paste the url into your browser: http://player.goldmail.com/default.asp?gmid=dhti8y3tza2n). Plus there's a really cool mandala!

Over the years, because I’m very open about my clairvoyance, many people have opened up to me about their highly developed intuition (also called psychic abilities) -- too many to count. Many of them, however, refused to acknowledge their own intuitions, to their great detriment. In fact, sometimes it feels like taking confession. And yet, they have some regard for the ability, or why would they call me?

So I’ve thought long and hard about what might stop you from acknowledging your deepest knowing (whether it comes in feelings, pictures, words or dreams, to name a few ways — but I’ll call them all knowing from here on), and I’ve come up with a few reasons. Are any of these familiar to you?

Someone around you told you it was wrong to ‘know’ things. As a child, perhaps you knew some truth that was inconvenient for the adults around you (e.g. who was angry at whom, or who was having an affair, or that someone who was supposed to love you didn’t). They told you you were wrong because they didn’t want to acknowledge these truths themselves. Or they told you you were wrong because they had the well-intentioned but misguided notion of protecting you from a painful truth. Of course that only compounded the problem, because not only did you know, but you also knew that either they were lying to you and could not be trusted, or else that you could not trust your own perceptions. Or these adults shamed you (or punished you) for innocently exclaiming that the emperor had no clothes, in which case, at some level, you learned not trust both them and yourself. You learned not to speak what you knew, and perhaps you learned not even to know what you knew, because it was too dangerous. For what to do about this, click here or cut and paste the following link into your browser: http://player.goldmail.com/default.asp?gmid=h52xhafji077 )

Society told you it was wrong to ‘know’ things. Society at large (teachers, priests, ministers, doctors, other kids, books, TV, cartoons, movies) conveyed the message that the whole notion of knowing something you couldn’t touch, see, hear, smell or taste was impossible. This may have come from one of two places in history. First, it might have come from the Church, which used its “exclusive” access to “God” as a control mechanism for the populace at large, and so had no interest in people accessing their own wisdom or deeper knowing. Or it may have come from scientific materialism, which was all the rage for 50 or 100 years. This idea said that if you can’t see it, hear it, touch it, smell it or taste it, it isn’t real. Well, we can’t see electricity, but it’s real, right? In any case, science has moved on in the intervening years, showing that even electrons know what is going on at a distance. So why not you? For what to do about this, click here.

You feel responsible for what you ‘know’. It is common to believe, beneath the level of conscious awareness, that if you ‘saw’ something bad before it happened, and didn’t stop it, then you are responsible for it happening. This is a major double bind. If you know something, and were regularly and/or strongly shamed or punished for “knowing” something as as child (or an adult!), you have only two choices. First, you can speak up and take society’s punishment, ridicule, ostracism, etc. -- not to mention that they won’t listen to you anyway. Or you can shut up, and then, when your foreknowledge is borne out, punish yourself for keeping quiet. Like any double bind, there is no way to win this one — you get hurt either way. So it seems easier not to know what you know. But you do know... For what to do about this, click here.

There is a related question about creating reality at a non-physical level. When something exists only at an energy level, it’s not clear, when we know something, if we are adding our energy to help create it, or are just neutral observers, especially if we talk about it, or think about it. This is a valid concern — but even if we ignore something consciously, we can still be acknowledging it at an emotional or physical level, which may give it more energy than if we consciously acknowledge it and then let it go. However, in general, I come down on the side of “you just knew it, you didn’t create it”, because I do believe that is generally the case, especially when what we know doesn’t involve us.

It hurts to know what you ‘know’. If you ever had a spouse or partner cheat on you, you probably knew at some level before you had irrefutable proof. If you’ve ever had the sense you were going to be fired, or laid off, you probably didn’t want to know. And so we shut this knowledge down to ‘protect’ ourselves, even though the unconscious knowledge hurts just as much as if it were conscious, only in different ways. Wouldn’t you rather know what you know, deal with it and get it over with? For what to do about this, click here.

You’re wrong sometimes! You know, a good psychic is only right 80 – 85% of the time. Why should you hold yourself to a higher standard? For what to do about this, click here.

Please check out my suggestions for what to do to overcome your own internal objections to knowing what you know — you’ll thank yourself for accepting one key to an easier, happier life.

Are you having relationship Issues right now? Do they seem worse than usual?

Last week, in 2 days, I had FOUR separate people complain to me that they were having relationship problems so severe that three of them couldn’t get out of bed, and the fourth was doing so because she really had no other choice. Three of these people were having problems with life partners (fiancé, husband, and ex) and one with a child.

My rule is that if something happens once around me, it just happens, and I’m an observer. Twice, perhaps it’s a coincidence. But three times, there is definitely something to which I should pay attention, perhaps about me. And four? Wow. But I don’t seem to be having any relationship problems at the moment, at least nothing I’m aware of. So I called a friend, another psychic with whom I trade readings, and she said she couldn’t see anything personal to me in this.

My next thought was that perhaps there was something astrological going on. While I believe that people mostly create their own realities, I do see the validity of astrology in affecting people and situations. So I called my friend, Robin, an astrologer, and — bingo! Venus (the planet of love and relationships) is retrograde. This is asking you to go inward and examine relationships, or to get closure on unresolved issues. Venus goes direct again on Sept. 8.

If you had told me 3 years ago that I’d be spending a summer Saturday night sitting out in a cold, empty field, in the dark, with a few people who were barely acquaintances (and my husband) with the intention of seeing some star visitors (aka ETs), I’d have told you you were crazy. (This from a woman who regularly talks to discarnate beings, and can communicate with animals and plants, at least sometimes!) But there I was nonetheless.

I mean, just because you can’t see it with your two eyes, doesn’t mean it isn’t there, right? Before microscopes, we couldn’t see cells. And before the Hubble telescope, there were lots of celestial bodies that we couldn’t see, even if we knew they were there. Which is where Mr. Shakespeare comes in... I mean, why wouldn’t there be beings who exist at frequencies outside our usual visual spectrum?

With that openness in mind, we gathered at a restaurant near the field we’d be sitting in later. Over dinner we chatted about other experiences with star visitors, or at least the others did. I was mostly just curious.

There are still places in the heavily urban Bay Area that are quite dark at night, and we went to one of them. Though I’m a newbie, some of these folks have apparently been going for years, so they led us down windy back roads right to the spot. I’m told it has a view, but it was so foggy, not to mention dark, that I really can’t say if it’s true.

There are two kinds of clairvoyance, internal (e.g. remote viewing) and external, which is seeing subtle energies, like the human energy field (aka aura) and chakras (energy centers which relate to different bodily organs and emotional/psychological issues). While my internal clairvoyance is decent, I’m still working on the external. The cool thing about the dark is that you can see subtle energies much more easily. I could very clearly see the aura and crown chakra of the woman across the circle from me! The layers of her aura looked kind of like the layers of an onion, but not as even. But I’ve seen that before, even seen colors occasionally, so no huge deal. The big surprise was seeing her crown chakra, which comes up from the crown of the head, kind of like a small fountain, but with a constantly changing cross between streaks and bubbles, all of which had very faint colors. I’ve seen line drawings of this before, but they really don’t do it justice, because drawings can’t capture the movement, change and color, in the same way that a black and white photograph can’t capture what a color video can.

Then there were the beings. What I saw with my eyes was sparkly things, little (or occasionally not so little) points of light, that came, sometimes moved, and went. What I saw internally were two odd-looking beings. The first was really tall, probably at least 8 feet, with a very long neck, kind of whitish. The second was a human-looking body, with the head of an eagle, and the feeling of guarding or protecting something, maybe us, maybe the land. It told me that similar beings had existed around western North America for millennia, and had appeared to the aboriginal peoples here, which is why some Native American tribes have thunderbird dances, and others have totems like that. Nobody else present saw these beings,  though they did see the sparklies. They did tell me that a well-respected clairvoyant had told them of the bird people, who are apparently guardians of the earth.

I did feel what I often feel, which is a warm, loving presence. I have always assumed that these beings are guides or angels, which is to say, higher intelligence. But you know, maybe higher intelligence comes in a myriad of forms, and maybe, rather than being angelic, it’s intergalactic. Or maybe both. What do I know?

Here’s the cool thing — we have pictures! (Unfortunately, I couldn't get my photo uploaded here, but it's on my blog, http://10minutesaday.blogspot.com/). I’m excited by them because it’s the first time I’ve seen visual evidence of what I feel. I’m attaching one to this email (that’s me on the left, with the striped sweater and white scarf, the top clothing layers of about 15 total — did I say it was cold?). Now you could say that these lights are... out there in physical reality? Reflections off the fog? NO. There were no lights at all, not even any in the distance in any sight line. We were sitting in the dark — well, actually, we did seem to be illuminated by some sort of diffuse glow — but either that was our own auras, or something more supernatural. And I was standing diagonally from the line between the photographer and subject a couple of times, so I could see the reflection of the flash on the fog, and it was, tiny sparkles of light, much smaller than what is in the photos. No, there is no “normal” explanation of these orbs.