How to Quiet and Learn to Love It

Published in Open Exchange magazine, January-March, 2007

Ever get really tired of hearing all the negative thoughts, the negative mind chatter in your head? I know that I really did! I will tell you of some of my experiences with my negative mind and how I learned to quiet it dramatically. So can you!

First, we need some background and the basic premise behind this powerful tool.

As we grow and develop, our conscious mind comes to believe that all we are is the physical body and that the survival of the physical body is its primary function. In other words, we come to consider that we are our mind and perhaps nothing more. Since the function of the mind is the survival of what we consider ourselves to be, the function of the mind perpetuates its own concern with survival. The result is the EGO and one of its main functions is to keep us safe and protected.

The ego is constantly judging everything and everyone, including itself and its own behavior. The purpose of this judging is to survive by being right. This manifests as the “voices” most of us hear inside of ourselves; the critical, negative voices that tell us how bad we are, how wrong we are, how unworthy we are, how we can never do anything right. This is the negative mind-chatter with which we are all familiar. Those voices that keep reminding us that we ³screwed up,” that we made ANOTHER mistake, that we will get in trouble if we do something we want to do. This negative self-talk forcefully leads us away from who we really are and into believing what we and others have told us we are. We have learned to criticize each other and ourselves.

Such criticism invariably translates into predictable failure. After all, if I believe that I can’t do anything right (as my father often told me when I was a child), how likely is it that I will ever succeed at anything in my life. That was the story of my life for many years. Learning the tool I will describe below has been of incredible value in my life.Since those “voices” arise out of the positive intention our mind has for our survival, rather than any malevolent or vindictive intent, we can separate the positive intention from the actual behavior. In other words, see if you can accept the positive purpose behind the negative mind-chatter and separate it from the mind- chatter itself. Another way of looking at this is to think of it as reframing the negative message from our mind into the positive intention behind it – our survival, our safety, our protection – even though the actions (negative statements) behind the intention (survival) don’t usually seems very positive. A common example of this separation is about a man who robs a 7/11 store late at night and steals all the money. It turns out that he wants the money to buy medicine for his sick child or to feed his family or pay his rent, etc. While the method he used was, I hope you agree LOL!, not very positive, his intention was. This is what I was referring to about separating the intention from the behavior itself. I can almost hear you thinking ³but the end does not justify the means.” I agree. However, acknowledging the positive intention can help us understand the situation better.One tool that I have found very helpful for dealing with the negative self-talk, both for myself and for many of my clients, is something so simple that it is almost comical. I have used this approach for so long that I no longer remember if someone taught it to me or if I created it myself.

The Tool

Any time and every time that you hear any messages, thoughts, Ideas, etc, in your mind that are anything less than 100% positive for and about yourself or others, say to yourself, in a gentle, loving tone of voice, “Thank You, Good-Bye.” Seems silly doesn’t it? However, it is not and it works!

The “Thank You” is acknowledging the positive intention behind the negative message. It is not acknowledging the message itself. It is almost as if we are saying to our inner critic, our ego mind, ³Thanks, I know you are trying to help me.”

The “Good-Bye” is giving that message permission to leave your consciousness as easily and quickly as it entered.

After a rather short period of time, sometimes only a couple of hours, at most a few days, if you are consistent in using “Thank You, Good-Bye,” it is quite likely that you will notice a significant decrease in your negative mind-chatter. Of all the hundreds people to whom I have taught this simply approach, everyone who has used it consistently has reported success!

Before I began using this technique, there were times when I actually thought I was going crazy because of the incessant negative thoughts and messages I was having, most of them in my father’s tone of voice. Now, I rarely hear from him.

“Thank You, Good-Bye,” or TYGB for short, is useful not only when our internal critic is coming down on us. It is also very helpful with critical, negative thoughts about others, as well.

How Does This Work?

Like any critical parent, when our mind thinks it is being heard, that its message for survival has been received, it does not need to put out the message as often or as loudly. So, when you use “Thank You, Good-Bye”, after a relatively short time, the mind no longer needs to put out the negative thoughts as it did before. It is almost as if the critical, ego mind is saying, “Whew, s/he if finally listening to me. Now I don’t have to work so hard.” What we are doing is reframing the meaning behind our actions into more positive ones, so that our mind can accept and support them more easily. This can also result in shifts in long-standing beliefs about ourselves and others. One of the things that I noticed when I first started using “Thank You, Good-Bye” was that sometimes it seemed as though that was all I was doing. The critical thoughts were coming fast and furiously. I kept at it, often just repeating “TYGB” for what seemed like many minutes, even though it was only for 15 or 20 seconds. Before long, I began to notice a nice change – less negative, critical thoughts about myself or about others.

Continuing to repeat the phrase as many times as it takes until it stops is primary key to its success. True, the same thought may pop in again in 10 seconds. So, you do it again. Before long you will likely begin to notice a decrease in the number of the negative thoughts and their loudness. If you only say TYGB a couple of times and then stop before the thought stops, it probably won’t be of much help.

Experience for yourself how easily you can change your thoughts and thereby change your feelings about yourself and others. Once the negative is reduced, there is so much room available for the positives that abound around and within us. After all, when you no longer hear all those negative, critical thoughts about yourself and others, you soon start to forget them and can then more easily remember all the positive things that are true about you!

Remember, Mikey will try anything! I did.

Try it! You’ll like it!

Copyright© 2007, Dr. Michael C. Pollack, Ph.D., CCHT

Reprinted from Open Exchange Magazine, Oct/Dec, 1999. Dr. Pollack was one of the first practitioners in the US to be certified as a Past Life Regression Therapist by the International Board of Regression Therapy.

In many ways, our mind is like a huge hard drive on a computer. It contains a recording of everything that has ever occurred to us since our first perception, our first existence, our very creation. This record includes thoughts, sounds, feelings, attitudes, biases, all experiences. Everything is recorded in the mind and is therefore accessible through the subconscious. This includes memories of earlier in this lifetime as well as memories of past lives.

Do past lives really exist?

This has been argued philosophically for perhaps thousands of years. What is true is that about 85% of the religions on this planet profess a fundamental belief in reincarnation and past lives. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “I believe I shall, in some shape or other, always exist; and, with all the inconveniences human life is liable to, I shall not object to a new edition of mine, hoping, however, that the errata of the last may be corrected.”

Within that quote is a basic foundation of Past Life Regression Therapy, that we can learn from the past. As the philosopher Santayana once said, “Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.”

In my practice, people have three basic reasons for seeking Past Life Regression: curiosity (did I ever live before? Did I live in Atlantis? Etc.); spiritual growth (discovering one’s path or purpose, accelerating one’s growth by learning from the past); and therapeutic (resolving current issues that have their origins in past lives).

One of the great innovators in Past Life Therapy, Dr. Edith Fiore, said that upwards of 95% of the issues we are dealing with today have their origins in past lives — unfinished business, unresolved experiences. Some of these might be fears and phobias, physical ailments, weight, addictions, abandonment, self-image issues, relationship difficulties, and many, many more.

As Souls, when we are ready to enter a new lifetime, we make various decisions about our “lesson plan” for the upcoming life. We decide our gender, race, geographic location, religion, physical appearance, what karmic lessons to learn, even disabilities. We decide what life lessons we are going to work on in the next lifetime, perhaps what old issues we want to resolve. Each soul is fully responsible for making it’s own decisions. These choices are buried deep in our unconscious mind and most of us do not consciously remember them once birth occurs.

Once the life begins, as Souls, we retain the ability and accountability of individual choice. Therefore, we can change our life plan at any time during any lifetime. Just because we plan to learn about trust, let’s say, doesn’t mean that we will stay on that path throughout the lifetime. We always have free will to make changes, to make new choices based on changing circumstances. These changes, when they do occur, do not happen at the level of the conscious mind. Rather, they occur deep in our unconscious, at the Soul level.

One does not even have to believe in Past Lives to benefit from this work. Some clients ask me after a regression, if they experienced real memories or made it all up. I don’t know! My viewpoint is that if the “memories” are useful to you today, that is all that matters.

Copyright© 1999, Dr. Michael C. Pollack, Ph.D., CCHT

This article on Past Life Therapy originally appeared as a two part series in the January-February & July-August 1998 issues of  OPEN EXCHANGE. In this article, Dr. Pollack discusses how past lives can affect us in our current lifetime and how past life therapy can assist us in resolving long standing issues.

Tom was unhappy with his life. He just didn’t seem to be able to connect with people, to have close relationships, to really open to others. He had done various types of traditional psychotherapy, with no significant lasting changes. Out of curiosity he came to see me to determine if there were any connections between his current life problems and prior lifetimes. During the session, Tom visited a lifetime as an Indian about 6,000 years ago in what is now Peru. During that regression, Tom discovered that the way he lived his life back then was a direct parallel to his current lifetime alone, separate, disconnected. Upon identifying the causal factors and completing some healing processes in the past lifetime, Tom returned to this life feeling very different. Soon after this session he began making close friends and embarked upon the first significant love relationship of his life.

When Susan was less than 3 years old she came across a history book open to a picture of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Becoming very excited, she began to correctly name every one of the signers. At age 7 Susan visited Philadelphia for the first time with her parents. While they were walking through the old part of the city, Susan started leading her parents around and pointed out various buildings with Colonial American history.

I injured my low back in a sky diving incident 25 years ago.  Over the years the discomfort and pain I experienced became worse and worse, limiting my activities rather significantly. In early 1996, while the client in a series of past life therapy sessions, I discovered that I had lived at least three prior lifetimes in which I had been killed by being knifed or speared in the low back. After processing and healing the past life experiences my back began to heal. While the actual physical damage I did to my back is still present and I have exercise some caution when undertaking strenuous activity. I am now free of the debilitating chronic pain I had experienced for over 20 years.

Are these just stories made up by the deeper mind, like dreams? I don’t have these answers. I know my back is better. I know that little Susan could identify the people in the painting she saw in the book, while she was still in diapers and with limited language development. I don’t think these answers are really important. If someone experiences some kind of healing or resolution of a problem, does it matter?

It is important to distinguish between Past Life Regression and Past Life Therapy. Regression is the process of guiding someone to recover past life memories, usually just for curiosity, not healing. Past Life Therapy is the process of guiding the individual through resolution and healing of the past life issues/events that arise in the regression. Belief in past lives or reincarnation is not necessary for the process of past life therapy to work; it is not required of either the client or the therapist.

How Do Past Life Memories Come to Us?

Past life memories may come to us in many ways: the deja vu experience of going somewhere you’ve never been before and having it feel very familiar (or the same experience, positively or negatively, about a person you’ve never met before); recurrent dreams of a specific place, person or event; or an unexplained fear or phobia. Quite often, people who fear water, public speaking or heights, to name only a few, uncover traumatic past life experiences that explain them. As these traumas are explored and resolved in past life therapy, the phobias often cease to exist.

Most PL therapists believe that these past life expe riences are more than dreamlike unconscious metaphors, but rather, are actual occurrences that have been recorded in a deeper, subconscious part of ourselves that survives beyond the time of a single life span. Just as significant events of childhood can affect our choices and patterns as adults, even though we don’t remember them, ancient memories in previous existences can have the same prayerful impact on our current lifetimes: choice of parents, choices we make in our lives, people we are drawn towards, even physical ailments of our bodies.

How Do Past Lives Affect Us Today?

People often find that past life patterns (such as those described in part 1 of this article) can influence a person’s behavior, attitudes, likes and dislikes, relationships, phobias, and virtually every aspect of life. Past life therapy techniques can assist a person to uncover the events in pastlives which cause the unwanted and non-useful behaviors and chronic problems in this life. Once the cause of a problem or behavior is discovered, it can be resolved and healed.  The bad news is that the more unpleasant the experience or painful the emotion connected with the past life, the stronger the memory trace. The good news is that the stronger the memory trace, the more accessible it is for resolution.

Michael induces past-life
trances in class participants.

Many people reject the idea of looking into a past lifetime for problems as they claim to have enough troubles in the present life. This sounds reasonable; however, in clinical practice, clients discover that present life conflicts and problems often stem from traumatic events in prior lifetimes.  When we explore present issues and conflicts in regression therapy sessions, the problems nearly always (some regression therapists say as often as 90%- 98%) result from painful events in what seem to be earlier lifetimes.

Resolution of past life trauma can ease or resolve presentlife conflicts. The objective of past life therapy is to eliminate the residue retained from prior lifetime experiences. Healing in the present moment involves resolving the unfinished business of the past which continues to influence a person’s emotional balance. Such unfinished business can be from a past life or from earlier in this lifetime. This opens the way for a fuller experience of the present moment, the current lifetime.

Experience has proven that many emotional problems and conflicts can be quickly and effectively resolved through past life regression therapy, usually in far fewer sessions than with conventional talk therapy, which often treats the symptoms, but not the root cause.

What Happens In A Past Life Session?

Normally, in a regression session the client is not directed into a past life. They are guided to locate the source or cause of the problems or conditions they describe. Their own inner mind reveals the time, place and circumstances which can feed the present life situation.

It is the task of the past life therapist to guide clients in an unbiased and non judgmental manner in unraveling the mystery of past life memories and to see the bigger picture, the spiritual meaning, of the pastlife experience. His experiential learning and understanding can bring immediate and permanent relief of present life problems. During a regression, the assumptions, decisions, conclusions, and judgments surrounding the event, the other persons invoked, and the death itself are explored, as this mental residue can forth basis of beliefs which contaminate subsequent lifetimes, including the current life. New statements of belief can be substituted for old, invalid ones.

The entire meaning of an event or lifetime can be changed. When the processing is completed, there often is no emotional charge on the formerly traumatic events.  Then, when the scene is described again, the client will no longer experience any of the physical sensations in the body that were formerly associated with the problem or conflict.

Recall an unpleasant event or series of events from your childhood. As a result of these events you began to make some decisions about yourself and your world, based on the limited perspective of a young child. These became some of your belief systems. Now, imagine if there had been a big brother or sister or some other adult present during those events who told you the truth about what was happening; gave you a more rational adult perspective? Can you imagine how different your decisions/beliefs might have been, and how those different decisions/beliefs might serve you positively today? In large part, this is what can take place during a past life therapy session.

Among the issues/problems/conflicts that often can be successfully treated with past life regression therapy are: unfounded fears and phobias; eating disorders; relationship issues; physical ailments; recovering lost talents; and finding a purpose in life. In addition, many people experience regression to explore lifetimes they lived place in history that is of interest to them, simply out of curiosity.

Past life therapy is essentially almost unlimited in its application to human condition.

With the knowledge and wisdom gained through rough past life regression therapy and the power of forgiveness, the emotional leftovers of past times can be healed. Then a person can live and love more fully hi the p resent moment. Past life therapy is a powerful, safe, swift direct approach to resolving issues, and the results offered are immediate and lasting.

Copyright© 1998, Dr. Michael C. Pollack, Ph.D., CCHT

Reprinted from Open Exchange Magazine, March/April, 1999

Ever wonder how you came to believe some of the things you believe about yourself, especially the negative ones? After all, you seem to get a certain amount of feedback from your world that is not consistent with those beliefs. Can all those people really be so wrong? Are you really that good at “giving facade?” Perhaps, logically you know that those beliefs are not true, yet there seems to be some part of you that keeps them active, keeps them contaminating so many aspects of your life. It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.

When children are born, the part of the brain that is responsible for logic and reasoning, the prefrontal lobe, doesn’t exist. It has not yet developed. It doesn’t grow in, become wired up and functional until about age six or seven in most children. That’s why that age period is known as the Age of Reason. I have often observed apparently frustrated parents demanding that their 3, 4 or 5 year old children act like adults and be logical.

Until the prefrontal lobe is functional, most children are not really capable of deep, intuitive reasoning ability. Sure, they can figure out that if they touch a hot stove they will get burned and can determine that the round block goes in the round hole. However, generally speaking, they can’t reasonably and logically evaluate most of the experiences they have in their young lives. It is difficult for them to “figure out” their world and their place in it.

Children are very magical, egocentric and non-logical.

They tend to take everything on themselves; they generally feel at cause for what goes on around them and to them. “It’s my fault!” “It’s always about me!” For example, when I was as young as two years old and my father would come home from work every day with a scowl on his face and would soon start his ranting and raving and hitting, I did not have the capability of thinking, “Well, I guess Daddy had a bad day at work. This isn’t really about me.” Instead, I interpreted all this as my being bad. “Oh, oh! I must have done something really bad to make Daddy so angry. I must be bad.” Then I started accepting as true the many negative statements he would direct at me: I’m stupid; I can’t do anything right; I’m worthless; I’m no good; it hurts to be here; the world is a dangerous place, it’s not OK to be me, ; etc. I made these and many other decisions about myself and my world.

“He must be right. He’s big. He knows everything.” Children tend to deify the adult care givers around them; make them into Gods, just as we later tend to make our Gods into parent figures to take care of us.

These decisions that we make as children quickly become our belief systems.

They stay with us for our entire life, unless we are willing to take the risk of changing our beliefs. Of course, none of this is done at a conscious level of the mind. It takes place on the deep level of the subconscious mind. That is why so many of our beliefs defy logic! We developed them at a time when we could not be logical enough and they became firmly ingrained in our deep subconscious mind. Had the same events I described above happened when I was 7 or 8, I would have been able to reason them out enough so as to not take it all on myself. At age 2 or 3, I could not do that.

At about age 2 or 3, some part of me began to notice that when I did certain things and showed certain emotions, the beatings got much worse; that they seemed to trigger my father even more. If I yelled, threw a tantrum, cried, said “No” (which all 2 year olds do a lot), or otherwise “disturbed” him, I got yelled at and hit. So, my subconscious decided I had to do something about this. It noticed that most other adults were very quiet around Dad, walked on egg shells, so to speak.

So, a part of me created this big bottle and put most of my emotions into it and corked it tightly. There my emotions stayed for the next 37 years. It worked! The abuse lessened, at least a little. That led me to make another decision, another belief: “I am safer if I don’t show my feelings.”

It is possible that it is because of that decision that I am alive today! It was an appropriate decision at the time. The problem was that as I grew, stuffing my feelings and acting out as I did, didn’t work in my world, at least away from home. However, the part of me in charge of the emotions bottle had no idea that this strategy wasn’t working any more.

Many of our generalizations about our experiences, ourselves and our world represent important coping strategies that were learned out of necessity as we grew up, and were usually reinforced through subsequent experience. And, they are understandably guarded by some part of us as tried and true friends. They are the ego defenses with which we survived.

Now, I want to make it very clear that none of this is accomplished on the level of the conscious mind. It is done at the level of the deep inner mind, the subconscious mind. The problem, when there is one, is that we forget that we made these decisions, developed these beliefs. So, when the behaviors are no longer effective in carrying out the positive intention behind them, we have no idea what we are doing or that we have any control over them. “That’s just the way I am.”

A compounding part of the dilemma is that our beliefs determine the reality in which we live out our lives. It is pretty much impossible for any of us to live in a reality that is not consistent with our belief systems. So, given the negative self-image, negative self-esteem and self-worth, that I carried with me growing up and into adulthood, I could not accept the positive feedback–the compliments, the love, etc.–that people offered me. It was as if there was a part of me saying, “Sure, but if they knew the ‘real’ me, they wouldn’t say that.” So, my reality was focused on finding those things in my environment that supported the negative beliefs that I was not OK. That was my reality, just as all of us create our reality based on our beliefs.

That is also why no two people have the same reality.

Because no two people, even identical twins, have exactly the same experiences. Each of us interprets our world from the perspective of our own reality; our own set of filters. You can probably imagine the difficulties this causes in terms of human interactions and conflicts.

This is what change work is all about–finding the root cause of the decisions we made that became our beliefs, and going back, hypnotically and with the tools of NeuroLinguistic Psychology (NLP), to earlier in this lifetime or, in some cases, to past lifetimes, and “re-deciding”; doing the necessary healing work.

Imagine what the impact would have been if, when you were a young child having the experiences from which you made the decisions about yourself and your world, which became your beliefs, you had had a big brother/sister, aunt/uncle, neighbor, some adult who told you the truth about what was really happening. Imagine how your decisions might have been very different if you had been told the truth and did not take it all on as being about you. I am certain that if there had been someone like that in my life, I would never have decided that my father’s rages meant that I was a bad person, and that would have completely changed my life. That is exactly what happened when I re-decided and changed many of my old beliefs about myself and my world.

Now, imagine what it will be like when you do this change work for yourself and bring forward into your current life all the new decisions and beliefs, spreading them over all the experiences you ever have had, allowing each of them to re-decide about themselves, and how that could completely shift your perceptions of yourself and your world!