Usually when I’m doing sessions with clients or patients, it’s all based on conversation and instant feedback.  When you are doing this work from home, however, it might help you to write down detailed descriptions of your current problem or issue. Then stop and feel how this problem is in your body.

Let’s say, for instance that you have a general feeling of failure. Begin to list or itemize the cost of this failure, e.g., what it has cost you in terms of loss of money, loss of respect from your family and others; disappointment, fear, and descent into a world of unhappiness and irrelevance.

Once this feeling is at its peak, notice the effect on your body.  Where is the tightness?  Then ask a thought to arise within you that represents this feeling . . . pull out of your mental/emotional file the very first time you remember failing or being criticized. Feel the energy surrounding that failure.  Notice the stress in your body.

If the emotion is at a peak – and the feeling is present in the body – look for some statement to arise.  Look to see if something comes to mind that summarizes this anger, fear, disappointment, humiliation or regret.  If so, verbalize it.  Write it down.  What statement would make you want to lash out at something? Be angry at something?

If nothing arises, just be with the feeling for awhile.  Be patient. Remember, this has been with you, like, forever. Wait for some thought to come up having to do with the very first time you remember feeling this failure, feeling this anger; feeling this inability to succeed, whatever reason.  This is because you had that same feeling at one point and the memory still resides in your body and nervous system.

The earliest remembered feeling (and corresponding thought) that comes up is usually tied with some judgment or decision you made about that experience.  This would be a decision tied to the Seed of Failure (SOF) for this particular issue.

In other words, let’s just say you were very small and you were criticized.  I remember I was very small and I had this general store that I had built out of cardboard.  It was in my front yard, and I sold comic books and candy that I’d collected from Halloween to the neighborhood kids.

I was real proud of my cardboard store.  I was a little kid acting all grown up and being a business person.  I was playing business, and actually succeeding: I made more than my allowance, and it was all profit since I usually got my inventory for free.

I also remember my dad walking up to me, playing the role of government agent I suppose, and he fires a couple of questions at me:

“Do you have a business license?”

“Are you going to file your tax returns and pay taxes?”

Now, obviously he was kidding, but it still had a deep effect as a child.  I remember feeling shocked; shut down.  I didn’t have these things, and had no idea what they were, how to get them, or what would happen to me in my ignorance.  And for years and years after that, I felt shut down.

I had made a decision “I don’t know enough.”  Then I forgot about it.

My body, however, did not forget about it. It was in my physiology.  I spent the rest of my life trying to overcompensate for what I felt was my profound ignorance on such matters.  I learned how to set up corporations.  I even studied the Internal Revenue Code and regulations, for Pete’s sake!

When my physiology became involved at that critical age of ten, everything that I did from then on was somehow connected to that failure to please my Dad.  In this sense, it also became a general decision that he would always know more than I did – something I was unable to shed until years after his death.

I took my Dad’s kidding a certain way.  As kids, we take a lot of things a certain way.  So, failure goes deep within our physiology based primarily on not being able to interpret events correctly.  I took the words “not having a business license” and made up a story about how I’m not smart enough, and the hidden decisions that were spawned by this feeling.

So the way you find the seed of failure is first to feel it inside your gut. What does that feel like?

• Close your eyes.
• Go back to the very first time you remember feeling that way
• Listen for the decision about that particular feeling.
• Write it down.

The next step is to create a statement or affirmation that is the opposite of your negative one.  “I choose to fail in business,” for example might be “I choose to succeed in business,” or whatever it is.

Then muscle test the positive statement.  If “I choose to succeed” goes weak, then you’ve hit on at least part of the SOF.   At that point, return to the first time you remember feeling where that wasn’t so.  That thought, that decision that you made, is the thought you need to work with.

That is the decision that can be changed.