Steps in Mental Training -- Life Areas
Each and every part of our existence - which contains, but is not limited to, our life on Earth in a physical body - can be affected by the untrained or wrongly trained functions of our mind. Mental training is the action of cleaning away the "garbage" from the affected life area, then locating and studying the knowledge related to it, and then practicing that knowledge until the life area is raised up to a state of prosperity.
The outline for our mental training - called "the path" or "the bridge" by some - therefore follows logically from our way through existence. With "existence" we don't mean only one physical life, but the existence of our conscious identity from its very start (its "birth" as a spirit), through its various incarnations (its lifetimes on Earth) and the times between the incarnations, to its final arrival at the merge and unity with its own origin - Christians call it "God", Buddhists call it "Nirvana", New Agers call it "All That Is" - pick your name, it is always the same concept).
Our whole way through existence is shaped by our thoughts, or lack thereof (often we don't even notice that we have delegated our thinking to parents, teachers, priests, politicians or other instruments of society). This is true even if we don't believe in things like reincarnation or a life independent from a body - even for a thoroughly mortal human being who lives only once, it is still true that his or her thinking is the one factor that determines happiness or unhappiness, good or bad luck, success or failure.
So, no matter what the specific problem is, the necessary program always consists of a series of steps to get our thinking in shape and then apply our upgraded ability to think to the problematic life area. If for instance the affected life area were "Driving a car", the typical components of such a program would be:
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Cleaning away the accumulated negative energy
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Removing false information and/or information enforced upon us by others
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Finding correct information (training, education, study)
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Practicing the newly trained skills until the subject is truly mastered
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Integrating the upgraded life area into our already established life
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Guiding the connection with like-minded people and the social integration with them
Some practitioners concentrate solely on cleaning away the negative energy and and leave it up to the client to manage the other necessary steps on his own. This is a big risk. The minimum that a practitioner can do, if s/he really decides to concentrate on clearing alone, is to educate their client in the remaining steps, because they are always necessary and can never be left out without serious consequences.
The steps mentioned above are best applied to one life area at a time, in order to avoid destabilizing one's life. A stable life, even with a narrow horizon and rather trivial goals, is in some ways better than a very ambitious but chaotic life that forever resembles a construction site. A stable life can be upgraded, because it is functional, and in a functional life, there will always be time and energy for one new project. If everything moves at the same time, nothing really has the focus of attention and there will be no completions.
Let's have a closer look at the typical set of steps in mental training, assuming we want to work on the area of cars - a randomly selected life area that is hopefully less emotional for most people than the more sensitive subjects like love or money, with which they will likely come up first, and therefore easier to study with a minimum of stress.
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Cleaning away the accumulated negative energy surrounding cars. That would include physical trauma (car accidents) as well as emotional trauma (embarassing experiences while doing one's driver's licence, parents screaming about messing up their car, etc. etc.). Other negative energies can typically be found in communication or lack of communication about cars, specific problems with cars, harmful acts connected with cars, including neglect or sabotage of cars, upsets with people about cars, dominance struggles regarding cars, and the vast area of organization and management of cars, where we cross over from mental "stuff" to physical training, the practical application of the so acquired skills, and administrative knowhow. All of these things can have residues of negative energy, caused by past experiences. Some people believe that this "Clearing" is all that needs to be done with the mind, but getting rid of negative energy is only a prerequisite to the much more important development of previously undeveloped abilities, dormant personality traits, and neglected life areas.
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Removing false information and/or information enforced upon us by others (typically our "culture"). The subject of cars may be quite rational and sane in this regard, compared with other subjects like sex, money, or spirituality. Some subjects may be well covered - usually an ordinary driving school will be sufficient in order to learn how to handle a car -, but in some subjects the severity of the absence of correct information will only be topped by the amount of false information that is shoved down our throats. It requires tremendous courage to break through the walls of some of these subjects with one's mind still intact. The key point in this step is that the client recovers the ownership of his own thoughts, by gradually removing other people's thoughts that he has been made to believe to be his own.
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Finding correct information , including theory about the life area and the mental functions related to the life area, and practical procedures that can be used to improve these specific mental functions and/or the life area itself. Here again we cross over from mental "stuff" to physical training and the practical application of the so acquired skills. Depending on a culture's social taboos (often called "tradition"), it may be simple and fast or rather hard or nearly impossible to complete this step. By looking into an internet search machine, we may find a good driver's school within 10 minutes, a reliable mental trainer within a few days, but we may wait for five or ten years until we find somebody who is willing to coach us with a comparable reliability in love and sex matters. In this context, mental training could and should contribute big time to the evolution of a society. A society always evolves in the minds of individuals. The more individuals open up for and become sane in a certain life area - which is one goal of mental training -, the more the whole society evolves.
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Practicing the newly trained skills until the subject is truly mastered . This is the completion of the previous step. It is taking the training from theory to practice, from the mind into the world of matter and energy that we call "life". We are still talking about training, but it is no longer happening in the mind - the mind has already understood the theory and now teaches the body how to work with it in the physical universe. In case of driving, this would be the time right after we got our driver's licence. We are now allowed to drive, but it is still a new activity and it has to be thoroughly practiced until it is mastered.
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Integrating the upgraded life area into our already established life . Once an area has been upgraded (or newly established), this fact may lead to quite a lot of change. We can drive a car now - we no longer have to keep a train schedule around, we can forget about busses that don't drive on sundays, but we also have to think of new expenses in our budget, we have to buy new items like car polish or reserve tyres, we need space for the vehicle, we may want to build a garage for it. Other new skills may change our lives as well. How we deal with our partner or children, how we succeed at work, what we do in our holidays or the way we vote - all these things and many more can change, hopefully for the better, with a successfully completed step in mental training.
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Guiding the connection with like-minded people and the social integration with them (finding one's people). A technical skill like driving a car may not prompt us to suddenly look for new friends - although, of course, we will join the local automobile association -, but if a previously dormant life area has been developed by mental training and now starts to unfold and flourish, social changes must be excpected. It is better to expect them than to be caught off guard. Not all groups of people are as innocent as a gardener's club or a newsgroup for cat lovers. We may feel compelled to vote for a different party in the future, and lose our friends in the old one. In our new enthusiasm, we may express our ideas in a less than diplomatic way, and financial connections may suffer. We may even run into serious trouble - some people who are developing a new environmental conscience will join Greenpeace and their health doesn't like being soaked with cold water or being thrown overboard 60 feet into a rough sea. Or their kids cry at night because Mummy has left for a crusade of two months and has stopped singing to them in the evening. It is still the responsibility of the mental training coach to keep track of these things and do all he can to really integrate them into his client's existing life. The keyword is integration. A life is not improved by wrecking it. Changes, even the most positive changes, have to be managed with care and consideration of family, friends and the working environment.
A mental trainer will typically start with the life area on which his client has the most attention. Attention on an area means that the area will allow the client to work in it and make progress.
There may be other life areas which are more in need of work, but they contain too much mental pain about past failures, past harmful acts or past trauma, and it would overwhelm the client to set it free at this point in time. He needs to work on other, more available topics until his general strength has improved so much that he can now address the previously unavailable area. One client may be well able to work in the area of his own children, but not in the area of his own parents. For another one it may be exactly the other way round. The mental trainer has to understand these things and adjust his program to the client's needs.
Aside from these considerations, the general rule would be to work from the most fundamental life areas upwards to the ones that build on these foundations. Working on a person's handling of pets while his income is still a problem would be the wrong sequence. The income is carrying all other life areas, it is their foundation - obviously it has to be one of the first things to focus on.
A general list of life areas can be found in our life analysis form. It follows the typical human sequence of priorities - the priorities that have to be set in order to manage a life in the physical body. If there are no areas of special interest that require immediate action, the mental trainer will work his client through this list from the top down.
For a person with high spiritual awareness, or a person without a body (between incarnations - in the "life between lives") the spiritual issues at the end of the list will typically have a higher priority and take their position at the beginning of the list. For such a person, the spiritual condition is even more fundamental than physical health or material income, as he or she is immediately confronted with the fact that the spirit exists first and takes on a body later - which makes it necessary to be well oriented in the spiritual world, before any physical matters become an issue. As soon as a mental trainer's client exists in a physical body, the body issues have to take priority, because bodies need careful management and cannot be left unattended.
