Season 3 – epiBLOG 9:

What a spectacular conclusion to Awards’ Season! Oscars 2017 was amazing… and what a surprise ending. It felt like we were watching a movie unfold momentarily. Congratulations to both La La Land and to Moonlight respectfully. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while now and haven’t noticed already, I tend to make everything a story. My life. The Oscars. And screenplays themselves. I love stories, which is why I read a lot.

The book that I’ve been reading for the month of February is called The Sedona Method by Hale Dwoskin with a foreword by Jack Canfield. The book is absolutely brilliant! I wish that I could say that I randomly chose it myself like I did with The Power of Now last month, but I have to give the credit to my loving fiancé. She noticed changes within me and my entire outlook on life as I was finishing up The Power of Now.

I told her that I finally understand [spiritually] what people have been saying for the past two decades when they would encourage me to “live in the now.” My usual response to what I perceived to be four of the most annoying words in the English language when combined in that order was nothing short of colorful. However, I now “get it.” Life-changing epiphanies are always nice to experience.

Today’s topic is on the review of the book The Sedona Method, and how it relates to your success as an artist.

What can all of you artists glean from my own self-inflicted and self-sabotaging journey and this book…? A lot, actually. All artists create — putting their imagination on paper, on a hard drive, on a canvas, within clay, on film, in some tasty homemade dish, in song, in the clothes they design… in whatever it is that you use to create your art.

Somewhere along the way, we run into rejections and obstacles. Self-doubt can start to creep into our subconscious. Some of us pretend to let go of that self-inflicted intruder by continuing to take actions that seemingly move us forward, but we never actually let go of the doubt. We subconsciously allow this “doubt” to become part of “our story.”

We keep adding it to the middle of the ongoing autobiographies that are our lives, as we move forward to attempt the next endeavor that we supposedly “hope” may just be the one action that helps us to break through and experience a victory. A mental intruder like doubt can also be accompanied with other useless intruders like: “ fear of failure,” “hopelessness,” feeling like “it’s too late” for you to get what you want, “helplessness,” “inadequate,” “tense,” “scared,” “compulsive,” “obsessed,” “impatient,”  “arrogant,” or even a world-class “know-it-all.”  Do any of these feelings sound familiar?

What The Sedona Method suggests is that we acknowledge our feelings, welcome them without making any judgement calls on ourselves or anyone else around us. Just feel whatever it is that you feel. Accept it and welcome whatever you feel. In the end, the author poses that you ask yourself three questions: Could you let it (the feeling) go? Would you let it go? And when? There is no right or wrong answer to any of the questions. There’s just an answer. As I applied this in my own life, I found myself letting go of a lot of feelings that weren’t serving me well.

When feelings are suffocated or buried because we feel we can’t experience them, or even be vulnerable enough to share with another person that we have these feelings that we are not proud of, we don’t acknowledge them. Not acknowledging the existence of a person or a thing doesn’t change the fact that they exist. Lack of acknowledgment simply brings about negative feelings. How would it feel to be ignored in social settings? How does it feel to suppress your true feelings?

There is no right or wrong… there just… “is.” The idea of just “being” is scary for many of us. I do recommend this book for anyone who is struggling with self-inflicted and self-sabotaging feelings that you use to create a mental story in your head. Stories conjure up images. Images become real, and when you use negative feelings to paint a specific story about your life, that story becomes your reality instead of the ambitions and goals that you’ve set for yourself.

As much as I would say – no, not only say — but actually claim to be a successful screenwriter/filmmaker and would constantly do the work in order to have that be my reality, the story that played in my head was titled “I have to struggle to win.” And although I’ve experienced successes in my career, it’s been more of a “struggle” to make it instead of an actual journey to enjoy and learn from along the way. My own story has stopped me from achieving greater successes because of feelings that I subconsciously gave enough power to hold me back.

You can believe that your actions will outweigh all of your feelings, but in reality, you’ve subconsciously created a story with an ending in mind that you actually don’t want on a conscious level. Maybe this isn’t you, but I’m definitely speaking about my life experience. For years I’ve been “fighting to be” a successful writer instead of “simply being” a successful writer.

Not everything has to be a fight. Not everything has to be a struggle. Not everything has to be hard. We create stories in our minds about what we believe things should be, and these stories become our realities. And like me, you spend a good part of your life simply being frustrated and confused about why the things that you’ve work so hard to achieve are not materializing the way every self-help book has told you they would. That was me. That was the old Nitara. I’ve revised my story in order to reflect the new and improved Nitara Osbourne.

Today’s LESSON is to let go of holding onto feelings that don’t serve you well through acknowledging that you have those feelings in the first place.

FUN ASSIGNMENT: Read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Secondly, read The Sedona Method by Hale Dwoskin. I recommend reading these books in this order not only because I read them in this order myself, but The Power of Now gives you a foundation that will expand your mind and will allow your experience with The Sedona Method to be that much more effective.

Resource: The Sedona Method by Hale Dwoskin

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