Category: <span>Uncategorized</span>

Uncategorized • • By Puja 0 Comments

Importance of feedback

Do not throw away all work & performance related feedback, just because it feels uncomfortable.

It’s said that one should take feedback from people who love and cherish us. Now, our loved ones may often see only the good stuff, which is great, because we all need people who cheer us in our lives. However, they may not be very objective when it comes to our shortcomings. If you’ve seen the movie, Florence Foster Jenkins, you’ll know what I’m talking about. In the movie, Florence wants to resume singing and her long time companion encourages her despite knowing how terrible she is at singing, ending with funny yet disastrous consequences.

When critical feedback comes from people in our work or social settings, we may want to discard it without realising that it can be a great opportunity, albeit uncomfortable one, to grow.

I’m not talking about rude or disrespectful comments , moral judgments and other forms of destructive comments that people make under the garb of feedback.

I’m talking about constructive feedback which may bring up defensiveness in you and make you uncomfortable, but ‘can be’ really helpful in your growth.

In order to discern whether the feedback will serve you or not, try this:

1. Untie the feedback from your self worth. The feedback is about your work, not you. If there’s a mistake that’s been pointed out, it’s about your work, not about you. In REBT we use the term ‘self-downing’ for putting our whole self down instead of looking at the behaviour that may need a change.

2. Distinguish realistic feedback from unrealistic feedback. It’s not your job to fulfill everyone’s unrealistic expectations, camouflaged as feedback. It’s one thing to try to do better, it’s quite another to start people pleasing by fulfilling unrealistic expectations of others.

3. Discern if the feedback is going to help you grow or is it putting unnecessary pressure on you, which in the long run isn’t really helpful.

4. Is the feedback kind or unkind? Discard unkind feedback, especially the ones that feels like an attack, and only take the feedback that is kind and constructive in nature.

5. In all this, tapping on defensiveness, hurt and anger will help. Once all these feelings subside, you’ll be able to separate gold from garbage (feedback).

We must remember that we can only do our best based on what we know in a given moment, and that it’s okay to make mistakes. Perfection is an illusion. What really helps is doing our best and making an effort, learning from imperfections and building our strengths. Constructive and compassionate feedback from others can be very helpful to become aware of our blind spots.

EFT Uncategorized • By Puja 0 Comments

Growth & Survival

We have two very important survival mechanisms: GROWTH and PROTECTION

Dr Lipton did an experiemient in the laboratory on endothelian cells. When he introduced toxins into the culture dish, the cells retreated from toxins, just as humans move away from lions and tigers. These cells “gravitated” towards nutrients just like humans move towards nourishing food and love/connection.
Gravitating towards nutrients is a Growth response and Retreating from danger is a Protection response.

Now these two mechanisms cannot work efficiently at the same time!
So when we become protective – trying to protect ourselves from real or imaginery danger- we are operating from a protective mode. We go into fight or flight and the body channelizes the enegry to tissues and limbs to be ready for protection mode. Hence the growth is inhibited.
An excerpt from Dr Lipton’s book:
“Inhibiting growth processes is also debilitating in that growth is a process that not only expends energy but is also required to produce energy…the longer you stay in protection, the more you compromise your growth” (p. 116)

Most of the times we are not at a point where there is extreme danger to our survival and since humans are multicellular, not all of our cells have to be in growth or protection mode at the same time. Only depending on the severity of the treat, the cells engage in protection response.
While we can survive threats, chronic stress can inhibit growth mechanisms and can compromise your health.

Bottom line is that not only do we need to cope with stress in a healthy manner but also actively seek joy and move towards fulfilling loving lives where growth processes are stimulated (p. 117)

In order to move towards joy and lead more fulfilling lives we need to lessen our daily stress and also the stress from past experiences. What better way to do it than EFT! It can help you release negative experiences and reinforce positive ones.

Reference: Lipton, B. (2005). Biology of Belief. India, Hay House.

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EFT Uncategorized By Puja 0 Comments

Subconcious Programming

Our subconscious mind retains all of our early life’s data. It’s a storehouse of learned experiences and instincts. It’s basically a ‘repository of stimulus -response’ tapes from our childhood. (Lipton, 2005)

Subconscious mind is habitual. Think of the last time you lost it when someone did something. For example, I used to dislike it when I saw a piece of misplaced furniture. If a person sat on a chair and didn’t put the chair back in its place or position, I would get irritated. My dad is very organized and growing up I’ve observed and retained a lot of his habits around organization.
So in essence, my overreaction came from my subconscious mind which had stored all the observations about my dad’s organized behaviour. Of course, it also made me very good in organizing stuff which is a great skill but at the same time, it also made me inflexible and a perfectionist. After I realized that my overreactions were coming from my subconscious mind, I became more mindful and conscious of my reactions. Now, it doesn’t bother me much. Although I will still put the chair back in its place 😅, I do so without any irritation.

In his book, the Biology of Belief, Dr Bruce Lipton says that the subconscious mind is more powerful neurologically than conscious mind. Our conscious mind is the state in which we are aware, conscious, creative and attentive.

If you read his book, you will come to know about many fascinating facts. Did you know that the cell’s main brain is not the nucleus but the membrane? Bruce Lipton explains how this is tied to how the mind influences the body.

The membrane consists of receptor (awareness) and effector (action) proteins. “These protein complexes are the fundamental units of cellular intelligence” The cell membrane interacts with the environment to produce responses that help in sustaining life. The cell membrane is the brain of the cell. And our brain is the main unit in a human body and each cell of our body has to “acquiesce control to the brain..the brain controls the behavior of the body’s cells” (Lipton, p. 101)

The mind is a function of the physical brain.
What this means is that we can heal if we properly use our conscious mind. Our conscious mind has control over the cells of our body and the way we think and feel can affect our cells and thus lead to healing or aggravate ill health. That’s why working on our subconscious beliefs is so important for a healthy mind and body.

Our conscious mind is very powerful. It can choose how to behave in a situation, it can analyze the data coming from subconscious mind and so and so forth. Those of you who know EFT, know that with EFT, we engage the prefrontal cortex, the conscious mind, and that can override the subconscious mind’s default behaviors.
Work on your subconscious beliefs, remember to take up specific events to transform these beliefs.

Reference: Lipton, B. (2005). Biology of Belief. India, Hay House.

Learn about Genetic Deternimsm and Epigenetics here

Healing physical Issues Uncategorized • • • • • • By Puja 0 Comments

Mind over genes

Genetic Determinism vs Epigenetics

Nature vs nurture will be always be a hot topic of debate. I remember reading about it for the first time in my psychology class in 12th grade. It was a fascinating topic and still is. Much research has taken place in this area. To make it short, Identical twins studies suggest that even though identical twins share the same genetic material, they often don’t share the same diseases or health outcomes.

The stringent concept of genetic determinism states that we are born with a set of genes and we are bound to get the same diseases our parents and grandparents got. Whereas epigenetics drawing from identical twin studies points out how even if we cannot change the genes, we can change the gene expression, meaning the way the gene expresses itself.

Bruce Lipton, in his book, Biology of Belief, says that Darwin’s theory has undermined the role of nurture (environment) and led us to believe that ‘genes control biology’. He further goes on to say that most diesease like diabetes, cancer etc are due to ‘complex interactions amongst multiple genes and environmental factors, and not due to a single gene’ and, ‘the environmental influences including nutrition, stress, and emotions, can modify those genes without changing their basic blueprint’

Which simply means, environment can triumph over hereditary.

Chromosomes carry genetic material and they are covered by proteins like ‘sleeves’. When the genes are covered, their information cannot be read. What you need is an environmental signal to make the protein to change shape , which allows the genes to be read ( p. 38, Lipton, 2005)

So the environment makes a huge difference in whether your genes will be expressed or not. For example, if you believe you have a ‘diabetic gene’, firstly it’s not a single gene, and secondly the environment will determine whether you will become a diabetic or not, whether the diabetic gene will be turned on (expressed) or off (silenced).

Given that stress, emotions, lifestyle can change gene expression, we have a lot in our control. Here’s what you can do with EFT, meditation and other techniques:

Change your negative beliefs about health. Nocebo effect is when negative beliefs about health make you sick. If you believe you will fall sick, most probably you will. Hence it’s important to release health anxiety, change your thoughts patterns and transform limiting health related beliefs.

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Reference: Lipton, B. (2005). Biology of Belief. India, H