I give an example of this. Here's a story. Let's just say you're on a train trip, right, and you're sitting in a train and you sitting next to this woman. And you get talking. It's a long trip. It's four or five hours, like all the way to Toronto. And she starts to tell you about her life and she starts to share a story of when she went to prom, that she actually had two dates and she had to break half of the time up with one date, half the time up with the other date because she didn't want either of them to know about one another, but she loved them both at that particular time. And then she ended up getting into a minor, minor car accident, minor fender-bender of her car as she was driving to the prom. So she would never actually get to the prom, the police pulled her over but there's no damage done and they didn't even give her a ticket, they just gave her a warning.
She finally then does make her way to prom and she is dancing with one of the people that she loves and then she dances with another one that she loves when the other one's gone to the bathroom. And she manages to pull this ruse off the whole night and not let either of them know, and they both feel very much love with her and she feels that she's done her job. She then tells you that she writes a story about these guys in a book that she wrote, all under the guise of erotic literature, if you will, that became a bestseller.
So you're listening to this, and she's a great storyteller, and you're listening to all of this and you're having these reactions in your body and she's leaving you on the edge, with cliffhangers here or there. And certain parts of your brain fire off. Certain parts of your brain fire off. The kind of same parts of your brain that oftentimes you'll get when you truly love somebody, the biochemistry, if you will, of the brain starts to go off and almost a positive resonance starts to happen.
Now, here's an interesting thing. If that never actually happened, if you never actually met that woman on the train, and you went and you had a brain scan, you went in and you actually had a brain scan. I believe it's a...not an MRI, I think it's a AMRI, it's slightly different machine, and you were put in that machine and they would take in a scan of your brain, a neuro-specialist behind that glass wall, and you were listening to this story, because you didn't actually see the woman, you didn't touch the woman, you were just hearing the story for the first time in an audio recording, the same parts of the brain, 9 times out of 10 would fire off as in if you were actually having that real conversation with that woman.
And if we take it a step further, when we plug the woman...back to the woman, into the MRI machine, and we plug you into a different MRI machine and we're getting what she's saying, what parts of the brain are firing off as she's talking and what parts of the brain are firing off as you're listening to her, for the most part, the mirror neurons are happening. So basically, the parts of her brain that are firing off as she's telling you the story are firing off in your brain, most of the time, which is quite phenomenal.
So oftentimes, we say, in hypnosis and change works, that treat the world as you want to be treated because we, on a quantum physics level, there's a thing called mirror neurons that basically how you feel strongly is oftentimes going to be reflected back to people in your presence. Hence when I do change work with people, especially if it's physical change work, I'll get myself into a certain state and I have this total belief that I can help these people, I truly do, and without me having to see anything, allow myself to be a vessel for healing, if you will, even if it's only make-believe that those neurons are happening in my body, and unconsciously, my client is picking up the mirror neurons and starts to, when we're in rapport with one another, start mirroring back and start to feel that difference in their body.
So that's oftentimes what happens in love. That's what happens around people that you love. And you see, love is the number one emotion in the world. There's a quote from "A Course in Miracles." Now, I don't subscribe to necessarily all the religious dogma behind that course, but there is a great quote, and the quote is, "There's only two emotions in this world, love and fear, and fear is merely an illusion." Fear - False Evidence Appearing Real, F-E-A-R. So there's only love. There's only love out there. That's all there is, many different forms. You can fall out of love, you could fall in of love. I am of the belief that you can totally be in the love with somebody and for whatever reason, you break up, and perhaps you never see that person again and you have very many -- easy for me to say, I've been drinking a lot 7UP today, Diet 7UP -- but you may never see that person again, have lots of wonderful, fulfilling, romantic relationships in the meantime. But there's probably still part of you that loves that person. Would you ever want to get back to them? No. Would you ever want to even see them again and have a conversation with them? Probably not. But there's still a part of you that loves them because it's never truly that person you're loving, it's the part of them that you carry inside of us, because we carry parts of everyone around us.
So oftentimes when we think we have problems with people, it's never actually the person you have a problem with, it's their internal representation that we have that we store as a part inside of ourselves that we're consistently interacting. Because if you ever have the experience of getting really upset about somebody who perhaps wronged you, and that person is not in your life, hasn't been in your life for many, many years but when you think about it, you still get upset about it. But when it happened, when they screwed you over, then yeah, you got upset, it was a trigger. But 5, 10 years later, they're not in your life anymore and you think about it, it still upsets you, what's upsetting you is that internal representation, that part of them inside that you carry around, because they aren't around for you to be interacting with. It's only you and that part.
So it brings to mind that when we love someone, do we truly love them or do we just love that part of them, that internal representation that we store inside for them? Do we truly ever truly love someone else or do we love that part of them and what they potentially can do for us? See, there's been an upgrade in the love recently, and I refer to a book called "Love 2.0" Well, I get a lot of these scientific analyses and what's happening on the mind and body with love and different levels of love. And I'll share a story with you.
I remember, it was probably about eight years ago, I had a girl in my life that we were together on and off for about five years. I totally loved this girl. She is my second first, not my second first, my second girlfriend, and she was older than me, and I was very, very young at the time. And long story short, we made up, break up, make up, break up, make up, break up like any great Hollywood sitcom or movies to build up drama on some level because chemically, we start to become addicted to that oxytocin release and serotonin dump that was going on. And basically we'd broken up. Her name was Sue. We'd broken up and we were not together romantic for three or four years, and basically cancer came into her life, and she had cancer and then we were together for a period of time. We did some work together and it erased the cancer. It was gone for about three or four years, completely to the point where the doctors couldn't believe it. And we broke up, we went our separate ways, but, you know, we stay in contact somewhat. And long story short, before I came to Canada, she died and it was heartbreaking. It was full of grief, and I grieved her, in some form or fashion, for about two years after that. It was very painful.
But the interesting thing about that was, I remember being in Canada, I remember being in Ottawa, and I remember being at a bus stop waiting to go to the dentist, and I was feeling this grief, this sadness. It was about six months after she'd passed away and I was just feeling it, it was just horrible. And I just asked myself a question, the question was, "In this moment, in this very moment, could I feel total love? In this very moment could I feel happiness?" No drugs, no sugar, no embrace from anyone else. I'm standing at the bus stop, it's the winter time, it's about minus 20 degrees out there, in the full grasp of grief, and I just asked myself that question, "Could I feel love in this moment, in all this darkness? Could I feel connection, in this moment and all this darkness? Could I feel happiness in the moment and all this darkness?" And my body started to respond and I had this amazing feeling of love, of connection, of happiness, of euphoria.
So here's the thing with love, if you've got someone special out there in the world, amazing. Make them feel loved, make them feel connected out there for you. And if you don't currently have someone at that level in your life, that's all right. Do you know where it starts is you love yourself. And not just you say to it to yourself in the mirror, "Oh, I love myself, I trust myself, and gosh darn it, I'm an amazing person." I'm not talking about that bullshit stuff. I'm not talking about going into your garden and saying, "There are no weeds. There are no weeds. There are no weeds," and there's a lot of fucking weeds and they're eating up all your flowers. No, I'm not saying that.
But what I'm saying is you truly love the person that you are, because when you do that, when you truly love that person that you are, when you accept that person that you are, it doesn't mean you can't grow, it doesn't mean that you can't become more, it doesn't mean you can't become stronger, it doesn't mean you can't achieve more things. No, you can absolutely and you should absolutely reach that brass ring in the sky, so to speak. But are you enough right now? Sure. Can you love yourself right now? Sure. Are you enough right now? Absolutely. Can you love yourself right now? Absolutely. Will you? Well see, that's the choice. That's the choice that you have. Will you? Will you love yourself right now?
Because see, that's how all this begins. You truly love yourself. Not a narcissistic love and, "Look how beautiful or sexy I am," but the kind of love where you're just like, "Yeah, you know what, I see my troubles and tribulations and challenges and achievements that I've achieved and done in this world and come through, I can love myself." And then when you truly love yourself, you give the universe, you give other people the permission to love you as well. You treat the world, you treat the universe, you treat people how to treat you by doing that.
So probably in closing, I'd like to share with you one of my favorite quotes from the movie. The movie is okay. The movie could've been better, but it was okay. It's called "Collateral Beauty" and it's about Will Smith. A good movie, but one of my favorite bits of it is he meets love, Will Smith meets love in this movie. And Will Smith is a love tease. He's a little child in this movie, I believe, and he meets a representation of Love played by Keira Knightley, someone from my side of the river. And he's very upset and he knows that she represents love and she's runs into him for the second time. It's my favorite scene in the movie, and it's somewhere in Manhattan and she comes up to him and he's quite upset and he's quite bemused at the same time. And she's talking to him. He has a bit of an outburst of where you can see the clip, if you're gonna watch the whole movie on YouTube, and he's very upset, he's very frantic-y. He lays on the line of how would love ever allow him to lose his daughter and all this, and then she says to him, "I'm in all of it. I'm the darkness and the light, the sunshine and the storm. You're right, I was there in her laugh, but I'm also here now in your pain. I'm the reason for everything. I'm the only "why." Don't try to live without me. Please don't."
Always Believe,
Luke Michael Howard CHT
Clinical Hypnotist
