Guest Blog by By Dr. Brian Alman and Stephen Montgomery

Here’s how to deal successfully
with any physical or emotional challenge. It’s called the “Find Your Voice Process.”  Spend just a few minutes a
day, and as often as needed, taking yourself through the following
three steps:

Step 1: Experience Your Challenge
First,
stop trying to get rid of your challenge; that never works and is even
counter-productive – – the harder you try to fix yourself, the stronger
your challenge becomes. Instead, begin to focus deliberately on the
experience of your pain, craving, fear, sadness, and so forth. Let
yourself become fully aware of all your difficult thoughts, feelings, and sensations – – everything that’s part of your challenge. Then flow right into accepting your experience just as it is. And last, find some private way to expresseverything
you’re thinking and feeling – – go ahead and say it all to yourself,
write it down, act it out in your imagination. When you go deep inside
and experience your challenge thoroughly and wholeheartedly, you learn
what it feels like to be in touch with your true, authentic self, and
this begins to empower the voice of your inner wisdom.

Step 2: Judge Your Challenge
Next,
you need to deal constructively with your Inner Judge, that
self-critical voice in your head that’s quick to blame you and punish
you for your mistakes and imperfections- – even for being challenged at
all. Poised in opposition to your true healing voice, your Inner Judge
is the tireless voice of your social/family programming, and it’s been
drilled into you for so long that there’s no getting rid of it. In
fact, if you try to fight your Inner Judge, you only end up being more
judgmental- – you are, in effect, judging  your Judge- – and this only gives it energy.  As in Step 1, the better way is to become aware of, to accept  and to express your Inner Judge. Only by embracing your Inner Judge and working with it can you relax this controlling, overanalyzing, never-satisfied, endlessly adversarial part of your mind.

Step 3: Resolve Your Challenge
Finally,
as you experience and engage positively with all your pain and
negativity- – as you embrace all the thoughts, feelings, and
self-criticisms that are driving your challenge- – you find yourself
spontaneously developing a new and more loving relationship with
yourself. This new perspective on yourself naturally quiets the many
strident voices of your challenge clashing in your mind, and almost
immediately you begin to hear your true, authentic voice, your deep
intuition, your TruSage. This voice is the real source of your healing
power- – it’s where all your own best answers come from. And once
you’re able to listen to your voice, you quickly and effortlessly
imagine creative ways to resolving your challenge. It’s as if new ideas
for health and happiness simply bubble up from your unconscious. And
the more you listen, the more the craving, the pain, the fear- –
whatever your challenge- – just dissolves away. It’s really quite a
miracle. And I don’t use the world “miracle” very often.

That’s
all there is to it: 1-2-3. In no time at all, you’ll be moving quickly
through the process, feeling confident that you can manage your
challenge, instead of having it manage you.   

Excerpt from the book The Voice: Overcome Negative Self-Talk and Discover Your Inner Wisdom by Dr. Brian Alman and Stephen Montgomery.
The above excerpt is a digitally scanned reproduction of text from
print. Although this excerpt has been proofread, occasional errors may
appear due to the scanning process. Please refer to the finished book
for accuracy.

Copyright © 2010 Dr. Brian Alman and Stephen Montgomery, author of The Voice: Overcome Negative Self-Talk and Discover Your Inner Wisdom