I’ve recently read “How To Do The Work” by Nicole LaPerla. It was recommended to my by my good friend Sean Hansen, who is also a colleague, a while back. I read self help books a fair amount (I probably should since I’m in the work I’m in) and honestly they all kind of say the same thing. What is great about a book is when it says the same thing in just a different enough way that it connects something for me. This book did that. Dr. LePera ties together a bunch of different concepts and builds off of Bessel van der Kolk’s book “The Body Keeps The Score” so well that I believe they should be read together, “The Body Keeps The Score” first and then “How To Do The Work” afterwards.
I’m blown away at how amazing book this book is that I recommend to everyone read it. Last time I was this jazzed about a book was about five or six years ago when I recommended “Your Brain on Sex” by Stanley Siegal.
There are many reasons to change. One, we want our lives to be better, life might suck and we want certain things to improve. Another is that someone might want to have more passion, a more vital existence. Or… we might just want to grow and evolve.
I’m convinced that deep down we all have an energy that’s driving us towards higher states of consciousness in an attempt to transcend the human experience. Whatever the reason change requires that we to stop doing certain things and start doing others. Putting it more mild doing certain things less and other things more.
Change requires different.
I’ve been aware for a while that a certain component to change is that we believe we can. Below our conscious awareness everyone from time to time doesn’t believe we can and some of us believe this all of the time. New flash, we can’t change unless we believe we can. Similar traps to this are that we lack the resources that we need to change, we’re better off staying the same (or some other sour grapes analogy), it’s too hard and won’t be worth it, no one will like us, we don’t want to get our hopes up, we don’t deserve better, or one of my favorites is that our life is really great and that if we change our life will be worse.
What was starkly pointed out in “How To Do The Work” is that there certainly are things can inhibit us from changing, there can be genetic issues or there can be organic things going on that require clinical intervention and/or things of that sort that drastically reduce the ability to change. Meaning, there’s something wrong with way your brain is wired that creates the limitation. The brain not the mind.
Scientists have now proven that our DNA can be changed, even later in life. Dr. LePera states that what that means is that we need to look towards the environment that we live in and the conditioning that needs to be rewritten in order to change and make our lives better.
We have a homeostatic gauge that operates unconsciously inside our minds. When we’re trying to change that’s the thing that starts to scream and tell us that this is all wrong, strop what we’re doing, ABORT!! ABORT!!! This is where I’ll remind you about the need to understand and continue to see the nature of the mind. This is why we’ve been programmed to perceive change as scary or bad.
The opportunity:
Do you have healthy emotional regulation? How could you improve that?
Are you able to have solid discipline in the areas of your life that you want to? How can that be improved?
Where do you need to be more consistent?
Thanks for your time, have a great day!