Your Body is Your Guru (© Jim Leonard, 1994)

Your mind is not the smartest part of you. When you have a Vivation session, you need to get your mind out of the way (it has earned a short vacation!) and let your body be in charge of the session. You can come to your session with a specific goal in mind. But then you and your Vivation Professional need to understand how to keep your body in control of your session.

Regardless of your ultimate goal, your first goal is to develop enough skill with Vivation to give yourself excellent sessions The role of the Vive Pro is analogous to that of a golf pro. The golf pro teaches beginning golfers the basics and helps advanced golfers improve their technique. The Vive Pro teaches beginning Vivers how to focus on their feelings for extended periods of time and how to receive maximum benefit from each feeling. In golf the first goal is to develop an effective swing. In Vivation the first goal is to develop "body leadership".

Body leadership means allowing your body to present you with surprising feelings, allowing the feelings to take their own course through your completely relaxed body. Body leadership occurs when you pay close attention to the details within your feelings, without trying to control them in any way. You concentrate your full attention on your feeling sense, and just let your mind go. When you surrender to the leadership of your own body, your feelings take you on a healing adventure within yourself.

Vivation is more efficient than mental methods precisely because your body controls the session. Results in life are created at least as much by the unconscious mind as by conscious intention. Your conscious mind does not know what your unconscious mind contains, but the feelings in your body always provide direct access to your subconscious. That's why it is so important to give your body full control over the session.

The importance of body leadership can be illustrated by an example: suppose a salesman signs up for Vivation sessions, with the goal of increasing his income. He may have already decided that what he needs is better "closing techniques," and he expects Vivation to make him more comfortable using these techniques. He might not realize that something emotional in his unconscious mind is inhibiting his sales a lot more than anything about technique.

If our salesman tries to steer his session with his mind, he'll create mental pictures and thoughts related to closing sales. Vivation is a fool-proof process and he will get some integration this way. His sales might even improve. But as he gains more skill with Vivation and surrenders to his body's leadership, he will integrate core emotions. Then his sales will really take off!

During a Vivation session properly led by his body, he might start feeling irritable. Exploring the subtle details within the irritable feeling, he discovers memories of his father. As he allows the feeling to follow its course, he feels a profound change. New feelings of compassion for his father suddenly appear, and he relaxes deeply.

Having integrated these feelings, he finds himself being more patient with customers. He no longer feels nervous when they're trying to make up their minds. He naturally says the right things to close each sale, because he's more sensitive to the individuality of each customer. Vivation has increased his income much more than any closing techni-ques could!

The integration in his session has permanently changed his results with customers. The problem turned out not to be with closing techniques, as he had suspected. The real problem was with impatience, anxiety and irritability, which he had suppressed out of his conscious awareness for many years. If he had directed the session with his mind, he never even would have found out what was really causing his problem. Letting his body direct the session, he not only found out what was causing his problem, he permanently healed it.

It works the same way with every kind of problem and every kind of goal. Vivation works out the core conflicts that limit your success. A partial list of specific areas that people have successfully addressed with Vivation includes: money, sex, relationships, creativity, health, chronic pain, phobias, post-traumatic stress disorders, addictions, child abuse, eating disorders, grief, death, and immortality.

Developing body leadership is the same as developing skill with The Five Elements of Vivation. As your Vivation Professional continues giving you exercises and suggestions for improving your skill with The Five Elements, your sessions will develop more body leadership.

To understand body leadership you must grasp two essential points:

1.     Any problem you are trying to solve is perpetuated by habitual avoidance of an emotion. Integrating that emotion eliminates the problem at its source.

2.     You already have direct access to the emotion you need to integrate. That feeling is in your body all the time. In fact it probably stands out and demands your attention many times every day. All you need to do is feel it in detail and surrender to it. The skills you learn from your Vivation Professional make this whole process easy and gentle.

People sometimes ask me, "How can I get my body to bring up the feelings I want to work on?" The answer is, You don't have to! Your body already knows everything you need and desire. It knows which subconscious factors are related to your needs and desires better than your conscious mind does. Your body already makes feelings stand out whenever you are not comfortable with them. All you need to do is pay attention to the feeling that is standing out most, and let your body take it from there.

The Vivation session can be called a feeling-level dream. Just as you do not need to do anything to make sure you have "the right dream" at night, you also do not need to do anything to make sure "the right feelings" come up during a Vivation session.

The result produced by Vivation is called "integration." I'll explain integration with an analogy. Someone asked a great yogi, "What then, can we eat?" His reply, "The question is not what can you eat, but what can you digest!" Integration means digesting your life experiences. Anytime you experience upset, it's because you haven't digested some experience. The experience will continue to upset you until you finally do digest it. The reason you haven't digested it before now is because you've developed a habit of suppressing the feeling whenever it comes up, putting it off for another day.

In Vivation your body gently presents the feeling you most need to digest. Then you relax and surrender, allowing your body to digest the experience. When you integrate an experience, you receive completely what's useful in it, and you completely let go of struggle and waste.

Your Vivation Professional helps you become expert at integrating. In the first few sessions, you learn to integrate the feelings your body produces when you're resting comfortably. You discover that your body generates continuous waves of emotional energy, even when you're just resting. After a few sessions, you'll know you're good at Viving, ready to take it on the road!

With practice you can learn to Vive while simultaneously engaging in any other activity. As you progress through a series of sessions with your Vivation Professional, he or she might lead you through some "Vivation-in-Action Field Trips". These are Vivation sessions in which you Vive while doing something else, so you can integrate the feelings produced by the activity. There are infinite possibilities for Vivation-in-Action Field Trips. Here are a few: Viving in warm or cold water, Viving in church, Viving on a roller coaster, Viving while striking up conversations at a singles bar.

To illustrate an extremely important point about body leadership, we'll take the example of going to some high, but safe, place to Vive and integrate your fear of heights. It's one thing to go to a high place and Vive into the feelings activated there. It's something completely different to sit on the ground pretending you're in a high place, trying to Vive into the feelings you'd expect would come up. The difference is that the feelings you get in the actual situation are not the feelings you would expect. The feelings in the actual situation will surprise you. Feelings you are trying to bring up consciously cannot surprise you. If your body is not surprising you with the feelings that are coming up, then you need more body leadership.

Besides advanced Vivation techniques, you can also do certain things, before and after the Vivation session, that will help you apply Vivation to your specific objectives. Here are some tips:

        Every day take some kind of direct action, even if it is small, to move toward your goal. For example, identify a behavior that contributes to the problem and make a program of doing the opposite. For your Vivation process, taking direct action is important mainly because of the emotions stimulated by the action

        Good results come from using affirmations before (but not during) the Vivation session. The affirmations activate feelings related to your goal. But let go of the affirmations during the session, and give all your attention to your feeling sense. Your body knows important feelings that your mind cannot reach. During the Vivation session, any mental activity, including affirmations and talking, interfere in letting your body lead the session.

         If you are trying to eliminate some compulsion or addiction, Vivation works extremely well in conjunction with 12-Step Programs such as Alcoholics Anonymous.

         When working on a specific goal or problem, increase your daily Vivation and increase the frequency of your assisted sessions.

Relax. You don't need to try hard at Vivation. Your body will lead your session and produce excellent results for you. Now you can experience that your wisest teacher, your greatest healer, is you

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