Ok. So we have learned how to do The Formula and The Basic Protocol.
Time to focus in on something that often happens while doing The Basic Protocol. Many beginners think it’s a problem, advanced practitioners realize that it’s actually a very important part of the process.
Here it is. Often when you do The Basic Protocol and you’re noticing the thoughts, emotions, and sensations as they come in and doing Acknowledgement on them, you get stuff that is irrelevant and distracting.
And so you might get a thought or sense of “why isn’t this working?!” or “I hope I’m doing this right…” or “This chair is so uncomfortable”…
At this point most people would simply try and ignore it so they can get back to work. This can be difficult and often times doesn’t work. It also obscures key information as we will discuss in later posts.
Ok, so what do you do?
And the answer (as you might have guessed by now) is to Acknowledge it! And so even though the thought you have at this moment doesn’t seem relevant to what you are trying to work on, the fact that it has shown up makes it a target for Acknowledgement.
We call this “Going Meta”.
And so in the example above where the sense of “why isn’t this working?!” shows up, to Go Meta we would then do “I wish this was working, ofc I wish it was working, who wouldn’t?! And I acknowledge the fact that this isn’t working”. For “I hope I’m doing this right…” we might do “I wish I knew I was doing this right… etc”. And then you get right back to where you were (unless something else pops up)!
And so here is the exercise for this week. For 5 minutes a day do Acknowledgement using The Basic Protocol making sure to Go Meta when something shows up that ‘doesn’t belong’. Let me know how it goes in the comments.
Good luck!
The most interesting thing that happened to me when I was completing this exercise was that I started acknowledging tension in my neck that arose when I was acknowledging things that stressed me out. It felt like it relaxed when I paid attention to it and acknowledged it.