HOW TO GET WHAT YOU REALLY WANT

“All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.”

—RAINER MARIA RILKE

“Gimme my first attack.”^* Elvis Presley always called for his first hit this way, fulfilling a bizarre daily ritual designed to make sure the King of Heartbreak Hotel got to sleep after a strenuous night performing. Elvis’s assistant would open the first envelope and give him “the usual”: a rainbow-colored assortment of barbiturates (Amytal, Carbrital, Nembutal or Seconal), Quaaludes, Valium, and Placidyl, followed by three shots of Demerol injected just below his bare shoulder blades.

Before he went to sleep, Elvis’s kitchen staff, which was on duty around the clock, would go to work. It then became a race to see how much food the King could consume before falling asleep. Typically, he’d eat three cheeseburgers and six or seven banana splits before nodding off. Often, his assistants would have to dislodge food from his windpipe to keep him from choking to death. Elvis would then sleep for about four hours before stirring.

So groggy that he had to be carried to the bathroom, he would make his second request by feebly tugging at his assistant’s shirt. Elvis was unable to take the drugs himself, so the aide would pop the pills into his mouth, and carefully pour water down his throat.

Elvis was rarely able to ask for the third attack. Instead, as a matter of routine, an aide would administer the dosage and let him continue to sleep until mid-afternoon, when the bloated King would jump-start his body by popping Dexedrine and stuffing cocaine-soaked swabs up his nose before taking to the stage again.

On the day of his death, Elvis remained lucid and saved all of the “attacks” for one fatal dose. Why would a man, so universally adored by fans and seeming to have it all, regularly abuse his body and then take his own life in such a horrific way? According to David Stanley, Elvis’s half brother, it was because he much preferred being drugged and numb to being conscious and miserable.^*

Unfortunately it’s not difficult to think of other famous figures—people at the top of their professions in the arts and business—who also brought about their own demise, either directly or indirectly. Think of writers like Ernest Hemingway and Sylvia Plath, actors like William Holden and Freddie Prinze, singers like Mama Cass Elliot and Janis Joplin. What do these people have in common? First, they’re no longer here, and we all experienced the loss. Second, they were all sold a bill of goods that said, “Someday, someone, somehow, something … and then I’ll be happy.” But when they achieved success, when they arrived on Easy Street and got a firsthand look at the American Dream, they found that happiness still eluded them. So they continued to chase it, keeping the pain of existence at bay by drinking, smoking, overeating, until finally they got the oblivion they craved. They never discovered the true source of happiness.

What these people demonstrated is something all too familiar to so many people: 1) They didn’t know what they really wanted out of life, so they distracted themselves with a variety of artificial mood alterants. 2) They developed not just neurological pathways, but expressways to pain. And their habits were driving them down these highways on a regular basis. Despite achieving the levels of success they’d once only dreamed of, and despite being surrounded by the love and admiration of millions of fans, they had far more references for pain. They became quite adept at generating it quickly and easily because they’d made virtual trunk lines to it. 3) They didn’t know how to make themselves feel good. They had to turn to some outside force to help them deal with the present. 4) They never learned the nuts and bolts of how to consciously direct the focus of their own minds. They allowed the pain and pleasure of their environments to control them rather than taking control themselves.

Now, contrast these stories with a letter I received recently from a woman who utilized my work to utterly and completely change the quality of her life:

 

Dear Tony,

I had been severely abused my entire life from infancy until the death of my second husband. As a result of the abuse and severe trauma, I developed a mental illness known as Multiple Personality Disorder with forty-nine different personalities. None of my personalities knew about the others, or what had happened in each of their lives.

The only relief I had in forty-nine years of living as a multiple was in the form of self-destructive behavior. I know it sounds strange, but self-mutilation used to give relief. After one of my many attempts at suicide, I was sent to the hospital and put under a doctor’s care. In order to integrate the personalities, I had to go back to the original trauma that created each personality. That trauma had to be remembered, relived, and felt. Each of my alters handled a specific function, a selective ability to remember, and usually a single emotional tone. I worked with an expert in the field of MPD, and he helped me to integrate all forty-nine personalities into one. What kept me going through all of the different processes we used was feeling that many of my people were very unhappy and my life had become so chaotic (one alter did not know what the other was doing, and we found ourselves in all kinds of situations and places that when I switched, I had no memory of). We thought that by becoming one we would be happy—the ultimate goal.

That was my misconception. What a shocker! I lived a year of hell. I found myself very unhappy and grieving for each of my personalities. I missed each of my people and sometimes wanted them back the way they were. This was very difficult, and I made three more attempts at suicide that year, and again was admitted to a hospital.

During the past year, I happened to see your program on TV and ordered your thirty-day tape series, Personal Power. I listened to them over and over, grasping at anything that I could use. My breakthrough came when I started to listen to your monthly POWERTALKs. I learned things from you as a single being that I never learned as a multiple. I learned for the first time in fifty years that happiness comes from within. As a single being I now have the memories of the horrors that each of the forty-nine endured. When these memories come up I can look at them, and if they become overbearing, I can now change my point of focus as I learned from you, and not in a dissociative way as I had done before. No longer do I have to put myself in an amnesiac trance and switch to another person.

I am learning more and more about myself, and am learning how to live as a single being. I know that I have a long way to go and a lot of exploring to do. I am sorting out my goals and planning how to get there. For now, I have begun to lose weight and plan to be at goal weight for Christmas (a nice gift to me). I also know that I would like to have a healthy, nonabusive relationship with a man. Previous to my hospital admittance, I worked full-time for IBM and had four businesses. Today, I am running a new business and am enjoying the increased sales I have been able to realize since my release from the hospital. I am getting to know my children and grandchildren, but most importantly, I’m getting to know me.”^*

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Pietrzak

 

WHAT DO YOU WANT?

Ask yourself what you truly want in life. Do you want a loving marriage, the respect of your children? Do you want plenty of money, fast cars, a thriving business, a house on the hill? Do you want to travel the world, visit exotic ports of call, see historical landmarks firsthand? Do you want to be idolized by millions as a rock musician or as a celebrity with your star on Hollywood Boulevard? Do you want to leave your mark for posterity as the inventor of a time travel machine? Do you want to work with Mother Teresa to save the world, or take a proactive role in making a measurable impact environmentally?

Whatever you desire or crave, perhaps you should ask yourself, “Why do I want these things?” Don’t you want fine cars, for example, because you really desire the feelings of accomplishment and prestige you think they would bring? Why do you want a great family life? Is it because you think it will give you feelings of love, intimacy, connection, or warmth? Do you want to save the world because of the feelings of contribution and making a difference you believe this will give you? In short, then, isn’t it true that what you really want is simply to change the way you feel? What it all comes down to is the fact that you want these things or results because you see them as a means to achieving certain feelings, emotions, or states that you desire.

When somebody kisses you, what makes you feel good in that moment? Is it wet tissue touching wet tissue that really triggers the feeling? Of course not! If that’s true, kissing your dog would turn you on! All of our emotions are nothing but a flurry of biochemical storms in our brains—and we can spark them at any moment. But first we must learn how to take control of them consciously instead of living in reaction. Most of our emotional responses are learned responses to the environment. We’ve deliberately modeled some of them, and stumbled across others.

Simply being aware of these factors is the foundation for understanding the power of state. Without a doubt, everything you and I do, we do to avoid pain or gain pleasure, but we can instantly change what we believe will lead to pain or pleasure by redirecting our focus and changing our mental-emotional-physiological states. As I said in Chapter 3 of Unlimited Power:

 

A state can be defined as the sum of millions of neurological processes happening within us—the sum total of our experience at any moment in time. Most of our states happen without any conscious direction on our part. We see something, and we respond to it by going into a state. It may be a resourceful and useful state, or an unresourceful and limiting state, but there’s not much that most of us do to control it.

 

Have you ever found yourself unable to remember a friend’s name? Or how to spell a “difficult” word like … “house”? How come you weren’t able to do this? You certainly knew the answer. Is it because you’re stupid? No, it’s because you were in a stupid state! The difference between acting badly or brilliantly is not based on your ability, but on the state of your mind and/or body in any given moment. You can be gifted with the courage and determination of Marva Collins, the grace and flair of Fred Astaire, the strength and endurance of Nolan Ryan, the compassion and intellect of Albert Einstein—but if you continually submerge yourself in negative states, you’ll never fulfill that promise of excellence.

However, if you know the secret of accessing your most resourceful states, you can literally work wonders. The state that you’re in at any given moment determines your perceptions of reality and thus your decisions and behavior. In other words, your behavior is not the result of your ability, but of the state that you’re in at this moment. To change your ability, change your state. To open up the multitude of resources that lie within you, put yourself in a state of resourcefulness and active expectancy—and watch miracles happen!

So how can we change our own emotional states? Think of your states as operating a lot like a TV set. In order to have “bright, vivid color with incredible sound,” you need to plug in and turn on. Turning on your physiology is like giving the set the electricity it needs to operate. If you don’t have the juice, you’ll have no picture, no sound, just a blank screen. Similarly, if you don’t turn on by using your entire body, in other words, your physiology, you may indeed find yourself unable to spell “house.” Have you ever woken up and stumbled around, not able to think clearly or function until you moved around enough to get your blood flowing? Once the “static” has cleared, you’re turned on, and the ideas begin to flow. If you’re in the wrong state, you’re not going to get any reception, even if you’ve got the right ideas.

Of course, once you’re plugged in, you’ve got to be tuned to the right channel to get what you really want. Mentally, you’ve got to focus on what empowers you. Whatever you focus on—whatever you tune in to—you will feel more intensely. So if you don’t like what you’re doing, maybe it’s time to change the channel.

There are unlimited sensations, unlimited ways of looking at virtually anything in life. All of the sensations that you want are available all of the time, and all you’ve got to do is to tune in to the right channel. There are two primary ways, then, to change your emotional state: by changing the way you use your physical body, or by changing your focus.

PHYSIOLOGY: THE POWER OF MOVEMENT

One of the most powerful distinctions that I’ve made in the last ten years of my life is simply this: Emotion is created by motion. Everything that we feel is the result of how we use our bodies. Even the most minute changes in our facial expressions or our gestures will shift the way that we’re feeling in any moment, and therefore the way we evaluate our lives—the way we think and the way we act.

Try something ridiculous with me for a second. Pretend you’re a rather bored and humorless symphony conductor rhythmically swinging your arms in and out. Do it very s-l-o-w-l-y. Don’t get too excited; just do it as a matter of r-o-u-t-i-n-e and make sure your face reflects a state of boredom. Notice how that feels. Now take your hands, clap them together explosively, and SNAP them back out as fast as you can with a big, silly grin on your face! Intensify this by adding the vocal movement of an outrageously loud and explosive sound—the movement of air through your chest, throat, and mouth will change how you feel even more radically. That motion and speed you’ve created, both in your body and your vocal chords, will instantly change the way you feel.

Every emotion you ever feel has specific physiology linked to it: posture, breathing, patterns of movement, facial expressions. For depression, these are certainly obvious. In Unlimited Power, I talked about the physical attributes of depression, where your eyes are focused, how you hold yourself, and so forth. Once you learn how you use your body when in certain emotional states, you can return to those states, or avoid them, simply by changing your physiology. The challenge is that most of us limit ourselves to just a few habitual patterns of physiology. We assume them automatically, not realizing how great a role they play in shaping our behavior from moment to moment.

We each have over eighty different muscles in our faces, and if these muscles get accustomed to expressing depression, boredom, or frustration, then this habitual muscular pattern literally begins to dictate our states, not to mention our physical character. I always have people in my Date With Destiny™ seminar write down all the emotions they feel in an average week, and out of the myriad possibilities, I’ve found that the average is less than a dozen. Why? Because most people have limited patterns of physiology that result in limited patterns of expression.