Page 95 - Taming Your Gremlin A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way (Rick Carson)_Neat

is difficult to escape. For this reason, I recommend that when you choose to
grapple with your gremlin you do so only for a few seconds or minutes at a
time, and only after setting a very precise time limit on your grappling.

Make certain to stop at the end of the time period. One to five minutes is
usually more than enough grappling time. Once you set the time limit ahead
of time, get in there and grapple to your heart’s content. Have a ball.
Fantasize, analyze, ruminate, obsess, get turned on, wound up, let down,
bummed out, happy, excited, scared, whatever—for a few minutes. Then
stop, center yourself, and use your “I’m taming my gremlin” mantra.
Remember that special place behind your heart and consider your breath

passing over it and brushing gently against it.

Your gremlin is proficient at creating a cerebral house of mirrors. Even
if on some rare occasion you manage to arrange the concepts in your head
in such a way that you feel like you are the intellectual victor over your
gremlin, be assured it will not last. Within a few minutes or, at best, a few
days, he will raise the whole issue again and you will find yourself
struggling desperately to resolve the whole matter all over again. Taming

your gremlin has absolutely nothing to do with arguing with him.
Remember also, that taming your gremlin has nothing to do with trying and
straining. It is a precise method relying on:

Simply Noticing
Choosing and Playing with Options

Being in Process

As you begin to directly experience how you are and who you are, your
gremlin’s myths, the habits he has talked you into accepting, and the
concepts he perpetuates on which these habits are based, there will occur an
automatic adjustment upward in your level of contentment. Why this is so, I
don’t know, but it is so and it has been so forever. As I mentioned earlier,
some call this phenomenon the “Zen Theory of Change.” Here it is again: