Cut Cords of Attachment (29 page)

The stakes are higher than with a kid’s game. You are helping your client learn to distinguish between relationships with fulfillment potential versus dreadful no-win relationships.

1. After you look over the Dialogue Box at the end of Step 9, does the cordee seem like a really difficult person? You are only reading about the relationship energy from a cord, not necessarily behavior. Still, does any cord item from the cordee sound a warning bell that this could be a no-win relationship?

2. When discussing the relationship pattern at Step 10, does this still sound like a no-win relationship?

3. If it seems appropriate, discuss the meaning of no-win relationships. It’s a kind of psychological Lotto for Grownups. Let your client decide describe the cordee’s pattern of behavior.

Let your client do it, not you. What matters is recognition that the cordee has a serious problem which your client never caused in this lifetime. Why expect that cordee to ever change? With cord cutting, more realistic thinking can become possible.

Usually, a no-win relationship is recognized by Step 10, when the client finally recognizes the negative side of being close to the cordee.

Even more exciting, in Step 11, the two of you can discuss a related logical consequences: Becoming capable of recognizing—and avoiding—similar relationships.

Sometimes complete healing for your client will require that he cut a whole series of cords to no-win relationships.

CORD SAMPLE: Impossible Test

Mother-in-law jokes are common. But sometimes a mother-in-law isn’t just funny. She does really upsetting things, some of which land in a daughter-in-law’s cord of attachment. This was the case for my client Phyllis. Can you find the no-win pattern?

Phyllis: I’d really like to please you.

Mother-in-Law: I think you’re crazy, but maybe you’re not. I’m going to give you a little test. Act the way I want you to. Do it in front of the family.

Mother-in-Law: Oops, too bad, you flunked again. Now I have the right to badmouth you behind your back.

Phyllis: Give me another chance, please.

Mother-in-Law: If you would just do what I say, I could approve of you.

Phyllis: Whenever I’m with you, I freeze up.

Mother-in-Law: You’ll never be normal. Prove to me that you aren’t crazy.

Phyllis: Why do you always have to criticize me?

Mother-in-Law: I can’t explain yet. Keep pouring your energy into me until I’m satisfied. Then I’ll stop criticizing you.

Actually, the tough thing here would be to find a cord item that wasn’t no-win. Kept busy placating her mother-in-law, poor Phyllis had no extra energy to question the no-win pattern.

During Step 11, I suggested a logical consequence around independence. Perhaps, with these cord items gone, Phyllis might find it easier to just walk away from any relationship based on pleasing somebody else.

Ending a no-win relationship sounds good, right? But how can a client start doing things differently?

Some changes may happen spontaneously. And, at least, with the cord of attachment gone for good, a client like Phyllis has gained a new degree of balance within her aura. She can now move forward
quickly
in future sessions with her choice of psychotherapist, life coach, or professional at Rosetree Energy Spirituality.

Stay Clear

Unappreciative clients are rare, especially if you are cutting your own cords of attachment. Read the following only if you plan to help others (and if you have a strong stomach!).

Assuming that you do offer help to family members and friends, as a volunteer healer,. I’d like to offer you some benefits of my own experience.

TECHNIQUE: Service with a Smile, Regardless of Outcome

Every client has an agenda. A client’s negative desires may surprise you, because it is so thoroughly unlike how you personally would approach an invitation to receive healing.

Strange as it may seem, a client may not really come to be healed. Here’s how to manage, regardless:

1. Don’t quiz any client about how much healing he’s willing to accept. Assume that each client aims to move forward as far as possible.

2. Define your job as fulfilling your client’s stated intention the best you can. As a healer, don’t expect immediate results.

3. If necessary, remember this: A client’s choice is never the healer’s responsibility.

Why would someone go to the trouble of scheduling a session if not to be healed? (Yes, even a family member or friend!)

• Some clients come to vent their frustration.
  
• They’re gathering new material to complain about.
  
• Perhaps they bring completely unrealistic expectations. They want you to magically fix all their problems. For free! In an hour!
  
• A highly skeptical client might disguise her negativity, all the better to find fault with you.
  
• Some clients come to test you (whether consciously or not). When such a client catches you in any seeming mistake or inadequacy, she imagines that she has won the game.
  
• Reluctant clients may come to taunt you for sport. Having no desire to heal or change; the agenda is to say afterwards, “I followed your advice. You were wrong. This nonsense doesn’t help.”
  
• Or a client’s preference may be to find new reasons to feel sorry for herself. If she judges the session a failure, later she can whine, “My problems are too big and important to be fixed.”
  

You get the idea. There are endless variations on the theme of Client Not Ready to Heal.

A client may surprise you with her reactions during Step 11. Sometimes she may cry. Sometimes she will fine-tune your language and be dazzled by
her
insight. Other times she will think about something she disagreed with and get back to you later with a big fat YES.

Occasionally, a client may try to manipulate you, consciously or otherwise. Since you’re already a family member or friend, she may try to take advantage in order to receive extra help, extra time, etc.

How can you protect yourself from manipulative clients?

Remember, your being a friend or relative doesn’t make you obligated to provide free healing sessions.

Offering a session or two as your gift is different from agreeing to be available on demand. Set a policy right now about how you will handle unreasonable requests.

Will you gently but firmly insist that your sessions end on time?

What if a client ends a session by bringing up new questions or projects?

• You can say, “Bring that up at the start of your
  next
  session, okay?”
  
• Or will you feel obligated to keep helping your client until she says she is satisfied? (Maybe a time called “Never.”)
  

Other useful questions to settle for yourself before inviting anyone to be your client:

• Do you wish to be available to answer unlimited follow-up questions after a session is over?
  
• Does your gift come with a lifetime warranty of continued free phone calls or e-mails?
  
• If a client has an emergency, does that become your emergency?
  

TALE: Gratitude Revisited

Here’s an example of a belated thank you, sent by e-mail. If you like, copy the following words as if they were sent to you. Eventually, someone like Kaori will take the time to send you a great big thank you.

Months after I did a session with her, this Japanese client sent me an e-mail. Although she apologized for her English, I felt that the awkwardness of her words made them all the more beautiful:

You cut a cord of attachment among me and my mother. After session, the situation does not change, as you said. However, myself changed surely. I can start to live in the life of my own.

Though I lived for years, it is the first sense.

I can feel that myself and mother live in the different life. I am very calm.

But I am not yet used to feel that feeling.

Actually, this week was my birthday. I have a feeling that at last it was reached my birthday of the truth. I thank you very, very, very much!!!

Chapter 14
Assign Homework

12 STEPS TO CUT CORDS OF ATTACHMENT

Step 1. Create a Sacred Space

Step 2. Make an Energy Sandwich

Step 3. Activate the Aura

Step 4. Choose Which Cord to Cut

Step 5. Locate the Cord

Step 6. Give Permission

Step 7. Remove the Cord

Step 8. Bandage to Rebalance

Step 9. Write the Dialogue Box

Step 10. Discuss the Client’s Logical Consequences with the Cordee

Step 11. Discuss the Client’s Logical Consequences for Other Relationships

Step 12. Assign Homework

Seize the Teachable Moment

Homework Remove Boggarts

Assign Creative Homework

Generate New Agreements

Encourage Lifestyle Change

Goal Setting as Put-In

Winning Affirmations

Give the Going-Home Instructions

Program Water for Healing

Do the After Picture

Officially End the Session

Let’s Get Practical

Cutting your sixth minor cord at Step 12 is a great way to celebrate all you have accomplished so far.

1. Remember, practice your skills by cutting at least 10 minor cords before you cut any major ones. (Even better, cut ALL the minor cords you have listed before attempting even a major one. Every bit of this permanent healing of STUFF will help you.)

2. When you do your “Official Reading” of this chapter, read it as if for the very first time.

3. Step 12 will officially complete your learning this method to cut cords of attachment. Afterwards you will own the skill set for Rosetree Energy Spirituality.

Be proud of yourself; I sure am!

Seize the Teachable Moment

What is a
teachable moment?
At every major stage of growth and learning, there comes a time when everything clicks.

Remember when you first learned to read? No matter how hard you had worked before, wrestling with phonics or whatever method was popular back in the day, suddenly you could read. It was effortless, too.

With any major learning in life, one special moment will click it into place. Once everything comes together, for a short time afterwards it becomes possible to learn at a way faster pace than normal. Enthusiastically, you can gobble up huge amounts of information and draw in all the nutrients. This is a teachable moment.

Well, a teachable moment occurs at the end of Step 11. Removing a cord of attachment and understanding its implications for logical consequences, your client has fully released a major limitation in life.

How fortunate if the healer recognizes this teachable moment! It can be used to accelerate further learning.

In the next chapter, I’ll supply a context to give you a deeper understanding about your involvement in teachable moments. For practical purposes now, it’s enough to understand this:

In subjective reality, major shifts have been set in motion. Now your client can quickly integrate the results by doing a simple homework assignment. This will hasten benefits of cord cutting for objective reality.

Of course, subjective and objective realities can affect each other. Step 12 works powerfully, right at a teachable moment, due to this reciprocal relationship.

TECHNIQUE: Are Those Flowers Really So Gorgeous?

Let’s say you find a beautiful bouquet of roses for sale. In the store, they’re so gorgeous, you can’t resist buying them.

Alas, after you bring them home, the poor dears start drooping. By the next day, the flowers are no longer beautiful. In fact, they’re obviously dead. Sighing, you fling your bad purchase into the trash.

Half-dead flowers, darn! Why didn’t it show?

Actually, it did. A smart consumer will always reads flowers’ auras before buying. You know, humans aren’t the only ones to have a personal energy field crammed with bits and bytes of information.

Right in the store, while shopping for flowers, you can use the “See It, Read It” technique. Or you could use my favorite, “Feel It, Read It.”

When flowers display a lively aura, their vitality will produce physical consequences. The flowers will continue to look good for about a week after purchase.

What about flowers with a puny, sad aura? That will soon show physically, too. Sooner or later, the truth of an aura always works its way out to the level of physical reality.

So remember to do Step 12 whenever you cut a cord of attachment. The whole purpose of cord cutting is to improve reality. Include the put-in aspect of Rosetree Energy Spirituality.

Virtual Reincarnation

Thank goodness you are no cut flower, having only one chance to blossom. Being human, you can go through many cycles of blooming and wilting, life and death, all within one lifetime.

Based on choice, or prayer, or innumerable other factors, you and your aura can be born again. These days, I think of this as
virtual reincarnation,
a very 21st century opportunity to move through many lifetimes within one earth life.

By cutting a client’s cord of attachment, you help him to experience a kind of rebirth into a more evolved lifetime. Well-chosen homework hastens this, causing results from your session to display sooner, rather than later.

So go ahead, take advantage of your client’s teachable moment and assign some homework.

TECHNIQUE: Introduce Homework

Assigning homework could become your favorite part of a session. Why? Receiving homework is fun. It’s a way for a client to help himself or herself (or if you happen to be the client, yourself). Right now! For free! At this teachable moment!

1. Explain to your client that now is the best time to receive a small homework assignment. It will be easy for him, and take no more than 10 minutes. But the impact can be enormous. Why? His subconscious mind has a powerful opportunity for put-in that resonates with his soul. If your client will do a simple bit of homework just once during the next 24 hours, he will gain huge benefit. Who wouldn’t want that?

2. Choose a unique homework assignment. (Specific ideas will follow.)

3. Explain the assignment to your client.

4. Answer any questions about the proposed homework, then finish Step 12.

Reassure your client that even if he doesn’t do the homework, his cord of attachment is gone for good. You may be surprised at how eager clients are to supplement their healing. Ten minutes of homework, during that teachable moment, is a fabulous investment.

Abundant Possibilities

Finding homework is fun because you have so many choices. Let’s use the example of Isabella to illustrate the many ways you might turn cord items into homework assignments.

Remember Isabella, the unhappy wife from Step 10? Here is the Dialogue Box from cutting her cord of attachment to her husband.

1. Husband: I’m a forceful man. I know what I like.

2. Isabella: I’m not forceful. I’m not sure who I am. I just know that I want to please you more than anything.

3. Husband: I’ll push on you to see how much I can get. You’ll do anything I want, won’t you?

4. Husband: How can I respect you when you constantly grovel?

5. Husband: You don’t give me sex often enough.

6. Isabella: I want to be loved, not used. No sex until you recognize who I really am!

7. Isabella: I feel lonely and rejected.

8. Isabella: No matter what I do, it’s never enough. I give constantly. You never give back.

Thinking expansively, you may find many possible logical consequences. Any one of them could become the basis for a homework assignment. Here is my short list. (Parentheses will contain the cord item related to each.)

For any one of the following topics, Isabella would write notes for nine minutes, then read them aloud during the final minute of homework time.

• How she might recognize when her husband acts too demanding. Which words or actions might alert her. (Cord Item 1 )
  
• What would/could it mean to her, anticipating
  her
  needs rather than her husband’s. (Cord Item 2)
  
• Consider whether her husband is
  capable
  of showing her respect. Does he respect her in some situations? How could she ask him to show her respect in other situations? (Cord Item 4)
  
• Social skills that could help her to build self-respect in other relationships. (Cord Item 8)
  
• Ways she might aim to grow more independent socially, financially, and emotionally. (Cord Item 8)
  

Although each Dialogue Box is unique, typically you can identify many logical consequences as a possible basis for homework. Just choose one for the homework.

If you are cutting cords of attachment for yourself, resist any temptation to skimp on Step 12. Put on your special cord-cutter’s beanie, or whatever hat you wear during self-healing. Then treat yourself with as much respect as you would any client.

Do a great job at homework selection for yourself, that very loyal, long-term client who deserves the very best work you have to offer.

Assigning homework for yourself or another client isn’t hard once you decide which type of homework is needed
most.
Sometimes that choice will be obvious. But what happens when many logical consequences seem possible during Steps 10 and 11.

Use your full assortment of skill sets to decide. That includes plain old common sense, training at counseling or healing, your inner guidance, and that advanced non-academic degree you have earned at Earth School. Of course, what else has been part of your skill set, ever since Step 2? “Questioning”!

TECHNIQUE: Find the Best Homework Topic

Let the “Questioning” technique help you to make an inspired choice of homework assignment.

1. Do the “Get Big” technique. (Think once the name of the Divine Being you wish to help you.)

2. Set the intention to find the most appropriate homework for your client.

3. Ask inside, “Which homework topic would help my client most?”

4. Release the question with two Vibe-Raising Breaths.

5. Accept whatever you get, and use that as a basis for choosing the homework.

Homework Removes Boggarts

Several different types of homework will be described in this chapter. I look at all dedicated homework in Step 12 as a form of Boggart Removal.

You don’t have to be accepted at Hogwarts to follow some sage advice courtesy of J. K. Rolling. In the Harry Potter books and movies,
boggarts
are frightening magical creatures who take the form of a person’s worst fear.

To remove them, witches and wizards must harness their creativity. They imagine something funny related to the fear, as when timid Neville Longbottom pretends that his grandmother’s clothes are being worn by sinister Professor Snape.

Then follows the magic word:
Riddikulus!

Your client needs no magic word or magic wand to remove old fears. Each type of homework described for Step 12 can work impressively all on its own, especially for healing the subconscious mind. A cord has been removed, and with it, old habits of subconscious functioning. Healing comes strongly in Step 12 to Cut Cords of Attachment. Each type of homework shown here helps the client with the put-in part of Rosetree Energy Spirituality.

Creative Homework

Ever since childhood games, playing has had healing power.

Playing can mean pretending, acting goofy, flowing creatively in the moment.

So guess what? Creative play is often the best way to try out new behavior.

Assign creative homework to help your client change an old pattern, transform a troubling relationship or practice ending a no-win relationship. How can you find a creative assignment?

1. Discussions with your client in Steps 10 and 11 will alert you to a client’s keenest desire for change.

2. Either you or the client might choose a particularly important logical consequence. This can become a homework topic for Step 12.

3. Assign a two-part project related to that theme. Ask your client which type of creativity she prefers, such as drawing a picture, writing a poem or letter, doing a dance, singing a song or improvising on a musical instrument.

4. Explain that this creativity will be used for a ceremony to reprogram her subconscious mind. Right from the start, she will say aloud, “Subconscious mind, pay attention, because this is going to be a reprogramming ceremony.”

5. Your client creates something related to the
old
pattern. Then she says, “Out with this old pattern.”

6. Your client creates something about the
new
pattern. Then she says, “In with this new pattern.”

7. A reprogramming ceremony needs to be done just once, preferably within the next 24 hours. It need not be fancy. Actually, it will probably take under 10 minutes. Remind your client. “This homework will speed up results from your session, with the potential to move you ahead by the equivalent of several months.”

Exchanging 90 days for 10 minutes just by doing this homework during a teachable moment—not a bad return on your client’s investment, is it?

TALE: Encouraging Independence

For Isabella’s homework I selected the theme of independence. With the cord to her husband gone, she would find it easier to be her own person.

What could help Isabella to figure out what she liked (or felt, or enjoyed) on her own? Creativity can jump-start independence. So, let Isabella’s creativity time begin!

Which kind of creativity did she prefer? When I asked, she told me “Drawing.” So I assigned two quick self-portraits:

Part One: Who did she used to be? Small? Holding out her hands and waiting?

Part Two: Who is she now? Isabella can draw herself as she would like to be: Confident, able to protect herself, happy even when alone, and definitely independent.

At a teachable moment, even the simplest creative actions can powerfully reprogram subconscious patterns.

Generate New Agreements

Energetically, an
Agreement
is a personal commitment to take a particular kind of action, become a particular kind of person, or use energies in a habitual way. Once stated aloud, a voluntary new Agreement generates immense spiritual power.