From Fear to Flow ™

The new book From Fear to Flow ™: Set yourself free from painful patterns to create enduring happiness, reduce stress & change your life for good is under way. I am writing a new book proposal for a literary agency who will sell the book to a publisher. I’m finding the process of writing the proposal a wonderful exercise in getting clear about how to refine the system I’ve been using with my clients for over a year now, and with great success.

As a clinical psychologist in private practice, a former graduate school lecturer, a trainer and supervisor of new therapists, and a practitioner and facilitator of meditation for 15 years, I have worked to devise a spiritually and scientifically informed, yet simple to apply method of working with my clients and students; one that helps them to understand themselves better, suffer less, and continuously progress on their life’s path to greater happiness, fulfillment and benefit to themselves and others. I call the method “From Fear to Flow ™,” where Fear and Flow are simple acronyms helping people navigate painful situations with flexibility, compassion, mindful awareness and presence. This system unites multiple disciplines of psychology, neuroscience and psychotherapy with the spiritual practices like mindfulness and compassion meditation, which have both recently enjoyed wide appeal in secular and scientific settings alike.

FEAR: F = Fixed Ideation (a Rigid Mind/Body); E = Emotional Entanglement (an Emotionally Flooded Mind/Body); A = Anxiety Mind  (Lost in past shame/guilt or fantasies of future disasters); R = Reactive Patterns (By definition, mindless, automatic, and often destructive and harmful).

FLOW: F = Flexibility (Nimble and Creative Mind/Body which is Possibility Focused); L = Love (Compassionate Mind/Body which is Benefit Focused); O = Orientation to the Present Moment (Mindful, Non-Judgmental Presence which is Reality Focused); W = Wise Action (By definition, naturally present, intentional, creative and beneficial to all Beings).

Using age-old basic meditation skills and wisdom traditions to build an experientially grounded, neurobiologically stable foundation, my clients and students learn to begin noticing themselves in psychological pain with compassion and curiosity. Rather than indulging in Reactivity, they are then free to learn to pause to conduct a gentle inquiry into their experience on the FEAR side of the equation. Once they begin to locate the primary ingredients of suffering and anticipate the Reaction that they might typically engage in similar conditions, they begin instead to experiment with intervening on their own behalf from the FLOW side of the equation, with a Flexible Mind, a Loving Heart, Oriented to the Now, and Wisely proceeding with intention, presence, creative possibility and benefit to one and all without exception as their guide. This leads them ever further from “The way it’s always been” and instead toward freedom from the tyranny of the past and the opportunity to author a new present with every breath they take.