"Like Smoke in the Stanford Linear Accelerator..."

but once should be quite enough...

worry not about how your family, or lack thereof,
stacks up to Norman Rockwell's rich inner fantasy life...

Getting Through Obligations
"Get What You Want Out of Life:...
––Richard Bandler

"As human beings, we are constantly faced with having to endure things which, in themselves, are not necessarily bad or good but for some people can seem unpleasant. Sometimes, going over to a relative's house and having Christmas dinner can seem like the most excruciating thing in the world. ...Some people make things a lot worse than they need to be. The trick to this is to have adequate preparation.

People usually think about how horrible or how unpleasant a future event is going to be. They plan for it. ...Whatever the event is, people can make things better or worse by how they think about it in advance. Events themselves are not necessarily good or bad. Our response to them is good or bad.

If you think about the things that make an excruciating event excruciating and you feel bad while you do it, and you do it over and over in preparation for the event, when you get there, it will be even worse.

I've always said that disappointment requires adequate planning. So does suffering. Suffering requires adequate planning because you have to know which bad feeling to have and when to have it. When Uncle ____ goes off on an unending story, you know it's time to pull your hair out by the roots. Instead, if you can learn to focus on only what it is that you enjoy, you can start to make the things that seem unpleasant feel silly.

You can do this through using a model like submodalities. What one person finds silly and what another finds excruciating can be identical. The truth is that it works much better when you take adequate preparation for the things that you have to go through. ...you can plan to deal with it more effectively.

In preparation for it, you go through and run the movie inside your mind, and while you're running it, you make it silly. Make it so that it doesn't bother you. It's silly that the same things, year in and year out, have driven you crazy since you know they're going to happen. You should be able to feel differently, and if you don't, then you can count on the fact that you'll suffer like you always do.

There are a couple of mental tricks that are really important to how you do this. In order to make time move faster, human beings mentally do something different. ...one of the things you do when you're driving down the road and things are moving very fast in your peripheral vision versus the center of your vision is to go into states of time distortion. That's why when people drive really fast down the road and then change speeds, they're still moving fast at about thirty or forty miles per hour, yet they feel like they are crawling because they were going seventy miles an hour beforehand. It takes a while for the brain to adjust.

When you want to go faster, you need to go inside your head and run a movie of what's going to happen so you know when to be disappointed, when to be in a state of frustration, or when to be in a state where you feel like pulling your hair out. You need to run it so that what you see in the center of the image moves very, very slowly and everything on the sides moves very fast.

...when Uncle____ is telling that same old, long boring story, you can watch everybody move around like they're Charlie Chaplin figures––so you plan in your head to make it go by quickly. It's about having adequate mental preparation so that, when it occurs, you go into a time warp and it doesn't seem like it takes hours. In fact, the trick is to run the center of the image in your mind really slowly so that Uncle____ talks at half the speed he normally does, but everything else moves really fast. Then, when the event actually occurs and he's actually talking faster than you had him talking in your head, it's going to seem easier.

Instead of wishing he would do things more quickly and imagining how fast it could be, you'll be doing the opposite. When it feels like it's slow, you imagine it going ten times slower than it normally does, so that when it occurs in reality, it feels faster. This has to do with contrast, and you can create the kind of contrast you want in your mind. Time is a very relative thing for human beings. Sometimes time appears to move very fast, and sometimes it seems to go by very slowly.

It's a mental trick to be able to shift from one event to another, from one time to another.

"What I Believe About Ghosts"
Robert Graves, Beryl & Marion, December 27, 1941
Bill Brandt 1928-1983
postcard procured in London while haunting a Brandt exposition...

Speeding Up Time Exercise

1. Think of a situation where you would like time to go by quickly.

2. Imagine the situation happening and whatever it is that is happening that makes it seem like time drags, then see the event happening in front of you going really slowly.

3. Imagine everything else around you is going really quickly and flying by like in a Charlie Chaplin movie. For, example, if it involves talking to someone, you will see them in the center of the movie talking really slowly while the rest of the background of the movie all runs around very quickly.

4. Continue to see the event go slowly while everything in your peripheral vision moves really quickly.

5. When you actually arrive and begin the event, whether it is standing in line or talking to someone or watching something, you will find it goes by far more quickly than you expected.

6. You can also go through this process while you are experiencing the event, and it works just as effectively.

Merry Christmas and Happy Time Distorting!


"Santa's On His Way"
Bob Wills & his Texas Playboys