Hootlessness #1
Bring to mind something you would like to be different. Likely something that causes you anxiety.
Identify each of the possibilities. This could be binary: it resolves, or it doesn’t resolve. Or there could be other possibilities too.
Then, go through each of them. Check with yourself: would you at least be okay if this scenario occurred? Can you be okay with each scenario happening?
If you’re okay with each and every scenario, then there’s no need to be anxious about the situation. You achieve a basic hootlessness.
Hootlessness #2
- Close their eyes and bring to mind something about yourself that you would like to be different.
- Check how this feels in your body when you bring this to mind.
- How would you feel if this were to go away?
- Feel your way into this, the richness, expansiveness, etc. That this is how not having the problem would feel.
- Now notice the curious fact that how you want to feel (i.e. when the thing is no longer here), you already feel, and the “bad” thing is still there!
Commentary: This can be a shock to see this. If it is, stay with that experience for a while. In some mysterious sense, they only need to imagine something going away and they have what they want.
Then we can explain how this can be used in life.
If we want something to happen, we often frame it in terms of what we lack. So we end up doing the “don’t think of an elephant” thing: we think of what we don’t want. Our orientation is towards something bad. In our communication with others in the world, this will show up.
Alternatively, if we soak into how it will feel to have the thing we want, we frame ourselves as if we already have it, and act accordingly, people will see us differently - they will see someone confident and are generally attracted to that.
Note, this can feel like lying. It isn’t. We aren’t changing the truth, we are just changing the emotional story, which is less concerned about conceptual truth or falsehood - it is much more about motivation.
Note: the term “Hootlessness” is derived from the American English expression: “Not giving a hoot”. It was coined by Lester Levenson, and is used extensively in the Sedona Method.