We aren’t born with anything wrong with our natures. We acquire mistaken ideas that we are not good enough in some way because of experiences in the world we’ve constructed. I don’t believe there is anything wrong with the world or life, either. The world/life acquires a negative slant because of the ideas we impose.

When we’ve been conditioned or ‘programmed’ to believe negative, anti-life things about ourselves and reality, these beliefs can cloud every aspect of our outlook on life. It is often difficult for people to believe that these are just ideas, because the associated emotions and seeming reality they create feels very real. At their worst, our negative beliefs make us ill – depressed, anxious, traumatised, and so constricted in our beliefs that we are unable to live a full, happy life.

Using wave-particle duality as a metaphor we could think of the mind we develop from our physical environmental experiences as ‘particle-like’ in nature. These ideas are related to our physical being and this mind can be called a ‘body mind’. When we perceive ourselves as physical beings only, we will naturally feel afraid: a small, individual body, vulnerable to its environment and subjected to ideas that can hurt very badly. Identifying as a separate body-being means that we inevitably compare ourselves to others – no-one who identifies as a body escapes fear and some sense of not being good enough.

The good news is that we all have a True Self - pre-existing, fully formed and complete. Other words to describe this true self are our life force, essential nature, soul or spirit. Using the wave-particle duality as a metaphor, we could think of our True Self as having a ‘wave-like’ nature: not restricted by any ideas we’ve collected in our physical environment. Our True Self contains all the ideas we need to live wisely, happily and without fear. As this Self is an energy field, it doesn’t have boundaries and limits; it contains the knowledge of our oneness with everything.

In my work, I always focus on a patient’s True Self, holding this in my mind until s/he becomes aware of it. And what I have found is that the values that people hold in this ‘wave-mind’ are very similar: love, kindness, peace, compassion always emerge as values in some form. There is a desire to heal; to evolve and to expand into our true spirit.

How do we clear the negative or limiting ideas? Either using psychotherapy as a process or Rapid Transformational Therapy as a subconscious reprogramming tool, we become aware of the ideas we hold. Without conscious awareness we blindly act out our conditioning. We can then ‘reprogramme’ ourselves according to our True Self values – questioning the conditioned ideas and learning to anchor ourselves in the ideas our True Self holds.

How do we get there? I like to think of it as a returning rather than working hard to create a better self. Therefore, recognising that we have a True Self is important – we aren’t trying to ‘recreate’ ourselves. We are returning to who we really are.