In the movie "Inception", just out now, the characters go into someone's dream to plant a seed so that the dreamer wakes with a new idea that he thinks is his own. Once accepted the seed will bloom and the mind will grow it.
He has to be the one to think it first or he won't accept it. That's the movie, but that's not necessarily true for us. We often accept someone else's idea of who we are, as our own. In the movie for instance, the son has accepted for most of his life, the belief that his father is disappointed in him. In accepting that limitation of himself, it clouded everything he did and felt. He had internalized his father's version of himself.
We do it all the time if the person is an expert or an authority of some sort like a teacher, or our parents. We accept their version of us as ours. We accept the limitations others put on us, and even if we hate it, we have their voice tone in our subconscious, carrying out their version of us.
Years ago I had a woman come to me in hysterics for an 'emergency' session. She had just broken up with her boyfriend, but it turned out she was less upset about him than she was about it making her mother right. She said her mother had always said that no one would ever stay with her because she was so horrible. This man had been abusive and violent, and she was glad he was gone, but also devastated that her mother was right. Was her mother right?
She said "even this horse's ass of a man won't stay with me"!
"But did you want him?" I asked her.
"No, but he wouldn't stay anyway because she said so, my mother said it, and it's been true my whole life." she sobbed.
Try arguing with that. You can't. Our version of our reality is all that counts, and so it must be us that changes our mind.
With the S.E.A. work, we are riding that wave of emotion back to the original moment what was a spike of overwhelm. That overwhelm caused the internal survival system to create a survival strategy, and along with that survival strategy are limiting beliefs about who we are and how we respond to the world.
We go into the past to find the seed that began the 'idea' of who we accepted that we were, so that it can be changed and we can become more! Those 'seeds' are I AM statements. "I'm shy." "I'm fat." "I'm lonely." "I'm typhoid mary" "I'm terrified of driving on the freeway, because I will kill someone" but in that original moment it was an incident that carried intense feeling that drove in deeply the limitation and how we respond to the world.
The future is created in our mind, and fueled by the remembered energy of the past. When our past is riddled with repressed fear and tension still in our autonomic nervous system, it becomes our referencing field. Clear the field, calm the sea inside, and we create a more benevolent future.
And deeper still is the seed of the original blueprint of who we are, and who we are here to become. When we clear the debris of our misunderstandings, we are free to find our way back to our passion and our joy! (no pun intended...really) and become our true selves.