Developing mindfulness and awareness can be like riding a rapids. It is easy to talk about, but actually to do it requires inner strength, stamina. The way to develop inner strength is to take every opportunity to practice it, bit by bit. Opportunities continually present themselves. Constantly practice breaking state and acting independently of the urge of habitual thought and behavior.

1) Go slow when you want to go fast, and vice versa. When you feel like contracting in fear, expand. For example, if you are sliding into a poverty mentality, give something away. Return kindness for rudeness. Patience is a form of generosity: cultivate it toward yourself and others. Give both space and time; take a deep breath and shift perspective: look at the sky, feel your feet on the ground. Affirm that there is plenty of time to do everything, and relax the contraction.

2) Do ordinary, habitual tasks, like brushing your teeth, with wakeful attention as if for the first (beginner's mind) or last time (awareness of the imminence of death).

3) Do things faster or slower than usual, i.e. become attentive to habitual patterns and vary them so you feel the friction.

4) Don't base choices or behaviors on external standards, or internalized external standards, such as praise or blame, good or bad, or right or wrong (think more deeply about what causes harm), or others' expectations.

5) Take risks, perform small acts of courage (and appreciate them), make arbitrary choices and plans and follow through. Just do it!

6) Practice witnessing thoughts and feelings. Sit quietly erect and relaxed, and simply label thoughts and feelings: "thinking ...thinking ...feeling..." Label and witness without getting involved. Build up until you can spend 20 minutes or more a day with this simple exercise.

7) Cultivate mindfulness in all your actions throughout the day, and create your own exercises for breaking state, for waking up.

This is a discipline, and true discipline itself is an act of courage: the courage to step outside the trance of narrow self-involvement and fear. To keep it real and fresh requires vigilance. If it becomes a routine habit, you've fallen asleep. If it becomes a duty, an obligation, involved with hope and fear, guilt, or a gaining idea, you will become resentful. Right relationship to wakeful living is the goal of this approach to hypnotherapy, not the trading of one trance for another.

8) Become aware of how and when you are ruled by your unexamined likes and dislikes. What are they? Make a list.

9) As an exercise, create a script in which you represent your most important goal in life as a living symbol of some sort. Relate to it, feel its energy. Take some time to become fully established in relationship to it, so it becomes alive and vivid. Then visualize it moving straight out into the distance, to the top of a hill where you experience its power and vividness as you simultaneously experience yourself at the beginning of a straight path before you and up the hill to the symbol. Walking this path symbolizes your walking your life