Here you go Lupita,
I'm doing some of these now but I have to make dinner and my kid is sick so I have to wait till I have alone time so I can really sit and think.
Have fun!
Firstly the intelectual healing you speak of, and the mental patterns that keep us locked away from the magic that's all around. I've been learning about mental patterns and thought I should share. As you say, you can compare our mental processes to a computer - Once we can analyse the individual pieces of the 'code' or programing language that runs us, we can begin to take it appart. Many people think of these pieces as the internal dialogue (that's why there is an emphasis on silencing your mind) - but it seems that the programing language/code actually includes all of our sensory systems.
So we have Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic (feeling), Olfactory and Gustatory (VAKOG) although there are further distinctions such as internal/external etc. The ones that affect our patterns the most are the first three: Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic (VAK). Now what's really interesting is that you can tell what patterns people run by looking at their eyes. Have a look HERE for an interactive chart showing the correspondence between each eye position and its euivalent sensory system.
Try this out: Ask someone to remember the colour of their fist car, 90% of the time people will look up and to your right (their left) and then tell you the colour. Now that's just an isolated part of a pattern - ask someone about their grand parents and you will get a whole pattern with the eyes moving all over the place (the patterns are very individual to each person). One can study these patterns to improve performance in specific tasks - for example excellent spellers all run the same pattern when spelling - you ask them to spell a word and they will look up to the right and then down to the left... this means when they look up to the right then remember a visual picture of the word and when they look down left to see if it feels right. bad spellers will often look to the right or down to the right, to remember how you spell the word phonetically - in english this is a very ineffective strategy.
We run such patterns constantly, we often have favourite sensory systems that we always rely on, but unfortunately disregard others. People with a post traumatic stress disorder will often remember what they saw and heard but hardly ever what they felt, because they try to block it out, but the blocking out is what keeps the stress stuck there... that's why some therapies such as Eye Movement Integration are so effective - they break the habitual pattern and force the client to unblock their feelings, and let go of the stress.
So the first step to completely healing the mental aspect of ourselves is becoming concious of the seemingly small and insignificant patterns that we unconciously run all the time. To start becoming concious of these patterns remember a slightly unpleasant memory - notice which sensory system you go to first (is it something you saw? is it someone's voice or a sound? or is it a feeling in your body?) people usually go to their preffered sensory system first and then move onto another one, thus running a mini pattern. Make the memory vivid make your picture clearer, notice where in your visual field this picture is, pay attention to the sounds, notice whose voice you can hear (if you can) or what the sound is and where it is coming from, when noticing your feeling, pay attention to where the feeling starts in your body, and then where it moves (usually the feeling then loops back round to the starting position). If you want to feel better about this memory trace the feeling backwards many times (speeding up each turn). Next remember a time you felt absolutely amazing and again notice each of the sensory systems in the same way, and pay attention to the difference between the two memories - this is very important (for example the pictures may be in a different position in your field of vision, they might have a different quality whether in colour, texture, brightness, 3D etc).
Pay attention to other people's patterns when you interact, this will help you become concious of your own patterns faster. It's important to break things down into the VAK system, since you can then become much more concious of what happens. Notice what you do when you get angry, when you are sad, when very happy, when peacefull etc. Once you stop running patterns uncociously (i.e. you will choose what pattern to run and when to run it, and if you dont want to you wont run any patterns at all), you will have achieved the no-ego state in day-to-day life.
Concerning emotions, what I believe the problem is, is that we try to supress bad emotions and keep getting good emotions - this gets us stuck and completely limits our emotional bandwidth... once you stop holding onto good feelings and running from bad feelings a transformation happens... every feeling whether thought of as 'good' or 'bad' will feel magical and teach you something important each time
Love
deb