Picture this: Say you’ve triumphantly completed a huge project and afterwards you sit down and think, “Maybe it would have been an even bigger success if only I worried more about it”.

Hideous, isn’t it? Life coach Christy Whitman says it’s only when you turn the worry concept around like this that you can see how futile it is to fret.

Still, most of us cling to worry as if it is a sort of immunisation that will take the sting out of worst case scenarios when they turn up in our lives. We worry as if worrying is a habit that will protect a future you against a hurt so overwhelming that you might just drown in it.

Mary Morrissey talks about the feeling of perfect bliss when looking at your sleeping baby and then suddenly thinking . . . “I will absolute die if something should happen to you!”

Have you ever thought, “This moment is so wonderful. I wonder when the next shoe is going to drop?”

Well, join the club. We all tend to go from bliss to bleeuugh in ten seconds flat. Thankfully, there are many techniques for identifying and repatterning thoughts.

Mary calls it “notice what you’re noticing”: You pause, step back and notice the thoughts you’re having. After all, you’re having them; they’re not having you.

When you notice the train tracks your thoughts are on, you can decide if you want to go where that specific train is taking you. So, you can either continue on or stop the thoughts in their tracks. And of course you know that your thoughts cause your emotions. Emotions don’t turn up out of the blue to overpower you.

With each passing moment, you are given countless chances to choose what you think (and hence how you feel); creating change by using nothing more than your awareness. The Sedona Method is an approach that helps people to do this. It is basically a series of questions you ask yourself so that you can become aware of what you’re feeling in the moment.

This method is the brainchild of Lester Levenson. In 1952, at age 42, Lester had his second coronary and his doctors sent him home to die. Instead of giving up the ghost, Lester devised the Sedona Method and lived until the age of 84. By the time he passed away on 18 January 1994, he had influenced the lives of millions of people.

Lester’s basic assumption was that we’re only limited by the concepts of limitation we hold in our minds. These concepts are not true and because they’re not true, they can be released. He used a three-pronged approach: Letting go of the unwanted emotion; allowing the emotion just to be; or diving into the very core of the emotion.

Lester explained it like this: Pick up a pencil. Hold it in front of you and grip it tightly. Pretend this is one of your limiting feelings. Gripping the pencil for a long time would get very uncomfortable.

Now, open your hand and roll the pencil around in it. Notice that you’re the one holding on to it; the pencil is not attached to your hand. Your feelings are as attached to you as this pencil is.

We wrongly believe that feelings hold on to us. We even start identifying with them. For example, we don’t say, “I feel angry” or “I feel sad”. We say, “I am angry” or “I am sad”. This is as untrue as saying that the pencil is holding on to your hand.

If you walked around with your hand open, it would be very difficult to hold on to the pencil. Likewise, when you allow a feeling, you are opening up your consciousness, enabling the feeling to drop away by itself.

When you magnify the pencil large enough, you’d be looking into the gaps between the molecules and atoms. Likewise, when you dive into the core of a feeling, you’ll discover that nothing is really there; just peace and quiet.

So, let’s do this dive, girlfriend. It will hurt less if you lead with your heart, not your head. After all, Lester said that there is more pain from holding on to the thought of pain than there is in the situation itself. “If you let the world strike you, it will do so less cruelly than your own imagination.”