Clear for Life

Can find an address in Chicago by looking at a map of Detroit?

Of course you can’t. What you are looking for isn’t on the map.

Do you believe you can get clear and live a happy life if your map says you are a miserable loser and nobody likes you because of your acne?

Confusing?

Then join me for this fascinating journey into your head, and on the way you just might discover why all these years you’ve struggled in vain to get clear.

You have what I like to call an internal map of reality in your mind. Similar a real map your internal map of reality described the way you see the world. It’s the sum total of all your experienced to date. Your map tells you what’s real and what’s not real, what you can and cannot do, how to do things and how to react in different situations. Some people call these maps ’subconscious programming’.

You probably know that you have a mental image of yourself. This self-image explains what you think of yourself; the way you see yourself. Your self-image is a part of your internal map of reality.

Stephen Covey in his bestseller The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People explains the mental maps like this.

Each of us has many, many maps in our head, which can be divided into two main categories: maps of the way things are, or realities, and maps of the way things should be, or values. We interpret everything we experience through these mental maps. We seldom question their accuracy; we’re usually even unaware that we have them. We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be.

And our attitudes and behaviors grow out of those assumptions. The way we see things is the source of the way we think and the way we act.

Stephen R. Covey
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, p. 24

As Stephen wrote we often aren’t aware of these maps. We simply assume that’s the way life is.

These maps are a bit like lenses. Say you wear glasses with green lenses. As you look at the world through those lenses everything you see is tinted green.

Let’s say you believe you are a miserable loser and nobody likes you because of acne. Because of that belief everything in your life is ‘tinted’ with that ‘miserable loser’ color. Say you are out and some stranger looks at you a bit longer than is normal. You just know they are looking at your acne and thinking how horrible it is. Next you feel like a miserable loser and the rest of the day is ruined.

Bet that has happened to you more than few times.

Let’s step back and see what really happened there. Do you really know that the stranger was looking at your acne and thinking you look horrible? Did you go and ask them? Or did you just assume it?

Why did you assume that? It’s possible they looked at you a bit longer because they thought you looked attractive. I’m sure that would have made you feel better. So why did you assume the worst case?

Because of you wear those ‘miserable loser’ glasses (or whatever you happen to believe of yourself). They tint everything so it looks like you are a miserable loser.

The only fact in the situation was that some stranger looked at you a bit longer than is normal. Everything else is fiction. In a fraction of a second your mind heaped all that mental garbage on it. And that mental garbage influences how you experienced the situation.

This is an example of how these maps create the way you experience life. But their effect goes far beyond this simple example. These affect the thoughts you have, emotions you feel and the actions you take. These maps create your life. Some people say your external life is only a reflection of what goes on in your head.

Change your maps; change your life

Because most people are not aware of these maps they struggle in life. They struggle to make the changes they want to make and feel stuck.

They try all kinds of tricks and techniques to change their life without ever considering the maps that create their life. That’s like trying to change your reflection by pounding the mirror.

Let’s go back to Chicago. You are standing on the street and looking at a map. Unfortunately there’s a misprint on the map and it actually a map of Detroit instead of Chicago.

Will you ever find the place you are looking for just by looking at that map? Do you think becoming more skilled at map reading helps? Do you think trying harder helps? Do you believe you can get there if you just think positively?

Of course not. No matter how good you are at reading maps, you are still reading a wrong map.

To try to change outward attitudes and behaviors does very little good in the long run if we fail to examine the basic paradigms from which those attitudes and behaviors flow.

Stephen R. Covey
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, p. 28

Change your maps; change your skin

Your maps, or subconscious programs, also affect your health and your skin.

At this point I invite you to watch this snippet of an interview with Dr. Bruce Lipton.

As Dr. Lipton explains 90 to 95% of your thoughts flow from your subconscious programs. That’s why positive thinking rarely works. You are pitting 5% against 95%. That’s why positive thinking often leads to frustration and ends up reinforcing your subconscious programs.

Your maps affect your skin and health through your thoughts and actions.

At some point you probably believed diet has nothing to do with acne. At that point you would have said I’m a crackpot for suggesting that the McDonald’s burger your just ate has anything to do with your skin.

It doesn’t matter if I’m right or wrong, you still wouldn’t listen to me because my message goes against your established beliefs. As long as you believe diet has nothing to do with acne you only take action on solutions that have nothing to do with diet and dismiss everything else as wrong and irrelevant.

Similarly if your map says you are a miserable loser you only take action that allows you to experience yourself as a miserable loser. Anything else is dismissed as wrong and irrelevant - and that probably includes this blog post.

For an example of how your expectations influence what you see take this quick and revealing test. Demo: Perception: Two Women. You only see what you expect and your expectations are shaped by your mental maps.

What happened when you started accepting that diet may have something to do with your skin? Did you start paying attention to what you ate? Did you start avoiding certain foods and eating more healthy foods? Did you feel like you opened your eyes?

Hmmm… what else in your life could change if you’d change your maps?

Don’t think yourself into another breakout

In the interview Dr. Lipton talked about the ‘nocebo’ effect. Placebo effect refers due to spontaneous healing because the patient believes into the treatment.

Nocebo effect is just the opposite. Person gets worse because they expect to get worse.

Ten years ago, researchers stumbled onto a striking finding: Women who believed that they were prone to heart disease were nearly four times as likely to die as women with similar risk factors who didn’t hold such fatalistic views.

The higher risk of death, in other words, had nothing to with the usual heart disease culprits — age, blood pressure, cholesterol, weight. Instead, it tracked closely with belief. Think sick, be sick.

Brian Reid
The Washington Post, Tuesday, April 30, 2002
The Nocebo Effect: Placebo’s Evil Twin

Research shows stress can make acne worse. The same can probably be said also of other negative emotions.

What do you believe about getting clear? Do you believe there’s no way you can get over acne?

Nocebo is one reason I ask you not to worry about Candida and other ‘health problems’.

I’m not saying Candida isn’t real, but it has become sort of a boogie man in the natural health field. It has become the ‘catch all’ disease that’s said to be behind each and every symptom.

I believe that Candida infection is illusion for most people. They never get it diagnosed. Instead they read symptom lists (that are so vague and general they could describe many diseases) on obscure websites. Are they feeling tired and lethargic because their bodies are fighting the effect of chronic sleep deprivation and years of eating junk; or is it because of Candida? Most people assume it’s Candida.

What do you think happens when you believe you have Candida infection and it takes years of hard work and expensive supplements to get over it? What do you think happens when you believe this hard-to-get-rid-of Candida infection causes your acne?

If the mind can make you 4 times more likely to die from a heart attack, can you be sure that your belief into incurable acne and Candida infection doesn’t prevent you from getting clear?

What about more global beliefs? Can you be so sure that poor self-image has nothing to do with your skin?

From working with acne victims I know acne often ‘justifies’ certain beliefs. For example, if you believe you don’t deserve love, it’s easy to point your finger at your skin and say how anyone could love a person with my skin.

Keep in mind that your self-image was formed before you even knew about acne. What you think of yourself is mostly based on the first 6 to 7 years of your life. If you want to learn more about this please read They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life by clinical psychologist Oliver James.

This may be hard to believe, but acne is not the real problem. What you really need to look at is your mental maps and subconscious programming. Once you get clear inside of your mind it’s much easier to get clear on the outside also.

How to get rid of negative subconscious programs

Hopefully by now you understand how much your mental maps shape your life. So let’s look at how to get rid of wrong maps that may prevent you from getting clear.

By far the most difficult part is to become aware of your maps. Most of the time people aren’t really aware of what they think; much less that they can do something about the garbage that flows through their minds.

As Dr. Lipton mentioned in the interview if you just stop and listen to your thoughts you’d be shocked at what you ‘hear’. Those thoughts reveal what you really think of yourself.

Unfortunately most people aren’t conscious enough to pay attention to their thoughts. Instead thoughts just flood over them and they find themselves getting angry, depressed or feeling bad.

Meditation is a good way to become more conscious of your thoughts, that’s why Clear for Life now comes with easy to use meditation tracks. Meditation is not the only way and in Clear for Life I describe a systematic way to identify mental ghosts and other dysfunctional subconscious programs.

When you become aware of your thoughts you can stop and decide that such thoughts don’t serve you. Then you can use various techniques to clear the negative beliefs and emotions. This is actually very simple and quick, but the trick is in identifying the real issues.

Two techniques I frequently use are Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT, and Sedona Method.

I recommend you start playing with EFT; simply because it’s so easy to use, effective and free to learn. Simply go to the EFT website and download the Free EFT Manual: Introduction to EFT.

The free manual teaches you more about EFT and how to use it. You’ll get everything you need to know about EFT from the free manual. Also please read the free tutorials on the EFT website, especially the ones that talk about finding the core issues and importance of being specific. Your success with EFT (and other similar methods) comes down to nailing the core issues and beliefs.

What happens when you get rid of negative subconscious programs? Remember that your external life reflects your mental maps and subconscious programs. When you change them you change what’s reflected back in the mirror of your life.

How exactly that happens depends how your maps create your life. You may find old issues that used to bother you have no effect anymore; so you become happier and more peaceful. Perhaps your eyes open up to new information that can help you to get clear. When you change your subconscious program you also change your thoughts and actions. And with new thoughts and actions come new results.

No matter what happens it’s an interesting and rewarding journey and one that I invite you to start on.

If you have any questions about this, feel free to post them as comments below.

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

Should you get some sunlight, or should you lather yourself with sunscreen and avoid the sun like a plaque? Which one is better for your skin.

One of my customers took a quiz at acne.org and one of the questions was about sunlight. The answer he got back shocked him.

“While the sun is important for the production of vitamin D, especially if you do not eat dairy products, excess sun exposure is actually skin damage. While the sun feels good, it may bite back with acne in the weeks following exposure.”

I agree with this completely. Unfortunately many people miss the point of this message. The operative word is excess sun exposure.

Sunlight is absolutely essential for good health. But that doesn’t mean more is better. It’s the same with exercise. You need enough sunlight - not too much, not too little.

Exposure to sunlight benefits your health in many ways. You get vitamin D from sunlight. It helps you to sleep better. It makes you energetic and happier. It can kill bacteria from your blood. Just to give you few examples.

Sunlight is the only viable source of vitamin D

Since the acne.org quizz mentioned vitamin D let’s talk about it briefly. Sunlight is the only practical source of vitamin D.

In Clear for Life I quoted a study where the researchers measured blood vitamin D levels from people after they’ve been on a tanning bed. They were exposed to amount of UV radiation that leads to very minor sunburn (your skin gets a bit red and is back to normal the next day). The researchers found that those people had blood vitamin D levels of equivalent of taking 25′000 IU of vitamin D.

To put that into a perspective a multivitamin supplement usually has 400 IU of vitamini D and vitamin D supplement has about 1000 IU. A glass of whole milk has less than 100 IU.

As you can see no other source of vitamin D even comes close to what you’ll get from sunlight.

This is a bit of a problem for people living in the Northern latitudes. During the winter months sun rays hit the northern part of the globe in such an angle that most of the UV rays bounce back to space. So in such latitudes your skin won’t make vitamin D from sunlight. You have to either use tanning beds or take vitamin D supplements.

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin

Michael has tried everything.

Several courses of Accutane, all OTC treatments you can name, master cleanse many times. He eats healthy. Still his skin looks horrible.

Then he goes to Puerto Rico for 2 months, smokes like a chimney and eats greasy food. Yet his skin never looked better.

What’s going on here? Doesn’t this prove diet has no effect on his skin?

In case you are wondering. Michael is a member at Clear Skin Space, where we had this discussion.

Michael’s case is interesting because it shows that getting clear doesn’t always make sense… or does it? So what can we learn from this? If you are in a similar situation should you throw salad to the wind and eat whatever you want?

No. Not if you want permanently clear skin, anyway.

Food affects your skin in two ways. Some foods trigger a breakout soon after you eat them; often within a day or two. I call these ‘trigger foods’. This is often because you are sensitive to that particular food, or the food is otherwise inflammatory.

These foods are easy to spot, and their relationship to your skin is easy to understand.

However food also affects acne indirectly. This is where people get confused.

Foods can either contribute to your or they can take away from your health. If your health suffers from your diet and lifestyle choices it always means more inflammation in your body. And more inflammation means more acne - to those who are prone to it.

Let’s get back to Michael.

We can conclude that the foods he ate in Puerto Rico didn’t trigger acne. But it would be quite foolish to say foods have no effect on his health. And because foods he eat affect his health, they also affect the health of his skin - even if the effect is indirect and shows only after a long time.

But this doesn’t make any sense. Why did his skin get better in Puerto Rico?

Who knows. We can rarely reduce these things to one or two factors. Perhaps his body needed sunlight and fresh air more than anything. Or perhaps in that tropical paradise he was happier and less stressed. Perhaps the foods he ate back home contained some ingredient he was sensitive to, and this ingredient was not present in the foods he ate in Puerto Rico.

This brings us to the next concept many acne victims struggle with.

Your health is only as strong as its weakest link.

Unfortunately 90% of all the questions I get have something to do with diet. Is this food good? Will this make me breakout? Is this food safe to eat?

Diet is the only thing many acne victims can wrap their heads around. They have overblown the importance of diet in getting clear.

Sure it’s important to watch what you eat, but diet is just one of the elements of health. You have to make sure you exercise, sleep well, get some sunlight and fresh air, and remain positive.

Diet is no more important than the other elements.

Let me finish this by telling you the BIG SECRET to clear skin.

I get a certain amount of hate mail. For whatever reason some people feel compelled to tell me I’m a greedy and evil bastard for withholding the secret to clear skin. I should go and yell it off the mountaintop, they say.

Since there are no mountaintops nearby, and it can get a bit cold in those altitudes, I’m just going to yell it off here.

So here it is. The ’secret’ three-step formula for clear skin.

1. Put all the elements of health in place. This means finding a diet that works for YOU, and making sure all the elements of health are balanced.
2. Avoid trigger foods and substances you are sensitive to or that in some other way trigger a breakout.
3. Sit tight and allow the healing process to unfold.

There you have it. That is, honest to God, the big NON-secret to clear skin. There is nothing more to it.

Now just go do it.

And while you are at it, go grab a copy of Clear for Life to make me happy

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Clear for Life - The lifestyle for health, happiness and clear skin