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

You can’t get clear until your self-image is clear. Holistic health is the only reliable way to permanently clear skin. Readers love Clear for Life.

Those are just few of the results of a recent customer survey I did. Thanks for everyone who got back to me. Here’s feedback on the feedback, and few golden nuggets that help you get clear. You’ll pick up something useful even if you haven’t read Clear for Life.

You can’t outperform your self-image

Interestingly quite a few people commented that CFL gives them fantastic results when they stick to it. Unfortunately they keep falling off the wagon and in the process making a mess of their skins.

While I agree that staying healthy in today’s world takes some work, I wouldn’t say it’s difficult. The truth is that eating and living healthy is easy - once you get over your own limits.

If you find yourself repeating a pattern where you make progress and then fall back, I believe you need to work on your self-image.

In the personal growth circles it’s well-known that you can’t outperform your self-image.

Deep in your subconscious mind you have an image of yourself; your self-image. That image shows what you really believe and think about yourself. It shows what you can and cannot do. It shows what your life is like.

Your mind’s job is to make sure that your life matches your self-image. Scientists say that 95% or more of our behavior is subconscious. Humans like to believe they behave rationally and logically, but even a cursory look shows this is not true.

Your subconscious mind controls most of your actions and choices. It guides your life to the fulfillment of your self-image. One way this happens is through your thoughts. If you think exercise is boring, you’ll find it hard to motivate yourself to exercise. If you believe eating healthy is difficult, you’ll find that it is. But if you believe exercise is fun and eating healthy is delicious and fulfilling, living a healthy life gets easy.

While it’s true that you are free to choose your thoughts most people don’t exercise that power. Instead the choice happens in the subconscious level. And here’s where your self-image guides your destiny.

In each moment your subconscious feeds your mind with thoughts and images that guide your life towards your self-image. If you haven’t trained your mind your life inevitably slips towards your self-image - even if you fight it.

Acne can be part of your self-image directly or indirectly. You may see yourself as a victim of this horrible curse. Or you may, for example, believe that you don’t deserve love; acne then justifies that belief and gives you something to point your finger at, you can say the reason you haven’t found love is because nobody would date anyone with your skin.

I used to be afraid of success. I has a belief that it’s better to be small and not attract too much attention on myself - thanks to my childhood. This held me back in many ways. For example my mind created food cravings. I used to be able to stick to raw food diet for few days. But regularly also found myself eating pizza, coke or some other junk. I pushed my limits and my mind had to bring me back to my “comfort level”.

Luckily I found that belief and got rid of it. The food cravings disappeared overnight. Now I’m free to choose my meals and eating healthy is easy.

If you keep hitting a wall and can’t get past a certain point, I recommend you work on upgrading your self-image. Awaken The Giant Within by Anthony Robbins shows you how.

Holistic health is the only realizable way to permanently clear skin

Going through the feedback it got painfully obvious that getting clear is a holistic effort. Acne is a complicated problem and I don’t think anyone really knows how it happens. Equally obvious is that there’s no simple solution that would be permanent and would work reliably for many people.

Constantly working to improve your health is the only way to permanently clear skin. Further, you must put in all the pieces of the puzzle. Health is not just about diet or exercise. You have to work on it at many levels. You have to eat healthy, you have to move, you have to sleep well, you have to remain positive, and so on.

The feedback shows that you’ll get the best results if all the elements of health are in balance. Weakness in one area can hold you back from getting 100% clear skin.

Most acne treatments ignore this fundamental truth, so is it any wonder their track record is so miserable?

The biggest problem areas for people were sleep and stress and negative attitude.

Stress and negative attitude are related to your self-esteem and mental image, and I wrote a bit about sleep here:

Feeling tired and can’t figure out why?

6 Months to clear skin

I also have to admit that I may have been too optimistic about the time it takes to get clear. I usually tell 3 to 4 months is a reasonable time frame for big improvements.

While many people get good results within 4 months this may not be enough to get you completely clear.

I’ve gotten quite a few emails from people who tell me that they’ve been following CFL for 3 to 4 months and are still breaking out. Granted, their acne is much better than it was before starting CFL. Cystic acne has faded to whiteheads and breakouts happen less frequently and fade away quicker.

Still, when you expect to be completely clear, it may be hard to appreciate these changes and many people focus on their remaining acne - instead of how much better their skin looks now.

I should have communicated more forcefully that in the 3 month mark people are still going through the detox process and it’s normal to keep breaking out. It doesn’t mean you do something wrong or you couldn’t get clear.

From the feedback I get 6 months seems to be a better timeframe for completely, or nearly, clear skin.

Of course this changes from person to person, and I’m sure some people say they got clear much faster and some say it took longer than 6 months.

People love Clear for Life

I’m especially happy about this - and perhaps even a little proud. I asked those customers who bought Clear for Life at least 6 weeks ago - so that they had enough time putting it into practice - how satisfied they are with it.

A whopping 51% gave the highest rating. Here are the results:

About 10% of the people I send the survey filled it. I realize that there can be a positive bias in the answers - people who are happy with CFL are more likely to respond to the survey. Still, it shows people get results with Clear for Life.

And if you haven’t read Clear for Life the chances are you’ll love it.

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

Acne may be the greatest gift life has given you so far.

When you are looking at the mirror in anxiety about the big, new pimple you just got and worrying how you are going to get through the day it may not seem like much of a gift. More like a curse.

You may not realize it yet, but in those moments of anxiety and despair lay they keys to happiness and clear skin.

Bad times give us much needed shaking. They lay bare the insane ways we live our lives. This is true in both collective and individual levels. Collective tragedies, such as war and injustice, expose our collective insanity. Similarly your personal tragedies, such as acne, can show your own insanity.

I’m not talking about insanity as mental disorder. I’m talking about insanity as creating unnecessary suffering in your own life. Insanity is living in despair and frustration when you could live in peace and happiness.

Challenges act as stress tests. They show the parts in you that aren’t working. Suffering and negativity is like a friend shaking you and shouting at your face “just look at what you do to yourself!”. If you are willing to listen, you can learn a valuable lesson.

All suffering starts in the mind

Your mind creates all your suffering. External events are simply excuses for your mind to create more suffering. You suffer when you focus on something you don’t want. That’s the only way to feel bad. Try focusing on something you want and feeling bad at the same time - it’s impossible.

Most people don’t exercise much control over their focus. The focusing process is on autopilot, and so are their emotions.

The mind is a bit like a computer; it works by executing installed programs. Your beliefs and ideas about yourself and the world are examples of these programs. The job of your mind is to make those beliefs and ideas come true to you. If you don’t think much of yourself, well… then that’s what you are going to get. If you believe you are sad and lonely, then it’s the job of your mind to make sure that’s true to you. Your wish is your mind’s command.

Your mind scans the environment you are in for information that matches your programming. It then brings that information into your awareness for you to focus on - and to feel bad about.

Your beliefs work a bit like colored glasses. If you look at the world through green glasses everything is tinted with green. The glasses don’t change the world you are looking at, they simple change your perception of it. If you look at the world through glasses of desperation, frustration and low self-esteem that’s what it looks to you.

Changing from green glasses to red ones gives you a new perception. Everything looks red now. Going from sadness and frustration to happiness and hope gives you a whole new perspective on the world.

Can you see yourself with clear skin?

This has a lot to do with getting clear. First, negative emotions are toxic to your health, but that’s not the main reason. Your external life always reflects your internal life. What goes on inside of your head happens outside of your head. If you see yourself as an acne victims who is plagued with this invincible curse, that’s what you get. It cannot be in any other way.

To get over acne you first have to see it as something you can get over with; then you have to see and accept yourself as a person with clear skin. You have to put on new glasses.

This is the missing piece from all acne cures and books. The updated version of Clear for Life talks about this in more detail. Since this is such an important point I’ve made this section available to my customers even before the updated version of Clear for Life is released.

If you are my customer you can get the section here:

http://community.natural-acne-solution.com/forum/topics/emotional-and-spiritual

There’s more to this than simply changing glasses. Most people are totally identified with their mind. They think they are this [insert your name] person, who is so and so many years old, works/does this, and this and that is going on in their life. In other words they are identified with their story, or their ego, as some would call it.

You are not your story

They don’t realize that this story is the glasses they wear, not who they really are.

Once you become aware of the mental processes (glasses) that color your perception you’ll see this clearly. Once you’ve changed these processes few times and seen how that changes your world it’s easy to see they are not you. That you are not your story.

If you are your story then how could you change it? Who would be the one that changes it?

This realization will forever change your world. An irrevocable change process begins. The grip of your mind over your life starts to weaken. And with the mind goes the insanity and suffering it creates. To the extent you can see you are not your mind, not your story, to the extent you experience peace and joy - regardless of what happens to you.

Without the mind playing its dirty tricks on you it’s impossible to suffer.

When you realize that the I, [insert your name] as a desperate acne victim, is just a story you’ve accepted, you can let go of the story. When you let go of the story you create an opening for a different reality to emerge. Perhaps one where you have clear skin?

Clear skin doesn’t happen by some divine magic or any other mystical means. It happens by you taking concrete action to create it. But when you let go of your old story you also let go of the limitations it imposes on you. Remember, your life always matches with your story. When you let go of your old story you open up to new possibilities. Perhaps a book just jumps off the shelve that has the answers to your problem. Perhaps you just stumble on a website that has the answers.

Your mind finds a way to bring you new internal reality into your external world; just like it did with the old internal reality.

The power of Now

Challenging times and suffering create the opening for that transition to happen. When you suffer you can go inside and see how that happens. When you observe yourself doing suffering, you’ll see that the suffering is not a part of you but rather something you do. This realization spells the end of suffering and feeling bad.

You can only do this when you are present in the moment. Luckily it doesn’t cost you anything and is to do easy with practice.

Learning to be present in the Now is a skill, and like any skill, takes some practice to get good at.

Here are few ways to bring your focus into the present moment.

Observe your breath. Breath is one of the easiest ways to access the present moment. Simply watch as breath flows in and out of your body. Observe how your lungs, abdomen and chest expand when you breathe in and contract as you breathe out.

As you watch your breath notice how thinking stops. Your mind cannot survive in the present moment. It wants you to focus on the future or the past. To your mind present moment is simply means to a better future and thus to be discarded. But if you ignore the present moment you throw away the only way you can make a meaningful change in your life. Better tomorrow never comes as long as you try to escape the horrors of today.

So when you notice yourself thinking about the past or the future bring your focus back to the present moment and notice how the constant stream of thinking stops. That’s when you are in the present moment and free to see the mind for what it is.

Another way to access the present moment is to focus on what you experience in the moment. If you are sitting, feel what it feels like to sit. Focus on how your clothing feels on your skin, and the pressure on your buttocks and the backs of your legs. Feel your feet touching the floor. Again notice how you can’t focus on your experience and think at the same time.

In the Power of Now Eckhart Tolle gives another way to access the present moment. Become aware of your ‘inner’ body. Feel the energy in your body. Initially it may be easier to just focus on one body part, such as your hand, and feel the energy there. You may feel just the light tingle, but that’s it. Just focus on that feeling and it gets stronger. Later on you can feel the same energy in and surrounding your whole body.

I highly recommend you pick up Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now and read it. He talks about the power of the present moment and how to access it in much more detail. His other book The New Earth also helped me a lot. I got the inspiration to write this as I finished it earlier today.

Please try these exercises today. See which you like and make them a part of your daily life. Use any idle moment you have to practice. That way you’ll never be bored and always have something ‘to do’.

At first you may be able to access the present moment only for few seconds before your mind takes over again. But that’s enough. It’s enough to create an opening and with practice the gaps in thinking get longer and longer.

Accepting what is ends suffering

When you are at the present moment your next job is to accept it as it is. What is, is, and nothing you can do about it. So if at the moment you experience any negative emotions simply accept them. Resistance is the domain of the mind and only perpetuates the negative emotions.

Simply acknowledge how you feel and that is it. Accepting doesn’t mean resigning to your fate and thinking you can’t change anything. Accepting means seeing your reality as it is in the moment. It’s the only sane thing to do.

If it helps you can try seeing the negative emotion as some external object and resistance as pushing it away. When you stop resisting you stop pushing.

The negative emotion probably weakens significantly as you accept it, it may even go away completely and you’ll notice you are at peace.

If the negative emotion didn’t go away completely just observe it with curiosity. Don’t try to change it or push it way. Simply observe it. See what’s behind it. Ask yourself “could I let go of this feeling?”. As you keep doing this you’ll notice that the negative emotion vanishes completely.

Can you accept your acne?

Here’s how to take this a step further. This may be a bit uncomfortable at first, but please try this.

Find a mirror and look at yourself. If you see acne and that makes you feel bad, even better. Then focus on your breath and access the present moment. When you are present work on accepting what you see.

If you have acne, no power in the world is going change it today; probably not even this week. Your skin is what it is. The only sane thing to do is to accept it as it is.

Resisting your skin or wanting it to be something else simply creates more suffering. It’s no different than frustrating over the fact that rocks are hard. You wanting them to be soft won’t change the facts. It only creates suffering for you.

If you can’t let go of resisting your acne, accept that. Acknowledge that you can’t stop resisting it. Stop resisting the resisting. Then simply observe the resistance with curiosity and see what happens.

Then work on accepting your skin as it is. I’m not saying you have to be happy about your skin. You probably won’t be. It also doesn’t mean you resign to it. Acceptance simply means seeing your skin for what it is. Accepting means letting it be what it is, for now. When you accept you stop doing suffering. When you stop suffering you create an opening for a different reality to emerge.

As you work on accepting your acne the story of yourself as helpless acne victim weakens. As your story and external reality always match, along with the story goes the struggle and frustration it brings.

What do you think happens to your acne if your new story is one where you are at peace with your skin? The worst that could happen is that your acne stays the same, but it doesn’t bother you anymore. You simply look at it with no emotion at all.

So, in your head you have your little Aladdin’s Lamp. Your wish is its command. If you choose to see acne and a harbinger of misery and suffering, that’s what you experience. You can have this experience as long as you want. And you can end it anytime you want. Simply choose again. Choose to see acne as a gateway to happiness and overcoming your limitations and that’s what you get.

It’s your choice.

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

Do you often have ‘bad skin days’? Those days you just don’t want to go out because of acne.

What if I told you those bad skin days are just in your head? That you create all those bad feeling, and you could just stop doing it.

That everyday could be what I call a ‘happy skin day’. I don’t mean that your skin would be perfect everyday but that no matter what your skin looks like you could be happy and optimistic. That you could face people with confidence and look them into eyes - even if acne carpet bombed your face the previous night.

Would you smack me on the head and call me an idiot, or would you want to know more?

If you want to know more, read on. If you choose to smack me on the head… well… luckily you can’t find me, but feel free to use the comment section to express yourself.

OK, I realize that may sound like a ridiculous claim. That you could be happy no matter what your skin looks like. If so, let it be ok. Because I’m going to tell you something 99.99% of the population doesn’t know.

All emotions are self created.

Whatever you happen to feel you created it yourself. Maybe it happened unconsciously. You may not know how you did it. It may have happened so quickly that it looks like the outside events caused those emotions. It may have happened against your conscious will; you may not want those emotions.

Nevertheless, you created those emotions and feelings.

You probably think I’ve smoked way too much pot lately and hallucinate these crazy theories.

Well, despite what you think of my drug habits, do this little thought experiment with me. It shows you that you do create your emotions, and a bit of how you create them.

I want you to think of a time when you were out in a public place and started feeling bad because of the way some stranger looked at you. You know just from the way they looked at you, you knew they were looking at your acne. And that made you feel bad.

We’ve all been through a situation like that. So just allow one to pop into your mind. And if you can’t think of any, just imagine one. Just imagine that you are in a public place and some stranger just looks at you a bit too long. And you know they look at you because of your acne.

How does thinking of that situation make you feel? Pretty bad I can bet.

Now let’s twist things around a bit. Imagine the same situation, but in that case imagine that the person was checking you out. That they were interested of you. Of course make sure that the person is of legal age and attractive to you.

How does that feel? I bet it feel different. Maybe even good.

So here we have two identical situations with completely opposite emotional outcomes. One made you feel bad; the other made you feel good.

You know what was different about these two situations?

Assumption = meaning = feelings

If you said your assumptions about the situation, good thinking. In one case you assumed the person was disgusted because of your acne, while in the other you assumed they were attracted to you.

“But I know they were looking at my acne“, you may object. “I just can’t hallucinate through my life that everyone who looks at my acne is attracted to me.”

Well, did you really know they were looking at your acne? I mean, did you go and ask them ‘Hey are you looking at my acne? Is it really that horrible?’

No you didn’t ask them. You just assumed they were looking at your acne, or to use your words, you hallucinated it.

And you don’t have to imagine everyone is attracted to you - though it might do good for your self-esteem since most of us imagine strangers think we are ugly. To stop creating bad feelings you just have to stop hallucinating those bad things.

Let me explain how this works so you’ll understand it a bit better.

Most people think emotions work like this: event –> emotions. Meaning something happens and that something causes the emotion(s).

How you create your emotions

Well that’s how it looks, but there’s one more step. Here’s how the process really works: event –> subconscious filtering –> emotion.

In reality all external events have no meaning. They are like a blank canvas. In our example the event was some stranger looking at you. Stop, the end. That’s what happened, and that has no meaning until you assign meaning to it. And that’s what these subconscious filters do (among other things). They assign meaning to whatever happens to you based on your past experiences.

I call these filters your Internal Map of Reality. That’s a term I learned from Bill Harris at Centerpointe.com. Your beliefs, values, ethics, language and memories are examples of these filters.

Without going into detail how these filters work they delete, distort and generalize whatever happens to you so that it confirms to your beliefs, past experiences and image of yourself.

You couldn’t go through life without this subconscious filtering. Here’s a simple example of how they help you.

Say you check into a hotel room in a city you’ve never been to, perhaps even in a foreign country. Could you open the door to your room? Of course you do. Because even though you’ve never seen that door before your mind has plenty of experience with doors. So it generalizes, and it could go something like this ‘This is a door. Doors usually open like this. Nope, didn’t work. OK sometimes they open the other way. Great that worked’.

It can also work the other way. Let’s say you had a problem with an authority figure while you were young. If it was dramatic enough, or happened many times, you concluded that authority figures are potentially dangerous. So when you see one, a cop for example, you get a bit stressed. You feel there’s something you need to watch out for. Your mind pulls those past experiences to warn you about this potentially dangerous situation.

Now let’s say you have some self-esteem issues (like we all do). Perhaps you don’t think you are that attractive or lovable. You might even think acne makes you unattractive or unlovable. So when you see some stranger looking at you your mind takes that information and deletes, distorts and generalizes it until it fits the way you see yourself. If you believe you are unlovable your mind fits the external event your belief by assuming they were looking at your acne. Out of the thousands of possible interpretations it picks the one that fits your beliefs.

Any evidence to the contrary is immediately deleted and distorted. So if (s)he actually comes and talks to you, you immediately assume the worst.

This is the exact same process people use to convince themselves that aliens have taken over their fridge, urging them to prepare for the arrival of the mother ship. If there’s a scratch on the milk carton the aliens made it - no matter that there’s also a cat in the house.

This same process fuels all the food fights, politically correct term is diet debates, that rage in forums and in the media. People have gotten their heads so wrapped around the idea that their diet is the only right one. Whenever a supporting study comes out they parade it like it would be the definitive word of God. Whereas opposing studies are immediately accused of having serious flaws and biased researches who fudged the numbers. Therefore such studies cannot be trusted. No matter that the same flaws and bias probably apply to the study they believed.

You only see what you believe.

So how does this relate to your acne and happiness?

If acne makes you feel miserable (even a little) it’s because of your Internal Map of Reality. Something that happened to you in the past caused you to form unresourceful beliefs about yourself. Those memories often have a lot of emotional charge (I like to call it emotional garbage). When triggered your mind drags that emotional garbage from past memories into your current experience. And you get the benefit of feeling lousy.

You know the saying pushes his/her buttons? This is the meaning behind it. We all have these buttons that the world just keeps pushing. Those buttons are ‘wired’ (in your subconscious) into negative memories. When pushed your mind drags the emotional garbage from your past into now, and you act accordingly. That’s why some people can get very angry from seemingly small things. It’s not that the event was such a big thing, it’s the fact that the button was wired into lots of emotional garbage.

The same thing happens to you when you make yourself feel bad.

The event that ‘made’ you feel bad is often not such a big thing. It’s that it triggered so many emotional memories from the past. Taking cue from those memories your mind then layers the event with negative meaning so that you can experience even more of that emotional garbage.

OK, so far this has been interesting theory, but let’s move onto how to use this to make yourself feel better. Into creating those happy skin days.

Theory into practice

With few reasonably simple mental processes you can ‘deactivate’ your buttons, clip the wires. So that even if something pushes the button it doesn’t lead to all the emotional garbage and your mind layering negative meaning on the events. Instead the event remains neutral. Someone looking at you and nothing more. And you don’t have to go through all the bad feelings.

The detailed explanation of this is just too much to cover in a blog post. Just the bare boned and practical how-to explanation took me 40 pages. And few audio-files to guide you through the mental processes. That’s essentially my upcoming book. It doesn’t have a name yet, but maybe I’ll call it Happy Skin Days: How to be happy and optimistic before you get clear. Few of my customers are currently testing the draft version and getting great results.

Anyway, this is not just a sales pitch for the new book. I’m going to give you something very valuable here.

The root of the problem is that this whole thing happens unconsciously. As long as it happens unconsciously there’s not much you can do about it. Your first challenge is to know it happens. And then to start noticing when and how it happens. To start noticing the situations that make you feel bad.

Your focus creates your feelings. When you focus (think) on someone looking at your acne and feeling ugly you get to feel bad. Focusing that you are attractive and lovable makes you feel good. Luckily your focus is always under your control. Most people just don’t exercise that control. Their focus runs on autopilot.

Your biggest challenge is to notice when the autopilot drags your focus on something negative and then consciously choose to focus on something positive.

Practical steps to happiness

Here’s a good way to do it. Carry some 3 by 5 cards without all the time. When you start feeling bad make a note of the situation. Look at what was going through your head that time (what you were thinking) and make a note of it. Do this every time you start feeling bad.

Since your focus runs on autopilot initially you won’t catch yourself very often. But as you keep up with it you train your mind to recognize these situations and bring them to your awareness. Once in your awareness you can consciously choose what to focus on. Little by little you start gaining more control over your emotions.

Lily’s success story

And once those buttons are gone incredible things can happen. Lily has been testing my upcoming book, and here’s what she wrote to me.

well, the incredible has actually happened! I am very happy to say that I managed to change my belief about how embarrassing it is to have skin problems and having to hide from people! I tried the folder swapping technique on Friday evening (before going to be) and I felt a bit relieved afterwards, which at the time was a bit weird to think about. I wrote down an affirmation about that particular belief and it’s like I woke up a different person the following day.

I am not even thinking about my skin’s condition anymore, I wear clothes without considering that I have to hide my chest behind big jumpers/coats etc and for the first time in years I refuse to cover up any spots/redness with makeup. It’s like I don’t care about it anymore…or rather I am accepting who I am with my flaws and everything! And what’s more, I don’t even get worked up or depressed when I see other women around me with flawless skin…I think they are lucky but it does not get to me! I just look in the mirror and smile regardless of what my skin looks like… The last time I remember feeling/behaving in such a way was when I was on Accutane (it did really produce some amazing results at the time).

All I’m saying is that for the last 4 days I have felt liberated and relieved…not only because I don’t obsess about my skin (I am following the clear for life guidelines because we all want to be cleared of acne in the end-I’m just not letting this affect me and make me miserable) but also because I feel happy with who I am!

Be well,

Seppo

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

I will start tomorrow

Ever uttered out those words?

I know I have - too many times. Looking back nothing good ever happened to me after saying those ‘cursed’ words. If you are honest with yourself you can probably say the same thing.

It’s just a simple case of "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak".

So what are the things you’ve decided to start tomorrow you know will help you to cure your acne?

The thing is that tomorrow never comes. Tomorrow is always one step ahead of you. When you go to sleep in the evening thinking you’ll catch it the next morning, it again moved during the night.

There’s always a "tomorrow". But if you want to cure your acne, or achieve any goal you set, one of those tomorrows has got to become "today".

So whatever you’ve decided to start "tomorrow" do something for it today. The thing is that we are creatures of momentum. It takes some effort to get us moving, but once we are on the roll it’s easy to keep up with it.

So do something TODAY to get yourself started towards healthier lifestyle. It doesn’t have to be much, but just do something. Get the ball rolling.

How many times have you told yourself you’ll do it tomorrow? So, when would NOW be a good time to start?

—
Clear for Life - The Fun, Easy and Delicious Solution to Permanently Clear Skin.

One of my customers, Eric, emailed an interesting comment to me.

He recently met a girl and said that just hanging out with her feels incredibly healthy.

This is of course nothing new to anyone who’s been in love. Being in love can do wonders for your mental health. Still it got me thinking.

When a person asks he what they should do to get clear they are often looking for a formula, or step by step instructions. Sort of do this, that and those and you’ll get clear.

There’s nothing wrong with such an approach. It can get you a long way towards clear skin. But we have to be careful not to let the formulas and step by step instructions limit us. There’s more to health and clear skin those formulas can capture.

We are integrated beings of body, mind and spirit. Harmony between all three creates the perfect environment for health and curing acne.

There’s still place for formulas and step by step instructions also. Health and clear skin just cannot exist without certain things (good nutrition and exercise for example). Because by making wrong diet and lifestyle choices we set obstacles to health and sabotage the body’s efforts to cure acne. Following these formulas can make sure you don’t shoot yourself on the foot by making choices that don’t serve you. And Clear for Life does a particularly good job at showing not just these formulas, but how to apply them to your life also (because each of us faces different challenges and needs a different approach).

That’s the value of formulas and step by step instructions. They show you how to remove the obstacles to good health and clear skin. And that’s enough to get cure your acne.

But I think you can do much better by going beyond those formulas.

Here’s where things like these come into play.

• Love and relationships
• Friends and social circle
• Creative expression
• Spiritual practice and growth (for those inclined)
• Taking time to do the things you love
• Personal growth
• Discipline
• Traveling and experiencing things. My motto here is: "Make the most of your time on earth".
• Being passionate about something
• Setting and achieving goals. So you feel you are making progress on the important areas of your life.
• Having a meaningful work.
• Making a positive contribution to the world

That’s just out of the top of my head. I’m sure you can think few of your own also.

What common with all these things?

They put that extra spark on your life. Make you feel like you are alive. Make your life worth living.

I hope I managed to open up your thinking a bit.

So what could you do to create peace, happiness and well being in your life today?

—
Clear for Life - The Fun, Easy and Delicious Solution to Permanently Clear Skin.

Warning. This can be a mind bender.

Most people don’t really get holistic health. Many people trying to cure acne with natural methods think they do. But as you discover there’s nothing holistic (or natural) about flushing your liver, cleansing your colon or any other natural health fantasies (treatments).

They are all based on the same idea as Western medicine is.

Because, whether we like it or not, human body is a holistic system and you have to treat it as such if you want to permanently get rid of your acne.

I just learned a good example to illustrate this.

Think of a flower.

Where does this thing we have agreed to call flower end? Or what does it include? Most people would say it includes roots, stem and leaves. Because that’s what we’ve all agreed. Probably because that’s what comes out when you pull it out of the soil.

So we’ve defined flower as its physical limits. But that’s entirely arbitrary definition. We do it with most ‘things’. The sun for example. We’ve defined the sun by the extent of its visible flames. But it would be equally ‘correct’ to define it by the extent of its heat or its light. Keep this in mind as we get back to our flower example.

Flower interacts with the soil and the microorganisms that live there. They all depend on ‘each other’ for existence (dead plant matter turns into soil). So it’s really like a flower-soil-micro organism system. But the flower also interacts with air and sunlight. So you should add those into the system also.

What about bees? Flower and bees depend on each other. So it should really be a flower-soil-micro organism-air-sun light-bees system.

I hope you see that we could go on forever with this.

Nature is really one big system, and each part of the system affect and depend on each other for existence. And that system is always in perfect balance. For example let’s say something brings down the number of bees. Soon the number of flowers goes down also and the system reaches a new balance.

For some reason we’ve just agreed to chop that system into different parts based on their physical limits. Then we agreed that those parts are separate. But then we noticed that those different parts interact and even depend on each other. That’s why we came up with symbiosis to compensate for the limits of this physical-based definition.

But wouldn’t it have been just as logical to define it all as one system?

We’ve gone even further. We’ve taken a snapshot of the system in equilibrium (balance state) and defined that this is how the system should be. If the system moves from this one balanced state we say something is wrong. Then we compare it against our idea of how it should be (our snapshot) and look for differences. When we find one, we say this is the problem. Then we try to frantically fix that part that doesn’t match our snapshot.

It would have been just as logical (in fact even more so) to say that the system moved into a new balance state. Something affected the system and it reached a new balance.

Now think of your body and you’ll notice that we’ve done the same thing with it.

We’ve defined it as a collection of different organs based on their physical limits. Well actually, all the organs are physically connected to one other with blood and lymph ducts. To get over this ‘problem’ we chopped the ducts off and pretended that they don’t count.

As you can see we’ve made quite a few leaps of faith with our idea of the human body.

Then we took a snapshot of the body and defined it as healthy. Different deviations from our snapshot are different diseases, and must be ‘fixed’. And we fix things by manipulating the ‘parts’ that don’t match our snapshot of health.

Here’s where we get really confused.

Based on our genes we are all little bit different. We have different strengths and weaknesses. So the same conditions or inputs cause different balance states (diseases) in different people.

Acne victims in their drive to exactly define what’s causing their problem fall for this trap. Look around at acne forums. They are full of threads where someone claims on having zeroed on the real cause of acne. Of course as soon as the thread goes live someone bunks the theory by saying that doesn’t cause acne for me, therefore it can’t be the cause of acne. If they ever discover perpetual motion, it’s going to be based on this debate.

No wonder many acne victims are confused.

My friend, acne and all diseases, as we understand them, are illusions. They are different balance states the system called your body is in. And the state of your body depends on the inputs or conditions it faces (such as diet, lifestyle, mental state and the environment).

So save yourself a big bundle of headaches by trying to figure out what caused your acne, because nothing did. And more importantly stop trying to fix what you think caused your acne.

Fix the conditions and your body moves to a state where acne doesn’t exist. And it won’t go there until you do your part.

This is the reason why following Clear for Life works so well for most people. Clear for Life takes you out of that fixing mentality and shows the easiest way to give your body the ideal conditions for getting rid of acne.

—
Clear for Life - The Fun, Easy and Delicious Solution to Permanently Clear Skin.

We live in tough times.

In the US politicians just took $700 billion of tax payers’ money and transferred it to their friends in the banking sector. And eventually we as tax payers have to pick up the bill. Not directly, but via raised taxes and runaway inflation that eats away our savings. And because we live in a globalized economy this affects not only the people in the US but all over the world. Even me, sitting at the other side of the world.

Actually it’s not the politicians who are to blame, but it’s the rich bankers behind the scenes. The crooks who own and run the Federal Reserve and other central banks in the world. And unfortunately $700 billion is not the end of the story. It was just the first installment and many more probably follows.

Anyway, I don’t want to moan and whine about the situation. Just to say that we’ve been dealt a tough hand. One we cannot do much about - at least not in short-term. But there’s no need to get stressed over the situation and hence make it more difficult to cure your acne.

So let’s talk about making the best of the situation.

Napoleon Hill writes that each adversary carries within a seed of an equivalent or a greater opportunity. It’s the old silver lining on a cloud thing. And I do believe it. Often we just cannot see the silver lining while we go through the tough times. Still, it’s there, and looking back it’s often easy to see.

So if money is tighter perhaps it gives us an opportunity to appreciate other aspects of life. To help us to discover that most important things in life don’t revolve around money. That money doesn’t make us happy, and that we don’t need money to be happy.

Of course I realize the practicalities of the world. I like what’s called practical spirituality. Money does make life easier, and having to constantly worry about money makes life difficult.

But at the end of the day, it’s not the money or your situation that determines your happiness. It’s what you think of them.

It’s not the lack of money that stresses you out, it’s the worrying you do over it. Worrying and stressing over paying your bills and making the ends meet.

Now you may say ‘what’s the difference?’. Lack of money causes those worries, therefore lack of money is what causes my stress and unhappiness.

Though it may seem like that, in reality that’s not the case.

Your financial situation is what’s called external circumstance and worrying over it is an internal representation of it. You may not always control your external circumstances but you always have total and absolute control over your internal representations; what you think of the external circumstances and what they mean to you.

Most people don’t exercise this control. That’s why it seems to them that external circumstances dictate their happiness. But whether you exercise this control or not doesn’t mean that it’s not there. You have the power over your emotional state (how you feel). You just have to learn how to use that power. Yes, it does take some work and discipline, but it’s worth it.

Let me share with you an experience that happened to me over the weekend.

I watched two documentaries. One was The Money Masters: How International Bankers Gained Control of America (click the link to watch). Money Masters shows how extremely wealthy and powerful bankers control and manipulate the economies in the US and pretty much in every other country. They do this through the central banks by controlling the amount of money in circulation, and that way causing economic booms and busts (depressions) to further their causes.

The other one was Endgame: The Blueprint for Global Enslavement (click the link to watch). Endgame is a bit wilder story of how ‘the elite’ wants to control the world, and how they believe themselves to be ’super humans’ with God-given right to control ‘lesser men’.

After I watched these documentaries I was quite shocked. I know men do ‘evil’ things, but these really take it to the next level. These really shook me to the core. In fact I was so shocked I started feeling physically bad.

Now are these documentaries telling the truth? I don’t know. They present quite a compelling case, but in the end I just don’t know. But what matters more (in my case) is what I believe about them.

After watching them I bought into their story. Many pieces of the puzzle clicked after watching them. And that story wasn’t bright. No bright clouds and happy sunshine. It made me downright depressed for few hours.

Then I started really thinking. And now we come to the point that’s relevant to you and your situation also.

I asked myself ‘what changed?’, I was happy yesterday but deeply depressed now. My situation hadn’t changed a bit. But my beliefs had changed. I bought into the dark and oppressing story presented in these documentaries.

So I did some belief work. I cleared out lot of the negative stuff that caused me to focus on the negative aspects. After that I could breathe easier and felt happier again.

The point of the story is that I didn’t choose my beliefs based on ‘reality’; what’s true and what’s not. I chose them based on what works, what makes me happy.

Now I don’t really know if there is some mysterious elite who wants to enslave me. But I do know that believing there is won’t serve me at all. It would just plunge me into depression and take away my power. In that state it would be hard to get any work done, and as a result my business would suffer even more than it already has (because of this financial crisis). So not a good belief to have.

I’d rather deal with the situation at hand now, and not make it any worse by imagining things that probably will never happen. And if they do, I will deal with them then. In the meanwhile I remain as happy as possible.

So in the same way you shouldn’t make the situation any worse by imagining how you cannot pay your bill or can’t make the ends meet. You will, you always have and you always will have.

It you have it tough financially now, be practical about it. Work the numbers on paper and budget your money. Then you know that, as long as you follow your budget, you will make the ends meet. So you can stop worrying over it.

Next focus on making the best of what you’ve got. Ask yourself how can I make the best of the situation. Questions direct your focus; your focus directs your emotions and combined they create your reality.

Questions are really powerful. Use them to help you instead of shooting yourself on the foot. Don’t ask disempowering questions like ‘how come this always happens to me’. Ask empowering questions like ‘how can I make the best of this’ or ‘how can I make extra income in this situation’ or ‘how can I turn this around’.

When you ask those questions, you get answers that fit your situation perfectly.

Perhaps you can use these times to connect and get closer to your family and loved ones. Perhaps you can sit silently and do some self-improvement work and come closer to discovering your true nature, and how you can live happily even with less money.

Finally I want to say that it’s the journey, not where you are right now, that makes you happy. Starting at a lower point and making progress by working upwards makes you far happier than simply staying still at a higher point.

Be well.

—
Clear for Life - The Fun, Easy and Delicious Solution to Permanently Clear Skin.

In an earlier post, How to feel good even if you have acne, I talked about a simple way to feel better with acne.

This post is going to expand on that.

What if you could stop the suffering and emotional pain acne causes? What if you could feel empowered instead of hopeless? What if all this is as simple as choosing to do so.

You are about to learn how.

I know that’s a mouthful, but give me few minutes and you’ll see it’s true.

So let’s get to it.

Let’s start by looking at why you suffer. And it’s not because of acne.

All suffering starts with attachment. If you didn’t give a damn whether you have acne or not, you wouldn’t suffer at all.

Now hold on there. I know this may sound stupid. But just hold on for a second and this will make sense.

So the emotional pain with acne is rooted to attachment. But there’s other side to this also.

You feel hopeless because you see no way to cure acne. It seems nothing you do works. Nothing you do takes you any closer to clear skin.

Let’s put those two things together and we’ll get this.

Attachment to clear skin + no way of getting there = suffering

I’ll show you how to break your attachment to clear skin and feeling hopeless.

First let’s see why you must do that.

The above equation is evil because it’s self-reinforcing. It creates more hopelessness and suffering.

Your brain is a goal-seeking mechanism. It takes whatever you focus on and brings you more of it.

Let’s say you feel downright miserable and keep thinking you’ll never get over acne. Your brain takes those thoughts and feelings as instructions. It’s almost as it would say:”If that’s what you want, I can make it happen”.

And it can. Trust me.

Your brain doesn’t care whether the thoughts and feelings in your head are positive and negative. It simply takes whatever you focus on and brings you more of it.

This may be hard to believe, but that’s how the human mind works. I explained this in more detail at lesson 5 of Acne 101.

Bill Harris, the Director of Centerpointe Research Institute wrote an excellent article that explains this principle in more detail.

Believe it or Don’t: How Your Beliefs Shape Your Results and
Experience of Life, and What You Can Do About It

So when you focus on acne and feel miserable, you send a clear message to your brain that you want more of acne and feeling miserable.

This is one of those great paradoxes of life. You are so attached to clear skin and want it so badly it makes you desperate. Wanting and despairing pushes clear skin further and further away from you. It’s like a rainbow. No matter how fast you run, it always eludes you.

This is why it’s important you accept yourself and your skin as they are. With pimples and all.

Of course this is easier said than done. But I believe the doctor has just what you need. These two approaches should help.

First, please understand clear skin is only means to an end. You want to get clear because you believe it stops the suffering and makes you happy.

However those two things are not connected. And you can find a way to be happy even with acne.

Acne doesn’t make you feel bad. Acne merely is. It’s just an event in your life. It’s the meaning you attach to it that leads to suffering.

Ask yourself:

• What does it mean to me that I have acne?
• How does it affect my life?
• What does it mean about me that I have acne?

Some common answers among acne victims are:

• Acne means I’m ugly.
• Nobody ever likes/loves me because I have acne.
• Acne makes me self-conscious.
• I’m embarrassed to go out because people just stare at my skin.
• Because of acne I can’t [insert your reason].

Take the time and write down few answers to those questions. It reveals a lot about you and what you believe about acne. Really, do it.

I mean really. Stop reading this and jot down few answers.

Great. Those answers are the real reason you feel bad. Those are beliefs you hold about yourself and acne. There’s probably more, but they give a hint of the way you think.

Imagine that these beliefs are like colored glasses. As you look at the world through them, they color everything you see.

The good thing is they are just figments of your imagination. And you can change them.

The bad thing is that because you believe them, they seem real to you. As you focus on them your brain either makes them real for you, or makes them seem like real to you. In either case you get to be right about what you believe.

Let me tell you something.

At this very moment there are thousands of people who will love/like/accept you just as you are. With pimples and all. And no matter what you believe acne prevents you from doing, you can find a way to do it even with acne.

You just never notice those people or opportunities. The glasses you wear only allow you to notice people and opportunities that match your beliefs. They make you practically blind to anything else.

This may be hard to believe, but your behavior reflects your beliefs about yourself (the glasses you wear). Often we are blind to this, but other people pick up these subtle clues (the ‘vibes’ you put out).

So if you believe you are worthless it will come out loud and clear, and people will pick it up and treat you accordingly.

I found a great post about this from acne.org forums.

“I used to think I was just hideous. Guys didn’t hit on me or ask me out that much and I assumed it was because of how unattractive I was. Honestly, now I think it was just my whole attitude - I was terribly shy and off-putting to any potential suitors. I gave off a “don’t talk to me” vibe, I kept to myself. And of course I didn’t get too many offers.

These days, I still don’t think I’m a supermodel. I recognize that I’m not what’s traditionally considered “beautiful,” but there are definitely men who think I’m beautiful and have told me so. I’m happy with who I am. I have learned that I don’t have to be a supermodel to be sexy. It’s all about attitude. And there are plenty of guys interested in me - because I’m happy and confident, and people respond to that.”

keltron’s post at acne.org forums

The solution of course is to take away the glasses. Or to replace them with more useful ones. In the earlier post, How to feel good even if you have acne, I explained how to do this.

As you do that, you’ll notice your whole world changes. People start to treat you differently. And doors that were closed suddenly open.

Changing your beliefs is one way to accept yourself. Understanding the law of cause and effect is another.

The power of cause and effect

We live in a world based on cause and effect. And it may be the most powerful law governing our world.

It simply says that for every effect there’s a cause.

This means that nothing in life is random.

Acne is simply the effect of applying certain causes.

It may not be the effect you are looking for, but still it’s a predictable result of certain actions. And when you stop doing those things you stop getting acne.

Similarly clear skin is simply an effect of applying certain causes. Granted, those causes may not always be that easy to find. But they are there.

I believe anyone can get clear. Maybe you just have to look a bit harder for the causes, but when you find and apply them, you’ll get clear. It’s that simple.

Let me give you an example of why it’s absurd to curse acne.

Let’s say you are in Chicago and you want to go to New York. But you don’t know the roads and don’t have a map. So you’ll end in Detroit.

Ending in Detroit is simply the effect of the causes you applied (the road you took).

Now are you going curse Detroit because you ended there? And I’m pretty sure you are not going to think of Detroit as a monster that keeps you captive. And you wouldn’t be sitting in Detroit feeling sorry for yourself.

None of those things make much sense, as I’m sure you agree.

Perhaps you feel little stupid, but then you get over it and try again. You would simple accept the fact that you are in Detroit and use whatever means you have to get to New York. Perhaps pick up a map this time. Or a GPS navigation device. Or ask someone who knows the way.

Use the same approach with acne.

Just recognize the fact that whatever you have done so far caused acne. Then regroup, find something else to try, and just do it.

Wallowing in misery only keeps you stuck. If you do that, you need to give yourself a serious kick on the ass to break out of it.

Then use the law of cause and effect to get clear. Here’s how to do it correctly.

1. Decide on the effect you want.
2. Do you best to find out the cause that leads to that effect. The best way is to ask someone who already has the effect you are after. But sometimes you just have to guess.
3. Act on the cause; apply the information from the previous step.
4. Look at the results you get and use the feedback to adjust your actions. Be flexible in your approach. If what you do is not working, try something else.
5. Allow the process unfold and let whatever happens be ok. The effects are not under your control, but as you keep adjusting course you’ll get the effect you are looking for.

Finding the cause is often not a big problems. The causes to curing acne are not big secrets. In Clear for Life I explained one way to get clear.

I’m not suggesting Clear for Life is the only way to get clear, but it’s pretty damn good. Anyone with little dedication can get permanently clear.

Other books and other people can show you different ways to cure acne. I’ve noticed the ones that get the best long-term results are based on same or similar principles than Clear for Life.

Let is be ok that there’s a learning curve. Adjusting and fine-tuning to the exactly cause that gets you clear may take a bit of time. The same principles work for everybody, but you may need to tweak them a bit to fit your situation.

Let it be ok. You are learning a skill and it doesn’t happen instantly.

Once you find the cause you need flexibility. And this is where most people fall flat on their face.

Most people want different results without changing the way they think and act. We are all guilty of this. As an example just think of how many years you wasted trying different topical treatments. They are more or less the same thing. Just packaged under different brands and endorsed by different celebrities.

The only way to get different results is to change the way you think and act.

There is no other way.

Unfortunately our beliefs often make us suspicious towards different ideas. Simply because they don’t conform to our beliefs. That’s why I keep saying that changing your beliefs and the way you think about acne and getting clear is more important than what you do.

And that’s one reason I think Acne 101 and Clear for Life are so successful in helping people cure acne. They make so much sense and feel so right it’s almost impossible to ignore the message.

They force you to look at things from a more useful perspective.

That’s why I believe Clear for Life works where other approaches have failed. I’m happy if you choose Clear for Life as the way to go and give me the privilege to work with you on this.

But no matter what you choose, remember the principles you learned here.

The only way you can suffer is if you make acne this invincible monster. This can happen only with your willing submission.

Don’t give acne that power.

Refuse to tell yourself lies that make you a victim. Change your story. Change the way you think about acne, getting clear and yourself. Find out or guess the causes to clear skin. Let whatever happens be ok, and remain flexible and keep adjusting course based on the results you get.

Do that and I guarantee you must get clear.

And if you get stuck, ask for help. You can always find someone who has gone before to guide you.

Does acne make you feel bad? Even downright desperate?

From the countless emails I get I know many people agree.

In this post I’ll show how and why this happens, and more importantly, how to turn this around.

Usually the story goes like this:

1. You look into a mirror and notice new pimples. Or perhaps you hear some remark about your acne.
2. Think of everything you’ve done to cure your acne.
3. You start thinking how unfair this is. No matter what you do nothing helps.
4. You feel frustrated, trapped and desperate. You feel like a victim.
5. When you feel really bad, you do something that makes you feel better. Watch TV. Eat. Drink. Surf the net. Check emails.
6. Feel some relief and comfort now that you’ve distracted/ drugged yourself.
7. Allow some time to pass and repeat from step 1.

The ’steps’ may look a bit different for you, but I’m sure you notice the pattern.

The general pattern/cycle runs like this.

Think of something you don’t like/want -> feel bad -> comfort yourself

This pattern is very, very common. Almost everyone runs some variation of this (maybe regarding their finances, job, relationship, health, etc). It’s highly addictive, but not very smart.

The reason it’s not smart is that it doesn’t fix the underlying problem. Comforting makes you feel better temporarily, but you are no closer to breaking the cycle.

This kind of pattern is very destructive. I know many acne victims go through this almost every day. If you don’t break it, you could easily blow years - even decades - of your life going through the same cycle.

Now, if you feel bummed, don’t worry. This story has a happy ending. I’ll show you how to break that cycle (and you don’t have to buy anything). So please read on.

You want to break this cycle for two reasons:

1. It makes you feel miserable
2. If you don’t, you’ll never get clear

I think you already see the first point is true.

Let’s see how this cycle keeps you stuck with acne.

First, feeling bad in itself makes it difficult to get clear. Negative emotions have an effect on the body. They can break your health. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying ‘worry yourself sick’.

Second, and more important point. Your brain is like a high-tech goal seeking missile. It takes whatever you focus on and makes it happen.

So if you focus on feeling miserable and how you’ll never get over acne, your brain goes ‘ok, if that’s what (s)he wants, I can make it happen’.

And emotions turbo charge this whole thing. The stronger the emotions you feel the faster it happens.

Your brain doesn’t care whether you focus on positive or negative. It just takes whatever is going through your mind and makes it true for you.

I talked about this quite a bit at lessons 5 of Acne 101. In a nutshell your brain either causes you to behave in a way that makes what you focus on come true, or it ‘alters’ your perception in a way that it seems true to you. As far as your experience is concerned they are the same thing.

Don’t believe me? Look at books on NLP, certain branches of psychology or self-development. They all say the same thing.

You get more of what you focus on.

Most people believe external circumstances cause them to feel bad or focus on the negative. And it certainly seems like it, but again, it’s not quite the whole story.

Here’s how negative emotions happen.

Something happens -> your perception of the event -> negative emotions.

Your perception of the event is what you think of it. What you say to yourself (or the voice in your head) and the pictures you make in your head. Your perception is also called ‘internal representation’.

The second step flies past so quickly that unless you look for it, you’ll never notice it. But it’s there and you’ll notice how this happens when you start looking.

Here’s the important part.

You have total control over your internal representations. If you choose to exercise it.

So it’s not the event itself that makes you feel bad. It’s how you perceive them.

Let me give you an example.

Say you get a new pimple. What goes through your mind when you notice it? I bet you immediately start to think of negative stuff. Like how it makes you look ugly. Or how again nothing you do works.

So it’s not the pimple that makes you feel bad, but what goes through your mind about the pimple and what it means to your life.

So all negative, and positive for that matter, emotions are self-created. You do them to yourself.

I’m not saying you do them intentionally. Or that you want them. It’s just that the internal representations fly past so quickly you don’t even notice them. They are on autopilot, and your past behavior programmed that autopilot.

But even if you are not aware of this, you still do it to yourself.

And because you do it to yourself, you can stop doing it. Or you can start putting a positive spin on this.

That’s when the magic starts to happen.

Breaking the pattern

You have two options for breaking the pattern.

• Catch yourself in the moment and refocus on something positive
• Schedule time everyday to think and imagine what you want

Let’s start with catching yourself in the moment. It simply means when you are focused on something you don’t want, such as how the new pimple ruins your life, you stop and force yourself to focus on something positive.

I’m not going to lie to you. Without meditation practice and reasonably good self-awareness this is difficult. For most people focusing on negative happens automatically. They are not driving the bus, simply sitting as passengers.

If you can do this, great. And you can with little practice. The way to do it is to keep it constantly on top of your mind. Let’s say you focused on the negative, felt bad and didn’t catch yourself. Just remind yourself to do it the next time. Maybe post notes around your house to keep this on top of your mind.

After the fact, it also helps to visualize (imagine) how you would have liked the situation to go. So imagine yourself in the situation and starting to feel negative. But instead of going down that path you stop yourself. Imagine focusing on positive and how that makes you feel better and how the situation turns into something positive.

By doing this over and over you train your brain to respond differently in the situation. You reprogram the autopilot.

Here’s another thing I recommend you do.

Visualize your life as you would like it to be. For example visualize how good your life would be without acne. Imagine all the things you could do. How much better your life would be. How much happier you would be. How you could get and do all those things you now can’t. See yourself with perfect skin.

Dwell on it. Obsess over it.

Don’t worry about practicality. Just fantasize. But fantasize in a particular way. Make it feel like it’s happening right now for you. Don’t project it into the future (so it’s happening at a future date). Visualize and feel it happening right now. Make it associated. See things through your own eyes; rather than watching a mental movie of yourself.

A good way to do this is to set aside 20 minutes every evening before going to bed. Do this sitting up so you don’t fall asleep.

Close your eyes or stare off into space, and think about what you want to experience in your life. Whatever you think about is fine, as long as it feels good to you.

The key is to find something that feels really good. Simply visualizing without emotions is not going to do you any good. So take as long as it takes to find something that excites you. Something that makes you feel good.

Bare minimum, do this exercise for 20 minutes at a time every day for a week. That’s seven days, not just five days. If you skip a day, start over from day one.

As you do this over and over you reprogram your mind. The autopilot that used to draw your focus on negative start to find positive things.

Your whole focus shifts. You will notice that you spend even more time thinking about what you want and less time worrying about what you don’t want.

Remember earlier we talked about how your brain makes the negative thoughts real to you? Well, it works in reverse also. Now your brain takes the positive images and feelings from your mind and starts to bring them to your reality.

You’ll start to get new ideas. You get attracted to new activities and things that help you move towards your goal. You may find books that contain solutions to your problems.

You start to get inspired to take action that moves you towards what you want. If exercise felt like struggle earlier you’ll do it happily now - as an example.

Whatever you do keep visualizing every evening. As you keep doing it, you’ll notice that life gently guides you towards the things you visualize.

So instead of instructing your brain to create more misery, acne and hopelessness you start creating hope, optimism and clear skin.

Clear Skin Coach has many more such exercises and takes this to a totally new level. It shows you how to build unstoppable motivation and eliminate struggle from getting clear. So the whole process is as easy and fun as possible. Clear Skin Coach comes as a part of the Clear for Life package.

But even this simple exercise, when done consistently, takes you long way towards permanently clear skin.