You know how we can tend to beat up on ourselves?
People from the outside are far nicer to us then we are to ourselves on the inside. Are most of your thoughts encouraging or discouraging? Do you focus more on what you don’t want...than what you want? Being mean to ourselves, talking down on our abilities or ideas and focusing on what we don’t want is kin to beating ourselves up.
In this first segment of the Hypnotic Trip shows series, you get to watch me as I beat myself up out on Browns Lake Trail and then through a divine insight quickly turn it around into a more loving voice.
Remember this: Negative thoughts are like ants and when you get too close to their mound, you get the heck out of there or suffer those stinging bites.
Here is the today’s lesson from the trails called “Have Mercy on Me”
The story I began telling myself began at 5:00 AM as the alarm sounded. “I’m not in my house, darn, I forgot to get a glass of water. Bryan will be up in 15 so I better get to the bathroom. I really hate, yes a strong word but the right word, hate getting up early and rushing out the door—especially in a strange house and without any control. They are his friends, their car and their hike.”
Packs with rain gear and jackets line the wall near the garage door, mine contains a GoPro, turkey jerky, potato chips and 64 oz of water. All set.
It’s an hour and half drive to the trail head, I feel good physically and am excited about hiking in a new spot. They said it was four miles to the lake and a fairly difficult trail
In Texas, we sit at 600 feet above sea level, the summit today is about 11,400 feet. I can hike 10 miles in 100-degrees with no slowdown, but up that high, it turned out that I was the slow poke. The caboose. The last one, lagging behind about 100 yards and short of breath.
Very early in the hike I started to complain to myself about myself. I showed no mercy: “Come on! You can hike faster. They are going to think you are out of shape or worse hungover. “Why is this so hard, I thought I was in better shape. “Okay Val, you need to start hiking more.” (I had already hiked 80 miles in the month of July, which didn’t count waking the dog or other steps in the garden or the lugging of 40 pound bags of manure and building my greenhouse in the middle of the day in 100 degree temperatures.) “I need to be in better shape.” I needed to justify why I needed to stop and catch my breath. No mercy. “I am the caboose,” I realized with shame.
Now I was treating myself the way I used to treat ‘those walkers’ on the trail when I was a runner. “Get out of my way,” I would say under my breath, “this is a running track, it is a track field “a track for runners and sprinters. Not for walking slowly or worse with your child in a stroller!” I didn’t want anyone or anything to slow MY pace. Even the weather. I would run, cursing the rain for slowing me down. This went on for about eight years and finally when I turned 50 I chilled a bit, I stopped running in parks and suburbs and became a trail runner. I was relentless there too but not as mean, and never mean to myself.
“Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy.” stopped my rant. I was reading The Sermon on the Mount by Emmet Fox and the Beatitude, “Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy,” drifted into my consciousness. “The Law of Life is to be merciful in your thoughts and be congruent with your actions,” Fox explains.
Fox explains further, “be free all from the weight of our condemnation and then it is possible to absolve yourself from self condemnation.” “I am sorry, I am very sorry,” I whispered to release myself as I observed my situation.
As I softened, I stopped and looked around and was in “the moment”. I was on a mountain in the Comanche Peak Wilderness in Colorado. Browns Lake Trail Group,
The pedometer showed we had gone 4 miles (and I grumbled for most of it), almost to Browns Lake. A flowering meadow surrounded me. The sun was shaded by clouds, the wind was low. And a light mist introduced us to the possibility of rain.
So, it was not the distance or me being out of shape, it was the 11,427 foot elevation that was slowing me. I had heard of people getting sick or having headaches.

Browns Lake Trail, Colorado hiking, mindfulness training, subconscious mind, how does hypnosis work, can I be hypnotized, how to learn self hypnosis, nature heals, lessons in nature, trail hiking, virtual reality

The Hypnotic Hiker
Valerie Grimes
http://hypnotictrip.com​

972-974-2094
5310 Harvest Hill Rd #266​, Dallas TX 75230