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In the early 2000s, I took the Avatar Wizards Course twice. The first time I took the course, I pretty much skipped over a section that seemed useless to me called Secrets and Hidden Agendas. I noticed that the people who had attended the Wizards course many times, however, were spending a lot of time on that section. Why?
The object of that section was to free your attention and the basic steps of the process go something like this:
1 ) List secrets that you are keeping. (Hint: Look for anyone you are blaming, criticizing, feeling separate from; disapproving of; judgmental toward; angry at; or feel betrayed by.) The following kinds of questions can be helpful:
- What would make people think less of you if it was revealed?
- What is something you would not want _______________ to know about?
- What do you feel, if revealed, would disappoint other people?What would make ________________ disapprove of you?
2 ) For each response, describe the humiliation (resisted experience) from which you are protecting yourself or from which you believe you are protecting others. What have you created as a result of resisting it?
The process then went on to use a technique to deal with the creation and the resisted experience which ironically, was an Avatar secret. (Maybe that suggests that they should run their own process on it?) Another irony – one of their examples of a Hidden Agenda included any goals or plans that were misaligned with the expansion of Avatar and Harry Palmer (Avatar founder). They actually told us that revealing an Avatar secret would impact our Karma for seven generations (which didn’t really scare me). Overall, though, I did get a lot out of the course the two times I took it.
So why am I talking about secrets and hidden agendas? I want you to understand that secrets and hidden agendas simply suggest that your mind is not clear and that you are holding yourself back.
Quite often, people in the Super Trader program have issues that they consider deep dark secrets, ones that are very difficult to reveal. However, once they have cleared the issue, they either 1) totally forget what it was about or 2) they no longer feel the issue is a secret anymore because it doesn’t have any charge.
At the time I took the first Avatar Wizard course I had an issue with anger — which especially seemed to come up any time someone questioned my financial integrity. I had tried to trace it back to experiences when I was younger, even possible past life experiences, but nothing ever came up. And then an extreme example of the charge happened after that first course. My wife and I had been working out with a personal trainer who had us use a particular gym. We paid him his fees and from those fees, he paid the monthly gym dues for us. But then we went on one of our six week trips so I arranged to take a break with the trainer until after we returned. When we returned, we discovered that he had not paid the gym dues for the last two months and that the gym had taken us to a collection agency. Suddenly, I was livid. I got so angry that I seriously considered picketing the gym for unfair business practices. I was really, really mad and yet the intensity of my anger didn’t make sense to me.
When I attended my second Wizards Course, I spent quite a bit of time on my hidden agendas and I was able to remember a great childhood embarrassment. It was something I didn’t want anyone to know about and at that time, I certainly would have never shared it in a newsletter for the world to see. When I was ten years old, I stole some comic books from a store but my mother found out and made me hand them back to the store manager admitting what I had done. I found that whole process mortifying. Through the Wizards Course, however, I cleared my charges from the memory. After that, I didn’t get angry when anyone questioned my financial integrity, my anger about that totally disappeared. Beyond the anger not appearing anymore, the whole issue is no longer that big a deal so I have no trouble writing about it publicly in this newsletter.
While I won’t reveal the Wizards process, we at VTI have developed our own methods of dealing with secrets and hidden agendas through some very simple processes. They are not secret and my belief is that civilization will improve as more people know about them. You don’t have to take my courses or pay money to get them. Share them with the world. Here they are.
- Think about and identify your secrets and hidden agendas.
- Identify the beliefs that you associate with your secrets and hidden agendas.
- Realize that these beliefs are about you, not other people.
- Clear the charges from the beliefs (using some form of feeling release).
- Clear or change the non-useful beliefs.
It’s not that hard at all.
Here is an example of using that process on my comic books experience. Actually, I cleared everything about that 15 years ago so I tried to recreate what I might have been thinking at the time. Here are some of the beliefs and charges that resulted —
- My mother was disappointed in me because I stole something. She would frequently tell me if I did that again, I would no longer be her son. So there was an issue with who I was at that point. This created the charge of abandonment.
- The worst part was returning the comics and admitting what I did to the store manager. I had imagined I would get punished or even thrown in jail. This belief created a charge of fear.
- And then there was the issue “What will others think of me if I tell them what I did?” I’d be so humiliated and I’d lose my reputation. The charge here was embarrassment.
After identifying the beliefs and charges, do a major feeling release like we teach in Peak Performance 101, or follow a releasing process like you can find in The Sedona Method or from other sources. In my case, I would have done three feeling releases, one each on the charges of abandonment, fear, and embarrassment.
When the charges are gone, then it should be easy to get rid of any non-useful beliefs. Here were some of the non-useful beliefs I worked on —
My mother will abandon me.
Later in her life after my father and sister had died, she used to tell me “you are all I have.” That hardly sounds like someone who would stop caring about me. When she told me I wouldn’t be her son anymore if I stole again, that was just her way of trying to guide my choices. She died in 1993 and I could call that abandoning me but she is inside my heart whenever I want to visit with her.
I will be punished.
Well, my thoughts about what would happen were much worse that what actually happened. I don’t remember but I would guess the store manager thanked me and told me not to do that again. I wasn’t arrested or thrown in jail and I have never stolen anything else since that time.
And what will others think of me? Will I lose my reputation?
Well, when I think back now, the riskiest thing I have ever done was publish Trading Beyond the Matrix. I worried that people might think that Van had gone off the deep end — and some people did think that. Overall, however, that book has helped attract people to us who were willing to work on their issues. As my friend Lee Coit used to say about the women in his life. “One third of the women in the world will like me; one third of the women will probably dislike me; and the last third will be indifferent. I think I’ll concentrate on the third who will like me.”
Issues come up with my Super Traders sometimes when they have secrets and they are not sure whether they can trust me to keep them. That becomes an interesting dilemma for me because I know that 1) I need to keep their secrets as long as they consider them secrets, but 2) my job is to get them to be free of such secrets. When they do become free of a secret, it’s usually a big shift even though it might not seem that way to them at first.
In the Peak 202 workshop last month, one of the students summed up perfectly his experience of releasing a secret. In a debrief for one of the exercises, he said, “In the last exercise, I decided to work on my deepest, darkest secret.” I asked, “Is it still a secret? Can you talk about it?” He responded with a look of surprise and said very calmly, “Sure, it’s not a big deal anymore.”