The Work Can Be Used In Any Situation
Even future situations.
Usually fearful thoughts involve the future. They are concerned about what might happen. And what I hope won’t happen.
So it’s natural, when doing The Work, to look at future situations, not just past or present situations, and to harvest stressful thoughts from those future situations to question.
This Can Be Done Two Ways
The most direct and straightforward way is to put yourself directly into the future situation and write your Judge-Your-Neighbor Worksheet from that future event.
I did this when I was preparing to come out of the closet as being in a gay relationship. I pictured future situations where I was telling my dad or my step-dad about it. And I imagined how they might react.
I wrote down all the stressful thoughts from that imagined, future situation on my worksheet, and questioned them. This reduced my fear significantly.
Here’s a Second Way to Question Future Situations
Because the future is always a projection (it hasn’t happened yet), it can be helpful to go back to the original cause, the past.
Why do I fear the future? It could be because something stressful happened in the past and I’m now projecting it into the future.
In this case, it can be very effective to do The Work on that past situation. When the stressful thoughts of that past situation are questioned, the stress often starts to evaporate. And simultaneously the stress of the future situation fades as well.
This Happened for a Participant in the Two-Hour Taste of The Work a Few Weeks Ago
The participant was feeling anxiety about her job search, and worried that she would end up in a stressful job.
She was planing to do The Work on the future situation, but decided instead to do The Work on her old job first. It was a bad experience that she was projecting would happen again in the new job.
She questioned, “I am angry with my job for requiring the sacrifice of my health and wellbeing.” And “They should not expect me to drop my plans to meet their needs.”
After working the situation with her old job, there was less worry about her future job. You can purchase this recording here for $9.99.
Questioning The Past Has One Advantage
The past is set, while the future is nebulous. Even though questioning a future situation may seem more straightforward, it can actually be harder to hold yourself in inquiry when working a future situation.
This is because the future hasn’t happened yet. So the mind may start to change the future as you answer the questions. That’s one reason why I often look for a past situation to work, even when I’m feeling stressed about the future.
But sometimes questioning the past just won’t do. If I work a future situation, I find it helpful to nail down my future situation with all its specifics before writing a worksheet on it. Then I hold myself to those specifics when writing the worksheet and questioning what I wrote. This allows me to do The Work effectively even in a future situation.
Have a great week,
Todd
“I often use the word story to talk about thoughts, or sequences of thoughts, that we convince ourselves are real. A story may be about the past, the present, or the future; it may be about what things should be, what they could be, or why they are.” Byron Katie, Loving What Is.
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