Cohen - Your Life Is Designed to Work: A Psychological and Spiritual Guide

YOUR LIFE IS DESIGNED TO WORK

A Psychological and Spiritual Guide

Copyright 2021 by Jane Ilene Cohen

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Printed in the United States of America
Conscious Life Press, Encinitas, CA
LifeIsDesignedToWork.com
First Edition

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021915953

ISBN:978-0-578-96545-1

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) basic concept of limiting decisions, as taught by Dr. Tad James, has been invaluable as a foundation and jumping-off point for developing this thought system. (Although it is not religiously based) this book also uses a modification of the Christian Science synonyms for God as a jumping-off point.

In addition, the NLP perspective that we only experience a model of the world, as opposed to experiencing it directly, also greatly influenced this work, although I took it in a different direction.

The support and input from friendsin particular, Jenny Schipper, Lynn Pollock, and Rebecca Speerhas sustained me in the long process of bringing this book into focus. And, my dear lifelong friend, Judy Rothschild, has been a consistent cheerleader over the years in helping me get this book out.

My very talented editor and writing coach, Jan Allegretti, has been amazing in her ability to help me structure and focus this book so that what it's meant to bring into the world could be heard. My editor, John Cannon, has been wonderful to work with and masterful in his editing, comments, and insights, putting the final polish on my book.

DISCLAIMER

When I refer to "therapy" or "therapy sessions" in this book, I am not referring to traditional therapy, such as practiced by psychotherapists or psychologists. I am referring to NLP TimeLine Counseling sessions, which is what I call the sessions I give.

Time Line Therapy is an NLP process for therapeutic change created by Dr. Tad James. NLP TimeLine is a process for therapeutic change I developed that integrates my Life Is Designed to Work thought system with the Time Line Therapy process.

This book is not meant to provide psychological or other individual professional services. If you need personal expert assistance or counseling, you should seek the individual services of a competent professional.

CONTENTS

Bringing Yourself into the Present
Moment

INTRODUCTION

Realizing life is inherently designed to work took quite a journey.

I was born in July 1945, near the end of an old era. It was just a month before the atomic bombs were released, bringing a cataclysmic end to World War II. Growing up in a Chicago suburb, I couldn't relate to much of mainstream life. Hardly anything made sense to me. It was like making my way through a fog.

In high school, this began to change. It was the early 1960s, and the cultural revolution of the hippies and shifting social standards caught my attention and my imagination. New ways of looking at the world and experiencing life began emerging. I started feeling engaged.

About a decade later, now living in California, I read Richard Alpert's (Ram Dass) book, Be Here Now. It had a large impact on me, making clear the importance of coming into the present moment. I spent countless hours trying to be here now. But try as hard as I might, I just couldn't do it.

Then a series of pivotal experiences led to me finally being able to cross that barrier:

In 1971, I joined a small New Age spiritual community.

I have always had a strong desire to be a good person, but the spiritual leader judged me (as well as most of the others in the community) as being bad. I bought into the idea that we had to save our souls and, as a result, fully participated in the experiences the spiritual leader set up in the community. It was a confrontational, emotionally painful, stressful, and frightening experience. I stayed there for twenty-two years. (Yes, I really stayed there twenty-two years.)

Often feeling I was failing, I went through many dark nights of the soul, by which I mean times of great emotional despair, not seeing a way forward. During one particularly difficult time, I "made a deal with God": If God got me through what I was going through, I would help other people do the same. Looking back on it, I can see that from that point on, I had more and more of a sense I was meant to be a healer.

I had faced the possibility that I was a bad person and examined it to the bottom. Through that intense, soul-wrenching experience, I eventually realized how mistaken and dysfunctional it is to judge people as good versus bad. I experienced what happens when you ignore your own needs for the "good of the whole." I experienced what happens when you live by sacrifice and by treating others as more worthy than yourself. And I learned what happens when you let others define reality for you. In other words, I learned a lot about what causes life not to work and why.

The situation forced me to come into my own direct experience instead of blindly taking as reality what others said was true. That was the only way I could endure the spiritual community and eventually gain the strength to leave it. I was almost totally not awake when I joined the community and awake to a large degree when I left it. I had begun to be here now.

After leaving the spiritual community, I moved into an apartment and lived by myself for the first time in my life. I was no longer interpreting my experiences from the perspective of mainstream life, having been disconnected from it for twenty-two years. At the same time, having realized how dysfunctional the spiritual community was, I was no longer interpreting my experiences from that perspective either. I was in a sort of limbo state.

That's when I started studying A Course in Miracles , which is a very positive spiritual philosophy. I threw myself into an intense study of it, feeling that my life depended on understanding it. Looking back, I realize I was starting to build a positive way of looking at life, around which to interpret my experiences of reality.

Two years later, I met a woman at a party who was a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) practitioner. She did Time Line Therapy, which is an NLP process. What she said about it caught my attention, and I decided to have a session with her.

I was impressed with the Time Line process in the session because it worked directly with how experience is formed. Also, the process felt much more empowering than the traditional therapy I had experienced before. Somehow, I knew this was the direction for my life's work.

Eventually, I found myself on a plane headed to Hawaii to study NLP with Dr. Tad James. Studying NLP with Tad gave me concrete tools that helped me understand how the human psyche works. The most important of these was learning the NLP concept of limiting decisions. I've used this concept as a jumping-off point for much that has unfolded for me as I developed the Life Is Designed to Work thought system.

In 1995, I began my counseling practice.

After studying NLP and