Pavlov's Time Table. 3 strikes and your done

I was sitting outdoors with my spiritual teacher.
She LOVES hunting. She loves it for the sake of doing it...no blood lust, just pure unadulterated fixation on a task, no matter how long she has to sit still. Complete concentration. She will turn down play with other dogs, food and companionship to just fixate on a kill.

Reading about Pavlov, I think people get confused at the duration of necessary repetitive stimuli to create a conditioned response.
Twice? Done....
Three times? Might as well tattoo it on your Brain.



A contractor backed into my fence and broke a hole through it into my neighbors yard.
Out of that hole came ambling the Dumbest Rabbit I have ever seen...without even a pause, he came loping into our yard and almost Bumped into Sophie. If I did not intervene, he would have been a DEAD dumb bunny.

But I distracted her long enough for him to run back through the hole , after a long chase of switchbacks and trick moves.

A SECOND Rabbit came out of that hole. After the nip and tuck chase, Sophie now knows that to get the Rabbit, she must wait and fixate on that hole. It is clearly the 'Rabbit dispenser' and she is a very sensitive dog. She also knew to Hide behind my Ladders so she sees the Rabbit before it sees her. She doesn't think it might happen...she is CERTAIN it's gonna happen

Where is MY Rabbit hole. The thing that I fixate on because I am certain it is coming...not intellectually, but from conditioning. We fancy ourselves intellectual; we understand conditioning....but there is a little voice of ego saying "I'd know it if it was happening to me and it's not" It is. Where? I better sit still.

Did it happen twice? I'm probably conditioned. Three times? It's tattooed on my brain

The only way to get free is to know that I'm not.

 

@Baseball65 ,

When my youngest son was young, he couldn’t read for the longest time so they finally tested him at school and it turned out he had a genius IQ, but his brain couldn’t process how to read the way other kids could. Now, a grown man, he talks in analogies a lot.

Sometimes the things you describe remind me of things my son would say. I can tell they’re brilliant, but I actually can’t totally understand them. If I think really hard, I’ll get it sometimes. (And I don’t think of myself as a dumb person! lol) I love analogies. They are a sign of genius and creativity.

All that said: can you please explain a little bit more what you mean by this essay? I can take some guesses. Are we waiting for the wrong things? Sophie knows a good thing is coming. But all we wait for are bad things? Why don’t we fixate on the positive? (Is that what this is about?)

What does this mean?: “The only way to get free is to know that I'm not.”

Let go and let God? Don’t let one or two negative experiences become tattooed on your brain as a TMS “failure” —as no hope. (All-or-nothing, catastrophic thinking.) You get what you expect. You expect no rabbits, you get no rabbits.

help! am I interpreting this right?

 

I'm afraid I didn't understand it either, @Baseball65... but I want to.

 

My understanding is that our TMS brains are like the rabbits that keep falling to the holes even a dog is waiting on the other side for a kill. But who knows, my boss always has a beef with me understanding things in the opposite way, lol...

 

Ah, totally get you @Baseball65 that’s pretty much the entire premise I’ve been running on.
The EMDR therapist noted this starts (of course) way back into infancy and childhood because that’s when we learn about this kind of Pavlovian habit and how it can work for us. It’s exactly why Sarno has you look at your personality traits and your personal history and how your mind works in the current moment.
A hyperfocused dog will keep going after the same rabbit because it *might* be “rewarded” by the thing it is hyperfocused on. Frankly I don’t need another symptom to be my reward!