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A Time For Renewal

How Vivation® Resolves Grief, Depression, and Turmoil

by Jim Leonard

Positive change is continuously available to us, but sometimes life gives us a hard push. The end of something beautiful can present emotional anguish, but our future needs our attention. We need to pull ourselves together, marshal our resources, and get on with life. Vivation is a powerful skill for resolving our emotions and going forward with energy, clarity, and creativity.

I developed the Vivation process in 1979, in response to my own need for emotional resolution. I soon found that I could also teach it to others, and that they got the same great results that I did. Vivation is a physically pleasurable skill that resolves
emotions directly at the feeling level, without words or mental processing. Vivation is not a treatment applied to you by someone else. Instead we teach you how to do something powerful for yourself, and then we guide you through your first few sessions. During these sessions, you will integrate the feelings that have been troubling you. After you complete The Seven Basic Lessons (usually in a single weekend), you will continue to use Vivation on your own for the rest of your life. Vivation resolves stress, pain, and negative emotions.

In 1985, I suffered bereavement when my father died unexpectedly. I had grown very close to him. In young adulthood I came to appreciate his many unusual qualities, like a rare sense of paradox. I missed him terribly. Because of Vivation, I was able to integrate my grief and come to a peaceful place of immense gratitude for the years I got to spend with him.

Vivation resolves all emotions, directly at the feeling level. For example, it can be applied with complete success to the fear of flying, to body-image problems, and to bad habits and addictions. I have personally given more than 45,000 Vivation sessions in twenty-one countries. I have given Vivation sessions to traumatized war refugees, for whom grief was one of many severe emotional difficulties. Vivation works for everyone, quickly and efficiently, and works on all types of emotions and physical sensations. Vivation works on everything that has a feeling component. I have vast experience helping people at times of bereavement, loss, depression, grief, change, and turmoil.

Grief comes not only with the bereavement of losing someone close to us, but can also occur at the end of a relationship, a job, or anything else that is important to us. A medical opinion, for oneself or someone else, can bring on grief and depression. Anything perceived to be bad news can trigger grief. Any major change, such as moving house to a different city away from family and friends can stir up grief. Sometimes even a positive and desired change activates grief over the end of a phase of life. I have also worked with clients who had all the emotions of grief without even knowing why.

Grief is a complex emotion. It is much more than just the intense sadness that people expect. Fear, anger, guilt, shame, regret, and confusion are all common parts of grief. The death of someone close to us can activate our own fears of aging, vulnerability, and death. Survival fears, buried since childhood, are often brought to the surface. No one wants to experience anger at such a time, but people commonly do feel anger as part of their grief. They can feel angry at the very person whose death they are mourning. They might feel anger toward a person who is blamed for the death, or even anger toward God. Guilt is very common, even when it is completely unwarranted. If there was a sense of dependence, then shame and low self-confidence can come up. Grief also brings old regrets to the surface.

Confusion and indecision at such a time of change can be paralyzing. This is one of the main reasons to do Vivation early. Vivation provides the clarity necessary for making good decisions. The quality of the rest of one’s life may depend on overcoming confusion and emotional paralysis, so that the best decisions can be made.

Vivation works on the principle that if we feel an emotion honestly and in detail in our body, and simultaneously relate to the feeling positively, then the feeling resolves itself permanently. I discovered this principle in 1979 and developed it into a powerful skill that makes the resolution of emotions very efficient. To feel the feeling honestly and in detail does not mean that the feeling needs to be intense. In fact the opposite is true. Using the skill of Vivation, the client can reduce the intensity of a feeling to a manageable level, and integrate it quickly. Vivation is very gentle. Relating to the feeling in a positive way is easy to learn in Vivation lessons.  We teach many different ways of doing this and adapt the presentation to the individual. This ability to change to a positive way of relating to a feeling is a key skill that I have developed highly during more than twenty years experience working with thousands of clients all over the world. A person who does not learn the skill of Vivation will not get the immediate, thorough, positive results readily achieved by a person who does Vivation.

The efficiency of Vivation is very important. Upon completion of The Seven Basic Lessons, the client often achieves an efficiency of about one integration per minute. Everyone has experienced some integration, which means "the permanent resolution of an emotion". But most people have few and infrequent integrations as they pass through life. In a single session of Vivation, it is possible to make tremendous progress. Also the efficiency of Vivation makes it pleasurable, even in times of great difficulty. The relief one feels upon the permanent resolution of a horrible feeling, feels wonderful. Integrating layer after layer of emotions is an extremely positive experience of coming into our body, of being here now, of insight, clarity, and personal power.

The worst times of grief, depression, or turmoil, can be the very best times to take a step forward and learn the life-affirming skill of Vivation. Worldwide, more than 100,000 people have used Vivation successfully. Vivation will work for you, too.

Vivation is the registered trademark of the technique developed in 1989 by Jim Leonard, and stems from the Latin word “Vivere” - to live. © 2002 Vivation, Inc. All rights reserved.

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