I enjoyed a lesson today from Laura, of the Silva Method ($99), who talked about how she cured herself of her cat allergy. Her allergy started in her adult years and she was confused why this suddenly happened. Eventually she had had enough and decided to do something about it. Being born into the Silva household and having continued her dad's legacy by continuing teaching the Silva Method to people around the world, she decided to use the "glass of water" method to find a solution to this problem.

The "glass of water" method is the only Silva Method that uses an object outside of yourself to help you find a solution to a problem. The technique is quite simple. First, you should know that most of the Silva Method is based on meditating and entering a deeper state of mind (known as alpha although you sometimes go deeper to theta) to re-program your mind to improve your life. It's also used to find root causes of problems so you can find solutions to those problems.

This particular method involves a glass of water. You take the glass of water to bed, drink half of it and close your eyes. Tilt your eyes slightly upwards. This helps you enter Alpha quicker. Especially if you've been practising deep relaxation meditation. Then you say to yourself, "This is all I need to do to find a solution to my problem." Keep your mind focused on whatever problem it is that you want to fix. Really believe and convince yourself that this is the only action you need and that, when you wake up in the morning, and drink the remaining water, you'll have a solution to this problem.

The way this works is that you let this thought "incubate" in your mind while you sleep. Your subconscious is far more powerful than your conscious mind and it hates unresolved questions so it will work hard to find a solution for you. Other explanations include, "putting out a problem to the universe to solve", and so on. You can do it for whatever reason you like, as long as you really feel that it will work and aren't just faffing around with the idea.

In the morning, you repeat to yourself that this is all you need to do to find a solution to your problem and you drink the water. She has found that, in some cases, you will wake up with the answer. In those cases, she says that you should drink the water and say a word of thanks (in your mind, or you'll choke! ;)) for the solution.

It's also suggested that you hold the glass with both hands. She says this is because you're putting your energy into it so, both times, use both hands.

If you don't immediately get a solution, keep aware during the day. You might overhear the solution in someone else's conversation or open a book to just the right page with your solution staring right back at you. Or you might have a fleeting thought or hear something in a song that answers your question. The important thing is to be aware of what's going on during the day and keep that question in mind. The answer will arrive if you do this right.

This works similarly to what happens when you get a new car. Before you got that car, you didn't notice it on the road much. But once you've bought it (or decided to buy it), your mind is more aware of those cars and starts noticing them EVERYWHERE. It's not that these cars have appeared out of the blue but, rather, that your mind is more focused on them so pays more attention to them when it notices them.

So, what she found is that, as she awoke the next morning, she immediately and very vividly remembered a time in her childhood when she was putting clothes to hang up outside and heard a commotion inside her house. She came to see what was going on and saw that her sister had a kitten that everyone was doting over. She wanted to hold the kitten but every time she came close, her sister moved to face her back towards her again. Basically purposely making sure she could not hold the kitten.

Out of anger, Laura pegged a clothes peg on the poor kitty's tail and, of course, the kitten freaked out and scratched her sister and generally caused a scene. Laura was punished for this and, obviously, never let this incident go. She never got closure.

Now it's things like this that may seem silly to you but they affect you into your adult hood because the EMOTIONS are the same. The feelings of rejection, loss of control, fear, etc affect you, whether your childhood event was something silly or not. (As a child, it wasn't silly, it was very very serious to you!) And unless you deal with all that stuff from your childhood, you could find all sorts of things still bugging you today, but in the form of fears, allergies, headaches, knots in your tummy and other things. (Keeping in mind that your emotions affect your physiology. It's been scientifically proven that negative emotions prevent good chemicals being released into your body, which begins to affect your organs and so on. For more info on that, check out the movie, "What the Bleep do we Know?". Check out the sources for the info and do the research if you like. I'm not asking you to believe anything on blind faith.)

After doing this exercise, and discovering the cause, Laura found her allergy was gone and that was the end of that episode.

If you're struggling to figure something out, give this a shot and post about your experiences in the comments. Even if you don't use the Silva Method but use some other form of meditation or some other method of allowing your subconscious to help you find a solution or reason to a present-day problem, please post a comment! I look forward to hearing your story! (And it can help others reading to see how you used your subconscious to help with a problem in your life.)