First of all, unless you are familiar with NLP, the name itself is daunting .. Neurolinguistic Programing!!!

We’ve adopted our own acronym, NLP as in Now Live on Purpose! .. but that still [...]]]> NLP Training

First of all, unless you are familiar with NLP, the name itself is daunting .. Neurolinguistic Programing!!!

•      neuro, as in neurology;
•     linguistic, as in language;
•     programing, as in .. changing how you think ..

We’ve adopted our own acronym, NLP as in Now Live on Purpose! .. but that still leaves the big question: How do you do that?

There are a number of misconceptions about NLP I’d like to clear up first:

One: NLP is manipulative.
One student told me that someone on her street used NLP to sell cars. He eventually sold one to all her neighbors. I asked her if her neighbors were happy with their new cars. She told me they were delighted with them. The truth is, you can’t make people do things they don’t want to do, not for long at any rate. More than that, NLP has always taught that you work towards the best possible outcome for everyone and everything concerned.

Was Martin Luther King manipulative because he was a great orator? One of the foundations of NLP is to adopt what works best, to emulate the best .. Martin Luther King, Meryl Streep, Buddha, Mother Theresa, Richard Branson .. to figure out how they got the results that worked best for them, so that you can get the results that can work best for you.

Two: NLP is superficial.
Actually the very basis of NLP comes from asking how to make fast permanent change for everyone from the mentally ill, and the severely disabled, to artists, communicators, and business people. So much NLP has been integrated into contemporary training for personal and business development, sports coaching , public speaking etc. that it’s often not recognized for what it is. Far from being superficial, NLP has become established as part of elite methodologies across multiple disciplines.

Three: NLP is voodoo psychology, based on unverified beliefs.
As new research in neuroscience becomes available and accessible we hear of “breakthroughs” that many of us have been using effectively with our clients for decades. There has always been a small group of dedicated change-makers who were ahead of the curve. Time and society usually catches up in the end. The originators of NLP were considered marginal, but then so was Freud and Jung, not to mention Galileo, Picasso, and the Rolling Stones.

Four: You can learn NLP from books.
If you can learn it from books, then there’s no point in getting Master Certification, or even working with an experienced trainer. But can you learn how to be a parent from a book, or play in an orchestra? You can learn something; but it’s not parenting or musical virtuosity. In fact, you can learn very little from books. The same is true with NLP because a lot of it has to do with the underlying understanding. Being a good parent is valuable, playing music to move hearts is valuable, creating fast permanent positive change in others is invaluable. But to master those skills, you need to rub shoulders with, experience and learn form those who have already embodied those things.

Five: NLP is geeky,  Intellectual and not at all spiritual.
Nothing could be further from the truth. One definition of spiritual truth I have always liked is from the Plotinus; “Truth is the mind in agreement with itself.”  If there’s one thing that NLP does it is to create congruity, wholeness, and alignment, so that you are in agreement with yourself, inside and out, emotionally, intellectually, and  spiritually.  If spiritual means learning to appreciating the miracle of living, respecting the humanity of others, respecting life itself, celebrating your highest values  .. then I know of nothing more spiritual than the outcomes people achieve through NLP.

NLP, Now Live on Purpose. Once again, how do you do that in a world which constantly pulls you in many often conflicting directions. Well, that is the question NLP actually  allows you to answer for yourself, in your own way, so that it works.

NLP Training

Six Blind Men and an Elephant

Six blind men set out to discover what an elephant really was. [...]]]> What NLP isn’t

Have you heard the story about the six blind men and the elephant? How about the story about the six blind elephants?   First things first ..

The Six Blind Men and the Elephant

Six Blind Men and an Elephant

Six blind men set out to discover what an elephant really was. They were led to the place where the elephants were kept.

The first one bumped into an elephant’s leg and realized that an elephant must be a kind of pillar.

Another reached up and grabbed onto the tail and learned that elephants were like ropes.

The next one found himself touching something smooth and cylindrical and understood how elephants were a kind of tube or pipe.

Another felt the ear and thought that elephants were a special kind of cloak or garment.

The next put his hands on the elephant’s trunk and imagined it was the branch of a tree.

The last man reached up and felt the elephant’s belly and realized that elephants were huge cooking pots, miraculously suspended in the air.

Whatever we think we know about something is filtered through our own unique experience, partial and incomplete, subjective and often based on hastily drawn conclusions. We’re all blind in one way or another. Our certainties are never certain.

It’s true for everything we ever experience. Whatever you think you know about something is invariably incomplete, slanted towards old assumptions, the already-known, hearsay; filtered through subjective perceptions and second-hand conclusions and experience.

NLP is particularly helpful because it continually seeks to help you remember and acknowledges this. It leads you to always be questioning, and testing your assumptions. It asks you to see the bigger picture, and to them put what you see into action. It asks you to look at pictures other than the ones you currently mistake for the truth.

This is not so you get lost in relativity, but so you begin to look for what actually works, rather just sticking with the same old pictures and patterns and habits than you’re accustomed to. In addition, it gives you the skills to help the people you serve, as clients, customers, students, loved ones, to do the same. NLP is about learning to see elephants for what they really are .. whatever that may be.

Six Blind Elephants

Six blind elephants think people are flat

Six blind elephants wanted to find out what people were really like. They arrived at the place where they thought they would find some people. The first elephant stepped on one and flattened him. The elephants gathered round and agreed – people are flat!

How often do we come to a personal conclusion, or reach consensus with others, based on completely false information?

How often do personal frames of reference overwhelm any possibility of our having a fresh point of view?

When Heisenberg determined, early in the 20th Century, that the observer always influences what they are observing, he was thinking about physics, not elephants. But the blind elephants get his point across nicely.

And the point is this .. sometimes the only exercise we get is jumping to conclusions. NLP is not about helping you to do that. It’s about helping you to exercise your imagination, so can get better results than the ones you get when you keep on making false assumptions, running your old limiting beliefs, and continuing to be paralyzed by emotions that no longer work.

NLP is about helping smart people make real change in a three dimensional world .. for positive transformation .. professionally, in their relationships, and in their inner life. And because it has no fixed ideology, no overarching theory other than the search for what works to benefit most, it remains the most flexible, efficient, and effective systems for total personal transformation.

It’s been a couple of years now, but we still miss them, the long walks they insisted on taking, their wet noses, even their bad breath..

The good thing is that the land where we live at Manzanita Village, where we had dogs since we first came, is now filled with all kinds [...]]]>

Jati

It’s been a couple of years now, but we still miss them, the long walks they insisted on taking, their wet noses, even their bad breath..

The good thing is that the land where we live at Manzanita Village, where we had dogs since we first came, is now filled with all kinds of wildlife.

Bobcats drink at our pond, packs of coyotes race around the houses at night, sounding like hooligans, wild turkeys and deer have taken up residence.

And with predators no longer troubled by our dogs, the ground-squirrel and rodent populations are leveling off.

The point is this ..

bobcat

you have to give up something in order to have something else.

It may be a relief or it may be a sacrifice, but in order to live by the ideals and successes you aspire to,
you have to give up something.

Now, we love dogs, and we’ll probably have dogs again. And .. things will change again.

We’ll have to give up the bobcats, the deer at the pond, and the rabbits and the ground-nesting birds.

The choice is ours. The choice is always ours. For every change you make, something you may not have expected will also change, and you will probably have to give up something you didn’t expect to.

Think for a moment about what could be yours if you only gave up some of the things that were preventing you from changing:

• self-limiting beliefs
• assumptions and attitudes
• habits
• fears
• friendships that hold you hostage
• what else .. ?

More to come

We only had time to answer some of your questions. So here are a few more.

Thanks to everyone for your participation and energy. Most of these questions have a relevance beyond NLP, or our Five Changes NLP training. There’s [...]]]> If you missed the call/webcast  last Friday you can still catch the recording at  http://dld.bz/NLPcall

We only had time to answer some of your questions. So here are a few more.

Thanks to everyone for your participation and energy. Most of these questions have a relevance beyond NLP, or our Five Changes NLP training. There’s a bigger picture here that has to do with change, transformation, and healing of all kinds.

What are the possible negative outcomes for taking the training and doing this work?

This will apply to any genuinely transformational work that changes you from being the victim of circumstances to living your life at choice. Think of all people who have done amazing things in their life, sometimes against all odds. Some may be iconic heroes, like Mandela, or Oprah, or Cesar Chavez, others may be people you know. You may even be one of them yourself. Think about it! Think of people who have beaten the odds to do something extraordinary.

At some point they refused to put up with excuses for not doing what they knew they could do, what they had to do .. whether it was changing the world or dealing with some personal misfortune.

When you change what you are willing to tolerate in your life, whether it’s a bad situation or negative people, some doors may close. But others will open. When it becomes more important to you to face your challenges, than to continue hanging out with the situations and people who reinforce your excuses for not changing, you may lose some of those friends. But that may not actually be a bad thing, It may not be a negative outcome. You may have to change some of the things you do and places where you hang out. That may not be a bad thing either. But anyway, consider yourself warned ..

http://www.manzanitavillage.org/nlp-certification/

Are NLP and hypnosis the same? How are they related?

Milton Erikson

Yes and no. Hypnosis and NLP are certainly related, and share some common ground. But you can practice NLP without any formal reference to hypnosis, and there are numerous styles of hypnotherapy that make no overt use of NLP techniques. Consider hypnosis as simply the means to bypass the rational mind in order to effect deep long-lasting healing and change by accessing unconscious mental and neurological patterns. Based on that, then NLP and hypnosis certainly have a lot in common.

Some people are intrigued by hypnosis. Hypnosis may seem exotic and mysterious. Actually, hypnosis is a daily occurrence for all of us. As the great Milton Erikson said, “Most people walk around in a trance of disempowerment, our work is to change that into a trance of empowerment.” We are using the words hypnosis and trance interchangeably.

You will learn more about the amazing Milton Erikson during our training. His use of Conversational Hypnosis is very much a part of our NLP curriculum.

I’ve heard people speak of ‘NLP magic’ and would love to know what that means.

It used to take weeks, or even months, to get people to overcome a phobia. In the traditional behaviorist methodology curing a phobia is a long process of gradual desensitization.

With NLP we can effectively remove a phobic reaction in just a few minutes, permanently. People find it hard to believe that something that used to take so long can now be done so quickly; but in NLP rapid permanent positive change is commonplace.

What else can NLP change?

If you can quickly and permanently change a phobia, something that used to be considered so hard to change, do you think it might be possible to identify and change a limiting belief? Or a deep-rooted negative emotional pattern? Or compulsive or addictive behaviors and habits? Do you think common fears, like fear of public speaking, might also be something you might be able to change pretty easily?

One of the things we teach students of NLP is the importance of letting go of negative expectations of their clients. Studies have shown that clients and patients tend to fulfill the expectations of those they go to for help. Even completely unexpressed expectations are like self-fulfilling prophesies.

This may be one of the fundamental problems with traditional diagnostic approaches. Diagnoses are valuable, but only as ways to identify problems. If the diagnosis defines the client, or patient, it places them inside a box. But the client is always more than that box. Likewise, the cure, or the transformation, is always more than the conventional prognosis.

You don’t have to believe in miracles. More than fifty percent of remissions from ‘incurable’ illness is unexplainable by conventional means.  These are already ‘miracle’ cures. In other words, for those fifty percent something changed on an unconscious level to make healing possible.

NLP has always been very curious about how this happens..

How’s is NLP done?

We don’t have time to cover all the details. But the simple answer is that we all create our deepest reality, our inner landscape, our responses to the world, through the words and images that we use for mental access and recall. It is much easier to change those words, images, and the meanings associated with them than anyone realized back in the days when behaviorism and psychoanalysis, and related disciplines, were the only games in town.

NLP uses very specific ways to help people change how they represent and perceive the world they live in. We use a wide range of inductive techniques.In the NLP training we teach you how you can continue to develop ways to do the same for yourself, and others. You may take NLP into a therapeutic situation, a classroom or training room, or you may use it from the stage. The tools and techniques are applicable to almost any situation.

If you are working with clients you will have the tools to effectively change the physical, emotional, behavioral, social, professional, and even spiritual dynamics of their life.

Can I talk to Caitriona or Michele about this training before I register, and will I still get the special price?

If you have worked with either of us privately in past the couple of years we do have a special offer for you if you would like to join us for this. The offer is good through the end of this month. So call us before March 31^st

A Story

Once a client came out of desperation – as clients sometimes do – having exhausted all other options. She had chronic back pain from an auto accident years before. She had had several surgeries; had been to neurologists, acupuncturists, and pain doctors. She had been to a psychiatrist at a well-known Los Angeles university hospital who gave her pain medication on condition that she had sex with him. He told her that she would have back pain for the rest of her life. He also told her that if she ever mentioned his sexual abuse he would claim that she was psychotic and delusional.

She came to me for hypnotherapy. After one session her pain was gone. A year later she reported that she had no recurrence of the pain. Such cases help me remember how powerful these tools for change really are. Does that mean her pain was not real? Of course not! It had been very real for her .. for years. Does it mean those other healthcare professionals were incompetent? Aside from the psychiatrist, they were all probably very good at what they did. It is simply that she came to me at a moment when she was truly ready for change. Fortunately the tools I have were able to catalyze that change in an effective and permanent way.

The deepest change is often not about the symptoms. Effecting change is often a matter of helping people to claim their power back, and remember who they are. People may come with ‘incurable’ problems. But those problems are incurable only because the person had learned to believe them to be so.

We do not claim that hypnosis or NLP trumps every other healing or transformational modality. Amazing transformation takes place in many contexts and through many healing modalities.

We do say that there are huge possibilities for the deepest sort of healing outside of the traditional paradigm; and that deep healing often takes place beyond known and familiar territories.

http://www.manzanitavillage.org/nlp-certification/

Michele and her Obasaan. Kobe Japan 1977

I returned to Japan for the first time as an adult when I was 21. It was exciting, strange, and familiar .. [...]]]>  ‘I am never 5 minutes into stripping the clutter from my life before I start running into the clutter that is my life.’ Robert Brault

Michele and her Obasaan. Kobe Japan 1977

I returned to Japan for the first time as an adult when I was 21. It was exciting, strange, and familiar .. all at the same time. It let me piece together the distant memories of my early childhood in Kobe – a very happy time of my life.

I was introduced to so many extended family members during those six weeks. But I felt closest, and most connected to my obasaan, my grandmother. There was something so completely authentic and real about her.

She lived modestly in one small room that she kept simple, clean, open, and spacious. It magically transformed to serve many functions throughout the day – as a living room, breakfast, lunch and dining area, and then it turned into a bedroom at night. The bathroom was down the hall, and the bathhouse was a block down the street. She lived modestly, and her life was filled with simple rituals. Some were religious—she had her daily Shinto practices. Some were simply part of her daily routine. Both seemed equally important to her, and both were done with the same dedication and focus.

She got up dawn and stood outside her door, greeting everyone as they walked or bicycled past on their way to work. I can still hear her calling out “Ohayo gozaimasu! Ohayo gozaimasu!” .. “Good Morning! Good morning!”

.. as if handling a sacred object

Her closet and storage space was as neatly organized as her room, even though it was filled with all her things.Whatever she brought out from there she handled with great care, and loving attention. Everything had its place, everything had its use, and she could find whatever she was looking for in an instant. At the back of her closet she kept her treasures, her precious memorabilia that she had no space to display in her tiny room. But she would bring them out to show us. She unwrapped each item with great care, and then stored it away again afterwards as if she were handling a sacred object.

That visit to Japan, even though I have visited many times since then, is still vivid in my memory, and I look back on it with a tender heart.

When I think of my obasaan, I think of a life well-lived. She certainly saw her share of tragedies, living in Kobe through the Second World War. She had suffered a lot in her life, but if she showed it, it was through the simplicity, patience, and kindness that she brought to everything. It was as if her suffering was a way to shed the past. She is still an example for me, of someone who chose to live a life free from unnecessary clutter and negative baggage.

Have nothing in your home that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. William Morris

My  grandmother is my model of how someone can live so that their environment, and everything in it, directly reflects and reinforces their happiness.

What about your physical surroundings, the objects you choose, and the rituals you use, formal or otherwise, conscious or otherwise? What do they encourage in you? How do they support you?

Think about your work-space, your home, and the places you hang out. What feelings and qualities do they reinforce? What about the places where you go to volunteer your services, where go for entertainment, where you go for spiritual guidance?

Do the places you visit support feelings of peace and happiness? Do they energize and enliven you; or do they make you feel frustrated, negative, or simply numb? Do they drain you of energy, or do they enliven and replenish you?

Who you are is up to you

We should never forget how important it is that where we we spend our time has a huge impact on us. It always reinforces associations, good or bad. It becomes an anchor. A positive environment gives you strength and resilience for when you find yourself in less conducive places or situations. It also reinforces the mental qualities that determine who you are, as well as the outcomes and the results you get in your life.

One of the things we teach is how to use rituals as anchors, to help you create consistently resourceful states of mind. Because your state of mind is essential for you to achieve the results you want.

For example, do you start your mornings by pressing the snooze button? I know someone who sets several alarms, and never wakes up to any of them. It is as if they are saying, ‘Duck! here comes another day!’ or ‘I don’t ever want to really wake up!’

For my grandmother her morning ritual brought good feelings, for her and everyone else, standing in the doorway every day, calling out, “Ohayo gozaimasu! Ohayo gozaimasu!” .. “Good Morning! Good morning!”

Creating Rituals and Anchors

We live in a world of the senses, infused by feelings and thoughts. You can create a ritual, a positive anchor through associating something you do or experience through any of the five senses. How you do it is simple, my grandmother knew how instinctively.

There are more complex and powerful ways to use anchors that we teach our clients: for example, to transform a persistent negative emotion into a positive one, or to turn procrastination into a strong impulse to take action.

People who take our NLP trainings learn ways to establish resource anchors, rituals that in a matter of a couple of minutes or a few seconds, can change your emotional landscape completely.

My Grandmother died at the age of 89. Her neighbors were so used to hearing her morning greeting that when she was not on her doorstep one day, they looked in, to find that she had passed peacefully in the night.

As I take care of my old mum through her decline into dementia, navigating the family dynamics, and learning from all the ‘stuff’ that comes up while doing what I imagine, and hope, is best for the person [...]]]>

Jane Reed 1948

it’s not what you believe, it’s how you live your life ..

As I take care of my old mum through her decline into dementia, navigating the family dynamics, and learning from all the ‘stuff’ that comes up while doing what I imagine, and hope, is best for the person I’ve known longer than anyone else .. I realize that no amount of commitment to a belief, or to an ethical principle is a genuine substitute for authentic personal alignment and congruity.

In other words, if I let unresolved issues get in the way, or if I look at things as they unfold as anything other than a gift and an opportunity to learn something new, then I would be missing life’s big opportunities.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with belief, or faith, or clear principles. It’s just that, by themselves, they won’t make you happy or change you. Your life is a work in progress. Your hardest challenges are often the greatest gifts, sent to heal and transform you. All it takes is to recognize them for what they are.

Because I value all I have learned over the years from meditation, hypnosis, and NLP; and because NLP in particular is something that people are asking us about in anticipation of our upcoming NLP training, I want to write about the connection between NLP and what I referred to above as ‘personal alignment and congruity’.

First of all, NLP is NOT FOR YOU if:

• Your inertia is stronger than your sense of adventure and discovery.
• You prefer to blame others rather than change something within yourself.
• You don’t want to challenge the limits you have set for what is possible.
• You like to win people over to your point of view, rather than listening to where they are  coming from.
• You have high ideals but find yourself compromising a lot.
• You avoid doing things that cause you to risk failing, or making a mistake.
• You avoid learning new things that challenge what you believe and how you think.
• You don’t want to change any of the above.

Actually, NLP is not so easy to define, because it’s not what you do with it, as much as the thinking you use behind what you do. What shows up as personal alignment is different for everybody. When people ask us what NLP is we often say, “Everything you experience is made of the words and pictures you use to represent it .. and you can change that!”

NLP is not strictly a modality, because there is such a wide variety of ways to practice it.  Some of them may even seem to contradict each other! Though there is certainly a body of coherent skills within NLP that can be learned.

NLP is certainly not a belief system. In fact it tends to question the very mechanism by which we formulate beliefs. It emerged in the early 1970’s out of a handful of curious and brilliant innovators who took it upon themselves to integrate, synthesize, and model what worked best in the fields of psychology, personal development, and human accomplishment in general. Though it’s roots go back much earlier. The momentum that created NLP was through a methodology, a way of questioning and experimenting.  So NLP is best described as a method for replicating effective strategies, it is a means towards an end, the road to a positive desired outcome.

For example, someone may have an intense irrational fear of spiders, so strong that they avoid going anywhere near them. How might you instill a similar fear, not of spiders, but of needles in a drug addict? With NLP you can do that.

With someone who is chronically late for appointments, but never misses their morning coffee, you can apply a similar strategy .. to help them either to give up coffee, if that’s what they want to do, or to be punctual for all their appointments. With NLP can do that.

 Some good questions to ask are:

“What can I learn here?”

“What can I take from this situation to other situations, that will allow for greater effectiveness and maximum benefit?”

“If this is the best thing that could have happened, how can I make use of it now towards the greatest positive good?”

When should you use these questions? Anytime! Especially when you are least inclined to; when you don’t get what you expected, when your car breaks down or you are delayed in getting to the most important meeting of your life, when someone, or something, you had relied on suddenly isn’t there anymore, when someone surprises you with a devastating personal attack ..

Managing Your Emotions

Another way of say this is that NLP is all about managing your emotional state, and since NLP has allowed me to begin to learn how to do that, one of the great pleasures I now enjoy when I am with my ol’ mum, is to engage her sense of humor and irony, to be playful with her, to help her remember that there are ways to be light, relaxed, free from anxiety.

In the 80’s and 90’s I used to go for month-long retreats in Southwestern France to study with Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen Master, who was our teacher for many years. [...]]]> All things splendid have been achieved by those who dared to believe that something inside them was superior to circumstances. Bruce Barton

In the 80’s and 90’s I used to go for month-long retreats in Southwestern France to study with Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen Master, who was our teacher for many years. One of his constant themes, and something he would repeat over and over again, was that whenever strong negative emotions came up in our meditations, we should treat them kindly. He suggested simply being mindful whenever resentment, anxiety, regret, self-judgment or similar emotions came up; and instead of pushing them away, to treat them with the same respect and affection you might treat a good friend in need. Listen to them, be kind to them.

What would happen to your relationship with a friend in need if you were to judge them, show impatience and anger, or try to ignore them when they showed up?

The suggestion was to develop a relationship with those difficult emotions as you would with a friend. When you do, you can be sure that those emotions will cause you less grief in future encounters with them. It’s not that they won’t show up any more, it’s that your relationship to them begins to  change. This is a basic strategy of mindfulness training; simple, though not necessarily easy to do.

Go on, beat yourself up! You do it so well!

Unless you do something different than just fighting and blindly resisting negative emotions you will never learn the valuable information they carry. You never get to truly heal the deep wounds that we all carry. Worse than that, you end up compounding the negatives:
– beating yourself up about beating yourself up
– getting angry at yourselves for getting angry
– shaming yourselves for failures, weaknesses, your lack of confidence
– having anxiety in anticipation of anxiety or fear
in a repeating pattern of neurotic loops.

Those layers of resistance accumulate and compound, creating a tangle so dense that it seems almost impossible to ever extricate yourself.

Meta-states   

Those meditation instructions echo the ‘meta-state’ model of NLP, which I use now, to great effect with clients who have no experience of, and no particular interest in meditation.

The common key, and the starting point, is Awareness. You begin by simply being aware of the negative emotional state. As if you were with a good friend who was in trouble; you listen to it. You accept it as it is. Later you begin to evaluate the emotion. Is this state valid? Is it appropriate? Am I digging up some old reaction that is completely outdated in the present circumstances? Can I learn from this? What is it telling me?

Asking clear questions with awareness is the first step of becoming  master of your emotions. Most people don’t develop even this basic skill; or if they do, it is haphazard at best. But if you could learn to handle the infinite progression of emotional states, as they happen, with alignment and clear focus – imagine what would then become possible! You can transform all the emotional patterns that limit who you are, and what you can do.

What I am describing is a way of handling your emotions so that you can play the game of life in an entirely new way, with resilience, resourcefulness, energy, and creativity! And because treating it as ‘play’, may just be the one of the best ways to embody those qualities!

Welcome to the Meta-Zone!

In previous blogs I described how to use Meta-States. There are many ways of doing so, and after  you become familiar with the process, you will be able to adapt it and create your own unique approach.

I gave you an example of taking a negative emotional state and then gradually accessing  its higher level underlying intention. Grief and loss was the initial negative state, and I moved from there to joy and gratitude as its higher level intention, using four intermediate states to get there. I layered each state one on the other, until I was immersed in the joy and gratitude.

Here is another approach to creating Meta States. You begin in the same way, asking what the underlying highest purpose behind the negative emotion is. Then you go directly to it, and move  backwards to find the sequence that connects it to the original negative emotion. Once again you are layering state upon state, to transform that negative emotion.

Recently I experienced a strange and unfamiliar fear. I was about to stand up at a large gathering of entrepreneurs to publicly acknowledge someone from whom I had learned some life-changing lessons, and for whom I felt profound gratitude. My fear kept me paralyzed in silence. Then I examined it to explore it a little. I began simply with an awareness of the fear, and an acknowledgement that it was there for a reason. I realized that underneath my fear there was a stronger feeling – my gratitude. My gratitude had been buried under old habits, and emotional triggers that had lost their relevance years ago. That awareness alone was enough to shift my focus in such a way that the fear disappeared completely. As I tracked back from gratitude, through layers of love, celebration, energy, I found that I couldn’t even access the fear any more. The fear was now the messenger of profound gratitude.

The use of this powerful process called Meta States is something we use to help our clients learn to live with clarity, focus, and purpose. There are some amazing ways of using them that are impossible to describe fully here, but I hope you get a sense of how it works. Meta States is also something we cover in depth in our NLP Certification training.

Romantic love is such an all-pervading theme in contemporary culture that we assume it to be a human, if not a universal characteristic, “birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it,” [...]]]> There is virtually nothing known about the historical Saint Valentine. How appropriate is that!

Five Ways to Keep Love Going Strong

Romantic love is such an all-pervading theme in contemporary culture that we assume it to be a human, if not a universal characteristic, “birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it,” as Cole Porter’s song tells us. Romantic love is now the perennial theme of songs, movies, and literature. But it wasn’t always so, at least not in the way we now take for granted.

The modern western notion of Romantic love first arrived in the form of Courtly Love during the later Middle Ages from the Persian and Arab world. It’s not to say that people didn’t have the hots for each other prior to that time, it’s just that love wasn’t ceremonialized as it now is. Marriage was more of an expediency.

Sex, until western culture learned about sexual pleasure from exposure to Indian culture in the 18^th century, had little of the sophistication we (at least, some of us) have come to expect from it. It was more of a biological imperative.

Fortunately, it seems that love (and sex), in all its relatively recent glory is “here to stay” – as another unforgettable song goes.

“Our Love is Here to Stay”

Last month we celebrated 32 years together. We stumbled into our relationship, the week I had arrived in Los Angeles. After a month we moved into a huge downtown loft. Within a few months we traded downtown smog for the air at the beach, where we stayed for ten years until moving out to the mountains at Manzanita Village.

We broke up once, early on, for half a year. Sometimes we mention it to friends in the middle of their own break-up. It seems to give them comfort and hope.

In addition to living together we have worked together, run a retreat center, lead workshops and retreats together. Now as we launch our new business, we are working together more closely than ever. It has not always been easy. We’ve been through many transitions and life-changes. Who doesn’t in thirty years? So here are a few things we learned on the way, in no particular order of priority.

Get A Life

“Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

We do not share all the same friends. There are things we do together and things we do alone. We do share many interests in common, and there are some interests, and friends, we do not share. We go through phases. There have been times when we do more things together than at others. Neither of us takes it personally.

Unconditional means that there are no conditions

Actually, there are always conditions; like integrity, truthfulness (which doesn’t always mean telling each other every damn little thing), staying true to oneself and one’s passions. When Caitrìona changed her sex 15 years ago, Michele supported her. When Caitriona had hesitated from making that transition the previous year, Michele had threatened to leave, because Caitrìona’s hesitation smacked of falsehood and inauthenticity.

After Caitrìona’s transition it seemed clear to both of us that ‘unconditional’ had to mean what it implied. We could no longer deny each other the kind of feelings—and needs and desires and curiosity—that were emerging in relation to other people.

So our relationship became an open one, based on mutual respect, and a sense that we would remain together no matter what happened, or who showed up. There were, of course, no actual guarantees, just a vague sense that we would stay together. It allowed us to be completely open with other people, regardless of whether they were lovers or not. There was, and remains, a wonderful sense of spaciousness in loving someone very much, but without any sense of possessiveness or anxiety.

Finding a Higher Purpose

Some people look to religion, a set of beliefs or values, that they subscribe to. We tend to be a little more fluid, even when we had a more official role as Buddhist teachers. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of keeping the bigger picture in mind, seeking to bring the best out in oneself, each other, and other people. It may sound trite, but it boils down to feeling good in order to do good. It’s not even something to remember, just a central value that we both share, a simple priority.

Creativity

Everybody changes; most of us transform into entirely different people in the space a few years .. or days, or hours. Then there are some things that don’t change, or change very slowly. The textures that exists between what changes and what doesn’t, or doesn’t seem to, is the raw material of art, of creativity, of life itself.

We both thrive on new ideas and impulses, new directions and discoveries. Sometimes we both think with horror of how it would be to live with someone who relied with stubborn tenacity on being predictable. It’s not that it is bad to be like that, it’s just that we have survived by being reliably changeable.

Laugh Out Loud

“Oh darling, stop taking things so seriously. Life is far too serious to take seriously.” Noel Coward Private Lives

“The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.” Quentin Crisp

Just today we were getting impatient with each other, and not being very nice. We definitely do not try to be nice all the time and sometimes we leak energy in a way that might be shocking to more demure souls. But even as we were snapping at each other today, we were making jokes about it, and giggling. Within minutes we were laughing. A few moments later, and all the rough edges were gone.

There was a study once, of couples who had been together for fifty or more years, and the vast majority claimed that the one thing that kept their relationship going was their ability to laugh at themselves.

You don’t have to try this at home

We were not nearly as good at letting emotions go when we first got together; and I can’t imagine that we could have started out with an open relationship. In the beginning there were plenty of conditions, expectations, and anxieties. This is just an account of what we discovered along the way, not necessarily a recommendation for others  .. Wishing you a good laugh, and lots of letting go, on this feast of St Valentine.

For some fascinating insights on such modern notions as love, sex, travel, learning and more look at An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin,