January 23, 2009
Aren’t we all hallucinating?
Pyramid of Time
Aren’t we all hallucinating? I mean this in the most honorable way in that we are seeing from our own two eyes through the collective experience of our past. Our past may be very different from another’s past. So doesn’t it stand that we will all see things a little (or much) differently?
Have you ever been in an intimate relationship and your partner goes ballistic and you think, how did they make that up from what I just said. Have you ever responded to your partner in a similar manner? How does that happen? So it does stand to reason that we are hallucinating? If you have sisters or brothers, do they see life exactly as you perceive it? Think about it. You grew up in the same family, you were fed the same food, mom and dad were pretty much the same, but you came out completely different. How does that happen?
How did you become you? Unless we know how we did it, how can we unravel it? This reminds me of a client I worked with. She sent me a six-page fax of her issues. The story was a very big one, single spaced, small fonts. It was a very hard life she had led. Nothing had worked for her. Over a 20 yr period, she had tried all kinds of therapies and was fed up and truly was ready for a change. A client has to be ready and totally committed to change because, it is not the practitioner or the coach who creates change in the client, it is the utilizing of the technology that is brought to the environment of the client, when the client is absolutely ready and receptive to your guidance, miracles happen.
Once we filter information, we make an internal representation of that information, a picture. This picture can happen so quickly, you don’t even notice is consciously. Take a minute and get a memory of what you had for breakfast. How is that memory represented in your head right now? Notice that it comes to you in pictures. Your nervous system has a complete strategy of how it retrieves that particular picture.
Eye patterns in NLP were discovered at the Langley Institute for Brain Research while researching the left/right brain hemisphere dominance.
In future, when speaking with someone, notice their eye movements. Notice how they move their eyes in different directions with the different questions you ask.
They are accessing information. Notice when they look up they are accessing visual pictures, when there eyes move laterally they are accessing sounds, and when they look down they are accessing feelings.
So the two million chunks of information you intake per second into your nervous system, is filtered, then you give it a meaning, and then you make a picture of it. This creates the emotion connected to the information, and then you do your behavior. Because we don’t do this on a conscious level, it happens quickly.
Your eyes grow out of the cerebral cortex as embryos. The whites of the eyes grow out of the dera of the brain. They are deeply connected to the central nervous system. Your eyes are actually accessing pictures, sounds, and feelings because that is how your memories are deeply imprinted in your experience. The event happened once, yet you carry it around for a lifetime, in pictures, sounds, and feelings.
Have you ever had memories that when recalled, gives you an uncomfortable ness? If we have memories that are created by our principle filters, what happens when an event comes toward us and our memories are filled with unresolved emotions. Would this cause you to be more reactive or proactive? Reactive of course.
This is the point I was making when I spoke of our reactions and our partner’s reactions when we say something and an unexpected reaction in an explosive manner happens which causes you to think, how did they get that out of what I said? Something triggered the response as a defense from the past. When we’re going to be a fully operative human being, we must learn how to begin to decode our stories from our negative emotions, of the past, because they lock into your nervous system in pictures, sounds, and feelings.
What I’m laying out before you is a practical set of tools, an owner’s manual to help unravel the stories that cause the reactions and distortions of your future. Unless we unravel them, we will continue to respond in the same manner. Wouldn’t you like to respond differently to your future? If we choose to learn how to respond differently, we must harness the tools and the skills. We must utilize our manual. I can only present to you how to access and utilize these tools. It is ultimately your choice to implement them, or not.
Submodalities is one of the most important of tools in NLP. They were only discovered in the mid 80’s as the way that the brain encodes meaning. Think about it, when your parents were your age, they didn’t have access to this information.
Science Digest and Modern Psychology note that NLP is perhaps the most powerful set of technologies to change the human condition ever invented. These tools are not a light, fluffy, or metaphysical learning. They are scientifically proven to work on a neurological level by assisting you in every day life.
The past eighteen months brought about some intense challenges for many of us. Had I been void of these techniques, I would have been knocked flat. Because of these tools, I was able to put up my sails and moved pretty briskly through it. Submodalities are a tool I use frequently.
As I said before, submodalities are the five senses, visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory. Visual is what you see. Auditory is what you hear. Kinesthetic is what you feel. Olfactory is what you smell, and gustatory is what you taste. Each one of those learning channels are receiving channels. They have finer distinctions to them that give meaning.
Imagine a visual representation of you, beyond any limitations. It is the you that is” The Full Potential” you. And as you imagine that, notice that you can get a sense of that, or that you feel that possibility of that limitless you. And if that feeling could be represented by a form, what would that look like. When you have that imagined in your mind, your future “Full Potential Self”, make a picture internally, put a frame around it, turn down the colors of that image to black and white, and make it very dim. Create it to be two-dimensional and flat and notice what happens to the feelings.
Now take the frame off of it, make it panoramic and give it bright-vivid color. Add the wind blowing through your hair. Add in the sound of your favorite music, pump up the volume, and make it 3D. Now, step into that picture and look out into the future of the eyes of your Full Potential Self. Notice what happens to your feelings now. When you added color and sound and looked outside your own eyes, did the feelings become more positive? Did you have an increase in emotions? What is that? Can you change your emotional states by changing the finer distinctions in your head, of course you can, you just did.
What was being realized in that brain research study, back in the mid 80’s, is that submodalities are a powerful set of techniques to utilize. So powerful that the government began to have the military be taught these techniques to prevent them from being brainwashed. This in turn gave them a very strong ability to control their minds.
So what we begin to look at is, no matter what you are, mom, dad, sister, husband, wife, single person on the dating scene, what ever you are, you are interacting with submodalities all the time. This is what either creates your success or failure. And what harnesses your emotional states are the pictures you are ceaselessly contemplating in your mind because they happen just that quickly, just like that.
What happens when we have an emotional state? It creates a physical reaction that causes our reaction. Have you ever attempted to change a behavior? What would happen if you knew that your behavior was emotionally driven by the pictures you contemplate in your head. They are also driven by the language you use and the way that you filter your reality.
Shifting your memories will change your filters. Shifting your language will change your thinking. When the shift occurs, what happens with your behaviors, would they change or not? It’s very much like taking a holistic approach to your health. Much of our healthcare is much like treating symptoms rather than healing what the cause is. Many of us attempt to change our lives by shifting symtomologies by overlaying something that will change the symptom instead of going to the cause. Is that successful in the long run? We must go to what the cause is.
Submodalities are only one of eighty-plus NLP techniques. When you begin to shift the finer distinctions of the pictures you are contemplating in your mind, just as we did in the exercise, could you shift things more easily?
Let’s say you are having organizational challenges, such as: you have a messy desk and delay getting your paperwork in order, or you are procrastinating about doing your taxes, or you procrastinate in some other aspect of your life and it’s there only because you have a major resistance to it. What would happen if you took that image of what ever it is you are experiencing procrastination, taxes for instance. Place that image that creates an emotional state in your mind. Now, elicit the submodalites of the picture of “procrastination around doing your taxes.”
Next elicit an image and the submodalities of something you are absolutely impassioned to do, something you are totally passionate about. Now take the finer distinctions of that positive picture and override the finer distinctions of doing taxes. What do you think would happen to the emotion that drives the behavior around doing your taxes? Would you feel more or less motivated to do your taxes?
Utilizing submodalities allowed me to move though procrastination. Do you know that when you feel like procrastinating – and you REALLY FEEL it, you can’t get a team of wild horses to drag you into action. Even if someone comes along as says, “look, I’ll help you and you say no-no-no to the help and you still procrastinate. What working with submodalities does is it jump starts the change and changes the internal representations which changes the emotion, which moves you more easily into action. It can be done just like “that!”
Do you have any limiting beliefs? It is important for us to “always” state our beliefs in the past. How do your beliefs effect your life? Sometimes people suffer way, way too much because of what they experienced in past is still very much in their future. Referring back to the client I mentioned earlier, the one who carried 40 years of stories, pain, and limiting beliefs so much so, that she literally could not see “past” them. For someone to fax me six pages, single spaced, single lined, you know that her story had a big strangle hold on her present awareness.
Have you ever run a story over and over in your head and obsessed on it to the point that you’re in such pain that you could be walking down the street and there could be the beautiful sounds of birds every where, the sun in shining, and there’s a gentle breeze through you hair and you are just missing it all because your cup is upside-down? I personally think there is grace descending down upon us every nano-second of every day and in every breath we take. There is incredible grace, all the time. But the focus of our mind is what keeps our cup right side up or turned down.
We can receive this grace or we can pray at the temple of the God of our inadequacies or our fears, or of the unworthiness we tend to hallucinate and the bases upon what we ceasessly contemplate and what we live. We allow ourselves to suffer way too much. I can literally whine longer, moan louder, be a victim better than anyone reading this or I can choose to empower myself with the techniques I know and move myself from victim to action. The choice is ultimately mine as it is yours.
One of the presuppositions of NLP is that you are in charge of your mind, therefore your results. I could stand here and complain that I’m tired and I could stand another 40 hours of sleep because I’ve been working incredibly hard. I could say these things and think these things. Then what would happen? All kinds of pictures would be going off with in my mind, with al the submodalities associated, triggering emotional states that match that picture.
There is no place that I’d rather be then to be in a room with individuals who are really curious about evolving their lives. Who, other than those who have a strong desire for evolution, would assist me most in creating a better emotional state to present this information? I have a choice and this is what differentiates human beings from other species is that we have a choice.
The client I referred to earlier had never experienced anything like NLP. She said In the 20 years she has spent helping herself, she’d never experienced anything even remotely like this. I said, and now you know you can be free of burden that has carried you to this point.
I have a secret outcome that I wish to share with you. My outcome is to train people well enough to do what I do, and to do it better, by teaching them to utilize many of these NLP techniques. What could happen if you could harness the power of the language of your brain, submodalities, to begin to unravel the stories that consist of your memories and beliefs. What would happen when you start shifting them so that they are neutral and they turn into a cheering section for where your life is headed.
I want to speak a little about time, because time is a huge incredible metaphor. Quantum physics has proven that there is no time. I find this to be mind boggling, over the top. My head can’t even wrap around that concept at all. One thing I do know is that time does exist. NLP is a constantly evolving science because we are constantly evolving. It is not a static science.
(more tomorrow)
Love & Light
Gary De Rodriguez