Why do you say NLP is a science?

This information is not metaphysical mumbo jumbo or blind faith. It’s how the neurology works.  If you know how something works, you can do things to adjust it.  But if you don’t know how your own nervous system works, how you encode your reality, how your past influences you, how you program yourself, then there’s no way to really drive the vehicle of your life in the direction of your heart’s desire. People are floundering out in the world and creating immense suffering which is passed to their children for generation after generation.  Before you know it we have a complete world of dysfunctional people who are in intense pain who will die for the rightness of their illusions.  My vision is to unravel the stories of the past to awaken people to their fullest potential.

How are you different than other NLP Master Practitioners?

I’m different because I am 100% totally committed to changing people’s lives for the better. I desire to help people who, by their own example, can create a community of positive, resourceful, focused and successful people.  They can go out there and positively inspire their families, their friends, and who knows, maybe thousands and thousands of people that I’ll never see or touch.  All it takes is a small group of committed people to change the world.  And that’s the only thing that ever has.

It sounds like you’re putting a spiritual spin on it.

That’s true.  I really believe NLP is just a prop for me to talk about this creative force we call God.  Because above and beyond all of the technology that NLP teaches is another whole level of existence, which is our spiritual body, our spiritual essence, which is why we’re actually here.  But we cannot access those qualities inside of ourselves if our mind is filled with fear, unresolved negative emotions and the drama of our past. 

Until we can literally quiet that fear, we can’t access the truth about ourselves.  So my whole premise is to first give people the tools to quiet their minds so that the natural propensity to be who we are can rise to the surface.  Otherwise people will be in too much fear to be able to quiet themselves enough to do the spiritual work they came here to do. 

So for me everything I’m doing is about building the foundation, how to take people from “I know nothing” to “These are practical skills so I can have more options, so that I’m not totally locked in to my internal hell, and I can start making different choices about myself, my life and my world.”  Once they have that, there’s another whole level of teaching that has to happen. I know this because in my experience, I meditated for years and years, anticipating these huge spiritual awakenings.  I had minor ones, I had unique experiences that are paranormal, but the predominance of my meditation time was stuck in my head, rattling around my past and trying to quell the deep, deep emotions that were running my life. 

I tried for years and years to be this spiritual guy. I went to India; I studied with a guru.  I was meditating two and a half hours a day, from 3 to 5:30 EVERY morning for 15 years and you know what?  It was painful.  And I could not achieve the spiritual level I felt I should be reaching in the spiritual discipline I was involved in because my mind and emotions were completely out of control.

But the instruction I was given at the time was just “Keep meditating, brother.  Just keep meditating.  Use your mantras.”  And I’m like, “No!”  I’m in total agony about my mother, I’m in total agony about my father, and all these incest issues – I got all these repressed sexual feelings, I can’t cope with any of it.  Sitting for two and a half hours at 3 in the morning and falling asleep half the time is NOT going to resolve the issues!  It is about working at the level of the mind with the tools of the mind – that’s how you can awaken who you really are.  So until we can quiet our minds, we really can’t get to our hearts.  And that’s the whole reason I teach what I teach.

Do your teachings go beyond the basic NLP model?

The Master Practitioners at my Center and I teach a whole Life Design^© process – that we can redesign our lives in alignment with a higher reason and a higher function.  But until we’re able to really do it and heal the voices of our past we won’t be able to progress

The more that we continue to dwell on things we can’t do or things from our past, the more we become entrenched in the negatives.  So the focus of our mind is really the definition of our heaven or hell.  And if 97% of the 60,000 thoughts we think a day are about our past, then all we’re doing in our future is simply recreating the structure of our past.

Life Design is literally the tool to quiet the voices of our past so we can wake up to the natural stillness and the natural spirituality that we all are.

Are some people turned off by your focus on spirituality?  Do they think you’re advocating a particular religious doctrine?

Spirituality is not about a denomination or a structure or methodology of practicing worship of God, whatever that is to you.  It could be anything – it could be the wind, it could be Buddha, it could be Mohammad, it could be Christ – it could be anything.  But it’s something bigger than our egos; something larger than the definition of our personality.  When we create a reference point that is   something larger than our ego and our personality, then we start to live at a higher frequency.

How do your Life Design teachings facilitate that?

Our personality is very much like a glass of milk.  When the milk is stirred, meaning when the mind is restless, we’re constantly, habitually thinking about the past.  We think 60,000 thoughts a day, and 97% of them are about the past.  We’re constantly thinking, dwelling, perceiving, interpreting our future through the lens of our past, so that all we really see is our reaction to our unhealed emotional issues from our past in our future, so we keep recreating it.  That’s like the milk being stirred. 

We’re constantly being reactivated neurologically — we’re reactivated by what we perceive through the five senses.  Everything we see, hear, touch, taste or smell, we’re filtering through what memories it evokes from our past. When we still that, when we still the unresolved negative emotions from our past experiences, we reinterpret the internal voices so they’re our cheering section for our success rather than a booing section for what we have as our perceived failures. 

We can turn that around and change that, systematically, scientifically and neurologically, through reimprinting our nervous system through the three principal learning channels of visual, auditory and kinesthetic.  When we do that with the assistance of NLP and Life Design training we still the milk.  When the milk becomes still, then the cream naturally rises to the surface, the richness of who we are naturally comes to the surface.  We don’t have to learn how to be loving or spiritual beings – we already are. It’s the restlessness and the endless jabbering of our minds and our egos, our defenses, our pasts and our distorted filters that cause us not to function from the essence of who we naturally are – which is love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Love & Light

Gary De Rodriguez

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I’ll tell a story from Islam.  There was once a camel herder and the camel herder sought his entire life for Mohammad and thought, ‘If I could find the great prophet and ask him this one burning question, it would solve the riddle of my entire existence.’  One day, as a very old man, he was wandering in the desert and he came across an oasis.  And there sat Mohammad up against a date tree.  And he walked up to the prophet and said, ‘Oh, great prophet, I have one question to ask you which will solve the riddle of my life.’  Mohammad said, ‘Ask it, brother.’  And he said, ‘Shall I shackle the legs of my camels at night or shall I have faith in Allah that they will be there in the morning?’  Mohammad thought and he said, ‘Brother, shackle the legs of your camels and have faith in Allah that they will be there in the morning.’

 

So what we are doing by setting our outcomes, by languaging our world in a way that we know we are first person accountable for the reality we are creating, we are shackling the legs of our camels.  If I have a flat tire on the side of the road, am I going to sit there and pray that god comes along and actually fixes my tire for me?  Or am I going to use my legs, walk to the gas station and get my tire fixed, knowing that god gave me the legs to do it?  Whatever that power is gave us the power of imagination, of language and of being able to evoke emotions, all of which are the three key elements to conscious creating.

 

What if god just looked down and said, ‘Yes!’  Whatever you’re dwelling on, whatever you’re contemplating, ‘I’ve got no judgment!  There’s no death and there’s no good or bad.  I have no judgment.  Just Yes!  Whatever you choose to dwell on, the answer is Yes.’  Disease and pestilence.  Yes!  Wealth and abundance.  Yes!  What if that was the way it was?  Would that be weird?  It’s all a belief.  How does any of us know?  But what if that was true?  Would it be useful then to learn how to direct the mind?  It could be very useful.

 

I’m a firm believer that we affect and drive and move our reality.  I’ve suffered way more than what I know I could have.  I can hang on the cross longer, whine better, than anyone in the room.  I will guarantee it.  And I know one of the gifts of me teaching this course is because some of you get it and you’re off and running.  I consistently remind myself this is a gift to me completely.  I thank you so much for showing because I get to remind myself of this information.  I have yet to have it mastered.  And I think one of the reasons I have yet to master it is because, when I speak to groups it’s with a lot of emphasis and a lot of passion and a lot of power because I know it works and I know I’m still teaching myself. 

 

I got started with all of this working with the AIDS community 22 years ago.  I’ve seen more people die than a man my age ought to have.  I’ve seen horrific deaths; I have seen absolutely blissful deaths.  I looked at what made that different and it was really the quality and the consciousness that individual lived their life from and did they potentialize themselves in the context of their living.  Did they feel like they had done what they came here to do?  Each one of you is the one in your ancestral line out of thousands and thousands and thousands of ancestors who have gone before you, you are the one who has shown up to express your life differently.  Because you are an imprint of everything that has gone before you.  So you’re the one who can stand in your ancestral line and say, ‘I’m going to be the one to finally do it.’  Now either you can not be and hand it down to your children or you can be the one.  If that’s true – the Hopis say there is absolutely no past, that everything that ever existed is present right here in the cells of my body – every ancestor that ever lived is resonating in my DNA.  You are the culmination of the thought forms of everything that has gone before you and you have the choice to do it differently, to overcome the idea of separation and the idea of my fear, my victimization, and move out of the victim archetype into a place where you are first person accountable creating your world out of the words you speak, the things you contemplate and the emotions you choose to feel.  Every word you speak has millions of synaptic responses being fired off inside of your body moment by moment by moment.

 

How many of you can create depression?  How do you think you do it?  Every word you speak is a symbol like a cross or a swastika.  When you think of those two symbols all kinds of images and thoughts and feelings come up in your mind, true?  Your words are the exact same thing in microcosm to the subconscious mind.  Every time you speak a word which is the symbol of your thinking, your mind has to associate to those feelings.  You’re firing off thousands and millions of synaptic firing off in your body and you are creating emotional states word by word by word.  Have you ever walking along and suddenly by the afternoon you think, ‘God, I feel depressed.  Why?’  If you watch what you spoke and dwelt on and imagined you would find out why.  We’re creating the emotional states and as we create the emotional states our behavior follows and as we behave, we are responded to by the world; as we get the response from the world our identity builds and this is how we become who we are.

If I have a little child up here and everyone in the room is a child hater and we all silently thought hateful thoughts about this child, would the child be affected?  Are you any different?  If you have judgment and you are thinking those judgments, will the person you are projecting those judgments to be affected?  This is highly, highly important to be a committed listener.  Write this down: I stand in my light for your victory.

 

I was at a training with Robert Tennison Stevens, who is this amazing man who taught me tons about language.  In that training I was up in front of the room being processed.  I was the first one to go up during this particular training.  I did it other than because I was courageous.  It was because I raised my hand to ask when lunch was and my attention was someplace else and the whole room applauded because I had just volunteered myself to be the first one to be processed. 

To be continued in tomorrows Blog!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gary De Rodriguez

 

 

 

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