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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