January 1, 2009
I had a student once
Stop Negative Thinking
I had a student once in one of my classes named Ruben. He came into the class, he could barely speak because he was so shy and he listened to everything I said and every process I taught that class he went home and every night for the extension of a 5-week period of time he did every process every day constantly. The school director came and in and spoke to me once and said, ‘Ruben is taking his classes completely different. He shifted his entire life in that 5 week period.’ That was my challenge to the group. I said, ‘You can metamorphose your life in 5 weeks if you choose to do that. I’m laying the tools before you. You do with it what you wish.’ And he took it and I have yet to see a student do it as devotedly as he did. And he metamorphosed his life. You have the same opportunity.
Remember what I said to you – that the only way you know that you’re you is by the pictures, sounds and feelings you carry in your nervous system? The flotation tank metaphor. Well we’re going to be going into a process that begins to change the pictures, sounds and feelings in your head. First of all I’m going to teach you a very simple technique that will decode your nervous system in about a minute to 2 minutes from negatively charged emotions from your past. Some of you already know it. Who has a memory? Come on up.
Now the way this works is a process called eye patterns. In neurolinguistic programming we have eye patterns. It’s very much like the computer keyboard to the nervous system. The eyes grow out of the cerebral cortex. The sclera of the eyes actually grows out of the dura of the brain. So the eyes are deeply connected to the central nervous system. They’re much like our list files on a computer. You tap on your list files, you click on a particular file with your mouse and the file shows up on your screen. The eyes have a particular pattern that has encoded your memories, visually, auditorily, kinesthetically. So as you’re looking up you’re sorting for visual pictures. As you’re looking laterally, you’re sorting for sounds, remembered or constructed. As you’re looking down you’re sorting for feelings. If it’s down to your left it’s your internal dialog to get to feelings but it’s still to get to feelings. What we’re doing is we’re looking at our bodies as very much of a predictable biomechanical mechanism which the eyes are part of the computer keyboard. When we are retrieving a memory, that memory has a specific eye pattern that will bring that memory back as if it was now.
This is useful because if we were going to go to a door and we were going to look at the doorknob to open up the door and leave the room, if we did not have a method of encoding the learning, we would have to relearn the experience of opening up the door every time we went to a door. So the human body has this amazing capacity to store the experiences because of the learning achieved through those experiences. This is how we have learned all the things that we’ve learned and stored all the things that we’ve stored. We have an eye pattern that retrieves our learnings from our memories. Some of these memories are loaded with unresolved negative emotions and as we have stored them, we can retrieve them with the same emotional impact as before. So what we’re going to be doing is working with the eyes so that we can decode the nervous system so the emotional impact goes neutral and we retain the learnings.
The way you do this is very simple. NLP is very much like a set of keys. Each key will open up a different lock. This process is particularly good for memories that you’re done with. When you think about them they still bring you pain. However, it’s not something you’re masticating on like a baby pit bull on a bone – day to day, moment to moment. This is not like the biggest experience you’ve ever done. However, the last NLP class I taught in LA a woman got up. She was the first one to raise her hand and said she had a memory that had clouded and overshadowed my entire existence and everything that’s in it. And I thought, ‘Well, this may be interesting.’ So within two minutes she could no longer get back the memory.
Demo: Do you have a memory that you’d like to feel differently about? You’re going to go into the feeling of that memory and you’re job is to hold onto the feeling as you follow my finger with your eyes. So when you’re in that memory, just nod your head. So follow my finger with your eyes as you hold onto the emotions of that experience. You have to follow my finger. Keep holding onto that emotion and those feelings. Keep moving your eyes. Follow the finger. I’ll slow down for you. Okay, that’s about half a minute and we’re going to check and see where you are now. Let your eyes rest and go to that memory. You were up about a 10 on that memory so tell me what it feels like now. Those of you who are over here are watching him sort for his eye patterns. He’s looking for it. Get that puppy back. Make yourself feel bad. Can you get it back?
So what happened was, I wiggled my finger in front of his face on a memory that was pretty high up there as far as the emotional impact of anger. We spent about half of a minute and he can no longer get back the memory with the same negative emotions again. Could that be useful in your life?
More tomorrow!
Love & Light
Gary De Rodriguez
