The emotionally shattered young woman who was literally carried into Gary De Rodriguez’ office by friends did not want to live. Weeks before, she and her fiancé were kayaking in a glacial cave in Alaska when an ice stalactite broke loose from the cave ceiling and struck the man on the head, killing him.
”When Juno died,” recalls Sue Harley, now of Denver, Colorado, “all my dreams and hopes, my whole future, died with him.”
De Rodriguez, founder of the Santa Fe, NM based Life Design International Training Center and creator of the Life Design Trainings, had a reputation for helping people use the untapped power of their mind to heal their body and spirit. For Harley, De Rodriguez was her last chance to live.
”I immediately knew I could trust him when I told him the story of Juno’s death, and he cried right along with me,” Harley said. “Then he helped me find my way back from total despair through a timeline process by showing me my future.” Through this gentle, powerful method of harnessing and directing the power of the mind, Harley said, she began to see more and more exciting reasons to keep on living. In the new future she was mentally creating, she saw an attractive man with an accent; children; a new home. By imagining these mental pictures, and feeling the joyful emotions that accompanied them, Harley began to embrace her future life with enthusiasm.
Six months after completing her work with De Rodriguez, Harley said she met a cute man from Australia – and the future she designed for herself became real.
As astounding as Harley’s physical and spiritual recovery was, De Rodriguez says each of us holds the key for such dramatic change in our minds.
“We choose our heaven or our hell inside of our own neurology,” De Rodriguez explains. “The pictures we’re mentally contemplating, the words we’re speaking in our internal dialogue, and the emotions we’re producing all become our reality and determine any limits to our success.”
De Rodriguez speaks from experience. He traveled a winding and uphill spiritual path to overcome the hurts of his past – child abuse, juvenile drug addiction, paralyzing depression, the agony of seeing friends waste away from AIDS. Fifteen years meditating three hours a day in an ashram in India didn’t heal the hurt or catapult him into spiritual bliss. Studying and teaching positive disciplines like “A Course In Miracles” helped, but didn’t fix everything. It wasn’t until De Rodriguez discovered the mental management tools of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) that he was able to completely release the old pains and refocus his life.
”Realize that the brain is a computer,” De Rodriguez explains, “and NLP is very much the owner’s manual for the human body. It teaches us how we created our beliefs, our values, our individual perceptions and the foundation of our personality.” Through NLP technologies, says De Rodriguez, we can see how some aspects of our personalities cut to the very root of our ability to be successful. When we understand how we created those flawed thinking patterns, we can learn how to redirect them.
Deeply committed to helping to raise world consciousness, De Rodriguez built a complete spiritual element on top of basic NLP to create Life Design Trainings – his system of using the mind-body connection to achieve excellence in every aspect of life. His unique approach is being embraced by people from all walks of life, including professionals seeking to establish a more balanced and successful career path.
Los Angeles Attorney Sylvia Esquivel said De Rodriguez helped her gain a better understanding of how differently each person sees the world based on their past experiences.
”Once you understand this of yourself,” she says, “you can understand that other people have their own perspectives which are not right or wrong, but which are or may be different. Becoming aware of this alone is priceless — and it helps in releasing one’s point of view of ‘I’m right, he is wrong’ in personal, business or other types of interactions.”
For a successful San Diego Realtor who participated in De Rodriguez’ 12-day Life Design Training Practitioner certification program, the biggest benefit was a dramatic shift in his ability to solve problems.
”If I got stuck on something, I had lots of different options I didn’t know about before,” he said. As a result, the Realtor says, things that previously would bother him no longer have power, and he’s more confident, happier and able to build instant rapport with prospective clients.
”Where most training programs fail is they never teach the individual how to manage their own internal state,” says Rodriguez. “They put on blanket Band-Aids – ‘this technique is for diversity, and this technique is for communicating.’ But that training is all about your external behavior – and what’s happening internally is what’s driving the external behavior.
”What they’re doing is putting a Band-Aid over the already established ACT. They’re trying to shift behavior at the behavioral level, and you can NEVER shift behavior at the behavioral level. You must use the power of the mind to permanently shift behaviors.”
Psychotherapist Adam Colson interacts daily with homeless and destitute people.
“A huge challenge in my work is establishing rapport with down-on-their-luck individuals, and working with them to shift their mental outlook and create well-focused goals,” Colson says. “I’ve studied many different forms of therapy, and Life Design Training techniques help people change their behaviors more quickly and effectively than anything else I’ve tried.”
“If people had just the basic mental tools,” said De Rodriguez, “they could start improving their lives immediately. Where they get into the most pain is feeling like they don’t have choices. I desire to teach people they have the resources and choices to choose a different road, and a magnificent future.”
For information on upcoming Life Design Training classes, visit the center’s website at www.garyderodriguez.com or call (505) 982-1980.
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