Time & The Human Mind
Harnessing the Power of Your Mind
By Gary De Rodriguez
Transcribed and slightly edited by Ro Saundry
Do you desire to be more than what you’ve been? Do you know you are capable of more? Do you know what path you would need to take to be more of what you want of what you are desirous to be?
What is NLP? NLP is the modeling of excellence. It is the discovery and duplication of patterns of excellence of successful people for the purpose of enhancing lives by teaching these patterns and strategies of excellence.
NLP came into existence during the early 1970’s out of the curiosity of John Grinder and Richard Bandler. These men began a modeling project of three very famous therapists. They chose to model these therapists because all three were creating tremendous changes in the human condition outside the Freudian and Jungian Models and each therapist used totally different styles of therapy.
They are Virginia Satire, who developed the family form of therapy, Milton Erickson, who developed the greatest form of hypnosis and the know-how of working with the unconscious mind known today as Ericksonian Hypnosis, and Fritz Pearls, who discovered Gestalt Therapy. All three had an extremely different approach to the style of the therapy they did and yet, they were all very successful.
John Grinder and Richard Bandler chose to observe these therapists because of their successes. The interesting observation was that they had success in what they did and how they did therapy without an absolute understanding of the processes they were using. In fact, Milton Erickson wrote a letter to John Grinder and Richard Bandler and thanked them for explaining to him the processes he used and how he has such success.
These therapists were exquisitely good at intuiting and guiding client’s problems to resolution. They had what is called unconscious competency. Have you ever had unconscious competency in something? Unconscious competency means you are “just” good at what ever it is you know how to do without having to put much thought to it. Perhaps it’s a sport, math, or driving a car that comes natural to you. It is doing something with little or no effort.
NLP is applicable in sports, business, therapy, learning, educational fields, etc. It’s broad applications cross the context of all of the human experience. Why is this? It is literally the owner’s manual for the human mind. If you are going to tune up a car, program a VCR, put one of those difficult pieces of furniture together, you would be required to have some directional manual, would you not? Have you ever attempted to do one of these activities and experience frustration?
Here we are in the most complex organism on this planet called the human body. The human body contains more neurological possibilities then every grain of sand on every beach on this planet. No one has ever come along and said, “Would you like to know how to use it?” How did you create your unique beliefs, attitudes, and perspectives? How did you encode your memory to instantly retrieve them? How did you design the strategies you use to either motivate or sabotage? How did you do it? If you had an owner’s manual that could show you how, could you fix it, could you adjust it? You could!
Now every great thinker has consistently said that there’s only one thing to do here and that is to know ‘you. In all of our relationships, what we are really involved with is a deep intrinsic relationship with ourselves, in the context of another person.
Have you ever been in a relationship with anyone? Have you ever thought about what makes a relationship work? It IS your relationship with you. It IS your sense of identity, your boundaries, your negotiation skills, your ability to love rather than be afraid, and your ability to express rather than harbor and resent. Your ability to be in relationship with others is your key to financial, spiritual, emotional, and mental well-being. Your ability to know yourself will assist you in every context of life.
In the past, I lived in a lot of procrastination. When I say “the past”, I mean anything even a nano-second in the past. What I’ve learned from a whole securitous pipe of experiences is that the place of most change is when you’re really terrified, but you take the leap anyway, you just step out into the unknown. Have you ever done an action over and over and expect a different outcome then the time before? Did you know that the definition of insanity is: doing the same thing consistently and expecting a different outcome, a different result?
One of my most favorite movies is “The Last Crusade”, where the main character is searching for the Holy Grail out of the love for his father. He comes to this place after passing through this tunnel of slicing swords and spiders and he arrived to a precipice where he couldn’t even see the bottom. He closed his eyes and remembered a legend that taught him that when he chooses to step out in pure faith, he’d be supported. So he stepped out into thin air. As he did, a path appeared before him. He made the choice to move through his fear by taking that step, that leap of faith, right through the fear.
Another story I’d like the share is a story about David and Elisa. They were a young couple and they were given a beast. The beast was an inheritance. They knew the beast was a great gift, because once harnessed, it would be their greatest ally. They also know that if this beast was left unbridled, it was dangerous and deep.
Because they had inherited this beast from the generations of their tribes, they really had no way of knowing how to harness its power. This power was neither good nor bad, it was just power without direction.
David and Elisa knew of a legend of a great wizard, a great beast master. So the chose to take a leap of faith to search out the wizard. They had to hike through the deserts and the mountains. They must have traveled for half of their lives until they came to the sacred mountain where the wizard lived. They climbed up the path to the entrance of the cave and simply sat and prayed. The wizard, feeling their presence, came forward to the entrance of the cave and asked, “What can I do for you, how may I serve you?” So David and Elisa proceeded to tell the wizard that they had a beast and it is undisciplined.
The wizard chose to teach David and Elisa by instructing them on how to harness this beast. He began by telling them to sit a while, to listen, and to learn. In doing so, the tools they required to harness the beast, would be known. So they sat, they listened, and they learned how to harness the beast’s power, how to give it direction.
What I know about NLP is that my personal life has been and continues to be extraordinarily enhanced by these processes and this information. My past comes from a home that was not a jolly one. I was an IV drug user between the age of 14 and 18 taking LSD once a week for 3 years, doing heroin, and meth. By all means, my body should not be here today.
I began having experiences that initiated my awakening to what my purpose in life is. What I know about our life purpose is that, at some level, we are here to serve. We get the greatest amount of value in our humanity by assisting others. And our relationship with ourselves determines how we will shift and assist others.
In San Diego, California I initiated an organization called “The AIDs Holistic Response Program.” I worked with many people who were on the road to dieing. Back then, if you were diagnosed with AID’s, your life expectancy was usually no longer than 3 months. It was a very powerful place to work because there was no more denial there. It was a wonderful place to serve life and people. It’s a federally funded program all over the United States.
It consists of a group of holistic practitioners doing chiropractic, massage, acupuncture, and other holistic modalities. I taught the “Course in miracles” and “Rebirthing.” We crated an entire network of support. I received the greatest value of life out of doing that work and it evolved into what I do now.
This evolution derived from my realization of what I was doing for that demographic was very limited from the prospective of not knowing how to work with the other 90% of the mind, the unconscious mind. Think about it, your conscious mind is only 10% of who you are and how you are operating. You don’t stand there and continuously say, “alright, I have to inhale, I have to exhale to continue breathing. Your unconscious mind takes care of that for you. If you are going to create effective change, does it not stand to reason that you require working with the other 90%?
As I said earlier, NLP really came to reality out of the reaction of the laborious task of talk therapy, which is valid in the evolution of how some of us come to grips with what’s occurred in our lives. There comes a point where talk therapy is just talk. You don’t feel any different but you sure know a lot about your problems. NLP is about changing the structure of how your nervous system holds these challenges, these problem states.
The NLP model of communication is the prime model used in utilizing these tools and skills. It shows us that information comes in through our nervous system and through our five senses; visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory. Information becomes diluted or filtered from two million down to seven plus-or-minus pieces of conscious information per second. The rest drops into the unconscious.
These filters consist of our language, our beliefs, our values, our culture, our memories, our attitudes, and a thing called Meta Programs. It is what we do automatically, nano-second to nano-second. Have you ever had negative people in your life? Have you noticed that what ever comes through the filters is defined in a certain color? We are all doing something similar based upon how we see life through the collective experience of the meaning we’ve given our lives and the people in it.
(to be continued tomorrow)
Love & Light
Gary De Rodriguez
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