Anxiety and Stress

Spiritual NLP

Caitriona Reed / Anxiety and Stress, Emotional Intelligence, Hypnosis, Mindfulness, NLP, NLP Coaching / Branson, Fritz Perls, Korzybski, Meditation, Milton Erickson, mindfulness, NLP Training, Orah, spiritual practice, Virginia Satir /

September 2, 2014

Blog post and Podcast

NLP, Neurolinguistic Programing, has had a huge impact on public speaking, education, business, and therapy for over forty years. For those of us who can see its all-pervading influence, it’s hard to imagine how things were before NLP became part of the current human environment. NLP continues to evolve, and to provide cutting-edge skills that help top leaders, speakers, sales-people, creative artists, teachers, and therapists become better at what they do.Yet, to most people it still remains invisible.

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I first came across NLP through the recommendation of a Buddhist monk I met in Sri Lanka in the 1970’s. I began by reading the handful of books then available. Later in the mid-1980s I attended my first NLP seminar. The trainer was remarkably uninspiring and dull, but I was intrigued, and started using elements of NLP in my Hypnotherapy practice, even though I wouldn’t fully appreciate its brilliance and power until years later.

When NLP is being used well, you don’t notice it at all, because NLP is more than just a technique or a skill. Actually, it’s not even really a modality in the usual sense. It’s like a chameleon. When used well it can enhance any situation to help you to communicate, influence, heal, or effect change in yourself or others, remarkably quickly and effectively. It has been called “an attitude followed by a trail of techniques.” But the techniques are only the beginning. In the hands of an experienced practitioner, NLP is a truly improvised art.

Much of contemporary Neuroscience only affirms what NLP-trained therapists, teachers, leaders, and group-facilitators, have been doing to help people change their lives for forty years, based on precise observation and intuition.

NLP was born from the simple inquiry, “Is it possible to reproduce the results of the very best contemporary therapists (at the time that was Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson) by copying what they did?” NLP was created by learning the art of copying effectively (Modelling), and then from the specific details that were discovered from doing so. The emphasis on modelling, or emulating, what works, rather than getting rid of what doesn’t work, sets NLP apart from many other approaches to change that rely heavily on theoretical analysis and the diagnosis of what’s wrong.

Modelling in NLP doesn’t stop with the luminaries that inspired its creation. There’s no limit to what, or who, you can model in order to be effective – visionaries, innovators, therapists, healers, scientists, artists; Socrates, Mozart, Mother Teresa, Einstein, Korzybski, Jimmy Hendrix, Oprah Winfrey. NLP existed long before the term Neurolinguistic was coined. It’s as ancient as the first time someone systematically began to exemplify or copy others in order to improve their own performance. Contemporary NLP is simply the ongoing refinement of how you can do so most effectively.

The Spiritual Side of NLP Training

Michele and I both became serious about NLP after we had been teaching meditation and leading retreats for many years. We were feeling stagnant. We needed a change. We were noticing that many people used meditation not to transform their lives, but to reinforce who they already were, and what they already believed. In the words of our teacher of many years, Thich Nhat Hanh, they were practicing ‘bomb-shelter’ meditation.

The effect that we noticed NLP had, both on ourselves and on our students and clients, was that it accelerated deep transformation and change in ways that meditation alone usually could not.

Here are three examples of some of the many ways \NLP supports systemic and spiritual change.

Big Picture Thinking

Among the principles we teach our clients and students is the importance of seeing the big picture. When you see the big picture and have greater perspective, you have more choices. Having more choices, you learn to recognize the opportunities that life is continually giving you, as well as the long term consequences of your actions.

Most errors of judgment, missed opportunities, regret and unhappiness, are the result of failing to see a bigger picture. I remember a French movie I saw many years ago. It is the story of an illicit claustrophobic love-affair in a claustrophobic provincial town. The two protagonists eventually murder their respective spouses. At the end of the film, when they are arrested, the detective ask them, “Why couldn’t you just elope?” They had failed to see the obvious solution. They had missed the big picture. How many times do we miss the big picture because we are so focused on the problems immediately in front of us that we miss the obvious solution?

Awareness and Meditation

Mindfulness and Meditation have become part of our collective culture in ways that we could never have imagined a few years ago. Although we no longer teach mindfulness or meditation as we used to, we have taken elements from traditional Mindfulness training skills and combined them with elements from NLP – Expanded Awareness, Anchoring, and the use of Sub-modalities – to help people develop sustained focus and awareness. (You may not know those technical terms yet, but you’ll certainly appreciate them when you understand what they mean)

The results have been extraordinary. We have seen students raise their grade-point average by one or two points; and we have seen how NLP, in conjunction with enhanced awareness, can address chronic anxiety, emotional trauma, as well as panic attacks and phobias.

Emotional Intelligence

Most people are controlled by their emotions, even though they’d like to think that they are not. Suppression is often the only option they know. But when you learn that emotions are messengers, and that the information they bring is always relevant, you can free yourself from being held hostage by them.

Every emotion is connected by association to other emotions, memories, and expectations. When you learn to navigate through the intricate tangle of your emotions and mental states, you create a chain of positive emotion that can liberate you from the emotional maze that the majority of people spend their lives in. This is a central aspect of NLP – how to be the architect of your own emotional state.

Spiritual Materialism

Michele and I tend to avoid the word ‘spiritual’ because it creates a division. The biggest so-called un-spiritual experience can also provide a priceless opportunity for change; and transformational change is inherently ‘spiritual’. Whatever broadens your perspective teaches you something you didn’t know before, and if you’re really paying attention it will enhance the quality of your life. Creating a split division between spiritual and not-spiritual is how we have created war, environmental destruction, and our own human alienation from the fabric of life on the planet.

I knew a dedicated spiritual seeker who meditated in a closet because the birds outside the window disturbed his meditation. As an ardent twenty-year-old meditator I would swear at the neighbors’ children for disturbing my tranquility. I had no idea that ‘truth’ and ‘spirit’ are everywhere. Decades later, to my surprise, I noticed how going back and forth between the serenity of Manzanita Village and Los Angeles made no difference to my mental equilibrium. Apparently something had rubbed off on me.

‘Truth’ is not a rule book, or a story about an extra-terrestrial supreme being. Truth is what is useful to help you lead a better, more beneficial life, for yourself and others, here and now. Your spirituality is whatever leads you to do so most effectively.

Because NLP helps you to obliterate emotional baggage, break through limiting beliefs, presumptions, and self-negating behaviors, and to recognize your greater potential, it is a very real spiritual discipline. Perfectionism and self-judgment are obstacles that get in the way of understanding that everything you experience is a way forward. Inherent to NLP is the recognition that there is no failure, only feedback. When you are able to learn from the feedback you become like an engineer of your own human potential, and you move forward, spiritually, and in every way, because every way is connected.

Your Unconscious Mind is Speaking

Caitriona Reed / Anxiety and Stress, Coaching, Hypnosis, NLP, NLP Training /

April 18, 2013

Five changes and Your Unconscious mind

People used to ask us, “What are the Five Changes?” and we’d make up different answers .. all of them true in their own way.. But we thought it was time to come up with something that had some more weight to it. The five principles of permanent change are the broad framework that now supports the work we do with our clients. Here is what it has to do with your unconscious mind.

Your Unconscious Mind is Speaking to you .. listen!

Subconscious, Unconscious, Storehouse Consciousness (if you’re Buddhist) – the word you use is not important.

You may have heard that your unconscious mind makes up a certain percentage of your mind, and that your conscious mind makes up the rest. But you can’t divide the mind into segments. It works as a whole.

Your unconscious mind consists of everything you’re not aware of in this moment – everything you’re forgotten, everything that drives your habits, and all the triggers for all the emotions you experience. It makers itself known in everything you do .. in your dreams, in the choices you make, in what you love, and in what you fear.

It’s what keeps your heart beating, and your lungs breathing. It enables the 100 billion+ cells of your body to co-create the living system through which you experience your life as a human being.

There are two things must do in order to develop rapport with your unconscious mind. In other words, there are two things you must do in order to be truly healthy:

It’s essential that you develop the awareness and mindfulness so that you can respond rather than just react to impulses from old unconscious impulses, and keep going round and round, never making the changes, or getting the results, that you want.
It’s equally important that you learn to trust your intuition and imagination, and understand that everything is not always what it seems, that everything you experience has a purpose. By doing so you will discover the solutions that already exist inside you.

Trusting your unconscious mind is like developing a deep friendship with yourself .. until you discover, it’s actually more like developing a deep friendship with the universe.

Trusting

Once someone came for hypnotherapy and said, “Please help me with my confidence. I have to give a presentation at the end of every month to the entire staff where I work, and I dread it. I’m so anxious it makes me sick.”

I said, “You’re lying. There’s nothing wrong with your confidence. You just told me you’re confident that you’re going to feel sick with anxiety every month before your presentation. There’s nothing wrong with your confidence. The problem is that you’re confident about the wrong thing.”

It didn’t take long to help him change. After half an hour he felt pretty good about giving those presentations, and a month or two later, he told me that he had started looking forward to them.

We forget how powerful the unconscious mind is. It didn’t matter that years before, he had been forced to stand at the front of the classroom, and made to feel like a fool. The reasons why he had learned to feel nervous weren’t important. What was important was that he could now learn to trust his unconscious mind, and respect the energetic dynamic involved in speaking to a hundred people, and to respond with excitement, good-humor, and affection, rather than regurgitate anxieties from years before.

The Power of the Unconscious Mind

There’s no way he could have made that jump in thirty minute by analysis, or reason, or willpower alone. But by harnessing the power inherent in his unconscious mind, he could easily make that change. In order to do so he had to experience another reality stronger than the reality of anxiety, and to sidetrack his ability to go back to the old reality.

He learned that he was doing anxiety. Anxiety wasn’t something that was happening to him. That realization became even more powerful when he learned new strategies to help him learn to actually take pleasure in making those presentations.

Through the work we do with our clients, they learn to make that one important distinction:

What we assume is happening to us is often something we choose to do; and that when we truly trust, and harness, the full power of our unconscious mind, we make different choices so that change is no longer involves fighting with ourselves.

Instead it can be effortless, fast, and permanent. The old paradigm of no pain, no gain, does not apply to the deepest kinds of transformation when we are fully aligned with our unconscious.

Learn more

Your Unconscious Mind is Speaking, What are the Five Changes?, five principles of permanent change, Subconscious mind, Unconscious, unconscious impulses, The Power of the Unconscious, Beating anxiety, unconscious transformation, Mediation, NLP, spiritual practice, Neuro linguistic programming, Hypnosis, personal development, unconscious mind.

NLP Meta States

Caitriona Reed / Anxiety and Stress, Conscious Leadership, Five Changes, Mindset Mentoring, NLP, NLP Training / anxiety, meta-states, nlp, regret, self-judgment /

February 20, 2013

NLP Meta States:

All things splendid have been achieved by those who dared to believe that something inside them was superior to circumstances. Bruce Barton

In the 80’s and 90’s I used to go for month-long retreats in Southwestern France to study with Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen Master, who was our teacher for many years. One of his constant themes, and something he would repeat over and over again, was that whenever strong negative emotions came up in our meditations, we should treat them kindly. He suggested simply being mindful whenever resentment, anxiety, regret, self-judgment or similar emotions came up; and instead of pushing them away, to treat them with the same respect and affection you might treat a good friend in need. Listen to them, be kind to them.

What would happen to your relationship with a friend in need if you were to judge them, show impatience and anger, or try to ignore them when they showed up?

The suggestion was to develop a relationship with those difficult emotions as you would with a friend. When you do. You can be sure that those emotions will cause you less grief in future encounters with them. It’s not that they won’t show up any more, it’s that your relationship to them begins to change. This is a basic strategy of mindfulness training; simple, though not necessarily easy to do.

Go on, beat yourself up! You do it so well!

Unless you do something different than just fighting and blindly resisting negative emotions you will never learn the valuable information they carry. You never get to truly heal the deep wounds that we all carry. Worse than that, you end up compounding the negatives:
– beating yourself up about beating yourself up
– getting angry at yourselves for getting angry
– shaming yourselves for failures, weaknesses, your lack of confidence
– having anxiety in anticipation of anxiety or fear
in a repeating pattern of neurotic loops.

Those layers of resistance accumulate and compound, creating a tangle so dense that it seems almost impossible to ever extricate yourself.

NLP Meta states

Those meditation instructions echo the ” NLP meta state ” model of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, which I use now, to great effect with clients who have no experience of, and no particular interest in meditation.

The common key, and the starting point, is Awareness. You begin by simply being aware of the negative emotional state. As if you were with a good friend who was in trouble; you listen to it. You accept it as it is. Later you begin to evaluate the emotion. Is this state valid? Is it appropriate? Am I digging up some old reaction that is completely outdated in the present circumstances? Can I learn from this? What is it telling me?

Asking clear questions with awareness is the first step of becoming master of your emotions. Most people don’t develop even this basic skill; or if they do, it is haphazard at best. But if you could learn to handle the infinite progression of emotional states, as they happen, with alignment and clear focus – imagine what would then become possible! You can transform all the emotional patterns that limit who you are, and what you can do.

What I am describing is a way of handling your emotions so that you can play the game of life in an entirely new way, with resilience, resourcefulness, energy, and creativity! And because treating it as ‘play’, may just be the one of the best ways to embody those qualities!

Welcome to the NLP Meta State -Zone!

In previous blogs I described how to use NLP Meta States. There are many ways of doing so, and after you become familiar with the process, you will be able to adapt it and create your own unique approach.

I gave you an example of taking a negative emotional state and then gradually accessing its higher level underlying intention. Grief and loss was the initial negative state, and I moved from there to joy and gratitude as its higher level intention, using four intermediate states to get there. I layered each state one on the other, until I was immersed in the joy and gratitude.

Here is another approach to creating NLP Meta States. You begin in the same way, asking what the underlying highest purpose behind the negative emotion is. Then you go directly to it, and move backwards to find the sequence that connects it to the original negative emotion. Once again you are layering state upon state, to transform that negative emotion.

Recently I experienced a strange and unfamiliar fear. I was about to stand up at a large gathering of entrepreneurs to publicly acknowledge someone from whom I had learned some life-changing lessons, and for whom I felt profound gratitude. My fear kept me paralyzed in silence. Then I examined it to explore it a little. I began simply with an awareness of the fear, and an acknowledgement that it was there for a reason. I realized that underneath my fear there was a stronger feeling – my gratitude. My gratitude had been buried under old habits, and emotional triggers that had lost their relevance years ago. That awareness alone was enough to shift my focus in such a way that the fear disappeared completely. As I tracked back from gratitude, through layers of love, celebration, energy, I found that I couldn’t even access the fear any more. The fear was now the messenger of profound gratitude.

The use of this powerful process called NLP Meta States are something we use to help our clients learn to live with clarity, focus, and purpose. There are some amazing ways of using them that are impossible to describe fully here, but I hope you get a sense of how it works. NLP Meta States are also something we cover in depth in our NLP Certification training.

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