Menu

Mindset

Caitriona-Reed-NLP-Trainer

Why Most People Undervalue Themselves and What It Costs

/ , , , / , , /

Article and Podcast
Caitriona-Reed-NLP-Trainer
I grew up in a middle-class family. At aged eight, to my dismay, I was sent to boarding school, feeling confused and abandoned. At the start of each school term, before putting me on the train, my well-meaning parents gave me pocket money for the months I would be away. It wasn’t long before I began to confuse money with love.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

THE FORMATIVE YEARS: As a rebellious adolescent I saw myself as a vagabond, and a starving poet. Then, as an aspiring Buddhist, and later when I became a professional Buddhist Meditation teacher, I believed that self-denial was inherently virtuous. Add to that a lifelong commitment to social justice, driven by misplaced guilt and confusion about my place in the world. Then add to the mix the shame that I had carried for years as a closeted transsexual. Everything that I valued and believed in had become mixed up with feelings of worthlessness and confusion, especially when it came to money.

On the surface my life was fine. I had a great partner, interesting and creative friends; I traveled and led workshops in Europe and the US. It was only later, when I hit an invisible wall, that I could look back and see how much of a gnawing disquiet there had been. I hadn’t believed in the truth of what I was doing because what I was doing was not in alignment with who I was. I felt like a fraud.

My world-view was supported by beliefs like:

  • If you’re a good person you make do with what you have.
  • Money is bad.
  • Wealthy people are greedy and exploit others.
  • If someone has money, someone else goes without.
  • Making money means compromising your integrity.
  • What is truly valuable in life has nothing to do with money.

By the way, do any of these sound familiar to you?

how-many-people
By the time I finally grew tired of reaping the rewards of these beliefs i.e. frustration, disappointment, denial, and fear, I realized that they had completely blocked any positive impact I aspired to have in the world. As long as I still held onto those beliefs, even unconsciously, any action I took to circumvent them was just like beating my head against a wall.

Sure, it’s easy to understand that beliefs are self-constructed, and that the only power they hold over you is the power that you give to them. But it’s one thing to recognize limiting beliefs; it’s something else to transform them on a deep unconscious level!

AN AWKWARD GAP: It was painfully obvious that my own limiting beliefs were incompatible with my new work. I was no longer a Buddhist Meditation Teacher. I was now an Executive Life Coach using NLP Coaching and I had even started to teach NLP Certification Trainings. I aspired to work with clients and students of the highest caliber; people who truly recognized the value of investing in themselves, who were committed to transforming their lives and the lives of their own clients. But how could I start attracting such clients when I had not yet learned to value myself and my work, and hadn’t transformed the beliefs that still guided my unconscious life?

I had invested hugely in trainings and mentorship. But it just made me more aware of how blocked was. It wasn’t just about money, thought money is often a good barometer. Our new business model and our new aspirations were simply not working.

All the training, qualifications, skills and marketing gimmicks, even a lifetime of helping other people, means nothing until you fully embody beliefs, values, and actions that correspond to your potential and what you aspire to accomplish in the world. Unless you completely transform your old limiting beliefs on the deepest unconscious level they act as a deadweight, dragging you down.

Then I hired a mentor who said: “How many people are you screwing over by NOT being able to sell them on your services?”

Those words turned everything around. It was both a challenge and a relief. It was no longer about me. It was about what I could actually do for others (and help them do for themselves) if I could just get out of my own way. How can you serve other people by playing small, or by pretending that things are okay when they’re not, or feeling so unclear about what you do that ‘selling’ feels like a lie?

WHAT I LEARNED: It was like an instant download that bypassed all my old resistances. It declared, “Get over yourself. Do the work that reflects your full capacity! Do what the world is calling you to do! Embody who you ARE. Don’t rely on tricks, second-hand information, or marketing and sales gimmicks. Stand by who you ARE so that what you DO is obvious. Then sell that!” Actually, it’s not even ‘selling’ anymore in the way that people usually think of selling.

big-scary-changes
Everyone’s story is unique. I don’t think mine is particularly unusual. Okay, so I am a woman of transsexual experience. I faced a big challenge and had to make some big changes, but don’t most people have do that at some time or another, in one way or another?

We live in a society that gives us a lot of mixed messages about money. Most of us inherit ideas and beliefs about money and self-worth that do not serve us. I’m sure that I’m not alone in some of those old beliefs I adopted about money and value.

A GOOD QUESTION: Someone once asked, “If you are uncomfortable when someone is selling something to you, ask yourself, in what ways are you NOT selling yourself?”

When Things Change, They Change Very, Very Fast

Once at a training seminar, we were being guided through an NLP pattern designed to identify and change an old limiting belief. After identifying the old belief, you design a new one to replace it. I had identified one of those old beliefs from my childhood, that: “Money is hard to come by.” I chose to replace it with a new belief, that “I am a People and Money Magnet.”

At the moment the NLP exercise ended, someone who I had met at the seminar turned and told me how grateful she was for something I had said to her the day before. She had decided to train with that same seminar company and to designate me as the recipient of the commission that would be generated. In the two or three seconds that it took her to tell me, I had earned $2500!

How is it that when you change your mind, something changes in the world around you as if the world were fluid in ways we can’t usually recognize? I don’t like magical thinking. But when magic happens, it’s hard to deny it.

On another occasion, my partner Michele and I had made a thirty thousand dollar commitment for training and mentorship that we hoped would transform our business. We did not have the slightest idea where the money would come from. It was a leap of faith. Then within two weeks we received an unexpected gift of just over thirty thousand dollars.

Once we had made the decision and taken the leap; in other words, once we had made the decision that WE were worth investing in, the money found its way to us.

I don’t know how this sort of thing happens, but it does. And it seems to be in direct proportion to how you perceive and value yourself, and your work in the world. That’s the magic, right there!

My first Hypnotherapy teacher used to say, “It was a happy day for fools when modesty became a virtue!”

As a child I was very shy. I would blush to speak to more than two or three people at one time. If the phone rang I would walk away, rather than speak to some unknown friend of my parents.

Invisibility has merit only for those who have been brainwashed or coerced into submission, resignation, or perpetual fear, and who imagine it is safer to keep quiet than to speak. This has nothing to do with being introvert or extrovert. Some of the most visible and influential people in the world are, by nature, introverts. They have simply learned to balance their personal lives with their need to serve the world in the most effective way.

If someone’s sense of purpose makes you uncomfortable you say that they are driven. But they are no more driven than a well-tuned engine that is working at maximum efficiency.

So many people undervalue their gifts. The powerful catalyst they can be for others remains invisible. They live with false modesty, cheating themselves and others, ashamed to call out to the world and affirm their presence. 

WHY PEOPLE UNDERVALUE THEMSELVES AND WHAT IT COSTS. NLP PERSPECTIVEs:

People continue to undervalue themselves because they have not found the means to identify and transform the beliefs that hold them captive; or the fire to do so.

What it costs is everything, the world! Because the world is cheated of seeing you stand in your power and beauty – brave and free at last, living at your peak, giving your best, living in sustainable joy, enjoying generating the value that you know you are worth. For more click here

mindset-144x144

One Minute Mindset Test

/ , /

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” So asks the poet Mary Oliver.

mindset-144x144
Painting by Michele Benzamin-Miki

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how do in the best ways we can ..  learn, play, love, work, or just get by?

If we’re lucky we get some good guidance, or else we tap into our own best instincts.

When we make an important change it is often because we are forced, driven, or inspired to, or perhaps it’s because of a happy accident.

You’ve heard that mindset is important. But mindset is too often spoken of as if it were an afterthought like icing on the cake. In fact, it’s the starting point, and it’s the middle, and it’s the end.

A positive mindset consists of a positive emotional state, appropriate creative energy, and high expectation for what is possible.

Mindset can play out in the negative, or it can be an expression of awareness,
joy and creativity, and the expectation that ANYTHING is possible.

There’s no formula, except that everything you experience in life, how you respond, and the results you get, are in direct relationship to your mindset.

None of us are perfect we all have a hidden shadow of unfinished business. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. Mindset isn’t fixed, it’s always changing.

And Mindset isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, it’s more! Much more! It’s your navigation system, it’s how you illuminate the shadows so that you are working WITH, not AGAINST yourself.

Becoming master of your mindset determines everything you ‘do’.

One Minute Mindset Survey

  • Do you sometimes say no to certain situations, relationships, or opportunities because you’re afraid you’re not good enough?
  • Do you settle for less than you know you are worth?
  • Do you tolerate certain situations, or qualities in yourself,  when you could, in fact, change them?
  • Do you say yes when you mean no, or no when you could say yes?
  • Have you ever experienced a radical shift in what you knew was possible but settled back into what was familiar and never made the changes you know you could?
  • Are you afraid of not following through when opportunities present themselves?

If you said yes to any of these questions go ahead and schedule a complimentary consultation here

peacock

NLP and Love

/ , , , , / , , /

peacockSTAYING ALIVE

PART FIVE – LOVE. There are seven words for love in classical Greek. And there’s another kind of love for which there is no word. It is a state of being more than a feeling for someone or something. It is the Great Joy that comes from unconditional love. You live it, simply and effortlessly, when you are in full agreement with your own life.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

“the moon offers light without a hand
the sun is proof of the sun,

writing about love
my pen splinters”    Jalal ad Din Rumi

NLP and Love

As soon as our basic needs are satisfied, and once we are in alignment with ourselves, we come home to love. Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs includes the need for freedom of expression, creativity, and mental congruity. When those needs are satisfied, and when unconscious conflicts are resolved, you move into great joy and unconditional love. It’s that simple.

Twenty years ago, when my Zen teacher was empowering several of us as teachers, I asked. “When do you know when someone is ready to be a teacher?” He replied, “When they’re happy.”

The next question is: how do you become happy? The answer, like the question, can only be lived. But there are a few clues.

Society is driven by the assumption that happiness comes from getting what you want. Commerce depends on it. It’s our collective fantasy. It doesn’t take much to realize that there’s no end to wanting. But that doesn’t mean that ‘wanting’ is the problem. The real problem lies in the illusion that when you get what you want you will be happy. There’s nothing wrong with wanting. Denying your desires in the name of ‘spiritual’ perfection is another version of wanting, a kind of spiritual materialism. Finding a belief system that lets you close down for fear of disappointment is capitulation, a kind of death, wanting to destroy your dreams and aspiration. There’s another way to happiness outside of wanting or not wanting.

NLP provides a great road map. NLP is driven by the understanding that when you have internal conflicts you can’t be genuinely happy. There is something hidden inside you that remains unsatisfied.

Part of you wants one thing, part of you wants another. There’s a lack of clarity that feeds uncertainty and fear. You probably have an unexamined belief or two about what you can or cannot want; or about what you should or should not have. You’d like to do good for the whole planet, but you are so conflicted it’s hard for you to do good even for yourself.

NLP has a knack of pulling those limiting beliefs to the surface and changing it, After all, all beliefs are figments. We imagine that they are rooted in external events. But the beliefs we hold about ourselves are fictions that we have concocted.

NLP recognizes that everything you experience in your life is informed by your emotional and mental state. Love is simply the highest and most beneficial emotional state. It’s a natural combination of joy, energy, mental clarity, creativity and whatever natural positive tendencies accompany your own personality once you have become free from emotional encumbrance.

Four Parts to love

  1. Affection. Familiarity. Getting to know you. Feeling safe, known, seen, appreciated and owning those feeling as your own, as a natural way of being yourself. When we work with new clients we often begin by teaching them to like themselves. Perhaps it’s the single most powerful thing they can do. It is the beginning of love.
  2. Friendship. There’s a saying that money can buy anything except old friends. There’s consistency and faithfulness in friendship. There are common aims, common values, and trust. There is contact, accountability, transparency, and the challenge of growth.
  3. In the Greek conception of the world, Eros was the first element that took shape from primordial Chaos. We turned Eros into lust and pornography because we were ashamed of desire. Think of Eros instead as the embodiment of life, love revealed. It includes sexuality, because it includes everything we call life. Eros is celibate or fertile. It is the abundance of embodied living.
  4. Imagine the unconditional love of a mother for her child. Remove the child and let the love remain, now direct that love towards everything and everyone that comes within its reach. Or imagine the exquisite pleasure of being in love for the first time. Remember how it transformed your world, Now remove the person who awakened your heart, but keep the transformation. Neuroscience has measured the healing and creative capacity of that state. NLP teaches you how to own and embody it.

It’s almost meaningless to speak of love. Love is simply life lived. The only certainty is life itself, the only law – ‘more life!’  Love is the experience of life, the embodiment of the truth of living, along with the little joys and sadness, the coming and going of things. It is clearing the way to the ongoing happiness my teacher was referring to.

How can NLP helps in this central spiritual quest? It is the nearest thing we’ve seen to a User’s Manual for how to experience the love and joy that is the natural fuel for this business of living life as a complete human-being.

For details about the next NLP Certification Training follow this link

 

caitriona_reed

Perfect Timing. Life Coaching Tools – Blog and Podcast

/ , , , /

caitriona_reedSTAYING ALIVE: PART TWO – PERFECT TIMING.

There are two aspects to Perfect timing. There’s slowing down, and there’s developing your instinct for seizing the moment, appropriately, decisively and fast. Each aspect reinforces and supports the other.

Life coaching tools and resources from Five Changes

For many years we taught traditional silent meditation retreats in addition to our work with NLP and hypnosis. Although we shifted our main focus, I still find myself teaching meditation to clients – both traditional sitting meditations, as well as other, less-familiar forms.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The other day I taught a client about eating meditation. When people learn eating meditation for the first time, they often say things like:

“I have been in Over-Eaters Anonymous for years, and I’ve done countless diets and programs. Eating meditation has finally allowed me to have a relationship with food that’s not dysfunctional. I’ve stopped using food like a drug.” .. or, “I knew the kind of foods I should be eating, and I wanted to eat them, but somehow it was hard to change my old habits .. until now!”

I remember someone saying, “I never knew how awful fast-food tasted until I slowed down enough to really taste it.”

Eating Meditation

If you have never done eating meditation before, simply slow down, focus on your food, taste it, take your time. Get rid of distractions like reading, watching TV, or talking, and spend the meal in silence. Eat one meal a day as a meditation for a couple of weeks. You’ll probably change some of the food you eat; and you’ll also tune in to what your body needs – for most of us that means eating less. If this works for you, continue with eating meditation for one meal every day until it becomes a habit.

Walking Meditation as a Practice and a Metaphor

We also teach our clients to do walking meditation. When you first learned to walk you had to learn about perfect timing. Otherwise you could never have learned to balance on one foot while moving the other one forward. You would have kept on falling down just like you did in the beginning.

When you learn slow walking meditation for the first time, it may feel like learning to walk all over again. You may be a little wobbly. You have to find your balance again. You’ve learned to relying on speed to keep your equilibrium. Something powerful happens when you learn how to maintain your balance and equilibrium at any speed.

There’s something else that walking meditation teaches you. No matter how fast or slow you go, you’re always right here, wherever that may be. That may sound obvious; but how much time do we spend not accepting where we are, denying it, defying it, and trying to be somewhere else? Learning to be right here and now has enormous benefit – for healing, changing, learning, being receptive, and being fully alive!

Perfect Timing

Perfect timing is not just about learning to balance and slow down. It also teaches you that you will get there (at your destination) when you get there. But this doesn’t meant we’re suggesting you remain stuck in an eternal here and now. Perfect timing is also about your intuitive ability to know when you should seize the moment and move, appropriately, decisively, and fast.

This is connected to the first of the Five Qualities that bring out and nourish the spirit of being fully, absolutely and unashamedly alive – Click Here for article on Congruity. When you’re in essential agreement with yourself; when the inner and the outer, your conscious and you unconscious mind, are working together, you have natural perfect-timing.

Procrastination

Lots of people have a problem with procrastination. There are many possible reasons for it .. fear of failure, fear of success, resignation to your limiting beliefs, unresolved anger, or grief  .. the list goes on.

One of the big problems with procrastination, aside from missing deadlines and feeling stagnant and bogged down, is that it contributes to further loss of your natural sense of perfect timing. You dull your intuitive capacity to know when it’s appropriate to seize the moment, and when it’s not.

walking-meditation

Getting your timing right

Here are five things to help you kick the procrastination habit and develop perfect timing. Practice these five things and notice what changes (and let us know, write your comment below):

  1. Slow down. Begin your day, regardless of how busy you expect it to be, with something that slows you down. Do walking meditation for fifteen minutes (i.e. walk naturally as slowly as you can, focusing on your body’s movement), or ‘sit quietly, doing nothing’ (another exercise we give to all our clients). Eat breakfast as an eating meditation. Or simply do your own version of contemplation, or make music, sing, paint, draw etc.
  2.  Eat the Frog. If the hardest thing you had to do today was to swallow a live frog, you would think about it all day until you finally swallowed it. After centering yourself with the things suggested in number 1, do the thing that you’re most likely to put off doing all day. Do it first. Your whole day will be a lot more pleasurable, and efficient, without you trying to not think about that ‘frog’.
  3. Be on-time. Set your internal clock, and your intention, to be punctual. Do you know someone who is almost always late? Maybe you’ve been like that yourself. It’s usually very stressful. Give yourself the time you need to be punctual. If there’s going to be traffic, take it into account.
  4. Plan. Schedule your day, week, and month so that what’s important gets done, and so you can do it with plenty of time to spare. There’s no need to schedule everything. Schedule the things that are important. The rest will fit in around them. If they don’t, then re-evaluate the plan.
  5. Play. Schedule time for play, fun, recreation, sport, friendship, romance, travel, whatever you need to nourish you spirit.

If there’s an upcoming Spiritual Retreat at Manzanita Village, it will be posted here

Life coaching tools and resources from Five Changes

Perfect Timing, Good timing, Life Coaching, Five changes, Mediation, NLP, spiritual practice, Neuro linguistic programming, Hypnosis, personal development, unconscious mind.

leonardo-

Life Coaching Tools and Resources. Podcast

/ , , / , , /

leonardo-STAYING ALIVE – ONE.

By staying alive we are talking about living at you peak emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and physically. There is no belief associated with this, other than the assumption that it is better to be more alive rather than less .. and that many systems actually encourage resignation and distancing from experiencing life, fully and simply .. as it is.
Life coaching tools and resources from Five Changes

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Did you ever learn something that immediately became so obvious that you couldn’t imagine there was ever a time when you had not known it? Like learning a shortcut that made a task quicker and easier than you’d even dreamed possible, or learning new skills you never thought you would, or realizing possibilities that were once completely out of reach.

Afterwards you may still pinch yourself occasionally to make sure it’s real, but you would never think of going back to the old way.

It happens a lot when we’re growing up – learning to walk, or learning to read; learning to ride a bicycle, or to drive a car; or leaving home to go on your first big trip; or falling in love for the first time, or having your first ‘committed’ relationship. There’s a first time for everything, and it’s good to keep going too, with new experiences, new challenges, new accomplishments. It’s either that or resign to the fact that life, and learning, and creativity, is over.

There are other sorts of firsts, less visible breakthroughs, like learning you can be free from an addiction, or healing from a supposedly ‘incurable’  disease, or ending a destructive relationship for which there seemed to be no way out; or breaking a bad habit that had dogged you all your life.

For me it was a huge moment when I realized that I could change my designated gender, and that I could show up in the world representing who I was on the inside. That may sound like a big deal, being transgendered, and it may lie outside the experience of most people. But actually it’s not such a big deal, because most of us have questioned how we want to represent ourselves in the world, so that who you are matches how you live. Some people end up hiding. But it’s never too late to come out as who you truly are .. who you truly can be.

Living a conscious life usually means just that ..  making conscious and sometimes difficult choices and changes .. not constantly, but certainly more than once in your life. That’s how you stay alive, because for our life to be alive it has to be a work in progress.

No amount of strategy or expertise will help if you’re still putting roadblocks in your own way. No amount of hedging and dodging will make up for seizing the opportunity to live (in the words of Mary Oliver) “ .. your one precious, wild life?”

CONGRUITY

Here’s the first of five qualities that’s essential for bringing out and nourishing this spirit of living. Because the question is always –  How is it possible to embody your truth when life tests you, pushes you to forgetfulness and compromise?

Life coaching itzhak-perlman

So ingredient number one is congruity. Congruity means that two things reflect each other—the inside and the outside, who you are and how you show up, your walk and your talk. If those things don’t match it will wear away at you, costing you time, energy, pain and frustration. Being congruent is an action, an activity, checking in with yourself, so that you remain true to who you are.

Congruity is also feeling and knowing that you’re on track. It’s like being in rapport with yourself. Not creating roadblocks, living the life of your own choosing, and loving it

You recognize it when you see it in others, and you recognize some other qualities that usually come with it .. focus, curiosity, adaptability, a willingness to help others .. the ability to see how best to do that.. in ways that are appropriate. So it also entails having healthy boundaries.

There’s a well-known story about the virtuoso violinist Itzhac Perlman breaking a string in the middle of a symphonic concert and rather than stopping and changing the string he just went on playing and improvised the fingering necessary to play the piece on three strings. He pulled it off brilliantly. The question is whether he knew he could, or simply trusted that he would find the way? So often we may imagine we must know ahead of time, when in fact your strategies are most useful once you know you can. This is more than simple faith, it’s a degree of congruity that lets you trust absolutely the life you’re living, even though you have no idea what’s going to happen next.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Life coaching tools and resources from Five Changes

Life coaching tools and resources, change, trust life, congruity, Life coaching tools, Spiritual congruity, Mediation, MLP, spiritual practice, Neuro linguistic programming, Hypnosis, personal development, unconscious mind.

meta_states

Using Meta-States: Change Grief, Anger, and Fear

/ , , / , , , , , , /

Using Meta-States: Change Grief, Anger, and Fear

Down with rain up with flowers!

meta_statesIn an earlier blog I mentioned meta-states. In this piece I want to give you some pointers as to HOW you can actually use meta-states as a process. First I want to clear up some confusion. Meta-states have nothing to do with the word ‘Metta’ from the Pali language. The word meta, with one ‘t’, comes from the Greek, and means: above, beyond, the big picture. Metta, with two ‘t’s, refers to the meditative cultivation of unconditional love.

Actually, the Meta-State Process may have more to do with Metta—unconditional love—than is apparent at first; though the two words have no direct connection to each other. But I’ll leave you to decide that for yourself.

The ‘Meta-State’ process I want to tell you about here comes from our NLP training program. It is a way to help you to redirect your focus away from un-resourceful, unresolved emotions, towards positive emotions: and then to combine the two to develop a more fully proactive ongoing positive emotional and energetic resource. It is key for your own, or for your clients’ ongoing journey towards integration and emotional and spiritual wellbeing; if that journey is to be more than a quest for Band-Aids and quick fixes.

The activities involved in thinking and feeling are dynamic and nonlinear. Everyone has multiple ways of doing them. Thinking and feeling are interconnected, not always predictable, and infinitely more complex than we usually realize. The meanings we give to things (thinking), and emotional states (feelings) make up a system .. which you experience as yourself, as ‘I’. In going through this meta-state process I encourage you to create your own categories and distinctions. Use the methods, as you understand them from what I will describe; and then adapt them to suit what you intuit will work best for you. It will enable you to begin loosen up that rigid construct of ‘I’, and give you some more options towards becoming, ultimately, a master of your emotional states.

The Meta-State Process

Not so long ago I visited my elderly father in the nursing home where he now lives. I was feeling such intense grief that for a while I felt like I was drowning in it. I stopped for a moment to check in with myself. Then I made a choice to create a meta-state sequence. First I needed to find a quiet place, and take a little time to engage in some very specific self-observation. I began by looking for more than the experience of the emotion. I checked in with myself—body, thoughts, as well as my emotional states. We often imagine that by giving a word to an emotion that it is just one thing. But when you allow yourself to be completely present to it, you experience it as a system. So I checked in with multiple shades and nuances of the emotions I was feeling, as they revealed themselves to me, through the process of my observation. I could then begin to experience my grief more fully. Gradually I could take it to a higher-level state of joy, gratitude, and love.

Through the presence of an intense feeling of grief, I was able to shift, in a few steps, to a sense of peaceful inner calm. By asking, “What can I learn here? What is this grief telling me? What is the highest purpose for this emotion?” I uncovered compassion, nostalgia, love, and determination. In turn this allowed me to experience an ongoing and active acceptance of the situation, which then brought me back to the joy I used to feel in a more direct way when I was with my father years before. Then I expanded this joy in a specific way in order to create an anchor. The joy now spontaneously erupts whenever that grief is triggered again, creating a new, complex, and a more effectively positive emotion than the joy alone.

This meta-state process is not an analytic process, nor does it rely entirely on moving through a sequence of random emotions. It is not substituting one emotion for another; nor is it covering an emotion, or numbing yourself to it. It is similar to some meditation practices like Vipassana, but it involves more active engagement than is usually taught. It also requires that you trust your intuition. It is much more closely related to Psycho-magic than to either cognitive therapy or meditation. It works best when you have someone to guide you through it—at least initially. But you can certainly use the information here to great effect.

This process is strongly rooted in a deep trust in the human energetic and emotional experience. Imagine that every emotion is there for you as a gift, a healer, and a guide.

Meta-States on Your Own

If you have no-one to guide you, simply sit with the emotional state you want to shift and begin asking, “What can I learn here?” and “What is the higher level purpose of this?” The questions immediately change your relationship to the negative emotion. They move it to a meta-level, so that you can create a meta-relationship between the two states, negative and positive; and then move yourself to a meta-experience that is entirely above and beyond either of those emotional states as you would experience them on their own! The whole is more than the sum of the parts.

The essence of all NLP work is to effect rapid, positive, permanent change. The meta-states process produces new emotional experience that makes it impossible to engage in negative emotions in the old way. Naturally it is better experienced than described. This is one small piece of the work we use to empower our clients to live a creative, impactful, spiritually rich life. It is also part of the curriculum we teach in the Five Changes NLP training and Certification that we now teach.

Down with Rain, Up with Flowers!
Before my father entered life in a nursing home, one of the ways he used to express humor and beauty in his often difficult life was to write poetry and paint. Down With Rain Up With Flowers was a cycle of poems he wrote about the resilience of the creative force. What seems to dampen the spirit can actually regenerate it.

Using Meta-States: Change Grief, Anger, and Fear. Change Grief, Anger, and Fear, How you can actually use meta states, The Meta-State Process, meta-state sequence, Meta-States on Your Own, Mediation, NLP, spiritual practice, Neuro lingusitic   programming, Hypnosis, personal development, unconscious mind.