The NLP Life Change Pattern of the Month

June 2007

Heartistic Transformation!

by Bill Thomason

How is it possible for people to change? HEARTISTIC TRANSFORMATION

This question has driven a large part of my work and thought over the years. It is certainly a central theme of human potential inquiry. Perhaps you know someone who suddenly started to live a very different kind of life than they had before; someone who had experienced a "profound life change."

As NLP pioneer and developer Wyatt Woodsmall points out, Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) developed from a technology called Behavioral Modeling. Children learn from 'modeling" the behaviors of others, especially parents and other primary caregivers. The co-founders of NLP, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, sought out the most successful people from various fields to model their behavior. They wanted to discover the structure of "expertise;" how people do what they do well.

Richard Bandler was a computer information student. John Grinder was a professor of Linguistics. Since they were both interested in Gestalt Therapy, the first experts they modeled were therapists. Richard and John started to systematically elicit and then "model" or "copy" the behavior of these experts. Although there are some exceptions, it was said that if anyone can create any achievement in life, and if you can get enough "quality information" about how they do it, you can reproduce the same results.

So, what are the common elements among people who have experienced "profound personal change?" It seems that profound personal change is typically preceded by some traumatic event. Sometimes it is a near death experience, like an auto accident, or a doctor telling you, "Get your affairs in order; you have 3-6 months to live." It may be that someone you know went to church on a Sunday and, while in a deep emotional state, decided to re-dedicate his or her life. From that moment on, that person lived differently.

Everyone knows someone who has had a "profound life change" experience? But how can we "model" or reproduce profound change in our own lives? And, can it be done without the trauma? It is thought that by age 4 or 5, most people have almost all their deep-level, core programming in place. This deep programming operates at an other-than-conscious level and it drives a person's behavior for the rest of his or her life.

When we ask experts how they do what they do, they most often say, "I don't know how I do it, I just do it." However, when information is elicited effectively by a practitioner of NLP, we find that the person does know at some level. People who have had a profound life change experience report they were in a state of "deep emotion" at the time of the change. Deep emotion is one of the key ingredients of how new core decisions get in place. Core level decisions are expressed with specific language, in specific ways, including body language and gestures. People are expressing their core programming all the time in everything that they do and say.

The basic premise of The Core Decisional Repatterning© process is that our programming is created by the decisions we make. The deepest levels of our programming are formed at a very early age. Some of this programming is formed before we are even old enough to speak. Some programming is resourceful and life empowering while some is limiting in nature. Perhaps you have noticed that most people would like to change something about themselves. Some changes people tend to make easily and some changes are very difficult depending on how deeply the original decision is embedded in a person's decisional network.

A Time When…You felt Totally Loved !

Core Decisional Repatterning is a process designed to facilitate an individual in "heartistic transformation" by first, releasing old pain, hurt, anxiety, anger, limiting decisions, and other unwanted programming. Secondly, it involves healing your life and your world with "total love," and then installing empowering new success patterns. It is about loving and embracing every part of your life. Core Decisional Repatterning© is a process that, once you have begun, can now continue indefinitely.

This process is a synthesis of several models, including Redecision Therapy (a 9-Step technology for core level change), NLP techniques, TimeLine Therapy, Hawaiian Huna, Dream-Body Work, and The Sedona Method.

Contact Bill Thomason at knowtime@nlpskills.com

May 2007

Discharge Stored Pain and Negative Emotion

This article contains a process that is designed for people who have a lot of stored negative emotion. From a hypnotic point of view, physical pain is equivalent or at least similar to emotional pain. More than just a metaphor, I teach the following process as a tool for clients to practice at home to teach them to release old unwanted pain and negative emotion. In my Core Decisional Repatterning(c) work, and sometimes with other NLP patterns, I find people who have so much stored pain and emotion that it is difficult to get them to focus on the work at hand. In setting up the process, I may take a client through a parts negotiation (like in a 6-step reframe) if I detect any resistance to the process.

The idea is that in our western culture, people tend to stuff emotion instead of expressing it fully. As a metaphor, the emotional body generalizes to the physical body.  In a healthy system, you take in food. Your body separates the waste and you utilize the energy. This is called homeostasis.  Anything not used up in this process becomes toxic and may lead to physical dis-ease.  The same would be true of the emotional body.  When we are exposed to an experience, there is a bio-chemical response.  In the healthy system, we release or discharge any negative emotion from that experience, producing an 'emotional homeostasis.'  If there is unresolved emotional residue, you might here people say they 'stuffed the emotion.' One might call that, 'emotional constipation.' In a healthy situation, the emotion if fully discharged or transformed to a higher vibration.

The process below is designed to be ONE way (hopefully of many) that a person can learn to release negative emotion.  Finding one way, and practicing a few times, can cause the process to generalize to lots of other ways of releasing emotion that might have been stored over a lifetime.  Tad James and others refer to SEE, Significant Emotional Experience as way to explain the 'Gestalt' of an emotional chain going back in time to an earliest time an individual remembers an emotionally charged experience.  The problem is we often respond to present events as if they were connected to all the other negatively charged events going back in time. The response, then, is often out of proportion to the issue in present time.

Here's the process:

Release Pain and Stuffed Emotion

Find a comfortable place to sit as in a recliner or chair. Turn the lights down low and relax, focusing on your breathing, at least 3 long slow deep breaths and then begin to notice where there is pain in your body. (It has been suggested that there is pain/discomfort somewhere in the body at any time.) As you do notice pain in your toes(slowly pace through each part of the body), feet, balls of your feet, top of your feet, ankles, calves, etc, allow that pain to begin to move up your legs, through your calves and lower leg, into your knees. Allow the sensation of pain to come up into and through your lower legs. If the pain in your body had a color, what color would that be?

Continue to let the pain move up and through your body. All the pain, everywhere in your body moving upward through your hips, abdomen, organ, lower back, middle back, and notice your breathing as the pain continues to move up through your upper back, and your neck. Notice that as you shift your breathing, swallow, and any movement, involuntary movements in your jaw. Notice now that you can control the pain/the emotion. The pain is your emotion and it is moving up into your head. Notice any change in color as your allow the pain from your entire body to center in your head. Notice the color as it comes into your head and then allow that pain, that emotion, that color, to become a sound. Let that sound grow and grow until it wants to get out. Make the sound that is the pain, emotion, color in your head. Make that sound. If it is a scream, scream. If it is crying, let the tears come. If the sound it a kind of breath or a hiss, or a clicking, make the sound. Whatever the sound, make it. Make the sound more and do it again. Do it again, louder and more intense. Keep making the sound. Make the sound more, louder. Keep making the sound until you can not make it anymore. When you think you are done, make yourself do it more, let it come, more and more, until you cannot do it any more.

Now, breath and notice what is in the place of that sound, that pain and emotion. 'Imagine that 'joy' is what the universe is made of and you have created a vacuum that pulls the joy, the relief into you. Allow yourself to feel the difference. Let yourself feel the joy that has taken the place of the pain and negative emotion that were there before knowing that as you have verbalized your pain and negative emotion, you have released it forever. Let it go and feel the joy.

Do this process daily or more that once per day, until... If you think you have released it all in one sitting, do it again, until..

September 2006

DECISION DESTROYER

Use this pattern to change limiting decisions.  Poor decisions begin to run your life.  This creates a ‘meta-state.’  You are responding to limiting programming of the unresourceful decision and no longer to the present reality.  Limiting decisions go into programming become part of our mental map or who we are.  They also provide what we will do in various situations.  The problem is that even decisions that served you in past may have outgrown their usefulness and become outdated.  This is the simple version. 

1. Identify an ongoing limiting decision.  This could be a traumatic event. 

·       Elicit it fully.  When was it formed?  How long have you lived with it?

·       Fully associate to references underneath the belief.  What are the supporting events (references) that enhance the belief.

2. Go at least 15 minutes before the limiting decision event (trauma). 

• Ask yourself; "What experience could I have had then that would have prepared me for what was going to happen?" 

• And ask, "What was I deciding in this moment? (before the event when the decision was made)

• Go back before that at least 15 minutes...and before that, asking the question at each point, "What was I deciding in this moment?" until you get to a point in the past before the decision was going to be made.

• Notice the freedom you now have before the decision was ever even made yet.  Notice the possibilities that are now present in this moment before the limiting decision.

5. Come back through time to the present.  Come back from that past evaluating all those experiences in the light of the new resources and new choices that you have made.  Come all the back to the present allowing the changes to occur until you are all the way back to the present having made those changes fully and completely integrating them into your life

6. Consider the present situation.  Notice what choices have now become available and all the options you have now that you did not have way back then.

6. As you consider your new choices.  Ask yourself and get an answer to the question:  “What is it in the future I will feel now to allow me to be comfortable with my new decision(s) that I have made.

7.  Future Pace.  Imagine yourself in the future in a specific moment when these new choices are operating and you have new behavior operating easily and naturally. 

December 2005

Creating Unlimited Ability

Bill Thomason

Your NLP Success Coach

and Certified NLP Trainer

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