Understanding Family Constellations:  Constellation Training Course

Begins June 24, 2011
Three (three-day weekends)
June 24-26, July 22-24, August 19-21
See Calendar for dates.

Through the course of many constellations, instructions and lecture on the orders governing love in families, all participants will experience a greater sense of their proper place in their families and a fuller appreciation of what it means to be human.

• A way to work with your, or your client’s, largest objections to happiness
• A clearer understanding of the systemic dynamics affecting you and the people you work with
• A sense of your proper place in your family and the groups you belong to
• A way of aligning the resources in your family, or your client’s, so the system can be supportive.

If you are interested in the “facilitating” aspect of this class, we suggest you register early as those spaces are limited.

• Removing limitations and attachment to suffering
• Opening doorways to possibilities and happiness
• Letting people be who they are without making them wrong for it
• Inspiration and excitement about the future
• Allowing the imagination to work for us, rather than against us, in the most glorious ways possible

We are always happy to answer your individual questions. For further information or to discuss how this constellation training might assist you in your unique circumstances, and to determine if this is the right course for you. We look forward to talking with you! please call:  (415) 499-0639 or email: Shannon@nlpmarin.com

Register here online!

by Carl Buchheit
first published in Open Exchange magazine (1995)

In the twenty years or so since its inception, NLP has acquired a variety of reputations. Few who have encountered the power of Neuro-Linguistic Programming have remained neutral. At the extremes, NLP has been hailed as the ultimate fast fix and a panacea for personal growth. Alternately, it has been derided for being “techniquey,” gimmicky, manipulative, and mechanical. The truth is, NLP is neither the cure-all nor the cold, cerebral event that some of its most ardent—and often less informed—promoters and detractors claim.

A Brief History

Neuro-Linguistic Programming was developed in the early-to-middle 1970s by John Grinder, a linguist, and Richard Bandler, an information scientist. Like many others, they had observed that people with similar education, training, background, and years of experience were achieving widely varying results ranging from wonderful to mediocre.

Bandler and Grinder were intrigued by these differences. They wanted to know how effective people perform and accomplish things. They were especially interested in the possibility of being able to duplicate the behavior, and therefore the competence, of these highly effective individuals. In short, they set out to “model” human excellence in such fields as education, business and therapy. What emerged from their work came to be called Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

While the name is awkward—and some object to the word “programming”—it is nonetheless descriptive. Neuro refers to the brain and neural pathways of the human organism. Linguistic is about the content (verbal and nonverbal) that moves across and through these pathways. Programming is the way the content is directed, sequenced, and connected by each of us to produce the thinking patterns and behaviors that are our experience of life. As educator and writer Sid Jacobson puts it, “There is a relationship between perceptions, thinking, and behavior that is neurolinguistic in nature. The relationship is operating all the time, no matter what we are doing, and it can be studied by exploring our internal or subjective experience.”

Maps of Reality

It has long been recognized that human experience is based on internal reality maps. The structure and content of the latter determines the former. Our inner maps of reality comprise most of what we deal with as human beings. These inner maps determine what is real and unreal, achievable and not achievable, believable and not believable, for each of us. Understand another’s map, and you can understand (and share) their experience of themselves and the world. Change the map, and you change them and their world.

Study of the structure of experience led Bandler and Grinder to notice external signals and cues that were the keys to understanding the “how” of certain kinds of thought processes and behavior. They were able to assemble their understanding of these cues and signals into a system that allowed its user to know how another human being creates his or her experience—how they organize and maintain their unique internal map of reality that corresponds to and organizes their experience of the external world.

A variety of creative and brilliant people were quickly attracted to Bandler and Grinder’s unique work and discoveries. They helped to expand the NLP models and organize them into a vast and rich set of tools, skills, and information—a process which continues today.

Information Processing, Communication, and Sensory Experience

In NLP, we first distinguish between inner and outer sensory experience. We are all familiar with external sensory experience—the continual flow of sights, sounds, feelings, smells and tastes that make up our experience of the outer world. Our inner experience, our thoughts, emotions, responses, ideas, etc., are also comprised of information in these same five sensory systems.

Even words are multisensory events, although most of this sensory experience is deleted from conscious awareness. For example, if I write the word “walnut” on this page, you must internally access some combination of inner pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells if you are to understand it. Your experience of “walnut” is unique and is comprised of your own internal sequencing and combining of distinct inner sensory events. In other words, thinking is a sensory event. Thoughts are composed of inner pictures, sounds (including words), body sensations, tastes and smells.

Most of our communication with each other, and almost all of our inner sensory representations, operate (for good or ill) outside our conscious awareness. These inner representations—what they are and the order in which they occur—combine to make up our individual reality map. And this map determines what is and is not possible in our world and our lives. Again, understand the structure and process of someone’s map, and you can better understand that person’s experience of life. Change the organization of the map, and you change the life experience.

Above all else, NLP is about understanding and gaining access to human experience at the structural or process level—in addition to the level of content. Put another way, NLP is a set of models and methods—highly learnable, reliable, and effective—for understanding how human beings create and maintain their experience of themselves and the world around them. NLP enables us to know how we, and others, create our unique maps of reality. It enables us to understand our own and others’ processes of decision-making, communication, motivation, and learning.

Understanding our own map of reality enables us to make changes that lead to the life experiences we want. Understanding and having access to another’s map of reality makes it much easier to step off our own map and respectfully step onto the other’s. When this happens, the result is an experience of deep connection that is often experienced as a precious gift.

An “Operator’s Manual” for Human Relationship

NLP’s contribution, then, is to increasing the depth and effectiveness of our relationships—beginning with self and extending through personal and intimate relationships to our professional and work lives and, finally, to the therapeutic arena of working with others to bring about healing, change, and growth. NLP provides the tools that enable this rich connection with self and others to happen.

Chances are you have already encountered NLP, in one form or another, without its being identified and without your realizing it. NLP is so useful for the whole experience of being human that many of its original tools and distinctions have already integrated into education, training, business, and therapy—becoming part of the “common sense” wisdom of our society.

Experiencing the Structure of Experience

The whole issue of the “structure of experience” or the “process of experience” as used in Neuro-Linguistic Programming can be difficult and deadly dull to communicate with words, but easy to demonstrate with experience. To explore further, please see [Exercises].

by Bob Hoffmeyer
first published in Marin Scope newspapers (2003)

In any life situation or activity, success requires competence in the talents and abilities unique to that situation. In every life situation or activity, success also requires a high level of competence in human relations skills and the ability to access and influence one’s own internal states, beliefs, abilities, and resources.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a model for understanding human behavior. It is a fascinating exploration of how we marvelous creatures be ourselves. With the insights that emerge from participation in NLP courses, two significant things happen. First, we are better able to change ourselves in ways that we want. Our lives become more satisfying. We feel more fulfilled. Second, we are better able to understand, relate to, and work with others. Communication and connection are enhanced and our interactions become more satisfying and beneficial both for ourselves and for others.

As a model concerned with human behavior, NLP provides understanding and perspectives. As it is applied in life, NLP provides relationship skills and tools.

At its core, NLP is about understanding both how we human beings create meaning in life and the behavior we engage in as a result of that created meaning. Broadly stated, NLP’s objective is to increase choices. NLP enables you to access the internal resources that are appropriate and necessary to make the desired choice and have the desired experience. NLP asserts that, within a very broad range, if something one desires as his or her experience is possible for anyone else, it is possible for that person as well. Where there was limitation, there can be new choice and new opportunity. Anywhere! Whatever you are doing! Whomever you are with! Whatever the context!

How the student of Neuro-Linguistic Programming uses their learning varies with the context of each student’s life. Essentially, however, using NLP is about enhancing relationship—starting with your relationship with yourself and extending to all of your personal and professional relationships.

In short, studying Neuro-Linguistic Programming is both a human relations skills course and a program of personal development. Learning new skills and developing oneself go hand in glove, and most often both are required for greater success.

by Bob Hoffmeyer
first published in Marin Scope newspapers (2003)

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) has a wide range of very useful applications in human relations––essentially anywhere that two or more people are interacting with a common objective. This is because, at its core, NLP is about understanding both how we human beings create meaning in life and the behavior we engage in as a result of that created meaning. With this understanding, we are then able to act with greater flexibility and resourcefulness and are able to more elegantly influence others with integrity.

Briefly stated, the professional support you can expect from NLP can be conveyed in four words: connection, understanding, communication, and influence.

NLP begins with the observation that each of us has a unique internal map of reality and that it is this map that we all operate from most of the time; even when interacting with others or the world “out there.” The skill sets in the NLP model enable us to get access to these internal maps, and to understand them. As a result, we are more able to connect with others in deeper ways (appropriate to the context) and to then communicate with them in the language of their map. This makes it easier for us to understand them and they to understand us. Deeper connection and understanding, in turn, affect our ability to influence with integrity toward the end of accomplishing our common objective.

Studying NLP involves learning a wide variety of perceptual and behavioral skills. Perceptual skills have to do with broadening the range of what we notice. Behavioral skills have to do with increasing our flexibility in what we do; how we respond. Beyond these two broad distinctions, there are a variety of ways to group these skills. In the world of business, the following categories are useful.

Nonverbal Communication. For the most part, these are messages coming from outside of conscious awareness and are an essential part of what the person is trying to convey. This skill set involves both noticing and utilizing the nonverbal messages.

Calibration. This involves first noticing physiology (body movements, eye movements, voice variations, etc.) and then relating it to a unique internal state or experience the speaker is having. When combined with the words the speaker is using this assists us to determine congruency in the message being conveyed. This skill also assists us to usefully adjust our responses throughout the interaction.

Rapport. Rapport skills cover a broad range of perceptual and behavioral abilities that enable deep connection with those with whom we are interacting. This connection is with both conscious and (often more importantly) unconscious aspects of the individual. Rapport does not necessarily mean agreement. It is closer to connection or link-up. Without connection, whatever else we do in our interaction with others cannot succeed. The success of any interaction is directly related to the degree of rapport or connection.

Listening. The words that we use have unique meaning to us. Realizing this and working with the words the other uses significantly enhance connection, understanding, and our ability to influence. Discerning the meaning that the word the other uses has for them rather than substituting our word and meaning (in the assumption that we know what they mean) is often critical to avoiding misunderstanding.

Information Gathering. This involves precise utilization of questions which leads to greater clarity and to more quickly getting to useful information and avoiding that which is extraneous or misleading.

Noticing Objections. This is what NLP refers to as “ecology.” It has to do with identifying, in advance, the objections (often unconscious) that will prevent or sabotage accomplishing the ostensibly agreed objective.

Speaking. The NLP communication toolbox contributes to effectiveness in communication because it provides the speaker with the skills and tools to take responsibility for both what is said and for what is heard. Through utilization of the skills listed above, the speaker is able to assume the full responsibility for ensuring that real communication actually takes place. Whether one-on-one or in front of a group, the speaker is able to adjust the way he or she is speaking to ensure that it can easily be taken in and understood by the audience.

All of the skills referred to are interrelated and are used in combination. They are used, first, to become aware of the unique way in which those we are working with take in information, process it, and store it. Second, these skills enable us to adjust our presentation and, therefore, our interaction with the other’s map. As a result, the outcome of the interaction will more closely match the desired outcome, with greater ease and mutual satisfaction.

In the original research that led to the development of the NLP model, highly effective individuals were observed working. While they work in different fields and used different methods, one ability stood out as being that which made the difference between excellence and effectiveness or the lack of it. Highly effective individuals all had the ability to respectfully step onto the map of the people they were working with and do their work from there.

Training in the NLP model is both a human relations skills training and a program of personal development. Learning new skills and developing oneself go hand in glove, and most often both are required for greater success. Following are examples of ways NLP can contribute to professional success:

• Greater ability to understand and respectfully influence others.
• More clearly know where you want to go and how to get there.
• Quickly establish rapport with colleagues and clients and maintain it.
• Resolve conflict and build effective, aligned teams.
• Teach to your students’ best learning style.
• Avoid “losing the deal” because of simple misunderstanding.
• Develop effective people skills.
• More quickly get to the useful information and avoid getting sidetracked.
• Shift your own mental state and stay optimally resourceful in any situation.
• Eliminate internal obstacles to success.
• Acquire the success strategies of others.

by Bob Hoffmeyer
first published in Marin Scope newspapers (2003)

A beam of white light goes out and is received by three people. Through the filter of one it appears red, for another, blue, and for the third, it is dull grey. This is not unlike what happens as we take in our experiences of life. Each new experience we have is filtered through an internal map of reality that is already there. It is what is stored on our map that determines our experience of what happens in life. And, as we shall see, it is our map that enables or limits us as we go forward in life. It is the content of their individual maps that makes something so incredibly easy for one person and so seemingly impossible for another.

We all have an internal map of reality and each of our maps is unique. It’s ours and ours alone. Of course, our map is not totally different from that of others. Our maps overlap to one degree or another—enough, at least, for us to mostly understand, connect with, and relate to each other. But beyond that, our maps are unique.

We each started assembling our map at birth (some say before—but that’s another story we don’t need to go into here) and, over the years, we have added to them. Everything that has ever happened to us, everything we’ve ever decided to be true, and every belief we’ve ever formed is somewhere on our internal map of reality. Our maps contain our beliefs about ourselves—about our capabilities, our deservingness, and how we fit in the world. They contain our attitudes, perspectives, expectations, and general orientation toward life. Some of what is on our internal map of reality we are consciously aware of, but most of it we are not. And, like the highways and byways of a road map, everything that is on our map is somehow connected to everything else. Unlike a passive road map, however, our inner maps of reality are very active. They determine the meaning we make out of life. In fact, they determine our experience of life. Each new experience and new meaning made then gets added to the map; reinforcing, modifying, and adding to what was already there and making the whole thing ever more complex.

Our maps are pretty much automated. New input gets taken in, evaluated, interpreted, and assigned its place as best our internal mapmaker can accomplish those tasks. It’s a tough gig, given that everything new has to fit in with everything that is already there. Sometimes things get misplaced or incorrectly coded. Sometimes the new can’t be integrated and it gets rejected, like a compliment that bounces off because it doesn’t jibe with the view we already have of ourselves.

It’s a good thing that our maps are automated. We all receive far too much input, and need to do far too much internal processing, every moment of our lives to be able to handle all of it on manual. So, most of the time automation is good. It’s good, even great, that all those things we do and like, and all the experiences we attract that work for us, come so easily and unthinkingly—so automatically.

Unfortunately, our maps contain mistakes and they don’t always get appropriately updated. And that’s where problems can come in. Mistaken or outdated or not, our maps continue in their automated way to produce our experience of life. One client arrived saying that he wanted to “not be invisible.” He went on to tell story after story about how being invisible showed up in his life—like being the one who wasn’t asked when sandwich orders were taken at the company meeting; or being bumped into while walking down the street; or not being considered for promotion despite an excellent work record; or being cut in front of when standing in line. Over and over when he spoke up, the response was, “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.” These kinds of things happened far too often for them to have been just chance. His map was badly outdated. There was a time when he was a very small boy, that it was good and much safer to be able to become invisible when his drunken, angry dad arrived home. But that was a long time ago. His map needed an update in its equating of safety with invisibility.

While dramatic, that example is illustrative. We all have mistakes and outdatedness on our maps that limit us in life and that prevent us from experiencing all of the happiness, fulfillment, and success that we would like and deserve. Someone once said, “No life is so good that we can’t imagine it being better.” How would you like your life to be better? Think in terms of patterns you’ve noticed in your life, those things about which you wonder, “Why is this always happening to me?” or “Why doesn’t that ever happen to me?” Think in terms of what you want; what you would like to have be different in your experience. Examples include a particular person at work toward whom you respond in a way that you don’t like; some area of your life where you feel stuck; difficulty you are having in a relationship; an automatic response you have in a certain situation that doesn’t serve you; some new undertaking that you have been saying you would like to accomplish but have not been able to (perhaps because of fear, or lack of confidence, or for reasons unknown to you). Then you might ask, “I wonder what’s on my map such that I am having (or, the flip side, not having) this experience? I wonder what new perspective, understanding, attitude, or belief would serve me here?”

Neuro-Linguistic Programming is a model for understanding and working with human behavior. NLP has the ability to get direct access to our internal maps of reality and to shift them, to reassemble the connections, to update them, and to correct the mistaken representations, so that our life experience reflects more of what we want—personally, in our relationships, and on the job. NLP begins by accepting and respecting what is and what has been. NLP honors you, as you are. But NLP also insists that what you desire is possible. If it is possible for anyone else, it is possible for you.

by Carl Buchheit
first published in Open Exchange magazine

NLP is always about having more choices more freely available. At NLP Marin, we regard just about everything that people do that they do not want to be doing as expressions of old, out-of-date safety patterning. How much easier and more satisfying would it be, to be human, if our out-of-date patterning could be updated simply and directly? This capability—direct system updates that keep our internal software current with the reality our lives—is one of the main ingredients of NLP personal change magic.

Some of the most striking and common occurrences of unfortunate, safety-related out-of-datedness are the fear-based safety patterns that we all know as phobias and panic attacks. Both kinds of experience can vary considerable in intensity. Each can be mildly annoying or almost life destroying. Both are definitely unwanted, and both are—in terms of all conventional methods of treatment—extremely difficult to get rid of.

Panic attacks are conventionally viewed as “panic without an object,” and phobias as “panic with an object.” The person suffering a panic attack experiences intense fear, and apparently for no reason. The phobic individual at least is able to know what he or she is afraid of, but often not why. However, even in the case of apparently unmotivated panic, there is never “for no reason.”

Fear and panic reactions are always straightforward, sensible responses to specific stimuli, usually invisible, internal pictures and sounds.

The internal sensory representations (internal pictures, sounds, feelings, smells and tastes) that cause “irrational” fear and panic can do this because of a bug in human wiring. Put very simply, the brain circuits that light up when we process an external picture or sound are essentially the same ones we use to process purely internal (“imaginary”) sounds and pictures, etc. As a result, if we are being chased by a real bear, or if we are merely imagining such a chase, parts of our brain dedicated to issues of basic survival cannot tell the difference; they produce the same fear, the very same panic, the very same fight/flight physiological consequences (breathing changes, skin color and temperature changes, etc.). The problem is that we are not aware of what we are seeing internally. Although we are programmed to generate our own internal lions and tigers and bears, we are also programmed to not notice that we are doing this. The result, unavoidably, is fear and panic “for no reason.”

But, again, there is a reason; there is always a reason. There is always an answer to the question, “How are you making yourself afraid?”

Most conventional approaches attempt to correct things by changing attitudes, so that the phobic or panicked individual is more able to cope, and/or by helping to gradually desensitize the person, so that, over a rather long period of time, and after much exposure to the things that are so fearful, they really don’t mind much any more.

These methods have become part of the conventional therapeutic repertoire because they often do some good. However, they have a severe limitation: they treat the symptoms, and leave the source of the unwanted experience intact. NLP goes after the source of the fear in the brain’s processing, directly, with the result that the brain no longer generates the unwanted experience, because it has been re-patterned. Using the NLP toolbox is like plugging a keyboard into the brain. It gives us access to programmed neural instructions that the brain uses to create fear. It allows us to directly restructure, re-sequence, and generally revise the unwanted patterning that generates unwanted experience and behavior.

The NLP toolbox gives us an unequaled way to observe, capture, decode and understand how (not just why) human beings create and maintain their experience. When we can understand how someone generates a glorious capability, for example, or how he or she generates disabling fear and panic, then we can work directly to increase the former and eliminate the latter. The key word here is “eliminate,” not adjust to, adapt to, or cope with, but eliminate the patterning that produces the unwanted anxiety and fear.

Using NLP, the question, “What lets you know to be afraid?” is not useless; it is essential and straightforwardly helpful. It is essential because, through the body, other-than-conscious aspects of the personality always fully answer this question. It is helpful because, through these externally visible movements and changes that correspond to the internal fear sources, the body directs the healing practitioner to locate and reorganize the specific past experience that is causing fear in the present. Again, the client will usually have no idea what this past material is, but body physiology always provides the needed information. In fact, the answers come flooding out.

Once the old pictures and soundtracks that are causing the fear are identified, the next steps in fixing the phobia or eliminating the panic involve scrambling the signals that the brain has been using to produce the unwanted fear. This is done directly, by having the client change the look and sequence of the internal pictures. This is an astonishingly simple thing to do and it has the good effect of interrupting the brain’s ability to produce fear.

In situations where a phobia has generalized severely, or in which the loss of free choice has deeply affected the afflicted person’s identity, their definition of themselves, it is often necessary to do more than simply re-pattern the sensory sequence (the pictures and/or soundtrack) that caused the fear. This presents us with different, additional opportunities for transformational NLP magic, but that is another exploration altogether.

by Carla Camou and Bob Hoffmeyer
first published in Open Exchange magazine (2001)

How did you do with all those New Year’s resolutions of years gone by? If you are like most people, most of them got left behind around the end of January. Many became no more than a nagging memory until the next New Year rolled around.

If this sounds even a little like you, read on. You’re not wrong, you’re not alone—and you’re certainly not bad.

Resolutions are an interesting process that we put ourselves through. We use special dates to mark times for making major changes in our lives. We start into them with the best of intentions and the greatest hope and it’s exhilarating the first few days or weeks when we manage to stick to the change. But then something happens—all at once or little by little—intention wanes and hope fades.

It’s not unusual, not even unexpected. We’ve done it before. The sad part about it all is what we do to ourselves after the resolution is broken. We make some sort of a judgment about how weak or undisciplined we are. We get down on ourselves, we get discouraged and, worst of all, we lose a little faith in ourselves.

Most resolutions are hard to keep not because we lack self-discipline, not because we are weak, and certainly not because we are inherently bad. Most of the time, what makes resolutions hard to keep is how we make them.

A resolution is a decision to change our behavior, to do something different. Resolutions are generally made because we don’t like something about ourselves—we want to be different or have a different experience of life in some way. The part of us that doesn’t like something and wants to change makes the resolution. The key here is that the part that is responsible for the way we are (indeed, finds value in it) is never consulted. Most often, if that part of us is acknowledged at all, it is blamed, made wrong, and told to get lost. The result is internal conflict.

When there is internal conflict, we have set ourselves against ourselves and, as a result, we have no way to really win. Even if we manage to keep the resolution, the aspect of us that has other ideas still loses and the internal conflict begins to escalate. Eventually, the battle to keep the resolution will wear us down. We won’t feel as good inside as we’d hoped we would. It’s about here that we give up.

So, the trick is getting to a solution that doesn’t create an internal battle. Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) provides excellent tools for assisting with this process.

Present and future oriented, NLP starts with very positive assumptions about human beings and the behavior they engage in. For example, NLP assumes that people naturally make the best choice available from those they believe to be possible. Given a better choice, people will use it—automatically. Starting from these assumptions, the NLP model has developed into a very rich collection of perceptual and behavioral skills and tools for understanding and changing human behavior. Over the years, it has demonstrated an amazing ability to assist people to make the changes they want and have them last. Some call it magical.

True “re-solution” comes when you get to know yourself well enough that you see how every aspect of you is doing its best to work in your favor. It is when you come to respect all aspects of yourself that lasting change is possible and effortless. When all of you is respected, included, and engaged in contributing to what you truly want, the internal battles and self-sabotaging behavior melt away. Life begins to look more the way you want it to look. You begin to feel whole again—and isn’t that really at the heart of any resolution you make?

by Julie Clayton, who is an NLP Marin Master Practitioner graduate and freelance editor and writer. She lives in Portland, Oregon: www.sacredwriting.com

By now most of us have at least had an introduction to the operating principles of the “law of attraction.” Essentially, the premise of this “law” is that there are only two kinds of information in this universe: energy and matter. If something is not one, it is the other, and each influences the other. At a personal level, the most useful aspect of this premise relates to the quality of our life experience: our thoughts are energy and as such, they influence our matter, a.k.a. our reality or experience. If we want another experience, a better experience, then all we need to do is change our thoughts and we will attract a different matter/experience. In theory, this sounds fine, however it occurs to me that asking someone to change their thoughts can be like asking them to shift into third gear when they’ve never driven a stick shift.

At NLP Marin, we work with the change model known as neuro-linguistic programming, and the process generally begins with some basic questions. As expected, the first question asked is, “What do you want?’ or, “What is it that you would like?” If the client were to reply, “I want to change my thoughts,” we would then work with the client to “chunk down” this desire. In other words, we work with the client to articulate their want as a manageable size—not to change their wish, but to put it into a relevant context so that we can introduce more immediate resources toward achieving their want.

So, how does one “chunk down” thoughts? It’s really quite simple, however, first we have to understand that our thoughts are a conglomerate of the senses. We humans experience the world primarily through images, sounds and feelings, or in NLP terminology, the V’s, A’s, and K’s (visual, auditory and kinesthetic senses). Our conscious mind works primarily with language, however it is our unconscious mind that communicates in images, symbols and feelings. In addition, the unconscious mind takes things literally and does not process negatives. It also is primarily concerned with our health and well being—our survival. The conscious mind is what makes meaning from these images and symbols, and gives expression to that meaning through language and behavior.

As an example, if I were wanting to control my eating binges I might say to myself, “I don’t want to be a pig, so I’ll just eat half of that cake.” Unfortunately, the unconscious mind will quite happily make a picture of self as pig, eating cake.” Period. If I am unhappy in my work and I continually say to myself, “ This is such a pain in the neck,” my unconscious mind will very obligingly generate a feeling of pain in my neck. So, the process of understanding the structure of thoughts filters through the ranks of brain hierarchy and culminates in conscious awareness, with thoughts and actions that we broadly term as “experience.”

In order to change our thoughts then, it can be much more amenable to begin by chunking down and changing our words. Naturally, when we change our words, we will also affect our imagery and feelings—and that is the ultimate goal. However, keeping things simple is the key. All that is required is to change our words is imagination. What might happen if I were instead to say to myself, “It’s easy for me to choose foods that support my health?” Imagine that you have the inner resources available right now to choose your words so that they support you in your highest good, and you do!

If you feel that life is constantly a struggle, chances are good that you have an internal dialogue that sounds something like, “Life is hard…no one gets a free lunch…I never get a break…” and so on. Imagine that you can turn those negative words into positive ones and you’ll immediately put some high energy into your life. To begin with, an internal rewrite might sound something like, “ Life’s not easy.” (Remembering that the unconscious doesn’t process negatives, so the unconscious only hears, “Life’s easy.”) Eventually, you can work your way up to, “Life is great!”

The challenge to changing our words lies in our beliefs and identity. Our system has developed some highly effective and useful ways of ensuring that our identity remains stabilized, regardless of how much we say we want something different. Neuro-linguistic programming calls this the “ecology.” In other words, all of the “parts” function together (although sometimes not very harmoniously it seems) to preserve the overall environment.

Practitioners of neuro-linguistic programming are trained in the art of “talking” to the various parts, via the senses, so that more resource and choices are available to the client. And, although there are numerous skills that NLP practitioners use, the art of changing our words in NLP-speak is called “reframing.” Reframing literally wakes up both the conscious and unconscious minds by evoking a different set of V’s, A’s, or K’s.

Try it for yourself. Notice how you feel and what pictures you make when you say to yourself, “I’m sick.” Now try, “I’m not feeling well.” Now try looking up and saying, “I’m feeling better all the time.” It’s a different experience each time, isn’t it? Of course, reframing can be much more sophisticated than that, and one can become quite the word connoisseur. However, why not keep things easy, at least to begin with?

So, the next time you want something different in your life, imagine that it’s already yours. Then say the words and notice the feeling that comes with it. And, like the shampoo bottle directions say: wash, rinse, repeat.

by Julie Clayton, who is an NLP Marin Master Practitioner graduate and freelance editor and writer. She lives in Portland, Oregon: www.sacredwriting.com
First published in Open Exchange magazine (2007)

Have you ever wondered why you have to work so hard to get the things you want, when the things you don’t want in your life seem to occur and recur without any effort at all? Do you know that for many adults, our biggest secret fear is that we will be discovered to be a “fake,” to be less than we present ourselves to be? How is it that we can be so seemingly “successful” in many ways and yet we remain unsettled by feelings of inadequacy or by the events in our life experience that seem flawed?

We carry on wars within ourselves, inner contortions of conflict and fear: things from which we have been running away all our lives, or dreams that we’re always moving toward and never quite achieving. For some, life is an endless stream of personal crises, while for others life is mostly good, except for that occasional feeling that we’re not quite fulfilling our potential, or our embarrassing addiction to daytime soap operas.

But what if those nagging under-achievements or prevailing maelstroms were not a problem? What if what’s “wrong” is actually a positive by-product of an overzealous and outdated system for survival, and could easily be updated? What if we truly have all the resources we need to move from duality to wholeness?

Many of us are exiles from our childhood. In the moment of wounding our very survival is at stake, and how we adapt to survive the experience becomes trapped deep in our unconscious mind—not to traumatize us, but to preserve the learning. Courtesy of the reptilian brain (whose only concern is for creature-level safety and physical survival), our wounding becomes a survivable event, and hence we have no need to avoid future iterations. Our mammalian brain, next up on the brain food chain, adds strong emotions that support our well being. Our reptilian and mammalian systems together code our wounding as not only survivable, but as a prerequisite for survival. They’re just doing their job.

Neurologically speaking, inner conflict occurs when the frontal and pre-frontal human brain, which is a much more sophisticated driver for our experience, desires something that seemingly contradicts our reptilian brain’s functions. (We really do want to have a lasting intimate relationship, even though our four previous marriages lasted only two years each.) Neural patterns of long-term happiness and desire crash in to reptilian patterns of survival. Since survival is the number one impulse for staying alive, the outdated programming invariably reigns. The content of survival is perfect; it is the context that is misplaced or outdated.

Working with some fundamental yet powerful presuppositions, Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) delivers the good news: we are not broken! In fact, by understanding how the system works we can realize that there is a positive intention behind every behavior, no matter how incongruent it appears on the surface. This can be a challenging basis from which to function, especially if you’ve experienced some particularly malicious behavior. However, to continue the hypothetical example, let’s say that your wounding was around intimacy, then those “failed” marriages were actually the system’s best effort at keeping you safe and alive.

Just as importantly, it is useful and respectful to make a distinction between behavior and “self.” When we really get this, we stop judging others and even more so, stop judging ourselves. Sometimes, self-judgement has become inappropriately coded as a substitute for belonging, or other basic survival needs. For example, if a parent was overly critical we may have taken this on for ourselves as way of maintaining our place in the family system.

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) in its “pure” form is an awkward name for an elegant competence model of change that “rewires” the system. Unlike other models for change, NLP is more concerned with the context of our stuck patterns and less concerned with the content. Understanding how we create our experience is more useful than understanding why, because for every behavior, there is a discernable neurological pattern that occurs. We can track this pattern through the senses by “noticing:” where our eyes move, the language we use, our physiology, and our overarching patterns of relating to the world.

This noticing is part of the NLP “toolbox” that one can master as a client or a practitioner. However, the tools are just that—tools. What NLP really does, through updating and communication, is change our relationship to the events in our life. What’s wrong becomes part of a larger map of reality that is subsumed within what’s right. Our experience remains the same, but how we perceive it, the stories we tell ourselves, or the emotional charge, is all available for revision. Once revised, we have more choices, more resources, and more behavioral flexibility. It’s really that simple—and that effortless.

The damn choice between feeling innocent and being happy

by Volker Frank, who is an NLP Marin Master Practitioner graduate. Volker supports organizations with strategic planning, organizational consulting and leadership coaching. Visit him at www.VolkerFrank.com
First published in Open Exchange magazine (2008)

When we think about issues of conscience, we quickly go into the large moral and political questions of our times, like a woman’s right to choose, fighting a good or evil war, economic exploitations, and so on. And yet, our conscience is hard at work every day supporting us with our choices and decisions having our best interest at heart. We know we’ve chosen “right” by the immediate sense of comfort – the signature signal from our conscience. Are we in line for happiness if we follow our conscience, if we are “good” and do the “right” things? Then where do the difficulties and suffering enter the picture? Is it that we are flawed and full of sin?

Our decision-making processes are complex, mysterious and, from a right/wrong perspective, error-prone at best. There are so many conflicting values and beliefs pushing and pulling us that it is often preferable not to think about it too much. Could that contribute to the fact that lasting happiness is so elusive?

What if our conscience is not the moral barometer most of us were taught it is? What if it tells us little about good and bad, right and wrong? What happens when we look at it from the perspective of relationships and our sense of belonging? When a choice intensifies our sense of belonging, we feel good and innocent; when it threatens our sense of belonging, we feel bad and guilty.

The German psychologist, Bert Hellinger, offers us this new perspective. He developed a way to experience first-hand how powerfully our conscience rules our lives and choices together with an appreciation for the mixed results we are getting. His approach, Constellation work, also offers us the felt sense of what it’s like to re-choose for a different experience – a happier one if that’s what we desire. We can see the dynamics of conscience play out in three ways, which are well designed to support the strength of tribes, families and groups of all kinds.

1) Balancing giving and taking

Let’s consider two friends. When one of them helps the other, the helper experiences a sense of comfort and entitlement – signals from the good conscience. The one receiving the support experiences a sense of guilt and obligation. It’s the bad conscience nudging us to restore the balance. Now, many of us know people who love to help and give. They live in the comfort of innocence/giving and manage to avoid the guilty feelings of receiving. Unfortunately, the imbalance creates isolation. The people they treat so well, who are unable to reciprocate, withdraw from the helper after awhile. The helper ends up alone, often with a righteous anger about thanklessness that further supports the sense of innocence and good conscience.

2) Respecting membership

Our conscience tracks that all members of a tribe are fully acknowledged and included. In families, that means that everybody has the same inalienable right to belong. When somebody is excluded, the conscience creates a balancing movement, which compels another person to unknowingly represent and remember the excluded one. Take the example of Eric (name changed), who experienced exclusion and isolation at work. A Constellation revealed for him that he had identified with an uncle who died young. Because of the tremendous grief, the family stopped talking about the dead uncle and he became virtually forgotten (excluded). Out of love and following their conscience, new members of a family will do everything they can to restore the balance. In this case Eric attempted to “re-member” his excluded uncle by unconsciously recreating a similar kind of exclusion in his life. Eric has the comfort of innocence and a good conscience by doing the “right” thing, unaware that he is also accepting the suffering for himself. Knowing about the connection, Eric can consciously include his uncle as part of the family, fully step into his own life, and his rightful place at work.

3) Respecting order

In a tribe, those who come before have precedence over those who come later. When we respect seniority, we experience loyalty and pride, as we often do with teachers and mentors. When we don’t, we experience fear of retribution. This is an important dynamic between parents and children. When a child judges or dismisses a parent, the child, in effect, takes a stance of being “bigger,” which has a weakening effect. In Eric’s example, he interfered with the affairs of his grandparents by wanting to fix the exclusion through creating the same dynamic in his life. However, when he accepts and respects their choices without judgment, his conscious inclusion of his uncle strengthens him.

In our Western culture, we are essentially blind to these tribal dynamics and the ways our conscience guides our behavior and affects our quality of life. Constellations reveal these dynamics, which leads to new choices, away from the old suffering. It turns out that when we re-choose to step more fully into our lives, we often face temporary guilt feelings with the fear of exclusion. If we want to gain strength, personal weight and step into our own happiness, we must give up the comfort of our “good” conscience that comes with a blind sense of belonging and the feeling of innocence. It’s a tough spot, but hardly a choice

by Carl Buchheit, co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
First published in Open Exchange magazine (2006)

All over the universe, or so it seems, human beings are famous for routinely experiencing what they most don’t want to have, and for not being able to experience that which they most really do want. As human beings, all of our most stuck patterns of experience, from the slightly embarrassing ones (I always end up watching more TV than I want), to the ones that are actively life-destroying (I just can’t help disrespecting all the people I’ve tried to be partners with) have their source in our brains’ ongoing efforts to keep us well and safe. For us at NLP Marin, this is the most remarkable and amazing thing about humans: that everything we do that doesn’t work is actually the consequence of our brains’ patterning to make sure that we are all OK—both ourselves and the people we care about. But then, how can it be that something so positively and beautifully intended—our natural patterning to be well and happy—can go so terribly, terribly wrong so much of the time?

One of the really important reasons this is still happening for us humans is that, courtesy of creative evolution, we all have more than one brain, and each of them has a different set of instructions and descriptions about what well-being really is. A simplistic but still decent analogy is the issue of “legacy” hardware and software that plagues the computer world. Computer designers and engineers are forever faced with the job of providing their end-users with better tools (more elegance, reliability and functionality, for example) while still making sure that all of the old software can still work with and through the newer hardware designs.

Mother Nature has had a similar task with us humans: how to add functionality, adaptability, and ease-of-use without disinheriting everything that came before, in terms of our neurobiology. The result is that nature always builds new brain components and functions on top of (literally, on top of) whatever the processes of interactive evolution have already perfected across eons of time. As a result of this rather conservative approach to designing our hardware and inner software, all of us have a least four brains, and each of the four seems to have its own orientation, goals, and success indicators.

Courtesy of the neurophysiologists and their new and amazing brain investigation technologies (scanners of various kinds), we can observe our four different brains at work.

The First Brain

First and oldest is the brain with the most seniority—our Reptile Brain. It is not much changed in function from that of the average garden lizard. It is responsible for the basics of physical survival—heart beat, blood pressure, respiration, etc. (An old neuroscientist joke says that the Reptile Brain is responsible for the “4 F’s”—Feeding, Fighting, Fleeing…..and reproduction.)

The Second Brain

The Old Mammal Brain. A later development that is on top of around the Reptile, our Old Mammal Brain adds in a wonderful capacity to generate strong emotions, and to use these emotions to promote creature-level safety and well being. The additions of greater emotional range give the creature that has them even stronger drivers to move toward or away from conditions and experiences that will affect overall survival.

Note: At NLP Marin, we refer to the First and Second Brains, collectively, as our Critter Brain. It is not human, and it does not operate with truly human criteria. It has no attention to things like happiness, fulfillment, justice, truth or beauty. It works to fulfill the Four F’s, and that’s about it.

The Third Brain

Our third brain is our Primate neurology. It occupies a large part of the top and back of the inside of our heads. The Primate brain is very sophisticated, with a wonderful capacity to understand the realities and rules of community—the so-called primate dominance dynamics. Compared with us humans, however, the Primate brain lacks much inertest in or capacity to make meaning about abstractions, values, and long periods of time. It is the brain of a remarkable ape, but an ape that is not concerned with 20 year plans about anything.

The Fourth Brain—the Human Brain

This is the newest and most human part of us, neurologically speaking—our frontal and pre-frontal lobes. These are the reasons we have foreheads that are vertical instead of slanted. This Fourth Brain, especially their pre-frontal aspects (located immediately on the other side of our foreheads) are where the “I-ness” of us resides. If life damages part of our motor cortex or a speech center, farther back in our heads, then we may have impaired movement or speech, but we are still “us.” Damage to the pre-frontals, however, changes who we are and how we create meaning in the world. Moreover, there are some who say that our pre-frontal lobes are one of our main connections into whatever it is that we are part of in terms of non-physical reality.

All of four brains are operating constantly. They rely on each other and usually coordinate themselves magnificently. There are a few bugs in the interfaces, however, and these bits of bad programming can cause us huge difficulties as humans.

Some of the biggest bugs in our multiple brains

Bug #1

The main driver for the Critter Brain is fear, with the goal of survival, and with no attention to changing anything that has already become associated with this experience of survival. In complete contrast, the main driver for the Human Brain is love, with goals of learning and, basically, nothing but change. Consequence: our Human is always imagining things being different and better, while our Critter simultaneously values it all staying the same, especially if we are not dead yet (see Bug #3, below).

Bug #2

The Critter Brain does not deal in time, at least not in Human time. The Critter does a truly good job of being here now. For the Critter, there is meal time and nap time, but not a life-time. Consequence: the Critter will happily run hugely unproductive or damaging patterning forever. For the Critter, forever is just for-now.

Bug #3

The Critter has only one success indicator it uses to know if it is doing a good job for us. The Critter cannot actually speak, but this one success indicator comes down to a simple question, “Are we dead yet?” If the answer is no, then the Critter gives itself full marks, gold stars, and many thumbs up for doing a great job. The Human who is sort of riding along on top might be in life agony—doing their third failed business or fourth alcoholic marriage, for example, and the Critter will regard this as continuing a high-quality outcome. After all, these difficult or tragic experiences are no trouble for the Critter. It values a heart that beats; it has no attention to whether or not that heart is open or closed in more non-physical terms.

Whether our heart is open or closed, for example, is well above the Critter Brain’s pay grade. It does not know how to make meaning at this level. It can only create associations, and if a “broken heart” becomes associated with not-having-died, then the Critter will value “broken-heartedness” highly, and it will promote and foment the experience throughout the Human’s life. The more the Human tries to change things, the more the Critter operates to set them back to original conditions, to the ones with the most “survival value”—the experiences that we learned to survive and that, unfortunately for us humans, our Critter Brains then associated with continued survival. And because the Critter Brain is the one that generates most emotions, it knows how to create the feelings within us that will allow it get its way. Bug #3 is a serious bug indeed.

About thirty years ago, the founders of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) invented a description for their then newly synthesizing discipline, a new way of understanding and changing human experience. They described NLP as “the study of the structure of human experience and human excellence.” The important word here is “structure.” NLP is a terrifically good toolbox for helping us to understand how we create and maintain our experience as humans. The question that usually gets a session of NLP-based change work rolling is, “What would you like?” NLP change work is designed to locate and revise just exactly those kinds of Critter/Human communication problems that generate almost all of our unwanted experiences, the ones that go in the unwanted-yet-impossible-to-stop-or change category.

And working with the NLP toolbox promotes Critter/Human coordination and harmony. Our goal is to have what we want, based on our most truly human desires and standards, and to do so in actual present time. Neuro-Linguistic Programming can do this superbly well because it speaks English (or another language) to the Human Brain, but it speaks to the Critter Brain in the programming language of creature neurology, which is a language not of words, but of pictures, sounds, feelings, smells, and tastes. It’s like plugging a keyboard into the Critter wiring. When we reprogram or re-pattern the Critter in its own programming language, it accepts updates easily and, if desired, permanently.

In fact, at NLP Marin, we describe NLP as “a toolbox to help our creature neurology to better support our most human and spiritual goals.”

© 2006 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin

- The “Evening with Carl” event series

For our first “Evenings with Carl” event we invited the students and friends of NLP Marin to a insightful presentation on the topic. We are sorry that we could not accommodate all of you who wanted to come. The evening was a great success and we offer you these audio recordings so you can find out what Carl is paying attention to when it comes to the concept of free will. Thank you for all your interest.

Carl Buchheit is the co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
Listen to the first part of the evening (70 min)

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Listen to the second part of the evening (55 min)

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Read the article…

by Carl Buchheit, co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
First published in Open Exchange magazine (2008)

Most of us are mostly inclined to assume that most of our actions and decisions, or at least most of our more private and intimate choices, are the result of some kind of free will process.  Or, if we can no longer convince ourselves of this, we at least want to assume that it is our inner patterning for making meaning and selecting behavioral options that is the source of most of what we decide and do.

One of the main presuppositions of NLP is, “Choice is better than no choice.”  We routinely assert that one of the objectives of good training in NLP is to expand the experience of having more choices on our “maps of reality.”  However, there are many other points of view, some of them quite elegant and compelling, which argue that this “free choice” frame is illusory and counter to the experience of happiness and well-being.

What interests me are some of the alternatives to Bert Hellinger’s immensely convenient concept/creation that we usually call “The Family Soul.”  Within Hellinger’s frame, descendents in families seek to take possession of the pain of ancestors because of motivation that is mainly based in three things: the emotion of love; the desire to assert innocence; and the need to avoid or deny guilt.  At NLP Marin, we have developed some remarkable ways to utilize family constellations, to reveal and revise the beautifully intended but pointless transgenerational suffering that flows naturally from these three primary needs.

Whereas Bert Hellinger’s model of transgenerational suffering involves descendant’s seeking to locate and heal the unresolved pain of ancestors, there is another viewpoint that maintains just the opposite.  This concept is usually summarized as “cellular memory.”  Within this frame of “cellular memory,” the unresolved problems of the ancestors ask the following generations to find solutions.  ‘Souvenir albums’ containing memories of unsurvived trauma and unresolved loss are handed down from one generation to the next for this purpose.  In this way, perhaps, our “creature consciousness” seeks to perfect its relationship with a threatening and dangerous physical universe.  Or, perhaps, the “preconscious collective” of our hominid ancestors demands that it’s future expression – in our time, in our lives – prepare a future paradise or promised land, in which pain, loss and death will threaten no more.

Still another point of view, this one popularized by several noted interpreters of “A Course In Miracles,” maintains that time is a “vast illusion.”  Within this point of view, which is vastly difficult to comprehend adequately, all of our experience – both physical and non-physical, both in time and beyond time – is an entrancing replay of events and choices that were determined at the moment of creation (of the universe).

So, considered in these very broad terms, some of our options seem to be: 1) we voluntarily suffer for our ancestors in an unworkable effort to correct their pain, so that this pain will not be able to reach us in time.  This is the Hellinger description based on the emotion of love.  2) That it is not love, but fear that directs us to recapitulate family suffering–generation upon generation.  Within this frame, DNA has direct control over our choices; it compels present conformity with past family calamity.  3) Everything is predetermined until we wake up from the trance of time and non-time altogether.  (It is important to note that within this frame, the process of dying and the experience of death do not actually help us understand anything more about what’s really going on.  In this frame life is an illusion and death doesn’t help.)

So, do we actually have free will or not?  As practitioners and teachers of NLP, all we can know for sure is that the only really important question is “What would you like?”

© 2008 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin

by Carl Buchheit, co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
First published in 2008

1. That you can get somewhere positive by defeating something negative.

2. That people who take the “path of least resistance” in life are weak.

3. That fighting ourselves shows strength and builds character.

4. That denying and disrespecting our parents is a good idea.

5. That you as an intelligent adult would never, ever mess your life up in order to prevent something really bad from happening to someone else 100 years ago (just to cite a round number).

6. That the past is a failed version of a better future.

7. That now is the only time there is.

8. That your brain is supposed to care about how you feel.

9. That positive change will inevitably lead to more positive change.

10. That our private thoughts and feelings do not affect the experience of other people.

1. That you can get somewhere positive by defeating something negative.

When we act to improve our lives by defeating some aspect of ourselves (for example, “an old, unwanted behavior pattern,” or a recurring issue of “self-sabotage”) who is it, exactly, who wins?

One of the most enduring and unfortunate delusions to come out of the personal growth movement (especially the “monster power growth” version of it) is the idea that we all contain a “strong self” that can be trained to compel the subjugation of our “weak self.” It is completely understandable that almost all of us develop this impression. Human beings have been trying to make meaning out of their internal conflicts, their affinity with the light or dark sides of things, with their distresses related to virtue and guilt, for tens of thousands of years—long before the invention of the personal growth weekend seminar, as far as we know.

The easiest way to allow personal change and growth is to include—not to exclude or defeat—whatever it is that is not working in our lives. We can recognize that unwanted patterns of behavior are simply old solutions that have unwittingly outlasted their usefulness. Actually, when we go beyond this—when we seek to actively respect whatever it is that seems to be causing us the most pain and frustration—the experience of including and changing even long-standing patterns becomes safe, fun, and rewarding. Our old patterns are much more available for easy, comfortable change when we do not fight against them. In fact, when they are respected properly, we find that old, unwanted behaviors usually seek to change themselves. It’s as if they want to catch up with the rest of us, and that makes for a wonderful, and defeat-free, reunion.

2. That people who take the “path of least resistance” in life are weak.

Everything in the Universe is coordinated to move and change along paths of least resistance. Everything—electrons, inter-galactic clouds of hydrogen gas, white mice, and melting ice. There are no exceptions. So, it is curious and weird that, for humans, the words “taking the path of least resistance” are usually tossed out as in insult. Now, we are all getting gradually better about this. One is rarely congratulated about the pointlessness and intensity of one’s struggle any more. Still, who do we think we are, anyway?

3. That fighting ourselves shows strength and builds character.

Some of the saddest words are, “At least I respect myself enough to despise myself.” Proper self-regard is always the most courteous way to be in life and the universe. It invites the best for and from others. Too little self-respect provokes other humans to want to withdraw their care and support. They can’t help but feel this at some level. It is an ancient instinct in our hunter-gatherer DNA, a not-quite-knowing designed to protect the well-being of the whole troupe. The instinct can be overridden, and it often is, but to do this requires some energy and work. Proper self-respect is never costly or inconvenient for anyone. And, it is hardly ever fatal.

4. That denying and disrespecting our parents is a good idea.

Almost all of western psychotherapy seeks, in one way or another, to separate clients from their parents. This movement is in exactly the wrong direction. If we want to know what would come out of the mix if we put our parents into a giant blender and then hit the frappè button, the answer is—we would exist. We are exactly, precisely that combination.

Our broadband connection to the flow of life—the cable sockets themselves, so to speak—happens to be them. Not personally, necessarily, but certainly energetically, the sockets are where they are. We can deny this, but then we have to live on dial-up. When we deny parents, we deny ourselves and cut ourselves off from the sources of strength in life. This never has a good effect. If our parents are dangerous, crazy, or lethally boring, it is probably a good idea to stay away from them physically, but this is not the same as disrespecting them.

5. That you as an intelligent adult would never, ever mess your life up in order to prevent something really bad from happening to someone else 100 years ago (just to cite a round number).

As it turns out, this seems to be exactly what all of us humans value doing more than anything else. We are—all of us—driven to make sure that we experience some version of the tragedies and unresolved losses of the family members who came before us. As long as we experience their pain, or something closely like it, we have hope to provide our families with a better past, which, it follows very [il]logically, will allow us to experience a better present and future for ourselves. This is complicated business, and highly seductive. When our pain now signals us that we are on track toward past and future happiness, we go into a deep, deep trance of secure and loving family salvation. As crazy as this sounds, this is what we do, and are pretty much screwed until we start to catch on. Messing up our own life is never a good way to show respect for anyone.

6. That the past is a failed version of a better future.

The future is not a perfected or improved past. Our experiences as human beings, whatever this involves in the moment, always represent the very best life solutions that our systems have been able to achieve. We all deal with utterly mysterious and painful inherited patterns, which we then combine with the bafflingly elusive meanings and beliefs we invent for ourselves. However huge the resulting mess might seem to be, it is truly the most creative, positive, and loving solution we could find for ourselves (and for everyone else who was involved) at the time that the unwanted patterning became hyper-stabilized and hard to change. Truly, we are all doing the best we can with what we have, and with what we had.

7. That now is the only time there is.

Being present in the present is wonderful and useful. It’s an indispensable art, an essential part of changing our relationship with ourselves and with life itself. However, for humans who live in time/space, the future and past are real too. Properly created, a good future activates our choosing of it, so that it comes into manifestation against a supportive backdrop called the past. There is no substitute for having a good relationship with our future and our past. After all now, we are now our future’s past, are we not?

8. That your brain is supposed to care about how you feel.

Our brain’s main function is to filter out everything that doesn’t fit its own ideas about what fits with its ideas. Consequently, it is always very busy not noticing things. However, the good result of this is that it provides us with a stable, more-or-less predictable world in which to live.

To make the experience of being human even more fun, the older, most reliable parts of our brains—our creature brains, which don’t even know that they are parts of human beings—have only one important success indicator, one way to tell if they are doing a good job. This part of the brain doesn’t think, analyze, create, synthesize or talk. It is simply there to establish and maintain associations between this and that. It doesn’t care what this and that are, as long as the associations are intact. Thus, it does not care about the content of our human experience; it only cares that that content (the associations between this and that) do not change. Consequently, its most important success indicator is the answer to the question, “Are we dead yet?” If the answer is no, it knows to keep on with whatever it has been doing. If this happens to involve our being miserable in life, at the human level, that is not its problem, nor even its concern.

Our brain is not supposed to care how we feel. We are supposed to care how we feel.

9. That positive change will inevitably lead to more positive change.

Most really wonderful, positive change can eventually lead to feeling bad again. There are some beautiful ways of working with this unfortunate aspect of being human, so that it is not actually always true good change leads to feeling bad. However, for most of us, learning to allow wonderful change to stay positive takes a little practice. This is what we call “the ecology of personal growth.” It is quite an art form, and an extremely valuable thing to learn.

10. That our private thoughts and feelings do not affect the experience of other people.

Everything we think and feel affects all the space, all the time. We really do have this kind of huge effect. Having power like this is never a bad thing. Learning to recognize and use this power is a many lifetimes’ respectfully creative journey. Overall, this is pretty good news.

© 2008 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin

by Carl Buchheit, co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
First published in 2008

Part the First

Marin-style NLP has always been something that is difficult to characterize, especially when it comes to explaining how it is different. It has much in common with conventional NLP, yet it is tremendously not-like-that at the same time. So, from time to time I would like to share a little with you about where our forms of this wonderful work come from.

Their foundation is solidly in the amazing work of John Grinder and Richard Bandler in the 1970s. After all, even one of our Holographic NLP-level presuppositions is: “No matter how cosmic it gets, it’s still all V’s, A’s and K’s.” We never get too far away from this awareness, and when we do we return to it pretty quickly.

Although it is based in the NLP of the 1970s (what Robert Dilts calls “1st generation NLP), Marin NLP is not about techniques and procedures for techniques. Marin NLP is greatly filtered through my (Carl’s) experience of Dr. Jonathan Rice. Jonathan was my main teacher. He was the only one of Richard and John’s early students to be a credentialed therapist and Ph.D. psychologist. Jonathan added 1970s NLP into the work he was already doing with his clients in his practice in Carmel, just down the road from Santa Cruz. He studied with and stayed around John and Richard not because of their great charm, but because he watched them get results with people that were beyond what he knew how to do. However, Jonathan did not throw away his training and experience as a psychologist.

“Jonathan-style NLP” is heavy on attention to hypnotic language, elegant use of the outcome frame, and close calibration of physiology—especially!!—physiology. Jonathan was determined to teach himself to use Richard and John’s remarkable discoveries about accessing cues to observe and understand the structure of his own clients’ experience. Jonathan never stopped refining and extending this part of the NLP model. For example, the “what stops you” question is something we owe in great part to Jonathan’s persistence and creativity. In the earliest day’s, “what stops you?” was asked for information about content (as in, “Just ask the question and write down what they say”), not for the representational physiology of unconscious safety patterning. “What are the V’s and A’s that are making the K’s?” is Jonathan’s question also. (He didn’t remember saying it, but he thought it was a great one when I brought it up, years later.)

“Jonathan-style NLP” is also something that is usually done seated, not standing, and it expects the practitioner to improvise and constantly adapt, so that no two sessions are identical, and the techniques, if they can be called that, are generally hidden in the flow of life-revising rapport. Moreover, the practitioner seeks to serve the client, not to impress him or her with the practitioner’s amazing personal power. This should all be instantly and hugely recognizable to our NLP Marin students.

I spent years switched with Jonathan. Anyone who knows Jon can sense this in me, any time I am teaching or working with clients. I am greatly indebted to him.
Part Two

The Essential Reframe
“From Intended Positive Outcomes to IPO’s”

In the spring of 1979, when I first encountered the very new field of knowledge called NLP, I was immensely relieved to find within it a wonderful “presupposition” about human experience:

“All behavior has an intended positive outcome,”
(which was/is also stated as)
“Behind every behavior is an intended positive outcome.”

From here in 2008, almost thirty years later, I don’t remember if this statement about intended positives was formalized yet, as a presupposition, or even if “The Presuppositions of NLP” existed in codified form. I heard that the idea seemed to come from John and Richard’s exploration of the work of Virginia Satir, and I remember thinking, “Virginia Satir, whoever you are…way to go!”

All by itself, this one line about intended positives was enough to make it worth my while to learn a lot more about NLP. It directly condensed an entire worldview into seven or eight words. Even better, the idea gave all of us human beings credit for knowing what we are doing—even though our lives are so often so weirdly sad and compellingly hopeless. The presupposition resonated persistently with a thought that had appeared in my mind, elastic and sticky, some years before: “Being human is not a fallen condition!”

For years, I had been becoming increasingly cranky with a variety of “growth” methods and “spiritual” movements in which the main order of business was “purification” of some sort. It was as if the short-format version of these schools was, “Welcome to physical reality. Big mistake! Now, here’s how to recover and become worthy of something better.” There was something so intrinsically and intensely disrespectful about this that I really couldn’t help but think, “That has got to be nuts.”

During this time, I was also still voraciously consuming the work of Jane Roberts and her co-conspirator, the channeled entity, Seth. Jane’s writing was about “the eternal validity of the soul,” but what came through equally strongly was the intense “validity” of physical experience. Years before, Seth/Jane had flattened me with the line, “Within your physical atoms, the origins of all consciousness still sing.” Jane often wrote about the amazing creativity that goes into the achievement of being “securely couched” in physical reality. Since that’s pretty much where I happened to be noticing myself securely couched at the time, I thought that was great.

So, we might begin to imagine my dismay as I discovered that much of the NLP world, which I would come to regard as the place where “they” do conventional NLP, didn’t take the frame of intended positives all that seriously. It was more like, “Behind every behavior there is an intended positive outcome, except for…(except for when the person’s life is too awful…except for when they had really cruel parents…except for when they were misdiagnosed in the second grade…except for when, surely, they have nothing to do with what’s gone so wrong…except for, essentially, they are—surely—the victim, not the source, of their experience”) Out of this kind of nonsense have come “change patterns” that are beyond ugly, “techniques” with names like “Belief Crusher” and “Parts Annihilator,” and so on, and on, in the ceaseless, in-bred plague of “techniques” that is what NLP is for most of the world.

I have purposefully made a completely hardball interpretation of Intended Positive Outcomes the foundation of our Marin-style NLP. I have even extended the presupposition just a little: “All behavior, and all experiences, have intended positive outcomes—no exceptions, ever.” For me, this presupposition is the essential reframe that NLP offers the world. It is an important and powerful assertion. It is far more important than telling people about cybernetic this-and-that, for example. It is the idea that sets us apart.

Because it preserves our proper dignity as conscious beings, by requiring respect for the legacy of our personal ecology, the hardball IPO frame (somewhere I began to abbreviate Intended Positive Outcomes into the acronym IPO’s) hugely eases the experience and processes of change. It allows us all to begin from where we are, without having to pour energy into fighting where we’ve already been.

By adhering to the universal validity of IPO’s, we have been able grow the unique expression that is NLP, Marin-style. Our forms of NLP, so fundamentally rooted in the amazing work of Bandler, Grinder, Robert Dilts, Jonathan Rice, and many wonderful others, yet so completely different in tone, are able to further the soul’s fulfillment without dishonoring the life’s intentions. And that is just the beginning of the story.
Listen to Carl telling the story in more details (70 min)

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When You Make Wonderful Changes and Feel Worse Than Ever - Part One

by Carl Buchheit, co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
Published in 2008

One of our bedrock assertions at NLP Marin is that all human beings will be and do anything to make sure that their beliefs are true.  Anything!  We are meaning making beings.  This is one of our specialties.  Whatever we believe is true will be true, and whatever we believe things mean is what they will mean.  Even better, to make sure that we are not wrong or crazy about this, we will have “good evidence” for everything, for every part of it.  What we believe is so.  No exceptions-except sometimes.  I would like to explore one of those exceptional times in this and the next article or so.

We accomplish the amazing, perfect alignment of belief and “reality” through the local meaning-making magic of deletion, distortion, and generalization, and through the more non-local magic of using awareness to summon forth a whole world and, ultimately, a whole universe in all its parts.  Put simply, we can make sure that things mean what they are supposed to mean precisely because we are just checking with ourselves-however other-than-consciously we might be doing that.  We certainly get a lot of help from our families and the larger culture(s) in which we live, but we are basically just checking with ourselves, nevertheless.  For example, if we “know” (believe) that an object is green, we will perceive a green object, which will then let us know that the object is green, around and around again in merry infinity of reality perception and perceived reality perfection.  The famous 1948 illustration by M. C. Escher, below, says just about everything about this process.

“Drawing Hands”

It illustrates something called autopoesis, or self-creation.  One hand is what we believe, and the other is the reality upon which those beliefs are based.  Or, one hand is now, and the other is our future.  I wonder if one hand knows what the other is doing?  (I have to say, “The Secret” is a much better book title than “Autopoesis for Dummies,” but I am fond of the word nevertheless.)

It is usually a good and pleasant thing when our autopoetic processes work magic that generates positive experience.  “I have done some nice work on myself.  Things are better, and I feel better!” is a pretty wonderful and sensible statement.  However, “Things are better, but I feel way worse,” is not pleasant at all.  To generate strong negative feelings about having really positive results is a deeply confusing experience.  But drive to not feel wrong or crazy means that we will endure any amount of perceived pain rather than-actually, instead of-experiencing that our bad feelings are not accurate reports about the reality of our world.  As we grow and learn, as we come to trust and respect ourselves more and more, we may know full well that our negative, painful experience is completely wacky, shot through with contradiction and inconsistencies, but we will still make sure that it is “real and true.”  This seems to make things even worse-sometimes a lot worse.

Not only are humans meaning-making specialists, we are stubborn about it!  Our wonderfully automatic, unremitting meaning-making stubbornness allows us to both create and stabilize our worlds.  This is an incredibly important function.  It lets us be human.  It lets us rely on having a stable self across time and within that wider world we’re pretty sure we’re supposed to be involved with.  There’s a lot to be said for the stability afforded by all this stubborn certainty.  (Marin-style NLP change-work is actually based on using our predictable patterning to make changes in our predictable patterning, but that is another article.)

But what happens when we just cannot get good changes to make good sense, when the good things that we know to be so are just too far from the bad experience we are feeling about them?  What happens when the reality is so much better than the feelings that seem to be reporting on that reality-when our life experience is actually more positive than our belief systems can account for?  This is very difficult territory.  It is usually quite scary to be us when this happens.

I have worked with many clients who are caught in “the dilemma”-”My life is really great (or so I am told by people I trust), but my feelings about my life are still really, really, really bad – and this is sort of ruining my whole life, so it’s not so great anymore, only I know it is, except that, based on how it feels to be me, my life is still totally awful, which must mean that there is still something really wrong with me, which is making me feel worse, and about which I am sort of starting to freak out, except that everything is pretty much better, only I can’t feel it.”

Yipes!

Some examples:  a client with millions of dollars (much of it in gold!) and several very different businesses, but with the experience that it could (would!) all disappear instantly, including the gold-not in an economic downturn, but literally instantly.  The more success this person created, which was a lot, the more terror they developed.  I worked with someone whose relationship (primary, significant other relationship) developed into everything they wanted, yet they were certain that somehow, some way, something could instantly (again, that word) undo all of their remarkable accomplishments, in terms of being able to give and receive love.  Another client developed superb success in the context of their job, along with all the acknowledgement and corporate trappings that mark this kind of success, but this person’s feelings were those of someone constantly at the very edge of being humiliated and fired.  (Again, the experience was that this could happen at any instant.)  One more example:  a client who worked creatively to revise a serious writer’s block, who then had several published books to their credit, and whose feelings were, nevertheless, those of someone who would never be able to write or express themselves in any way.  Also, again, there was a certainty that all of their books could simply be “taken away, instantly.”

There is an excruciating good news/bad news dilemma (a situation in which someone must choose one of two or more unsatisfactory alternatives) in the experience of these people.  One of two things just has to be hugely in error:  either they are really wrong about the observable realities of their lives, or they are hugely wrong about themselves-about the reliability of their mean-making about self at the deepest levels.  Those of us still struggling for the success these people had created might think, “What a great problem to have,” but which would you choose to be “wrong” about-your ability to accurately know yourself, or your ability to accurately know your world?

This crazy-making dilemma presents a serious ecology problem-an unwanted consequence of otherwise wonderful growth and change-that is a challenge for the practitioner and the client both.  The problem is, “How do we work with ourselves and others so that lives don’t improve faster or farther than identity can explain, or so that our identity updates keep adequate pace with our life improvements?”  My experience is that, using our Marin-style NLP, we can do marvelous change work that actually works, but that if we don’t sufficiently and properly revise a certain belief, then there is nothing but trouble.

This really problematic belief is as simple as it is devastating:

“The most dangerous thing I can do is assume that I am safe.”

Best, Carl

© 2008 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin

test

by Carl Buchheit, co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
Recorded in 2008

Question:
I really enjoyed the last newsletter “When Reality Gets Ahead of Identity – When You Make Wonderful Changes and Feel Worse Than Ever”, the question comes out of that article … at the very end you wrote, “We don’t want the changes in clients’ lives to get too far out ahead of their beliefs…

Carl:
Not of their beliefs … of their identity.

Question:
So, basically I have two questions:
1. How did change happen if something wasn’t happening with the beliefs already?
2. Then how do you pace that?  How do you make sure those two are happening in a way that doesn’t cause all kinds of trouble?

Carl:
OK.  The changes happen anyway because of really, really, really good work.  So, the client has that foundational belief, one form of it or another. The most dangerous thing I can do is assume that I am safe, or, the most lonely thing I can do is experience being loved and wanted, or one of those.  That kind of foundational limitation reaches so widely and so deeply into just about every other belief, every other decision, every other experience—all of the rest of the person’s life across time.  It has tendrils that reach into everything.

If we could grab hold of that belief, let’s say we had some kind of special little clamp or tool, and we could pull that belief up out of the person’s system, in accordance with what they wanted, we would probably rip the whole system apart in the course of doing it.  So, what I do is find ways to revise the behavior and capability…out-picturing the experience of the quality of the person’s life in terms of their relationships or their job or their work, and still allow that other belief to be there.

It’s essential for their safety that they feel so unsafe.

At a certain point then, we finally reach a point where something has to give. Either they have to undo everything they’ve accomplished that’s so positive and so useful (in terms of quality of life and accomplishment), or we just have to revise the belief that says the most dangerous thing I can do is assume that I am safe.

There is such devotional patterning in that belief…“If I can’t be safe with you,” (whoever the child’s consciousness is speaking to), “If I can’t be safe with you, I will not be safe anywhere, ever, I promise”.  Now, that always corresponds with a childhood experience, an experience in the house that is beyond imagining in terms of its threat and its danger, and its damage.  I mean just extraordinary ugliness.  When those two go together, the more ugly it is, the more devoted and pure the love will be.  That then produces the belief ‘the most dangerous thing I can do is assume that I am safe’, and the assertion ‘the most loving thing I can do is never assume that I am safe’.

In fact, in the course of writing that article, I noticed that we have to be pretty good at getting someone out in front of that belief, so identity gets in front of the belief.  I had just recently done a number of sessions with people who are so stuck there. Their lives are so good and they are so freaked, because they’re lives are so good, and they can’t get that to make sense.

So part two [of the article] will be unpacking ‘the worst belief in the world’ – the most dangerous thing I can do is assume that I am safe.

That one’s so much fun to adjust because, of course the safer the person gets, the more in danger they become.

Best, Carl

Listen to the recording of the questions and answer session (4 min)

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© 2008 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin

by Carl Buchheit, co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
Recorded and first published in 2008

Note: These are transcripts of Q&A sessions lead by Carl Buchheit, co-founder of NLP Marin. They have been edited for clarity.

How do you help a client tolerate their fear when they are experiencing past pain? In this discussion, Carl describes useful re-imprinting techniques upon being asked about “baseline states” by a Masters student who had just participated in a class on that topic.

Question:
My question is about baseline states, which we were talking about today. In some of the practice that I’ve done it’s kind of difficult for some people to maintain those baseline states because they’re so charged. How do you use your techniques to get somebody to stabilize sufficiently, even though these states are so hard to be in? How do you get someone to stabilize long enough to allow for things like ‘re-imprinting’ and so on?

Carl:
OK. Thank you. To respond to the first part of that: We don’t usually seek to put someone into a baseline state experience, except for practice and learning purposes if they’re students.

To respond to the second part of that: How do you make it possible for someone to be present with the past pain…to be present now, with the negative feelings that go with past pain? Those negative feelings are being generated and experienced right now, although the pain is in the past, right? The events are in the past; the pain is now.

One generally does this [help a client stay present to that pain] through the magic of rapport, rapport, rapport, and by using language that constantly makes the distinction between the person now, and the person who’s having the experience then. So the simplest and most useful technique is to always speak to the person (who is the client) as “you”, and speak about the previous self as “she” or “he.” “So, what is ‘he’ experiencing?” “What is ‘she’ experiencing?” “If you step in there for a moment and come on back out (just a quick little recognizance), what’s it like? What is he or she experiencing? What is he or she deciding? What’s it like? Come on back.”

And so, through the direction of association and dissociation, the use of the correct kinds of pronouns, and waving your hand around (pointing to the past and pointing to the present, and sometimes, even using your hand or your body as a barrier between the past and the present), you can actually kind of push that past pain back up on a past timeline – an imaginary past line of time – and it becomes fairly straightforward for the person to be able to stay there with you.

It’s also a question of the client being willing to participate with you in this revision of a really important meaning in their world. They’re usually really enthusiastic to do it. They’re experiencing the edge of a lot of fear, but where they are – on the edge – is quite bearable (if it’s properly done) and there’s general enthusiasm for the mission, because they have a sense of the good things that will come out of it.

Practice, practice, practice. Rapport, rapport, rapport… and proper waving.

Best, Carl

Listen to the recording of the questions and answer session (3 min)

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© 2008 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin

by Carl Buchheit, co-founder of NLP Marin, training director and lead facilitator.
Recorded and first published in 2008

Ready to take on the New Year? Looking for some inspiration? Or are you reluctant to consider New Year’s resolutions? Carl responds to questions about resolutions, and how they can be seen and used in a new way for effective personal change and growth.

Listen to the recording of the questions and answer session (4 min)

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Note: The following transcript is edited for clarity.

Question:
Why don’t New Year’s Resolutions work? And what’s the difference between a “resolution” and a “Re-Solution”?

Carl:
First I think we need to notice that sometimes New Year’s resolutions do work. They work just often enough to give us the idea that this year they might work, too. If they never worked for us or anybody else we probably wouldn’t bother with them—except that we probably would because they’re mainly designed to produce good feelings about the future and take pressure off of the present. That is, they’re not actually intended to change behavior or revise capability in any way. So New Year’s resolutions do work if what we want is a better feeling about a possibility in the future. They rarely work if what we want is different behavior in the future.

The main reason they don’t work for most of us most of the time is because the New Year’s resolution operates by imagining a different future and then putting that future into conflict with the version of us who is doing the imagining in the present. In other words, as soon as we make a New Year’s resolution we have at least two of us there: the one in the future behaving differently and theoretically behaving better, behaving more responsibly, whatever it might be; and we have the present person who is imagining that better future. We have a problem; we have a conflict. We have attempted to ally ourselves with the future self against the present self. Or, perhaps we’ve tried to take our present self and get sneaky in some way and imagine that we will overcome that present self and thus produce a different future self.

In either case, this generally doesn’t work. With any luck we’ll forget the New Year’s resolution as soon as possible, or at least arrange to forget it as soon as we can after the new year so that we get away from the conflict, because the conflict is quite painful and that experience of internal conflict—of actually being at war with ourselves—is also kind of damaging. It reduces our morale by making the future a less positive place as a result of past failures to make that future better. It’s kind of a complicated business.

The difference between a resolution and a re-solution is the difference between doing something that actually works for New Year’s and doing something that seems like it’s supposed to work, but is not actually intended to work.

A re-solution is something that does not set a future plan against a present reality. It doesn’t create a conflict. The word solution comes from a Latin word which just means to loosen. So let’s think about solutions as activities and choices that loosen things up. A solution loosens up our reality, loosens up the steadiness or the predictability of our present experience to some extent. And then if we can find a re-solution, we can create a new solution—a different solution. If you pronounce re-solution properly you get the word resolution, but I think it’s much more useful to put a hyphen between the “re” and the “solution” and make the word re-solution.

A re-solution presupposes that the old solution was in fact a solution, that it was the very, very, very best solving of a past difficulty or a past situation that our system could find. A re-solution respects the past solution. A re-solution includes the past solution as the pathway, as the vehicle that gets us to someplace new and different. With a re-solution we’re not asking ourselves to overcome or defeat or declare victory over the past. We actually allow the past to be that which gets us to the present, which gets us to the future, which allows that unwanted present to become a past that changed. I know that gets kind of complicated, but it’s actually much simpler than it sounds.

If we make a resolution, we’re saying “I will defeat myself after January 1st,” I promise. If we create a re-solution, we’re arranging to use our experience now as the basis for something different in the future without creating internal conflict, without having to ask ourselves to defeat some part of us so that the rest of us can win. And when we defeat some part of us, who is it exactly that wins, anyway?

Best, Carl

© 2008 Carl Buchheit and NLP Marin