| I made my first account just to respond since no one else has. Think back to something that made you angry, that annoyed or frustrated you. Think back to a time where you got really riled up. A time where you were really pissed off at someone. You're going to close your eyes for 20 seconds and think about it, feel it, really try to go back to that day and immerse yourself in that moment. Now, close your eyes. Did you notice anything? Did anything in your body change in the last 20 seconds? By thought alone, you can change your physiology, your mental state, your blood pressure and heart rate. Nothing in your environment changed, you're still sitting here reading this, yet to your brain you were momentarily somewhere else. For me, stuck in traffic and some wanker just cut me off, nearly caused an accident and seemed oblivious to it all. I wanted to crash my car into his just to teach him a lesson. It can make your blood boil just thinking back to past events where you were wronged. I had you think back to something that made you angry, and you probably felt that same way you did that day but to a slightly lesser degree. If you continue to think about it, think about how wrong it was, you can feel EVEN MORE ANGRY. But you don't have to. You can think back to these moments in your life and feel less or more of the emotion by altering the memory, or your perception of the event. Your past influences who you are. Your past only exists as memories within your mind. Memories can be recalled and changed by your mind. You can think back to past events and change the way you perceive them. That's the practice of NLP from my perspective. Changing your memories so that they benefit you. All those times you've been embarrassed, angry, frustrated or annoyed, you can look back at these moments and laugh at them. Think about some negative moment in your life and then literally laugh out loud about how absurd it was. Seeing a memory in your minds eye you can turn the colour down so it's only in greyscale. You can mute the person saying hurtful things, or change their voice to that of a cartoon character, something absurd and comical. While you're doing all this, recalling past events and memory manipulation, you're comparing your emotions and how your body is responding, before and after each change. This might be something you can learn how to do in one session, but for me it took lots of purposeful practice. Like a muscle you develop, you become better at this over time. |
I want to emphasis that NLP "is" lots of different things depending on who you ask. The most important aspect IMO is the act of "going meta-" to your own psychology, learning to "reprogram" your "biocomputer".
It's a fundamental shift. People talk about education that adds facts to your store of knowledge vs. education that changes who you are. Learning to operate your own mind+body changes your self-image in a deep way, and raises the level on which you operate.
What excites me is the possibility that enough people learn to take responsibility for their own thoughts and emotional reactions, and we can collectively get over our shit and make e.g. some sort of cool Star Trek future, where humans are mostly sane and healthy. (And "we can hang out with cool aliens that like us." ~Dude, Where's My Car?)