People often associate hypnosis with weight-loss, quitting smoking, and overcoming fears, phobias, and other addictive patterns. But Hypnosis is part of everyday life. Hypnosis is a natural state of mind. You use it to make many of your decisions on a regular basis. Your attitudes and mindset, your ability to be effective as a leader, your ability to lead yourself, your ability to live at choice … all this depends on your unconscious programming. In other words it depends on the beliefs that have been instilled in you by a process that is very much like hypnosis. Fortunately, mindset and attitudes can be transformed through the use of hypnosis far more rapidly, and with far greater ease, than is often understood or appreciated.

The hypnotic state is a doorway to your unconscious mind. Your unconscious mind is everything you are not currently aware of: for example, that meeting you are nervous about, your love of going to the beach, the excitement you felt on your eleventh birthday, an unkind neighbor, a tune that pops into your mind inexplicably. The unconscious mind is the ten-trillion things that you couldn’t possibly hold in conscious awareness at any moment, but which together make up the climate of your experience.

However, the unconscious mind is more than a memory-bank. Experience is determined by emotions. One person may love going to the beach, another person may detest it. Everything you experience is filtered through emotions and perceptions, and the subtleties of associations through which you make meanings from your life.

Imagine a child being told by his mother to clean his room. Perhaps his mother was having a difficult day and speaks sharply, “Can’t you tidy your room, what’s the matter with you?”

Somehow the child hears that there’s something the matter with him, and years later, on an unconscious level, he carries that message everywhere he goes.  He carries it to social gatherings, and job interviews. He may even carry it to bed. He may have conscious recollection of that day, long ago, when his mother was impatient with him. He may have discussed it in therapy. He may have learned that it wasn’t about him. But still the pervasive belief persists. It will continue until he registers a new truth about himself on an unconscious level as completely as he absorbed that first message long ago.

The amazing truth about your mind is that it can learn and change very quickly. How long did it take for that child to learn ‘there’s something wrong with me?’  He learned it in an instant, and a new truth can be learned at the same speed, but only if it is absorbed on the deepest level, deeply enough to supersede the old patterns.

People often say that hypnosis performs miracles. If you imagine that the attitudes that inform your behavior have to take a long time in order to change, then hypnotherapy is indeed miraculous. The power of hypnosis is the power to access your unconscious mind. Perhaps you have been disempowered by repeated vain attempts to effect change through willpower, conscious strategy, and reason. You may feel that you have a long way to go before you can truly transform old limiting beliefs, but you do not need more information or skills. When you’re ready to effect change, the last thing you need is more time! What you require is very simple. When you can access the same open mind you had as a child at the moment when you heard those fateful words, then you can learn your new truth, “there’s something right with me.”

A skilled hypnotherapist will guide you towards your own natural ability to remember deeper truths about yourself. She will help you access your capacity to write your own scripts, reprogram those old programs.  The truths you recover predate the time when trauma hijacked your original innocence, capabilities, and joy.

Hypnosis is like finding the light switch after fumbling around in a dark room for years. Sometimes all you need to find that switch is permission from your own unconscious mind. Hypnotherapy is a miraculously effective way to gain permission from, and access the power of, your unconscious mind, to bring about radical positive permanent change.

Condoning or Condemning?

Keeping things simple can be a comfort. But sometimes comfort does not to move you forward. It doesn’t challenge you, or help you to learn new perspectives, and create new possibilities for yourself.

I am talking about the assessments we make of others.

You ask yourself, “Do I agree with you?  Do I accept you? Am I safe around you?”

If  you conclude, “I disagree. I don’t trust you.” You might also inadvertently add “I don’t understand you,” “I don’t like you,” or even “Because your belief system and values are different from my own there may be something wrong with you.”

Sometimes the most interesting thing can be to spend time with someone who is completely different from you. It may challenge you. It may be uncomfortable and edgy. But it  may teach you something new about yourself and your own presuppositions and assumptions.

If you always need others to agree with, it may be because you lack confidence in your own perspectives; or it maybe that you’re just taking yourself too seriously.

If you have only two options:

1. Agreeing, condoning, liking, approving, trusting, or
2. Disagreeing, condemning, disliking, disapproving, mistrusting.

then you may be missing a range of other possibilities:

• challenging your assumptions and strategies
• refining your communication skills
• deepening your empathy
• getting over yourself
• having more fun
• learning to be more flexible
• deepening your perspectives

In the world of NLP it is axiomatic that to help other effect genuine change it’s essential to respect their model of reality. Otherwise, how do you imagine you can genuinely communicate with them, let alone influencing them? Beyond that, it’s also to your benefit to do so.

Respecting others’ model of reality doesn’t mean condoning that model; but it does save you the aggravation of having to oppose it, condemn it, or persuade them they are wrong.

What sort of anxiety would lead you to spend all your time only with those who agree with you anyway?

Stretch a little. Spend a little time with people who make you uncomfortable and notice some of your patterns which, once noticed, you can change – if you choose.

You don’t need to know anything about Neurolinguistics, or NLP, to do this. It may just be an expression of you own evolving emotional intelligence.

Eleven day NLP and Hypnosis Training Intensive at Manzanita Village

A silent meditation retreat in California over the New Year holiday. We will use the healing process of vipassana, or insight meditation. It will integrate techniques that help you truly bring meditation practice into your everyday life. Beginners are welcome. Meditation is not something to isolate you from the world. It is something to give you the insight and power to determine your own course amidst the challenges of your every life. It does not ask you to conform to any set way of thinking, it actually gives you more choices, so that you can free yourself from limiting beliefs, decisions, and habits. Although the intention is to integrate mediation and mindfulness into your everyday life, going away on a retreat to learn transformational techniques and perspectives will provide you with skills you need to bring meditation home. If you are a beginner it will give you a jump start to continue meditating through the new year, and if you are already meditating regularly, the retreat will strengthen and deepen your meditation.

"The Way is easy for those who are not rigid.

"When love and hate are both absent

everything becomes clear and undisguised.

Make the smallest distinction, however,

and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart."

from the Hsin Hsin Ming

The purpose of meditation is not to be devoid of feeling - 'When love and hate are both absent' - rather it is to help you become so fluid that all the natural feelings that go along with being human simply pass, like clouds in the sky, allowing you to choose how you respond, and to let go of old fears, resentments, disappointments - to begin anew. Feelings are inevitable, they are part of living. Meditation is to transform the stickiness of certain feelings through clarity and awareness, and develop the habit of simply letting go. Meditation is a reliable teacher. The process of meditating leads you to towards the simple capacity of letting go of you 'stuff'. Loving Kindness and Compassion are key elements in this process also. Loving kindness and compassion begin with how you treat ourselves, how you respond to the inevitable mistakes that occur in daily life. Learning to forgive and let go are essential; allowing you to become expansive, so that you are able to engage in the world with awareness and congruity - so that you become happy, and so that your happiness becomes contagious..

"Angels fly because they take themselves so lightly"

Retreat Information

A Meditation Retreat is an ideal way to begin to learn to meditate. Beginners often say that they are not ready to come to a retreat yet. In fact, coming to a retreat is the very best way to establish a working understanding of meditation, and the numerous ways that it can benefit your life. On retreats there are fewer distractions, and the accumulated days of the retreat give you enough time to address some of the initial difficulties, and to clarify what meditation is all about. You are in a supportive environment; and on a teacher-led retreat you have the guidance of an expert who can help you avoid some of the pitfalls that beginning meditation students sometimes encounter.


You might be needing a little tranquility round about now. Just by taking the time to slow down and put aside distractions -- even temporarily putting aside the things that may be important -- can give you new perspectives, and help you tap into your internal resources of energy and tranquility. You will return to your everyday life refreshed and renewed. Coming to a retreat center like Manzanita Village, where the air and water are pristine, and where your surroundings are spacious, has a measurable beneficial effect on your physiology and mental state. Even without the meditation you would feel renewed. Add to that the gentle discipline of focusing and mindful attention, and after a few days you will feel like a new person.

You CAN teach old dogs new tricks. Meditation is easier than you think. Human beings are amazingly skilled at learning. I don’t just mean learning new information. I mean learning new skills and strategies. It's easier than you think. Who said it's hard to teach old dogs new tricks! We do it all the time - and we're old dogs ourselves, I'd even go so far as to say we have a passion for learning new things!

Here's an analogy … if someone showed you a shortcut that took fifteen minutes off your daily commute, how long would it take you to use the shortcut? You'd start immediately, right?

When you understand the immediate –as well as immediately accessible – benefits of tools you will learn for focusing and meditating, you will want to be using them right away. And we'll also show you how to overcome the inertia you may have in regards to with learning new patterns of behavior.

Do you know how many days it takes to learn a new habit? We'll tell you that too. Click here for details about our upcoming retreat.

Click here for details about our upcoming retreat

Here are 18 ways that meditation can help you. (from a combined NLP-Buddhist perspective) There's more! A lot more, actually.

This list forms the basis of an upcoming Meditation Teleseminar Class starting September 14th Click Here  Note: The class will be a teleseminar, so you can attend regardless of whether or not you are in Southern California. All you need is a telephone and a commitment to start putting the tools you will learn over the course of the six-week class into practice. Join our list to be sure you receive registration info.

Also listen to a short Podcast Click Here

And we have a September 4-7 retreat at Manzanita Village (over the Labor Day weekend).

This list of 18 is the ‘Why’. The ‘What’ and the ‘How’ will be covered in the upcoming class. 

1. Focus Focus is first because it is the most basic. Every other benefit of meditation comes from your increased capacity to focus; how you focus; and what you focus on.
2. Sensory Perception Through focus you derive increased sensory awareness, as well as increased awareness of your own internal process. The world becomes more vivid as does your own internal representations of it.
3. Open options and choices With greater awareness and clarity comes a greater range of bahvioral choices and options, how you live, what you do, the choices you make.
4. Change State With more focus comes the realization that you have the ability to choose your emotional state, just as you choose how you respond to events. It’s all up to you.
5. Let go of what doesn’t work You can let go of what doesn’t work. Happiness is a real option.
6. Change perspectives Meditation leads to greater flexibility and flexibility means that you can change your perspectives as you learn new information
7. Flexibility Changing perspectives means that you have greater behavioral flexibility
8. Deduction and Induction With focus comes clarity of mind and the ability to learn, inductively and deductively, rationally and intuitively.
9. Empathy – respecting other’s point of view When you are able to naturally respect others’ view of the world and interact with them based on who they are rather than who you might like them to be you communicate and empathize naturally.
10. Gratitude Appreciation for others, and for the miraculous circumstances of living.
11. Generosity A sense of unlimited potential, a sense of intrinsic abundance
12. Love Love is an expression of generosity and joy, in celebration of others
13. Energy Focus and congruence bring energy
14. Health Freedom to make the choices outlined above lead to less stress and greater health
15. Motivation Focus brings clarity and the means to effect strategies that work. Clarity also means being clear about and congruent with your intentions, plans, and aspirations.
16. Levels of perspective and priorities Focus also brings the ability to see things from multiple levels of abstraction, to see the big picture as well as being aware of the necessary details.
17. Time and time-line flexibility Your experience of time is relative. Standing in line at an airport for an hour can seem to take longer than a leisurely afternoon spent with a good friend. Skills learned in meditation allow you to speed things up or slow them down at will.
18. The Transpersonal Dimension. All the above contribute to a sense of the interplay and interconnection between the elements of your life and the life of those around you. The world is your lover, the world is you!

These are just a few potential benefits. The specific ways meditation benefits you is something that is revealed over time.

People have been asking us about our ten day NLP intensive July 8-17. So here are a few thoughts about NLP.

Neurolinguistics (NLP) has been around for nearly forty years. It evolved from the work of some of the most brilliant innovators in psychology, personal change, cybernetics, and linguistics - though it transcends all those fields.

Like any creative discipline, it continues to evolve. It is a lens that can sharpen your understanding and practice of any number of other disciplines. And it also brings the latest perspectives in neuroscience and quantum physics into the realm of the practical, while being entirely complimentary to time-honored spiritual disciplines such as Buddhism and Yoga, prayer and meditation.

It’s not so much about techniques - though there are simple techniques that are truly astonishing in their effectiveness, and can bring about profound lasting change - in yourself or others. It is perhaps, above all, a way to tap into the recognition that such change is possible. It is a way to step aside, to let the magic of change happen.

A simple example: there was a time when it was considered that it should take weeks, if not months, to cure a phobia or certain addictions. Now such things can be accomplished in a matter of minutes. Does that sound unbelievable? NLP has been tried and tested for forty-years. And in other forms perhaps it’s been for as long as minds have been curious. It is an exploration of the change that lies at the heart of change, and of the ‘difference that makes a difference’.

And if phobias and addictions can be transformed in a few minutes, what can be done with negative patterns of thought and emotion - which may be little more than internal addictions?

Some people consider this to be the closest thing we have to magic.

Ten Day NLP Training

 
Buddhist Coaching solves three implicit problems:

• Psychiatry and psychology tend to pathologize. In other words, they work from the basis that there's something in you that needs fixing.
• Traditional Buddhist teaching tend to exist within a context inflexible hierarchies, whether it's the remnants of old monastic models, or just the idea of "I'm more enlightened than you."
• Informal situations of spiritual friendship form organic means of support, but often lack the leverage to effect full accountability.

Coaching is an entirely fluid process. It is informed by an idea that is central to Buddhist teaching, to General Semantics, to NLP, and clinical hypnosis practice, which Alfred Korzybski sums up so famously; "The map is not the territory." Maps are beliefs, unexamined values, decisions, the whole inner world of perception through which we create an image of reality.

Many psychotherapeutic and personal change models would agree that the map is not the territory. This understanding is at the center of Buddhist teaching and practice too.

A problem arises though, when we say, by implication, "Your map is not the territory, use mine!"

Buddhism warns against dogmatism, just as it warns against absolute relativism, or nihilism. The question is; how do we fully question each map, each model, without rejecting them all as being mere constructs? However illusory they are, maps do exist for a reason, and though they are only constructs they can nevertheless be invaluable. So, flexibility and fluidity are important.

Fluidity means being open to using any map, and being open to letting go of any map, for the purpose of going deeper, understanding better, and being more effective, functional, and congruent within yourself, and in your life. Fluidity is not inconsistency, it is a willingness to grow and learn, and to look at your values, and any internal conflicts that may exist within and between them. In other words, it lies in looking very carefully at what you value, including your beliefs and assumptions, and any decisions you may be making about what and who you are.

Buddhist coaching is a powerful modality. It combines the essence of the map we call Buddhism, which is about you evolving congruent values, unencumbered by rigid maps, with skills that help you be effective in the world. As a Buddhist teacher who has only recently started defining myself as a coach, I am excited to have let go of some old maps, and adopted some new, more fluid ones - Buddhist Coaching, in conjunction with NLP and clinical hypnosis tools, is a peerless modality for helping you move towards your own personal empowerment.

Let's think of meditation as work. It is the work of remembering.

It's "chunking up" (that's an NLP term,) to a higher level of perspective and abstraction. It's getting the bigger picture. It's remembering where you are, who you are.

And it's doing so in a way that is not just intellectual. It's a way of embodying, learning in an intimate and visceral way, that anything is possible, that freedom is possible.

There are two kinds of meditation. A curriculum which involves two basic steps.
(actually there are many steps on the way, but we'll come to that in later modules).
For now let's deal with these two basic kinds of meditation.
The first is just stopping. Stopping all activity, ideas, habits, noise. Stopping. Now.

The second is coming into awareness, seeing things as they are, looking deeply, unencumbered by your preconception of them.

How do you do that? Practice and you will find out.

What does it mean - to see clearly?

It is recognizing that everything is interconnected and that therefore everything you do matters. Not just everything that you do, but everything you say, everything you think, everything you imagine, everything you feel .. has an effect, impacts your life, and the life of others.

I tell my student, "If you want to learn to meditate try it our for ten years. Take a shot at it. Stay open. What a luxury! No need to hurry. After ten years you can decide it you want to pursue it further."

And I'll also ask, "How long does it take? To be present, to let go of anxiety and distraction enough to just be present? A moment? A few moments? The time it takes to breath deeply two or three times?"

And then there's putting it into action.

Between those two possibilities and that question, our path lies."

continued from Practical Spirituality


"Have a great ride," he said.

Great ride! What an understatement!

Because it isn't just the vehicle. It's where you travel. It's how you travel. It's the places you pass, and it's your destination. It's who you meet on the way.

With all that power under the hood, I took my time. Because power isn't just speed. It's something you feel in your veins, in your heart. It's the essence of what the journey is all about, and it's the certainty that you will arrive - that you can't fail, that there's a kind of destiny to it. That you have, in some sense, already arrived.

Anyone you meet on the way is going to help you. Sometimes you don't understand how or why. But if you stop, if you know what to ask .. even when you don't know what to ask, sometimes it's enough just to know how to listen.

I pull into a rest stop and meet others on the same journey, traveling in their own style, traveling on their own road. There are others on foot. It doesn't matter how you travel. There's nothing intrinsically better or worse whether it's a Lamborghini or a pair of flip-flops. It's your choice, you pay, and you deal with the consequences.

And when you know how to love the journey, and know that you will reach your destination, you will.

continued from The Law of Distraction

“would you like to test-drive it?” asked the monk, handing me the keys with a smile.. "

Of course," I replied, feeling a little nervous, knowing how much power was under the hood, knowing how fast this baby could go, when you want it to.

I mean, that's what spiritual practice is - knowing that the resources you have at your disposal are virtually limitless. And by power I mean love, patience, creativity, humor, intelligence.

Practical spirituality isn't about rules, you can call it "everyday mysticism" - that's not to diminish it in any way. By everyday mysticism I mean keeping the big picture, keeping balance. Seeing the road ahead and enjoying the landscape, and remembering where you're coming from.

And celebrating the journey, celebrating your accomplishments.

He opened the door for me. It was the kind of door that looks like seagull wings.
He lifted it up, and I ducked under his am and sat down in the driver's seat.

It was surprisingly comfortable.

"I thought this was supposed to be difficult," I said.

"Have a great ride," said the monk. He was still smiling.

to be continued