Neuro-Linguistic Programming Models Summary (11 of 14)

The Inner Hero Pattern

Beat the drum and let the poets speak.

This is the day of purification for those who

Are already mature and initiated into what love is.

No need to wait until we die!

There’s more to want here than money

And being famous and bites of roasted meat.

--Rumi

Life can be lived in many ways. You can make it about making money or winning at all costs, or pleasing other people, or perhaps never standing out. Or you can live your life as a great journey of consciousness, one filled with many challenges and surprises, one that makes a positive contribution to the world. I want to talk here a bit about these different paths, emphasising that the Self-Relations approaches of Generative Self and Generative Trance are especially tools for supporting the latter path.

Life as a journey has been described by many people, most notably the mythologist Joseph Campbell.  Campbell (1949; Gilligan and Dilts, 2009) studied the stories of many different cultures and found a universal monomyth that he called the hero’s journey.  The hero’s journey is about a quest to go beyond the limits of the present world and create greater wholeness in one’s self and/or community. This can take a number of forms: a new type of artistic vision or social modality; some kind of personal or social healing; or perhaps a radically new way of thinking, acting, or understanding the world. Interestingly, Campbell’s model was used by the filmmaker George Lucas as the basis for the incredible Star Wars movies.

A great example of a hero’s journey is Milton Erickson, the psychiatrist who revolutionised ideas about how trance could be used for creative healing and transformation.  I studied with Erickson the last six years of his life. He was a classic Yoda-like character by then, a wizened old healer with twinkling eyes and amazing skills. But it took a long and courageous journey for him to arrive at this place of a genuine healer.  He was born tone deaf, dyslexic (including not knowing the dictionary was alphabetised until he was 15!), and colour blind (purple was he only colour he could ‘enjoy’). Severely paralysed by polio at 17, a condition from which the doctors said he would never recover, Erickson learned to walk again through inner work that featured what only later he came to call “naturalistic trance.”  On the basis of his positive and creative relationship to his own challenges, he developed a startlingly original way of working with all sorts of psychotherapy problems. His utilisation approach changed core problems into resources by creatively accepting them and then opening a generative trance within which they could transform into their positive roots. The good news is that this anybody can learn and practice this positive utilisation approach with the many challenges that life brings.  How to do this is the primary focus of the Generative Self approach.

You don’t have to be a genius, as Erickson undoubtedly was, for your own life to be a hero’s journey.  And the journey needn’t be on a grand social scale; it could be within your family or outside of the public spotlight.  But the possibility exists within each of us to live a deep and meaningful life, to be on the “long and winding road” of deep transformation and unique contribution.  Of course, such a life isn’t a given; you have to want it and choose it and commit to it with all of your being. There are certainly alternatives to this way of living.  As Campbell (see Osborne, 1991) pointed out, we have three possible life paths available to us: (1) the village; (2) the wasteland; or (3) the journey.

THE EGO IDEAL OF THE VILLAGE LIFE

The “village life” is the ‘ego ideal’ of the group.  Here you basically follow the traditional pathways of your society/ culture/ family, where all values and structures are externally given.  In the village, “the good life” moves through a clear sequence: you are born, obey your mother and father, do well in school, graduate, get a job, get married, have kids, buy a house, retire and then die.  The promise is that if you successfully follow this script, you will be happy and fulfilled.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this way of life; for some people, it is the best path. However, many individuals find themselves unwilling or unable to live within the confines of the village.  They may be denied membership because of skin color, ethnicity, sexual identity or gender, or socioeconomic status. Others may find that the way they think, the way that they know the world, the way that they are called to live, cannot fit within the “Pleasantville” of the village.  Still others may be exiled by a trauma that shatters the “ego trance” and plummets them into a dark shadow world that most villagers don’t want to know about.

THE SHADOW WORLD OF THE WASTELAND

The river’s tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland

This shadow world is what Campbell and others (such as T.S. Eliot) called the wasteland. Here, the predominant experiences are cynicism, meaninglessness, and negativity.  Many dark streets line the wasteland: the despair of depression; the numb trance-land of television; the violence of hatred, criminality, and fundamentalism; the haze of drugs, alcohol and other addictions; the withdrawal of fear and isolation.  As the shadow to the ego ideal, this world is primarily a negative rejection of (or by) the village.

When people come to therapy, they are typically stuck in the wasteland, unable or unwilling to participate in normal village life. Often the request, explicitly or implicitly, is to get them back to the village, so they can just be “normal.”  The fantasy is that if you can just get rid of the shadow world (of symptoms) through numbing, will power, medication, or other forms of self-violence, then you can re-enter the ego ideal of the village and live happily ever after.

It is important to realise that this may not be possible, or even desirable.  In generative trance, we see that seemingly negative experiences may be positive signals from the creative unconscious that some deep transformation is needed, that a person cannot live within the restrictive role that has been assigned to them.  As Campbell said, sometimes you climb the ladder all the way to the top only to discover you’ve placed it against the wrong wall—the wall of other people’s expectations. In this view, symptoms are often a “call to return” to a deeper soul consciousness, a call to a hero’s journey.

Inherent in opening a positive relationship to a symptom is the crucial understanding that what makes an experience positive or negative is the human relationship to it.  That is, what comes out of the creative unconscious is not innately good or bad; its form, value, meaning, and subsequent unfolding in the world are created by the human connection to it.[1] Thus, a symptom represents some part of consciousness that has not yet been positively valued by human presence.  From this view, treating the symptom with hostility and violence is “more of the same,” splitting consciousness further into the seemingly irreconcilable “ego ideal” and “shadow” camps. In the hero’s journey, the exiled shadow is engaged with creative nonviolence to integrate the broken parts of a world into a new wholeness.

THE WHOLENESS OF THE (HERO’S) JOURNEY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Out beyond ideas of right and wrong, there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.

Rumi

Beyond the confines and hypocrisies of the village, and the alienation of the wasteland, there is a third possible path– the transformational life of the hero’s journey.  Rather than following the beaten path of the village or falling into the ditch of despair, you live life as a “call to adventure.” You develop your own path, venturing into new places and creating new psychological realities, going “where no man nor woman has gone before.”  Generative trance is a vehicle for this journey.

“Generative” means to create something that has never before existed.

The journey of consciousness is not a rejection of the village, more a move to transcend it.  As Jesus said, “Be in this world, but not of it.” This is what we are able to do in generative trance: to be with something without being limited by it.  In his seminal study of creative geniuses, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1996) found that such people—who certainly would be examples of individuals on a hero’s journey—are distinguished by complementary ‘both/and’ traits.  For example, they are typically well trained in the classical aspects of their field, but at the same time rebel against the orthodox beliefs and practices within that field. In the same way, a person living the journey of consciousness knows how the village works, but is deeply committed to moving beyond its limitations.

The journey is often initiated by what Campbell calls “the call.”  A person experiences something that swells their attention in an extraordinary way.  This could be positive: Campbell often encouraged people to “follow their bliss.” While often misunderstood within the village as an irresponsible advocating of hedonism and debauchery, he was actually inviting people to notice when their experience ‘lights up’ and is filled with a deeper resonance. This ‘bliss’ tells you what you’re in the world to do.

I often ask clients if they can remember experiences in childhood where they suddenly found themselves in a magical moment, where the world opened up to a higher, enchanting space.  Many people initially say “no,” but upon further reflection begin to remember such beautiful moments. One man remembered the feeling of excitement and resonance when he first started reading poetry in high school, an amazing experience wherein he realized he was not alone in his deepest thoughts and feelings. A woman recalled her feeling of “cosmic wonderment” when she gazed into the starry sky during a camping trip as a girl.  I remember the moment at 19 years old when I was first touched by Milton Erickson’s work: a fire ignited in my soul; a silent voice spoke, “This is why you’re here”; and a sublime feeling opened within and all around me. Despite various efforts to ignore or put that fire out over the years, it seems inextinguishable.

Every soul has its own calling. It may be ignored or rejected—what Campbell calls “the refusal of the call”—but often at great cost. While some people can go to sleep and stay asleep, silently counting the moments until death, others suffer terribly when living away from their soul. I sometimes tell clients, only half jokingly, that they appear to be constitutionally incapable of being a “couch potato”—that something inside of them is unwilling to let them stay disconnected.

In this sense, ‘the call’ may initially seem negative. (It usually is in the Hollywood version of the journey, where an ‘inciting incident’ knocks the protagonist off their mundane path.)  Thus, depression can be a message suggesting that no matter what you do or how hard you try, your current path is unworkable. In other words, your conscious ego state (usually built to please others) is so completely disconnected from your core self, that nothing it does or thinks will make a significant difference.  That’s good feedback! The positive response would be to “stop doing” and instead connect with your core self, such that you can release the old identity state and let a new one be born. This is precisely when and why we use generative trance: when existing brain maps aren’t working and new ones need to be created. Generative trance allows you to unbind consciousness from the neuromuscular lock of a fixed identity state and move back into the resource-laden waters of the creative unconscious, where different identity parts can fluidly reorganise into new mandalas of self-identity.

For example, one client came from a very successful family where the strong (“ego ideal”) rule was to always be active and busy, focusing on helping others.  Interestingly, her symptom was a strange form of “chronic fatigue” that had resisted all medical treatment. From the Self-Relations point of view that the symptom is very often the unintegrated shadow of the ego ideal, and thus an attempt by the creative unconscious to balance and make consciousness more integrated, the “problem” of “tired inactivity” was a classic complement to the “family trance” of “always being active.” In trance, I asked her to connect with the “chronic fatigue” part and let it speak.  In an achingly beautiful way, she softly said, “I just want to surrender,” probably speaking the longing of the whole family. Briefly pausing, she then slowly added, just as poignantly, “But I really love my work.” Her challenge thus became one of integrating the two complementary sides—the exiled “yin” of rest and non-effort with the “yang” of action and effort—into a deeper wholeness. This is precisely the type of challenge one faces, at many levels, on the hero’s journey. As Eliot observed:

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion.

All of this suggests that the hero’s journey is no simple task.  It involves developing a deep connection to your center, and an expanding beyond your known self to something greater and grander.  It requires many skills: the “disciplined flow” of intentional but flexible consciousness; the capacity to construct, de-construct, and re-construct brain maps and filters at different levels; the willingness to learn creative nonviolence; the know-how to transform problems and suffering into solutions; and the courage to love your self and the world with all your being.  The Self-Relations work, especially the approaches of Generative Self and Generative Trance, are explorations of how to do this. In further blogs, I will elaborate on the details of these approaches to creative consciousness.

Holding Attention

In today’s over-crowded media environment, attention is at a premium. Whether you are offering ideas, information or goods, you’re up against the same challenge: how to capture interest.

The key lies in an ancient strip of brain circuitry that triggers the orienting response to anything new, novel or surprising. This circuitry was crucial in evolution for both recognizing threats from predators and learning how to adapt to anything not encountered before: a new place, new food, new animal.

Today those powerful circuits reflexively make us pay attention to whatever differs from what we are familiar with. The ways to capture this kind of attention are endless. For instance, one of the many new web apps centers on the orienting response is Vine, which shows us six-second clips. You’ve got to be original to stand out on Vine.

Witness Meagan Cignoli, a Vine super-star, who works with ad agency BBDO for Home Depot. In one of her Vine posts, Cignoli first appears as an eye staring through a sea of cotton balls, then slowly emerges, spitting cotton balls, as a dark background finally frames her face. You’ve got to see it to understand why these scant seconds are visually gripping – and irresistible to the orienting response. The best-known Viners, like Cignoli, have followers in the millions.

A TIME magazine article about Vine, however, gets it wrong, suggesting that the key to Vine is appealing to short attention spans. One myth today is that people’s attention spans – especially younger people’s – are shorter, and so we’ve got to grab them and get the message across.

To bust that myth, watch any youngster rapt in a video game for endless minutes or hours. Those games continually trigger the orienting response, keeping users’ attention glued.

Once you’ve got someone’s attention – thanks to the orienting response – how do you keep it? One powerful way that appeals to the brain’s emotional centers is to tell a gripping story. For the cutting edge of story-telling, check out The Future of Story-Telling. Their October 3 conference was sold out, but you can catch up on their website.

So you need attention grabbers plus a powerful story line. And how do you come up with those? Well, that requires other varieties of focus, ones that stimulate creative insights and innovations.

Nuanced Gesturing

Make big gestures to hint someone

Symbolic Somatic Priming

Show correct interest to people of grieve

Somatic Awareness Enhancement

Show interest with actions

Essence Leading

Summarise grieve with an impact

Somatic Leading

Inspire to encourage speak up

The Vision Communication Protocol

Diplomatically use a secondary reason to ask for something

Cyber-Porn Addiction Removal

The destructive problem of pornography addiction has literally exploded over the last few years thanks to the ease of finding and viewing in via the internet.  The pornography addict no longer has to risk discovery by going to the local adult bookstore; instead, he or she can feed the addiction in the safety and privacy of their own home.  If you want to get rid of your porn addiction, we can help.

About Pornography Addiction

The majority of porn addicts are men, although women can experience this addiction as well.  Frequent viewing of pornography can have disastrous results, damaging your relationship, friendships, self esteem, reputation, and even putting your job at risk.  The addiction starts because accessing pornography feels good; it gives you pleasure.

Very soon, however, viewing porn begins to affect your normal sexual desires and change your normal patterns of behaviour.  You start to feel stronger and stronger desires to focus on porn, interfering with the other parts of your life. You might lie to your partner about what you are doing, only to be filled with guilt and remorse at the secret you are hiding.

Some of the most common symptoms and indications of pornography addiction include:

• Preoccupation with thinking about porn and planning opportunities for viewing porn
• The inability to cut back or stop viewing porn
• Increasing tolerance for porn, leading to the need for more porn to achieve the same level of excitement and satisfaction
• Telling lies to friends and family members to hide your addiction
• Risking the loss of a significant relationship in order to continue viewing porn
• Feeling irritable or restless (withdrawal symptoms) when cutting back or stopping the use and viewing of porn

The addiction to porn is a learned behaviour pattern that has become so automatic you no longer think about or care about why the urge to view porn is so overwhelming.  The only way to break the cycle of addiction is to break the learned pattern of automatic behaviour.

Getting Help From NLP And Hypnotherapy

NLP and Hypnotherapy are excellent tools for disrupting the patterns of addiction and replacing them with new, healthier patterns that create a healthier and more productive lifestyle.  Through conscious choices and unconscious inner resources, you can learn how to get rid of your addiction to pornography and start living a constructive life once again. The change in thought and behaviour is often quite rapid and dramatic, thanks to the powerful nature of NLP and Hypnotherapy.

How Long Will Treatment Take?

If you are truly ready to eliminate your addiction to pornography, you can do it successful in one to three one-hour sessions.

Don’t let pornography addiction destroy your life and the lives of your loved ones any longer. Let Riverina Mind Designs combination of NLP and Hypnotherapy is successfully help you disrupt the cycle of addiction and start living with freedom an honesty!

Winning Over Internal War Zone

What is the relationship between left brain/right brain - mind/heart and adult/child like behaviour? - And how can we embrace the positive attributes of both such that we can enrich our lives?

(Abby Eagle) Most of us would have had the experience of being in two minds about something. It is like one part wants to do one thing while the other part wants to do something else. Most of us are able to resolve the inner conflict and get on with our lives but for others it can become problematic. For example, even though some people may make a decision to stop smoking, avoid chocolate, cut down on alcohol, stop using a drug, break up a relationship etc., they are unable to do so. They know they don't want to do the behaviour yet they find themselves doing it anyway.

The medical model tells us that some people have an addictive personality. It says that genetics, brain chemistry, neurotransmitters, receptor cells, etc. are at the root of the problem. Yet the addiction model does not completely explain how some people are able to stop an addictive pattern without medical intervention while others struggle desperately for decades. If the addiction model was correct then once someone had successfully withdrawn from an addictive substance they should be free from the habit for the rest of their life - and yet it is not uncommon for stress to kick off the habit once again. Even though it is widely understood that stress is associated with many physical and mental health problems - including 70% of visits to the Doctor - it is the one variable that seems to be sidelined in favour of searching for a physical problem.

Inner conflict from an NLP perspective.

Looking at inner conflict from an NLP perspective we start by having the client acknowledge that there is a part of them that wants to stop a behaviour and a part that wants them to continue. Then we gather information about each side. It generally looks something like the following:

Attributes of the 'Sensible' part  (Adult part / Left Brain / Mind)

• Serious, sensible, cognitive, thinking, intelligent, mature, grown up, goal directed, ambitious, outgoing, controlling part.
• Wants to be healthy.
• Knowledgeable. Has conscious understanding of the problem and its consequences. An adult thinking part. Can't understand why it can't change the behaviour.
• Does not like the other part. Judges the other part. Often fights with the other part. Lacks awareness that there is another part of the self.

Attributes of the 'Bad' part (Child part / Right Brain / Heart)

• Fun loving good time part. Wants needs fulfilled now. Innocent, playful. Sometimes feels small, hurt, shy, fearful.
• It needs a resource state which may be provided by smoking, chocolate, drugs, 'bad' behaviour.
• Lives in the now, does not have a concept of future consequences. More like the heart of the person. A childlike part. Does not have cognitive skills - more like a 2 year old child - a kinesthetic part feeling part.
• Usually willing to work with the other part.

The adult part may want to change a behaviour but often finds itself powerless against the child part. In a way it is humorous. In my mind I see an image of a strong adult man in conflict with a 2 year old girl. As most adults would testify, a 2 year old child can win over an adult man any day.

Ironically part of the solution is for the adult part to relinquish 'control' to the child part and then have both parts work together as a team, sharing their positive attributes. Once the child part gets to play a bigger part in the clients life it grows up and the negative behaviours disappear.

Characteristics of parts using left brain/right brain and mind/heart generalities.

Now let's take a quick look at left brain and right brain attributes.

Left brain functions

• linear thinking
• uses logic
• detail oriented
• facts
• words and language
• things have names
• past and future / time
• math and science
• order/pattern perception
• reality based
• forms strategies
• practical
• safe 
• separation between yourself and others
• ego

Right brain functions

• simultaneous thinking
• uses feeling
• big picture oriented
• imagination
• symbols and images
• name for objects disappear
• timelessness
• philosophy & religion
• spatial perception
• fantasy based
• impetuous
• risk taking
• sense of oneness
• egolessness

When you compare the attributes of the parts in the first table with that of the characteristics of left and right brain functions in the second table we find the analogies of left brain is to mind is to adult part - and right brain is to heart is to child like part.

It gets even more interesting when you watch the short film of Jill Taylor, a neuroscientist who suffered a blood clot to her left hemisphere. Her description of the experience, eight years after the event, is fascinating. As she lost her left brain functioning she totally lost her cognitive abilities and entered into a right brain experience of the world. She seems to be describing an experience of spiritual enlightenment - albeit caused by a physical trauma to her brain.

The film is about ten minutes long and well worth watching.

So how to have more right brain experiences?

Meditate! It is as simple as that.

You can easily get a sense of moving from the left hemisphere to the right with peripheral sensing meditation. Start by gazing at a spot somewhere in front of you. Don't concentrate, just gently gaze at a spot somewhere in front of you then begin to explore the peripheral vision.

In a matter of moments you will see how objects lose their names and just become objects; colours lose their names and just become colour; and as you close your eyes and drop into a meditative space now, you will find yourself expanding and losing a sense of time so that by the time you open your eyes again you might wonder how long you have been sitting here enjoying the space.

P.S. Take the brain hemisphere dominance 'test'. It's a bit of fun. See if you can get the whirling woman to shift direction.

Changing Belief: The Logical Approach

The NLP Logical Levels of Change Model, inspired by Gregory Bateson and developed by the pioneers of Neuro-Linguistic Programming is very helpful in designing an action plan for change. The Stages of Change give us a general road map of the process of change -- a process that has a beginning, a middle, and an outcome.

As noted in the Stages of Change, if the Action Plan for change is inadequate, a recycling or relapse will occur sending the person "back to square one" or "back to the drawing board" of Contemplation again where they must start over... or give up and decide change is not possible. Be sure to check out the information on Alignment of the Logical Levels while you are here.

The NLP Logical Levels of Change:

• Spirituality - Change for whom and/or what purpose?
• Identity - Does change reflect who I am?
• Values and Beliefs - Why make the change?
• Capabilities & Skills - Change how?
• Behaviors - Change what?
• Environment - Where to change?

Gregory Bateson, a well known cultural anthropologist, pointed out that in the processes of learning, change, and communication there were natural hierarchies.

The function of each NLP logical level in the hierarchy was to organize the information below it. Changing something on a lower NLP logical level of the hierarchy could, but would not necessarily affect the levels above it. However... making a change at an upper level would necessarily change everything below it in order to support the higher level change.

In other words, "whatever is on top runs everything underneath"... so if you make a change at a lower level but the problem is at a higher NLP logical level then the change is not likely to last.

NLP Logical Levels - Environment: Where do I need to change?

In describing each level of the hierarchy we will begin at the bottom and work our way up. One reason we start here is because the lowest NLP logical level of change is the easiest to change.

This is precisely why most of us start with our environment when we first enter the Contemplation Stage of Change... When we are experiencing pain in our lives we often have an instinct to blame someone or something "out there" in our environment for the problem.

For example, have you ever heard any of these statements...

"If you would quit doing that, I wouldn't have to feel this way."

"If my boss would get off my back I could do much better at work."

"If I had more money, I could go to college. Then I wouldn't be trapped in this crummy job."

"If we didn't live in this boring town, I wouldn't have to drink."

In these examples, the proposed changes are the result of denial, deletion, and distortion... they can keep us stuck in our problems. But sometimes there are obstacles and barriers in our environment that need to be removed when we want to change some aspect of ourselves or our lives...

In the case of recovery there is a saying, "we must change our playgrounds, playmates, and playthings" in order to recover... Put another way, we need to let go of the people, places and things that support our addiction.

In fact, the environment is where we have built the external networks of people, places, activities, and things that support our codependency, addiction, or depression.

When we consider the concepts of pattern matching and Pavlovian triggers it becomes very apparent why these changes are necessary... It is incredibly difficult - if not impossible to stop compulsive behaviours in a "trigger-rich" environment.

NLP Logical Levels - Behaviors: What do I need to change?

In NLP terms, behavior refers to what you think about as well as your actions. When we have a deeply ingrained problem network such as depression, anxiety, or addiction - what do you suppose we spend the majority of our time thinking about?

Each time the problem network is activated we begin thinking about it... those thoughts progress to fantasy... fantasy to obsession... obsession to compulsion, and compulsion to acting-out.

In this NLP logical level it's not always the behaviors we choose -- but the behaviors that seem to choose us that cause problems. How many of us have experienced feeling mad at ourselves while saying "Why do I always do that!" or "Man, I hate it when I do that!"

Our neural networks are loaded with attitudes and behaviors that have been designed to support our problem feelings, thoughts or behaviors. Couples can get caught up in behaviors that cause each of them to react to the other in cycles that go nowhere fast!

We may NOT have solution-oriented behaviors and attitudes installed yet... These will have to be learned, practiced, and practiced again so we can establish, grow, and maintain a neural network for a new, more effective way of doing things.

NLP Logical Levels - Capabilities and Skills: How do I make these changes?

What are the skills and abilities that we currently possess that will help us get the changes we want at this NLP logical level? We must also identify the skills that we need but have not yet learned in order to make the needed changes.

Perhaps we want to go back to school aquire skills for a new career, take some training in our current job in order to get that promotion, go to a marriage encounter class to enhance our abilities to communicate, or take up pottery in order to add more fun to our lives.

Once we have identified and learned the new skills, we must repetitively practice them to gain competence and mastery with them. In cases where we have emotional woundedness the new skills we need to aquire may be the building blocks for a new neural network called recovery - the alternative to codependency, addiction, chronic depression and anxiety.

A good example of a crucial new skill is developing the ability to cope with feelings in a healthy way. Those of us who grew up in a less-than-nurturing-family system were not taught healthy emotional coping skills.

There were certain unspoken rules our families, such as Don't Trust, Don't Talk, and Don't Feel. All three of these rules must be broken in order to develop effective skills at this NLP logical level.

In order to learn the new skills we need, we must first know what they are and where to find them. This helps us understand why being with groups of other people in recovery is one of the most important new habits we must develop.

There are many groups to choose from... church groups, community support groups, therapy groups, 12 steps groups, online groups such as - online forums, email, and chat groups.

At recovery groups and meetings we have an entire hour of listening to the "experience, strength, and hope" of others. Since we all have our own map of the world is a lot of diversity in the perspectives being shared about recovery - we simply take what we need and leave the rest.

The ideas, values, experiences, and beliefs of those who have "been there and done that" provides us with much needed "how-to" data for this NLP logical level that did not get installed in our family of origin.

We learn such things as reaching out to others, learning to trust, what its like to feel safe in a group, self-disclosure, being accepted for who we are, being loved even before we can love ourselves - you know, all that stuff that goes with healthy intimacy.

We must also read recovery literature specific to our particular problem feeling or behavior in order to gain the knowledge necessary to achieve and maintain recovery.

How many books and pamphlets do we digest when we discover we have a serious illness such as heart disease? It is no different here.

Prayer and meditation is also one of the most important recovery skills we need to develop - especially at the NLP logical level of spirituality.

Since we have relied so much on something outside ourselves for comfort and relief, we lost touch with our Higher Power which is the main source of our ability to generate comfort from within.

What many of us did when we felt bad and wanted to feel better was to act-out our addiction... Even when we felt good and wanted to feel better... we acted-out our addiction to food, work, drugs, sex, gambling, shopping, drinking, etc.

Studies have indicated that people who self-medicate with an object or event have trouble creating alpha waves in their brain - i.e. the relaxation response - in recovery.

There are many ways to teach your brain to create these important brainwaves such as guided imagery, hypnosis, relaxation training, soothing background sounds, aroma therapy, etc.

Notice that all of these methods involve the use of our sensory input channels (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, etc). It is important to include them in your daily routine as soon as possible.

Prayer and meditation are skills that go hand-in-hand... Some say prayer is talking and meditation is listening.