In October 2006 I finally admitted to my counseling supervisor that I could predict a lot of what a person was doing inside by the way they moved their eyes. I nervously handed over a piece of paper with eye directions and information accessed. He smiled and said, “You’d love NLP”. I’d been driving myself mad with those observations for months and he just casually said I’d love NLP!
Within a couple of months I had read a lot about what it was and had attended a taster course where I saw PTSD cleared in minutes. I was hooked. I discovered that there was a Practitioner course with a leading teacher in London next March. I knew I had to be there – I saved what I could, and sold some possessions. “What am I doing?” I sometimes wondered, but the feeling was the same one I had always followed and it had rarely let me down; that was enough for me.
The teaching was exceptional. It liberated my already free mind beyond my wildest expectations. I found myself able to do things eloquently and easily, to exhibit the skills being taught and to go with the information presented in a completely new way. No one had ever shown me how I was good before. It was as if I discovered the keys to the kingdom, and I ran amok with those keys opening any and all doors I encountered. During the course, break-times and evenings became opportunities to go out and practice everything, and I wholeheartedly embraced my new perception and was amazed and excited about everything.
Three days after my return I had an epiphany experience. It was like emerging from the Matrix, or a toxic wakeup. During this time my neurology felt like it was surging into everything I observed, and making adjustments to my projections. Reality was never going to be the same again. I had no idea how to be like I had been before, or even what that meant, but I started to be able to help clients in ways I would never have dreamed of previously.
The first really surprising result came when I had a client who had had both his legs amputated and suffered phantom limb pain. He also complained that he felt like he was constantly stubbing his toes on things, and also that his prosthetic legs were shorter than his real ones had been – he was already a short person so it really annoyed him.
As I was walking to meet him it hit me as I stepped from the road to the sidewalk that if his phantom limbs were longer than his prosthetics then they would stick out and hit the kerb; and maybe the same for stairs, which might explain the stubbing toes sensation. Although I felt a little strange about it I mentioned it to him. He was taken aback – he’d never considered the possibility before but he was up for experimenting and so was I.
As the head of a Spiritualist church, he was no stranger to trance. I explained the process and then we both went into trance. I did a formal eyes closed induction, induced an arm catalepsy and set up finger signals. His unconscious was very responsive. I asked his unconscious would it make it so that the neurological stimuli, which he had been interpreting as phantom limb pain, would no longer feel like pain, and to make it so that the feeling of having phantom limbs was adjusted to be the same dimensions as his prosthetic limbs. It agreed to take full unconscious control for achieving that, that it knew what to do and had all the resources necessary to do that, so I asked it to go ahead and signal me a yes when it had started an inevitable process to do that at the unconscious level. I waited around a minute then got a clear yes response. The session ended soon after that.
A few days later I received a call. The pain was gone, he hadn’t felt like he was stubbing his toes, and in fact his prosthetics felt so like his real ones that he had forgotten a few times when approaching flights of steps and nearly stepped down without holding the handrails. He virtually cursed me over the last part!
I was blown away. I would never have attempted to do anything like that as a counselor. I had been encouraged to go out there and find out what was possible, with a proviso that there were strange things out there, magical experiences. This was way beyond giving up smoking, improving skills or feeling better about life. This was a whole new level, which I had never encountered, and it made me wonder just what else was possible.
This result was life changing for both my client and I. I would not have encountered this without NLP training, and it propelled me through Master Practitioner and Trainer courses, and several other related courses. My life has become whole, I love living, I am becoming more proficient with my skills over time, have helped so many people and myself too of course, and am accelerating the process all the time. I encourage others to train, and intend to teach as many people as possible the skills for themselves, to make my own small contribution to the positive development of the future of human consciousness in the time I am around.
Every day I am grateful that I took the opportunity to leap into what it was that I did not know yet, to go for something I was unsure about but felt it was the right thing to do. I hope NLP and Hypnosis helps everyone at least as much as it does me, and continue to hold strong in my mind the possibilities for the great future that’s totally achievable and being achieved right now.
What have been the key moments for you on your NLP journey?