Beginners Mind - Part 1
Reflections at the end of the first session of the NLP Practitioner Certification Training
By Berry Moore
Eyes have always been a big thing in my family. My mom says eyes reflect the soul, and that’s what makes some eyes more attractive than others. Now it seems there are a whole lot more reasons for watching eyes … consider the scene: I asked my best friend if he could remember the curtains in his childhood bedroom. Ping! His eyeballs shot to the top right corner, and before he could say anything I clapped my hands in delight and exclaimed “Oh wow, you did it!” My friend was confused. “Did what ?” he asked. “Went into visual recall. Don’t worry, it’s a thing people do, quite normal,” I reassured him airily, but he didn’t look enlightened so I just smiled and went back to my books.
It’s been fun, since that first weekend, watching people’s eye patterns, watching their reactions as I “mirror” their body language. Or not. Suddenly, instead of watching myself to make sure I’m saying what I mean, I find myself watching the person I’m communicating with to check what they are hearing. I’m playing a new game, called: “What I said may - or may not - have been what you heard”. And the world, it seems, is playing it with me.
NLP is not like an ice-cream, delightful but enjoyed only by the consumer. It’s more like a ripple of laughter, expanding outwards and creating more ripples and causing people to smile without knowing why - and who knows where that might end ? Once I saw a poster of a large gorilla lazing in a grassy glade, scratching his head. The caption was: “Just when I learnt all of life’s answer’s, they changed all the questions!” The first weekend of the Neuro-Linguistic Programming course is a bit like that. I always thought the question was “Why ?” For example, “Why don’t I have what I want ?”, “Why am I here ?” Now, it seems, halfway through my life, the real question is “How ?” as in, “How do I get what I want ?”, “How did I get where I am ?” … “or not”. Somehow - there’s that word again - changing the focus seems to bring the intangible closer, like grabbing clouds and finding … cottonwool. How do I describe those “oh wow!” moments when ideas floating in the air suddenly land and become crystalized, graspable, visible?
Fifteen of us chose to participate in this course, arriving as a diverse group of strangers from a wide array of backgrounds, circumstances and career paths. Some of us see the point - or not; some of us dance to a different tune. Some of us think it all makes perfect sense - or not. And some of us just feel we’re moving in the right direction. We’ve laughed a lot together, shared - cautiously, at first - our ideas, and established that miraculous trust that strangers offer each other within the perceived safe confines of an intimate course such as this one. Just one quarter of the way through the NLP Practitioner course, I find myself struggling to contain an expanded view of my world in a few words. I’m learning a new language, wading through a sea of new expressions like predicates, modalities, pacing, leading, eye patterns, sensory acuity, rep. systems, matching and mismatching … ideas and words are falling over themselves, and I’m afraid of giving away just how little I really know. How much I still have to learn.
Yes, I feel I have learnt, and grown and experienced, but “how” will I use Neuro-Linguistic Programming - as I know it so far - on a practical level ? I just will. We all do, every day, whether we know it or not. The power of the game lies in using the skills consciously, deliberately, and with positive intent. The value lies in harnessing that elusive power to increase our understanding of ourselves and the people we deal with on a day to day basis, whatever walk of life we happen to be involved in. The beauty of it lies in that most enigmatic dynamic of all - the gift of choice, not only for me but for the delightful souls who populate my world. At least, I think so.
Berry Moore is a holistic massage therapist and metaphysical healer. She is also an AHT trained Master Practitioner of NLP.
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