Tag Archives: NLP strategies

Cellular healing

I was recently reading Deepak Chopra’s book Quantum healing that gives a lot of food for thoughts, especially regarding the cellular healing work I do combining integrative NLP and Hypnotherapy.

There’s an inner intelligence in our body, which makes it so structurally perfect. It’s that intelligence that knows when to produce the hormones and chemicals we need when we need them. Take the flight or fight response. How does the body know how to produce adrenaline and cortisol in the exact amount you need to respond optimally to a threat? When you’ve got a virus, how does your immune system know to send T-cells to identify and destroy the intruder, and furthermore to flag it to recognize it in case of future attacks to protect you better? When you look at the complexity of our bodies and yet the perfect mechanism that keeps it functioning, it is very hard to believe it’s all happening “by chance”, isn’t it? There must be an inner program that makes sure all of it runs like clockwork. That’s what Chopra describes as our inner intelligence, and that’s what NLP calls the unconscious mind. When you look at the primes directives of the unconscious mind, you will find the one that reminds us that it is in charge of running and preserving the body.

Based on the study of our physiology Chopra explains that our body regenerates itself completely every year. Some other sources claim that it happens every seven years. In any case, it means the cells of our ENTIRE body get totally renewed at the worst, every seven years. Structurally, it simply means we are not the same body we were a few years ago. Which raises an interesting question, if our body gets totally replaced at the cellular level, how do people manage to carry non genetic illnesses and diseases for a longer period of time? According to Chopra, less than 5% of cancers are genetic. So how does the body manage to re-create cancer cells that are not programmed in our DNA when those ones have been totally wiped off by chemotherapy?

Chopra introduces the idea of phantom memory. Physicists often talk about muscle memory, where the body learns and remember repetitive tasks we perform. Walking, riding, playing a musical instrument or driving are a very good example of it. Not only do you remember how to do this at the neurological level, but your body also remembers the movements associated with the task, in order to make it easier to perform next time.

However there seems to be another type of memory in our mind and body. A kind of immaterial memory that contains information that gets transmitted to our cells and triggers old physiological responses even when all the cells that used to be deficient have long disappeared. I’m talking about cancer type of illnesses, or even chemical addictions. Where does this memory come from? Our past, our experience, of course. But how does all this chemically alters our body? How does the mental message gets translated into a chemical reaction? There aren’t yet any satisfactory scientific explanation for that.

However I strongly believe that the unconscious mind plays a major role into this process. It is where memories are stored, and it is what controls our body. Therefore it must be the missing link between thoughts, emotions and physical reactions. So if the unconscious mind has got the power to change the chemical structure of our body, what would happen if we reprogrammed the messages the unconscious mind follows? What would happen if we could instruct the unconscious mind to heal the body instead of creating illnesses?

That’s where hypnotherapy and NLP, among other techniques, come in. They allow a direct communication and reprogramming of the unconscious mind, therefore opens up the possibility for cellular healing. I’ve done major work on chronic illnesses, and so-called incurable diseases and observed some very promising results; whether curing an allergy, recovering much quicker from the flu or even working with cancer, M.E or Crohn’s disease. And I’m hoping to continue my exploration of this fascinating field and keep pushing the limits of the possibilities of cellular healing.

5 steps to avoid being overwhelmed

The reason why you haven’t seen many of my blogs recently – and apologies for that – is because in the past few weeks I was working between France and England. In France, I was running seminars and coaching sessions for people suffering from chronic illnesses. Back in UK, I was working with my NLP/hypnotherapy clients, training my Person Centred NLP/H courses and performing music concerts at the weekend. I must say that I’m often asked “How do you cope with so many things to do?” And I’ve realized I’ve developed a strategy to avoid being overwhelmed.

To start with, I go back to the basics and make sure I sleep enough, I eat healthily and get enough exercise. I’ve used the NLP spatial anchoring technique to motivate myself to exercise, submodality change work and the Swish to alter my food taste in order to have more healthy ones. I also make appointments with myself in my diary to go swimming and meditate, as that gives my unconscious mind the message that I am, and my health is as important as the other areas of my life.

And finally I make my “to-do” lists. The first list I make is a monthly one. At the beginning of each month, I write down what my goals are for the next 30 days, whether is preparing my new NLP course, or the next Smart School exiting transformational future workshop, doing my tax return, reading that book I meant to read for ages, or writing my blog.

Then I chunk down this monthly list into a weekly one. For each task, looking at all the steps I need to take to complete the task. I schedule them in the week looking at my wall calendar, deciding realistically how long each task will take and when is the best time to do it during the week. I then write it down in my diary.

Finally I chunk that list down into daily tasks, reviewing it each night to fine tune it according to what is left to do. So I’m going to sleep having written down my to-do list for the following day, which takes it off my mind and allows me to go peacefully to sleep, avoiding insomnia based on the worry of so many things to do.

The following morning, after having had a healthy breakfast and meditated, I look at my to-do list and get ready to start work. Now, I don’t know about you, but I am brilliant at finding excuses to delay starting work. Social media, needing a break, having to check this important thing on internet, feeding the cat…so I’ve created a great way to avoid falling into this trap: I do the NLP perceptual positions on myself. The first position, is me being my own boss. That’s when I decide which tasks need to be accomplished and by when. The second position, that I take every morning, is me being the employee who’s been asked to perform a task. Because in reality, the main reason that prevents us to do what we are supposed to do, is because we give ourselves the choice, don’t we? So I simply step into the shoes of someone who doesn’t have the choice. An employee whose boss requested a task.

So here are a few tips to cope with being overwhelmed:

1. Write down every thing that needs to be done

2. Write down all the necessary steps for each task

3. Looking at your diary, decide when you can realistically start working on it making sure you stay balanced as much as possible

4. When working on one task, only focus in that one thing, knowing you’ve concretely planned already for the rest of it to be dealt with later. Meditation does help to stay focused in the here and now rather than worrying about what’s next to do.

5. Regularly take some deep breath to relax your body and oxygenate your brain making sure your keeping your concentration levels at their peak.

Hope that helps! Please let me know your strategies to handle too many things to do by dropping a comment below!

 

When the NLP fast phobia cure doesn’t work

Richard Bandler put together his fast phobia cure a few years ago and supposedly in 10 minutes manages to free people from their phobia. In my experience however – and the one of a few of my NLP colleagues, it’s rarely that straight forward.

The brain learns and change very quickly, therefore it’s indeed essential to do some processes in a high-speed as it’s the key to destabilize old running patterns. A lot of clients get rid of their phobia with a basic NLP approach, however sometimes a client might need a few different processes to completely overcome the complexity of their phobia.

Today I saw a client with a spider phobia, and on our first session I mentioned I had a plastic spider in my bag. She panicked and was on the verge of tears at the thought of it. Considering the extent of her phobia, I chose to do first a part integration process in order to address her secondary gain – protection – that appeared to be very strong. If you don’t address the secondary gain before doing the phobia cure, it’s likely not going to work or last.

After the first session, she felt more comfortable but still was quite terrified. On the second session, when I mentioned getting my plastic spider out of my bag, her unconscious communication clearly signalled that she wasn’t ready for it. So I did the phobia cure on her – the normal version, not the fast one, and at the end of it she felt better but I could tell she wasn’t totally sorted.

So I saw her today for the third time. She had managed to stay in the same room as a spider during the past week and her reactions were much less dramatic. So we looked into her unconscious strategy to create the phobia and more specifically her internal visual representation of a spider. And as I suspected, it was completely distorted and exaggerated. The spider was oversized, very close up and out of context, i.e there wasn’t any background in the picture. So we installed a new strategy based on the one she unconsciously uses with insects she’s fine being around, whilst using anchoring and pattern breaking. At the end of the session, she asked for my plastic spider and spent 20mn playing around with it!

Every client is different, all patterns are different, and processes are only crutches to help you help your clients. And the key – and the principle behind NLP – is to first understand the structure of your client’s internal patterns before knowing how to start changing them.