Integrate!

We have all been told - and told others - to take a deep breath as a way of collecting our thoughts or changing our states. Taking a deep breath is as appropriate in the quiet of private reflection as it is before a performance. It's interesting language: take a breath. We don't take it from anyone else: breathing adds as much to the air as it takes. What if you changed your language. Instead of taking a breath, what if you followed it. Your attention would have to make choices. Would you imagine your breath as starting at your mouth and moving down (as it does) or would it seem to start at the bottom and move up (as all your muscles shift to accommodate the depth of your breath)? It's harder than it sounds, this business of following breath and deciding what comes first: the air or the intention? Either way, following your breath will lead you to the space in between breaths, the space where there is nothing to follow. In that moment that hangs between one breath ...

Let's go back to first principles. Let's begin with what came into your mind when you saw this phrase. It's one of those deceptively simple phrases: none of the words are unfamiliar, but the meaning of the whole is curiously hard to express. The meaning of the words would be one example of first principles: any attempt to understand communication through language finally runs back into the correspondence between words and what they mean. It is a first principle of language that to understand an expression you need to understand the words used in that expression. The way we define a problem becomes the problem. That's also a first principle. If the problem is a battle, we fight to win. If the problem is a sale, we persuade until we get the cheque. If the problem is to understand, we seek more information. In NLP, we say that all problems are choice points and there is only one way to handle a choice point: step outside it, find new resources, then integrate the ...

Over the weekend I had an intriguing weekend with a group of friends working on a problem which may or may not prove insurmountable but certainly looks very large. Everyone there was smart and skilled and everyone wanted the best for everyone else. We were in an wonderfully warm, safe, and very beautiful setting. Here's what I noticed. Most of the people in the room were used to solving problems that have solutions. They had excellent skills for applying to people who are trying to do things that they (the people in the room) believe to be solvable. Their various approaches and techniques work brilliantly almost all the time, because almost all the time they are working in situations where they congruently believe a solution to be possible. However, we were working with a different kind of problem - a paradigm shifter, a creative problem or maybe we were tilting at windmills. No one in the room was sure that problem could be solved. And here's what I noticed. Everyone b...

My mom and I are going to Paris in June. We have our flights booked and now we are exploring places to stay. I look at one of my computer screens at a tiny picture of a room or a spot marked on a map. And as I look the room I am in disappears and I am walking down and up big streets and small streets and garden paths. And it is that glorious time of year when light lasts longest and I can walk through mornings and afternoons and evenings. Sometimes I am people watching in a park. I could be in a cafe but more often I am wide eyed in front of some achingly beautiful display in a patisserie or a fruit shop. Or in small streets so crowded with people that it is hard to get a good look at the shops. I wait patiently for the clearest view of a painting or wonder at the play of curve and flat and light in one of the Rodin statues in a garden. This is Paris. So even the tiny pictures of rooms in small hotels are memories of things that have and haven't been on streets I have or have...

It's the time of year when almost everyone wishes for just a little magic. If you're celebrating Christmas, then magic goes with the territory. And if you're not, then there's still moonlight on snow, and parties, and a fresh start in a new year. So here's just a little magic for the season, marked with stars to remind you that these are not instructions but magic tricks! * You can make the most trivial gifts into wonders. Try this: Think about someone you want to give a terrific gift. Allow yourself to be flooded by memories of the things that connect you with this person, the things you really enjoy. Now tell yourself that the next time you see this person, you are going to feel exactly what you're feeling now. You might be surprised to find that whatever gift you give in that frame will be received as something extraordinary. * Scan through your body until you find sensations or information that is pleasant. You just need one part of you that is feeling...

What if trance is so relaxing precisely because it is a state in which you have no concerns for anybody else? Then you could be in trance whenever you were completely self-absorbed. It doesn't sound particularly nice. It doesn't sound particularly ecological. It doesn't sound like a mysterious gift from your unconscious mind. It sounds - self-absorbed. I think about this paradox whenever we are running a hypnosis course. People love taking hypnosis - they float around with smiles on their faces, convinced that something wonderful is happening. Something wonderful is happening. It's just that something wonderful - like many gifts - is not without an edge. While you are in trance, you are completely yourself and completely separate from your environment. No one goes into trance and worries about someone else's pain. There is no jealousy in trance, but there is no compassion there either. This week, I am reading two books that speak to each other in interesti...

One of the dangers of spending a weekend working closely with the ways people perceive and influence is the need to be intentional about one's own framing. As we slide in and out of connections that interest us and warm us, we also slide into frames. If that term is new to you, think about a window frame and the way it draws your eye to certain parts of a landscape, moves other parts to the edges, and leaves some parts out of what you see. Where we look is, in part, determined by the size and shape of the opening through which we look. Changing the frame, changes what we see. The same is true with metaphoric frames. When we answer a question or get caught up in someone else's passion or urgency, we look through the frame someone else has set. It's not necessarily a bad frame, and it may show us something we would otherwise miss. It's good to borrow different frames. It's good to remember that they are borrowed; we have frames of our own. It can be hard to be ...