Cobwebs

Ingleborough, North face

Our lives, especially those millions of us who live our lives with many metaphorical cupboards, will gather cobwebs on a regular basis. And in whatever way we might utilise these cupboards in our day-to-day manner of being, it is essential we clear the decks regularly – for we are only human after all and we’re not weatherproof to the power of thought.

Thought energy comes and goes – and yet the moment we enfold any thought energy unto our aegis, we personalise it and it then becomes part of our thinking. And from that moment on, our thinking populates the cupboards and the whole cobweb cycle commences.

When we come to clean house and home from time to time, one of the good exercises to engage with is to clean the cupboards, wipe the dust off the shelves and blow away the cobwebs. 

It is very much the same with our Inner House.

The Cleanse

The "col" between Ingleborough and Little Ingleborough

I’ve just returned from climbing the mountain Ingleborough in the Yorkshire Dales, where I grasped the opportunity to blow away some cobwebs of my own! These had built up over the summer months since June and eventually I knew that only taking some deeper breaths then blowing hard, which included some shouting out at the top of my voice, would send the stale and dusty filaments packing once and for all. It was a very cleansing exercise!

(NB – I made sure I was sufficiently isolated so that no-one could hear me, but myself!)

Wardrobes and Cupboards

In my article The Wardrobe from November 2013 - http://pjwhypno.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-wardrobe.html - I wrote about the metaphorical clearing out of old clothes hanging in our wardrobes. Clothes we might have been keeping for a rainy day, but discovering sometime later, after many rainy days had come and gone, that they were just a waste of space. A waste of space, stopping us from populating our wardrobes with new clothes – the clothes that will fit us NOW, the clothes that are in style NOW, and not the clothes that wear that musty smell of age.

Whilst our clothes should only ever be a transient label, our cobwebs are a current label of unkempt and unattended cupboards. Cupboards of experience, of ideas, of thoughts and perceptions and occasional shibboleths of a bygone version of ourselves. Even the recent bygone-ness of just a few months – as it was for me!

Trig Point!

My resulting experience was akin to being able to really take in and enjoy that very first breath of new fresh air! Now, all my senses could properly translate the data I perceived around me – instead of being sullied from within. 

And that’s the first thing we notice after clearing away the cobwebs. Next comes a sense of feeling everything lighter. You could almost say it is enlightening! The baggage is no longer on the journey with us – and we realise we never needed it at all anyway!

And, as I started back down from the (by now) cloud-shrouded Ingleborough summit, my first task was to find not only the right pathway, but also to notice the precipices that loomed out of the clinging mist. For all was not yet as clear as you can see in the photo of the North Face I took the following morning!

No longer the scrambled mind

Scramble at Trow Gill

My “newest” cobweb, spun on the way up the mountain, was how might I negotiate the scramble at Trow Gill on my return journey? For some crazy reason I’d forgotten to wear the knee support this day, and I know that going down any climb is much harder for me, as I approach the age of 71 only held together by various neoprene supports!

With the lurking doubts blown away and with plenty of breaths of fresh air flowing through the cupboards, it was quite a simple and straightforward exercise – whatever had I been thinking and worried about!

Afterthought

There is no doubt that the way we breathe is the springboard to blowing away every cobweb that might by lurking in our cupboards … and a whole lot more besides! 

Breathe well, dear reader!

Coming Forward - Part 1

Cobwebs

Our lives, especially those of us who have lives with many metaphorical cupboards, will gather cobwebs on a regular basis.

I’ve just returned from climbing the mountain Ingleborough in the Yorkshire Dales, where I grasped the opportunity to blow away some cobwebs of my own! These had built up over the summer months since June and eventually I knew that only taking some deeper breaths, then blowing hard (plus shouting out loud) would send the stale and dusty filaments packing once and for all. It was a very cleansing exercise!

When we come to clean our house from time to time, one of the good exercises to engage with is to clean the cupboards, wipe the dust-off shelves and blow away (or vacuum up) the cobwebs.
And it is very much the same with our own, and very personal, "Inner House."

In my article The Wardrobe from November 2013 - http://pjwhypno.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-wardrobe.html - I wrote about the metaphorical clearing out of old clothes hanging in our wardrobes. Clothes we might have been keeping for a rainy day, but discovering sometime later, after many rainy days had come and gone, that they were just a waste of space. A waste of space, stopping us from populating our wardrobes with new clothes – the clothes that will fit us NOW, the clothes that are in style NOW, and not the clothes that wear that musty smell of age.

Clothes are a transient label, and cobwebs are a current label of unkempt and unattended cupboards. Cupboards of experience, of ideas, of thoughts and perceptions and occasional shibboleths of a bygone version of ourselves.

A Breath of Fresh Air

One of the ways of dealing with those cobwebs is that we can set up for ourselves a regular process of getting out into nature.

Walking, running, or cycling through nature with a purpose can drag our Attention from all those periods of Narrow Focus that we engage with on a daily basis – whether at home or at work – and that leech all the resilience out of us. 

The breath of fresh air not only gets deep into our lungs, it also (if we enable it) gets into the “cupboards” of our Mind and blows away the cobwebs.

Narrow Focus and our metaphorical Footwear

Now, don’t get me wrong - Narrow Focus IS a very useful perspective for doing certain tasks in life, work, play and performance. The trouble arises for us when we feel compelled to use Narrow Focus as a perspective for ALL things.

It’s like when we have just one pair of shoes and make them DO for all day and every day. We KNOW this doesn’t work, yet we’ll make excuses and put up with the inappropriate times. We despair when our shoes wear thin or go out of shape, when they fail to support our feet properly. We also find that we need to replace them very regularly because we use them ALL the time – and yet, even if we had two pairs of the same shoes, they would actually last more than twice as long.

One pair of shoes – physically and metaphorically – is a very false economy!

The same goes for when we ignore the DEFAULT setting of our Attentive Focus, which is Open Focus.

We are born with that default setting and grow up with that same default setting. Then, at some time between the ages of 5-7 (or, sadly as I will relate in a moment, even earlier), we become subjected to the requirements of the society we are growing up in. These requirements start to make increasingly high demands upon how we manage our Attention.

Our Mums and Dads, by virtue of their OWN Attention Management, may make demands upon us at home and within the family environment, over and above what we might consider to be our learning about our place within the life of the family unit.
Recently, I was walking behind a family of four (including 2 children below the age of 5) that were on holiday. All I could hear was the mother shouting at her eldest,
“You are ruining my holiday. Yes, you are! You are ruining my holiday!” It was painfully obvious that the state of Focus of the mother was decidedly Narrow – and the benefit of the holiday to restore her default status of Open was unlikely to accrue! Sadly, with a tone of cruelty borne of frustration, she eventually threatened to cancel her little girl’s Birthday.

We drive ourselves to run all the elements and tasks in our lives with a Narrow Focus, because life is very demanding of our attention. We are constantly being pulled this way and that – and we have a label for all this pulling and how it makes us feel.
STRESSED.

And with sore feet from poor, ill-fitting and worn-out footwear, a daily round of Narrow Focus and no resilience to break free from the stress of it all, we might easily end up finding ourselves bellowing at our pre-school children when they don’t instantly conform to our demands …

Opening the cupboards of our Breathing

When I work with clients – and myself – on locating that default Open setting of our Focus, I always start with that most primary and basic physical element that is the Breathing Cycle.

The knowing of WHEN our next breath is arriving, and HOW it is arriving, are probably two key factors that underpin our ultimate sense of security. 

I know that these two were vital elements for me during my period of 22+ years of stress-related anxiety of choking when drinking – even everyday liquids such as water, tea, coffee etc. For when I had a mouthful of drink “go down the wrong way” I found that, for me, there was no KNOWING of when and how – in those moments when the gagging and choking was happening.

Discovering and expanding our knowledge on the four parts of the Breathing Cycle is a great education and enables a wonderful resource to help us towards a more calm and grounded state of mind. “Take a deep breath,” is a widely use phrase of enablement for when we are agitated, stressed-out and overwhelmed. However, we need to go beyond mere words and discover where our breathing habits are RIGHT NOW before we can plot the pathway to improving them.

With even just a little more knowledge and practice we can dramatically change how we breathe and bring back a huge level of control of our grounded state of mind and tap into the innate sense of wellbeing that previously had seemed to have abandoned us – in the moment.

When good breathing is allied to any activity we undertake, then we’ll perform it better and for longer.

And when we do this, straightaway we’ll feel better about ourselves – which will feedback into our motivation and desire to continue to do it, and to do it more often as well.

These are simple processes, I know, yet for those who are beset in the Slough of Despond, or worse, that simplicity never seems to equate to EASY … even though we are always only just ONE THOUGHT AWAY from changing our mind.

The way we breathe is the springboard to blowing away every cobweb that might by lurking in our cupboards … and a whole lot more besides!

If you want to know more about enhancing your knowledge AND practice of good breathing, then contact me at pjw@thewrightwayltd.com to set the ball rolling!

Quo Vadis

Yin and Yang

You know that phrase from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities – “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times”? And it goes on … “It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,” and further examples of the Yin and Yang of Life.

This, all and more, has been the feature of the most recent 3 months of my life.

To be fair, this Yin and Yang is going on ALL the time for ALL of us, and most of the time we don’t notice the peaks and troughs, the ebbs and flows – EXCEPT when we do!

And we only notice, our attention is drawn to the major/minor balance in our experiences, when there seems to be a less than random or cyclic flow to things.

And because we ARE ONLY human after all, we find ourselves noticing the runs in sequences of DOWNS far more than the UPS.

This was how it happened for me – round about the time I overdid it in terms of some sporting action. The weather was hot, I’d done some strenuous activity for two days and then spent a lot of time on my feet on the third day as well.
It was on the third day evening that my physical body began to shut down, crying out loud enough for me to hear – “Enough IS enough, Matey. You’ve overdone it, and this now is the wakeup call.”

Although my awakening to physical frailty was only in extremis for five days, I subsequently took things easy for much longer. And that was where the other rot began to set in. 

In the midst of lots of simple and regular everyday stuff, I began to notice – and pay more attention to – things I would normally look upon with a grounded understanding and an objective eye.

Bit by bit, I began to arrive at conclusions I wouldn’t have previously arrived at. More and more I would trip over bits of mental baggage, as I plied the daily pathways.

Apocalyptic Horses

My relationship with my thinking took a turn to the dark side – I began to believe my thoughts 100%.

I began to take many more things personally. Lapses in memory, everyday things forgotten, became more than random happenings of a busy-minded person – they became categorised and catalogued. I increasingly noticed every time I was criticised, judged, questioned.

EGO was under attack – and when ego feels under attack, then ego fights back for one’s self.
Ego became defensive, aggressive and, on occasions, very angry.
On the battlefield of the Outside-In nature of reality, the responsibility for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune is ALWAYS with the world and, in my particular case, the people in it. It’s their fault for doing that to Me. It might start out as unfair or insensitive, yet the Horse gallops off and takes common sense with it.

When ego takes the reins of the Horse of Our Life and hangs on to them for too long, then things not only look apocalyptic – they very soon, in perceptive reality, become apocalyptic.

We might ask ourselves at some point, with blinding rhetoric, “Am I losing it?”

And in the midst of apocalypse, every answer we notice whispers Maybe, at first, then finally Yes.

In the end, this entire manic gallop came to rest in a “swamp of despair” that bore a remarkable resemblance to what John Bunyan described in The Pilgrim’s Progress as being “The Slough of Despond.”  * (pronounced Sluff)

The Slough of Despond

Without quoting Bunyan’s scary and indeed apocalyptic words, I can aver to this place as being where the Soul can feel - and be - abandoned.

Some may scoff at this declaration, saying that, “Surely the Soul cannot feel and be abandoned. What a ridiculous notion. The Soul is infinite, is eternal.”

I can also aver to this place being a “clearing house” for our state of mind and associated emotions.
It is like a quicksand – either you sink in deeper or you get pulled out.

Sinking in deeper will lead to depression and worse.
Getting pulled out will require some resource or other.

One of the awful and tragic things that is brought about by riding headlong into The Slough of Despond, is what becomes of the Horse of Our Life in that dreadful mire.
There are many metaphors and images that can spring to mind, as the Horse struggles to carry us back to safety. Yet, how true it is when we find that the life we lead cannot and will not bring us out of the Slough.

Some Resource or Other

There are resources, needless to say, that will enable us to be dragged from The Slough of Despond. These are the lifelines afforded to us, that are NOT always governed by knowledge, understanding, wisdom or common sense.

One of the lifelines is to abandon the Horse. By this I mean, that we extricate ourselves from our previous life, some or all its trappings and everything about it. However, some people might not want to abandon their way of life – and there’s a similar and graphic metaphor about how we might get ourselves out of a car that has been driven into the sea, a lake or a river.

We might break ourselves free of the Horse, stand on its back and jump to safety. We might then be able to rescue our own Horse as well.

Another lifeline is if someone Sees Us. We might hope that the someone has enough concern or resource of their own and have the will to throw us a lifeline. However, few people will either see or hear us. The Slough is a personal and silent place of our very own. We rarely, if ever, cry out for help … something I discovered at a very young age when exposed to drowning in a swimming pool. I might have waved and floundered around but calling out was not my intuitive action.

Another resource is Time. This is not THE most reliable of resources, since it is the gravity of thoughts, fears and judgements that weighs us down, pulling us deeper into the mire.

However, by lightening the load of our thoughts, fears and judgements we can shed some of the burdensome weight, allowing us to crawl nearer to safety. Of course, our lifestyle and trappings will be part of the equation too, which will play into this.

You may have some of your own considerations and conclusions about resources here too.

However, there is a caveat I will offer up to you.
When it comes to The Slough of Despond, then “Knowing Thyself” is the most distant of resources. We find our cupboards full of self-knowledge and self-understanding, of wisdom and grounded wellbeing, have been stripped bare. What was there yesterday has gone. When we are gasping for breath and flailing in the quicksand, our inner resources are removed from view in their usual place. We still have them, but our Soul will have laid them up, by way of preparation, into a place of safety.

“Quo Vadis?”

With my own recent journey, there were many questions related to “Am I losing it?”

Some were related to mental degeneration, a not unserious question in terms of my age, loss of synaptic connectivity, referential evidence of my own mental lapses and those evidenced by others. The instances highlighted in The Confession – “Left undone those things I ought to have done,” “erred and strayed like a lost sheep,” and “there is no health in me.” (NB - I’m not a religious person!)
Taking my “eye off the ball”; letting people down – both in my own judgement and being told so by others; being unable to let go of a persistent feeling of anger; having a sense of being mentally rendered down by complaint and criticism; and a catalogue of other instances.

As the Yin and Yang came and went like waves on the shore, it was a journey that was the best of times and yet also the worst of times.

Every journey we are on in Life WILL throw stuff at us out of the left field, and a reasonable smattering of curveballs. We ARE human, however – and we are not hermetically sealed from the things we come into contact with. Because we have nerves, there are always SOME nerve agents that are going to affect us. These affects are cumulative and can often come from the kindest, most benign and respected of sources. We need to be both vigilant AND honest with ourselves and others – and we also need to see the tell-tale signs in ourselves and others.

Finally, to those who really do care, I'd say just this ...

“In terms of Respect – our Soul Commands though never Demands.”

Perceptual Hybrids

There’s a subtle power encapsulated within NLP that seems to defy science – which is reflected in the way that science cannot seem to prove what NLP is. We all have an idea of what NLP does, and what it can do in conjunction with other elements within the hypnotic domain, yet science regularly demands that NLP be defined, rather than defy!

I believe that the subtle power embedded in NLP plays out – for each of us – at a neurophysiological level. To put it simply, it is how the communicative power of language acts upon our minds and bodies, both in a conscious and cognitive way as well as in a more unconscious (outside of our attention) and intuitive/connective way.

Experiments – Just to see what might happen!

I have often experimented with creating Hybrid Processes by mixing certain routines, and then running them for clients just to see what might happen – mainly because there’s always something going to be going on!

Probably my most notable experiment was called “Watch your own performance.” This was where I took a cricketing batsman, in a practice scenario against a bowling machine, and asked him to imagine – while he continued to practice and hit balls – that he was observing himself batting from a position some 10-15m away. To do this he had to dissociate from the action he WAS doing, which elicited a range of interesting comments, responses and subtle inner adjustments to the way he was playing. In summing up, I described it as -

“He was able to improve the quality of his batting from the inside-out by first dissociating, and then opening out his focus through spatial re-association.”

You can read my article on this experiment here:-
http://pjwhypno.blogspot.com/2012/02/watch-your-own-performance.html

The Latest

So, what might happen if I mixed the linear nature of the elements in the Cognitive Cycle with the concept of Perceptual Positions by using the spaces within a room?

This came as a 4am message from out of the blue, as I woke up to a call of nature – there was this idea, in my conscious in-tray, waiting to be considered. So, I expanded some branches of the ideas and concepts, and came up with an experiment that I ran later for one of my clients.

In a large room I placed four chairs in a semi-circle facing a large empty box on the floor.
I labelled the box – THE WORLD.
I labelled one chair THOUGHT, the next FEELINGS, the next, JUDGING and DECIDING and the last one, ACTION and BEHAVIOUR.
In front of the first two chairs, on the floor, I put the label – WHAT IS IT THAT’S HAPPENING?
In front of the third and fourth chair, on the floor, I put the label – HOW SHALL I RESPOND?

Now, my client knows about The Cognitive Cycle and how the Power of Language links all the elements together. Also, he understands that how we experience the world and respond to it is simply represented by Our Relationship with Our Thinking. He is very well versed in the theory and practice of all of it.

So, when he arrived for our latest session and he saw the Experiment laid out as I’ve described, he was intrigued as to what might or might not happen!

Sometimes our Relationship with our Thinking tends to hoodwink us, because of the impression that we seem to feel certain things first and then go and think about them. In actual fact, what is really happening by this point, at a cognitive level, is that we then go and think about the feelings some more.

We would do well to remember that our feelings are generated from thought processes, for often there is such a high-speed link between our thinking and our feeling that it seems like the other way around. It is always the Egg!
By opening up this cycle to being represented by two separate chairs (thinking and feeling) in a space in a room, the Relationship immediately becomes a lot clearer!

Another bit of by-play in this physical representation, is to put a couple of little cushions – labelled MEMORIES and BELIEFS & VALUES­ – into the “Thinking” chair.

For when the client then sits in the “Thinking” chair, they also get a felt sense of how our Memories and Beliefs & Values play a vital role in how we filter the contents of our Thinking!

Next, I took my client through some specific examples of how he receives instances or stimuli from (the box labelled) The World … out there.

It started with his being sat in the THINKING chair – being pushed and nudged into a certain posture by the cushions of Memory and Beliefs & Values.
By asking him “What’s Happening Here?” I got him to evaluate, as best he could, just his thinking around this particular stimulus.

Then I quickly moved him to the FEELING chair and asked, “And what’s Happening HERE?” getting him to evaluate what and how he was Feeling as a result of his evaluations from the THINKING chair.
With those feeling evaluations fresh in his mind, I moved him back to the THINKING chair.
“OK – look at the FEELING chair and, tell me, what are you NOW getting from what you experienced sat in that chair?”

After his responses, I then asked him to stand next to the box labelled THE WORLD, and I got him to tell me what he’d evaluated – from this perspective – from observing himself at, first, the THINKING chair and then, secondly, the FEELING chair.

I then asked him to go and sit in the JUDGING chair – look back at the WORLD – and give his objective and impersonal evaluations of this particular stimulus, from a Judging perspective. His responses were calculated and dispassionate.
“Now that you’re assessing how to respond to this stimulus,” I said, “when you are ready go and sit in the ACTION chair. When you’re there, then tell me what responsive action you’re going to take.”

This he did, and finally I got him to go and stand next to THE WORLD and see himself taking the Action that he had Judged would be the response to make.
“What does THAT look like, from the perspective of you as observer, standing there at THE WORLD?”

Feedback

“Interesting,” he said. “I need to spend less, or as little as possible, time being sat in the THINKING chair. In terms of the things I’d like to change – if I could, quickly, go straight from THINKING to JUDGING then it would be a lot better.”
“If you could move one of the chairs out of the circle which one would it be?” I asked.
“That one,” he said – pointing at the FEELING chair. “All the reasons for me taking the choices I have done in the past, are from what I experienced in the FEELING chair. If I had felt nothing, then I’d have made a different Judgement as to what to do next.”
“That’s great,” I said as I picked up the FEELING chair and put it at the back of the room. “Let’s see what happens NOW.”

I asked him to stand by THE WORLD and imagine the same particular stimulus as being presented to him. I then directed him to go and sit in the THINKING chair. “What’s gone on NOW, in that chair?” I asked him. Amusingly, he asked if he could do without the cushions! “OK,” I said. “Put them on the floor and tell me how different the chair is without them. Then tell me about how this stimulus presents itself to you NOW.”

Without the cushions he was able to occupy the THINKING chair in a different posture. He discovered that his evaluation of the stimulus was quite different, much more neutral.
Then, without any more ado, he moved on quickly to the JUDGING chair and started smiling. It was the kind of smile we often make when experiencing lightbulb moments.

Somewhere, in the gap between the THINKING chair and the JUDGING chair, was the arrival of a whole raft of recognition and understanding.

Clouds

And now old friends they're acting strange
They shake their heads, they say I've changed
Well something's lost, but something's gained
In living every day.

I've looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all

Songwriters: Joni Mitchell

Both Sides Now lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Crazy Crow Music / Siquomb Music Publishing

And, rather like some of the lyrics of the Joni Mitchell song Clouds, once we start looking at THE WORLD from a number of perspectives, using space and chairs and cushions and labels, then something that altogether seems to defy science emerges from the particular illusions that we had once created for ourselves.

Conclusion

There’s a subtle power encapsulated within NLP that seems to defy science and what it can do in conjunction with other elements within the hypnotic domain! Is it how the communicative power of language acts upon our minds and bodies, both in a conscious and cognitive way as well as in a more unconscious (outside of our attention) and intuitive/connective way?

I wonder!