We designed these cards specifically for participants on the efa NLP Practitioner programme. People use them in a variety of ways. As they can be separated, some use them during sessions with clients to remind them of the process they are taking someone through. Others use them to help them with revision in the run-up to integration and assessment. Increasingly, people attending other trainers’ programmes are buying them and using them to supplement their own manuals.

The cards are laminated, quite small and can be placed in any order and people find them very practical. The content includes the heart of most NLP practitioner programmes plus extra material on beliefs, timeline work and Ken Wilber’s quadrants. They are intended to supplement learning and not instead of an NLP manual or book.

The buzz around Ken Wilber’s (link to efa model and course description?) work continues to grow and I am often asked which of his many books to start with. It does depend on each individual’s particular reason for reading him but for a short, general introduction to his work, I can’t think of a better place to start than “A Theory Of Everything”.

In under 200 hundred pages Ken lays out his basic AQAL theory (link to efa or mtltt AQAL page) and shows how we can apply it in a variety of contexts. It is also the first time that he mentions the Graves/Spiral Dynamics (link to efa course page) model and his introduction is one of the clearest that I have read. Within a short period of time he is applying the concepts to concrete situations that will be understood by everyone.

Highly recommended.

A word about reading Ken’s work: people sometimes relate being dazed and confused by the terminology that Ken uses (he is a philosopher after all) and spend days digesting his works a page at a time. My recommendation is to read his books as novels; if you feel lost just carry on, knowing that he will return to the theme again and that it will make sense further on. I personally find that it is quicker and more beneficial to read through the book twice rather than studying it over a long period.

Integral Vision

Those of you who have been following this site for any period of time will know that I am a fan of Ken Wilber. This new book, subtitled, “a very short introduction to the revolutionary integral approach to life, god, the universe, and everything”, offers just what it says on the cover.

If you are intrigued by the concept of integral and have heard of Ken Wilber but haven’t yet jumped into the heady waters of his books, then this might be just the push that you need. It is a small format book of some 230 pages with big writing and lots of pictures and diagrams that often say far more than the text. The book introduces all of the elements of the AQAL Model – All Quadrants (the Interior and the Exterior of the Individual and the Social), All Levels (the concept of developmental change introduced primarily, though not exclusively, through the work of Clare Graves and Spiral Dynamics), All Lines (a summary of the work started by Howard Gardner), All States (of consciousness), and All Types (sticking primarily to masculine and feminine).

There is also a chapter on the difference between Religion and Spirituality and a practical one on how to develop your own Integral Life Practice. Although there is a lot here for everyone, those who have been following Ken’s work for a few years will not find anything new here as it is very clearly the introduction that lots of us have been asking for an easier way to introduce friends and colleagues to the Integral Model. Those wanting to explore where Ken is now need look no further than to grapple with “Integral Spirituality”.

The book starts with the hero answering an advertisement: “Teacher seeks pupil. Must have earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.”  He is surprised to find that the teacher is a gorilla who communicates with him telepathically.

I have to admit that I found the idea of this a little twee but, as the book had been recommended by so many people I respected, I persevered, and I am so glad that I did. The fictional device works and there are very good reasons why the author has chosen to communicate his ideas in this unusual form.

Although outwardly a novel, the book is really one of ideas, and really big ones at that as it concerns itself with the survival of humanity and all of the other species on the planet. Almost everyone I have urged to read this book has been delighted and disturbed by its contents.

You won’t agree with everything in this book but it will certainly provide you with lots to think about and discuss.

I can also recommend the website dedicated to Quinn’s ideas, www.ishmael.com.

(For those of you who know the Graves Model or Spiral Dynamics you may be interested to check out where Quinn is on the spiral; I find a lot of his ideas high-level Green, and there is nothing wrong with that.)

Introduction

Spring has come very late this year which may be why I haven’t heard much about Hay Fever yet. For many people that is what the onset of warmer weather and lighter evenings means. This is true for Jean and thousands like her who now start checking the pollen count every morning, and the days herald more sneezing, itching, and breathing problems. Jean had suffered from these problems for nine years since the untimely deaths of her parents. Imagine how pleased she was to find out that NLP had developed a Fast Allergy Relief Process that could be used to combat Hay Fever. After one session she rid herself of Hay Fever and hasn’t suffered from the debilitating symptoms since.

In the seventeen years since I discovered the process I have helped many people to relieve the symptoms of Hay Fever and other allergies. A surprising number of these have eradicated the symptoms completely, and although the process doesn’t work for everybody, it is amazing how many people can be helped.

Most people I have worked with have needed only one session to get a huge amount of relief. In those cases where there is no significant improvement, in the hands of the right practitioner, no harm can be done with this process and the worst that happens is nothing.

Neuro Linguistic Programming

Many of you will be asking what NLP is. Put simply, NLP was developed to model excellence. It is a process for working out how people do things well. Once we know that we can develop techniques and procedures using NLP to pass on these people’s skills and strategies.

In the field of health, we find people who have stayed well or who have healed themselves against the odds and try to work out with them how they did this so that others can benefit. NLP has had great success dealing with phobias and allergies, and, of course, Hay Fever.

The Onset of Allergies

We know that allergies can start at any time in life – childhood, teenagerhood or adulthood. We know that allergies usually start at times when we are facing an identity crisis of some sort. People I have worked with started allergies when they moved from small school to big school, when they were facing exams, when they were going through puberty, when they were leaving home for the first time, when they were divorced, or when faced with the death of a loved one.

During these times of crisis, every part of the person’s system is on alert. The immune system is primed to protect us against any possible attack. Unfortunately, this will be the first thing that the immune system notices and so we end up with an allergy because we are being protected so well.

The Immune System

With Hay Fever our system wrongly assumes that we need to be protected from pollen even though we know consciously that pollen is not dangerous and that most people have no reaction to pollen at all. We can use the NLP Fast Allergy Relief Process to re-educate the immune system allowing it to continue protecting us while no longer needing to respond to pollen by attacking it. We can relieve ourselves of those uncomfortable and disabling symptoms.
Taking Jean Through The NLP Hay Fever Relief Process

Secondary Gain
The first thing that Jean and I did was to check that it would be ok for her not to have the symptoms of Hay Fever. This may seem to be an odd way to start but we needed to make sure that there was no secondary gain to be achieved in Jean maintaining Hay Fever. For Jean, there wasn’t and so we could continue with the process.

Thanking The Immune System
Next, we needed to thank Jean’s immune system for doing a great job and keeping her safe and sound all of these years. It had been ready and able to dash into action every time that it felt that she was under threat, hence the symptoms of sneezing and itching. This is important because we want Jean’s immune system to continue looking after her after she has rid herself of Hay Fever. The metaphor I often use here is of a small child who has taken on an important job in the house and years later she no longer needs to do this job. It would be unkind not to thank her for doing a good job and then explaining that she doesn’t need to do that any more but can go out to play.

Replicating The Symptoms
Next, I asked Jean to remember a time when she had had Hay Fever. I need to be very careful here and only allow Jean to think of the symptoms for a very short period of time because it can be quite distressing and comfortable. Once Jean had showed me what it is like to have Hay Fever – running eyes and sneezing and the like – I quickly got her back into a resourceful state. The point of this was to show Jean that some, if not all, of the symptoms are produced by her. How can she produce the symptoms of Hay Fever in the depths of winter when there is no pollen around? This is a big convincer for lots of people that they can start to have more control over their own health.

Not All
Another thing that convinced Jean that she could have control was the realisation that not everyone suffers Hay Fever. There are many, many more people who don’t than there are who do. Pollen in itself is not a dangerous substance and does not affect everyone. Once Jean had realised this, she was ready to move on to the next stage.

Finding An Alternative
The next part of the process was the fun part where Jean and I needed to get creative. We needed to find something that, for Jean, is like pollen but which isn’t pollen. After some fun and rejecting most ideas and suggestions we recalled a time when Jean had been baking cakes with her mother and she had dropped the flour bag and it had split on the floor. Suddenly, there was flour all over the place. Jean remembers looking worriedly across at her mother scared that she would be angry. But her mother, covered in flour, as was the whole kitchen, had burst out laughing. And Jean remembers being hugged by her mother and rolling over and over in the flour as they laughed and laughed and laughed until they were exhausted. And in that time both inhaled a lot of flour but it did no harm.

Jean had an experience of something safe floating around in the air, breathing it in and it having no ill effects on her whatsoever. In fact, it added to the fun of the whole experience as they spluttered and laughed.

The Process
The process itself is very easy to complete as all of the hard work has been done. Using simple visualisation techniques, I helped Jean to find a place in her mind where she felt completely safe. For Jean, she was surrounded by a thick Perspex bubble. She then imagined herself on a television screen in a kitchen surrounded by flour and breathing it in. She was safe in her bubble and safe in the picture. I then helped Jean to change the picture in stages so that the flour eventually turned into pollen and she was in the picture and fully associated into the experience. We did this in small stages ensuring at all times that she was safe. Once or twice we went back in the process to make sure that she was alright. Surprised and happy, by the end of the process, Jean could feel once again how safe pollen used to be to her.

The Test
After a thirty-minute session, Jean now felt completely different. She wanted to test the results immediately but I asked her use caution. We agreed that she would test out the results slowly but surely in measured steps and that she was to take a step back if there were any abreactions. She agreed and that was the end of our session together apart from her agreement to call me with results of her success.

Jean calls me occasionally to tell me how much better her life is now. She can go into her garden during the summer months, she has been on several holidays that would have proved too difficult for her previously and she gets out and meets her friends much more often than before.

(Concepts that may be new to readers have been highlighted, if you click on them you will be taken elsewhere on this site or across to our sister site, www.excellenceforall.co.uk, for an explanation.)

I just love the way that the universe presents us with gifts. As I was driving to work this morning thinking about how this article might develop, I had to stop at the traffic lights coming down into Rawtenstall. Just before these lights is a pedestrian crossing, the junction making a three-way split. It can take quite a few minutes for them to change back to green if you miss-time it. As it was market day there were a lot of people around and many of them must be drivers who know what a pain it is for someone to start crossing just as the lights go green. It is only polite to stand back and allow the drivers to get through. Not this morning, however, this morning people just strode across the road oblivious to the drivers’ needs. As I considered this selfishness, one of the drivers pulled forward in anticipation and frustration and ended up parked on the pedestrian crossing so that the walkers now had to negotiate their way around the car. It really struck me how little “second positioning” goes on in the world these days, which is the theme of this article. Many of us seem to be losing the ability to put ourselves into the shoes of the “other”, and others haven’t even developed the skill yet.

It reminded me of a great story I have been reading to participants on our programmes for years. It comes from a very interesting book that discusses the links between Native American philosophy and quantum mechanics, “Blackfeet Physics”. The story is about a great feast that the one tribe invite another tribe to. The former are an agrarian people who store the food that they have grown so the feast becomes an opportunity to show how much food they have in store for the difficult winter months. According to their culture it is impolite to leave the table empty. For this reason, while the others kept eating they kept bringing more and more food to the table, muttering behind the scenes at how impolite they were for eating them out of house and home. The other tribe are a nomadic people who hunt food where and when they can, and have to eat whenever they can in preparation for times when there might be no food. According to their culture, you eat whatever your host places before you, and they came to believe that their hosts were trying to feed them to death as they tried to eat everything on the table.

I think that that story shows so eloquently how easy is for disagreements and conflicts to arise just because we have the inability to put ourselves in the “other’s” shoes; and what a relevant message for the world today.

However, this whole issue of “perceptual positions” is slightly more complex than just doing the exercises suggested elsewhere on this site. It is also a developmental issue.

Most psychologists today agree that human beings go through various developmental stages; how they split these and the names they give to them may differ but most agree on the broad principles. If we take Jane Loevinger’s stages as one example, she has discovered that we go from “egocentric” to “ethnocentric” to “worldcentric”. Translated in terms of Perceptual Positions, “egocentric” means taking the Self Position, “ethnocentric” means taking the Other Position with those I consider to be part of my tribe, and “worldcentric” means taking the Other Position with all other human beings (Ken Wilber has expanded this and added “Kosmocentric” where Other becomes all of creation and hence the Observer Position).

Loevinger discovered that all human beings go through these stages and in that order. Using NLP terminology, this ever expanding usage of Perceptual Positions means that we start in Self, shift into the ability to utilise a growing sense of Other, before we move on into Observer (what many of the wisdom traditions call the Witness).

Another researcher in the same field did an interesting experiment with young children that enabled him to work out when they first have the ability to take the Other Position. Give a very young child a large piece of card painted green on one side and blue on the other and then show him that you have an identical card; if you then hold up the card and ask him what colour you can see he will assume that you are seeing the colour that is visible to him. It is not that he is unwilling to see the world through you eyes; he is unable to see the world through your eyes. This ability develops later.

This got me thinking. Perhaps I am wasting my time internally railing against those who do not do second position; the truth may be that they haven’t yet developed that skill.

Today, 7^th July 2006, like many of you, I have been pondering once again the tragic events that unfolded a year ago.

If I am honest, my immediate thoughts on that fateful day were ones of gratitude that I wasn’t in London that day; my first position was the one of Self. My perspective then shifted to Others, but initially only those that I know well and care for. It was only when I knew that family and friends were safe that I expanded the realm of my consciousness to those caught up in the tragedy. This seems perfectly reasonable and human and appropriate; if we are to move into a position where we are really going to solve the problems of this world around us then we need to develop the ability to expand the limits of consciousness beyond the merely ethnocentric and into the realms of the worldcentric or even Kosmocentric.

I am one of those who has been perplexed and bored by the football but one thing that I noticed is that if you can keep people at the level of talking about “football” there are fewer disagreements and arguments but once this shrinks to “nation” or even “city”, the potential for conflict amplifies exponentially.

As a species we seem to identify very strongly with the concept of “tribe”. We need to belong and one of the strongest ways in which we identify is with the “tribe”. This is perfectly natural but the larger the unit that we can identify with, the safer we shall be as a species. I thought that this was perfectly exemplified by H.G. Wells in “The War Of The Worlds” when the threat posed by the Martians made all earthlings realise that only by identifying with the tribe of human being would they survive as a species.

My aim this month is to attempt to expand my awareness of my tribal membership.