There are those who make change in their lives willingly – because of restlessness, because of inspiration, or through curiosity. They begin by changing their habits, or their external circumstances, or the meanings they give to things. And once they truly change any one of those things, the others change too.
Then there are those who accept change only when they must.
How we change is our own responsibility and our own choice. Change is not good or bad in itself. We each look for happiness after our own fashion.
There’s an idea in many circles that real change is hard – personal change, social change, organizational change … But often change is simpler than we think. By looking from a new perspective, by considering factors previously disregarded, by challenging basic assumptions, a new world of possibility opens up to us.
One of the great masters of Budo (a physically demanding Japanese dance and performance-art form) didn’t take up the art until after he was seventy.
Thomas Edison went to school for a total of only three months then went on to become the man we consider the most brilliant inventor and engineering innovator of all time. The original business of Richard Branson, which have made him one of the richest men in the world, was named Virgin because everyone in the company, including himself, was completely new to business.
Neurolinguistics (NLP) is based on studying how we make change, internally and externally, and how we make, and can change, the meanings we make of things.
It’s not a religion, or a cult, or a sales technique. Originally it was developed by modeling such luminaries as Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, Milton Erickson, and Gregory Bateson.
As someone who has been passionately interested in the nature of change for as long as I can remember – as a Buddhist teacher, as a poet, as a clinical hypnotherapist, and as a women of transsexual experience – my passion for Neurolingistics has reawakened because I have come to it as the tool par excellence for implementing effective person change in any area of your life or work, and as the ideal compliment to any personal or spiritual discipline for change.
- I hope you can join us for our ten day training in July http://www.manzanitavillage.org/retreats/nlp/
