What NLP Has Done for Me

It was very early one morning. Somehow, my husband and I started discussing one of those obstacle-laden subjects. In the dark. While we were still waking up.

I would not recommend this, by the way.

We argued. It reached such a vehement peak that I just left for work. I was angry. Sometimes you just have to take a break and let the old reptilian brain and automatic responses settle down.

I got into my car and started into work.

Now, I live in North Austin and I work in South Austin. Interstate 35 was my route between the two. If you have lived in Austin any time since 1962, the year I35 opened, you know it's been under construction. The whole time. Sometimes, they shut down the whole thing. Sometimes, they shut down a lane or two.

And they often like to do this shutting down very early in the morning.

So, I had a lot of time to think that morning, passing by the grinding machines and day-strength work lights, while traveling at 5 miles an hour.

I replayed the argument in my mind. What had escalated it?

Then, I realized it. I wasn't angry about the topic that Keith and I had discussed.

I was angry about the onions.

The night before, I had been chopping onions for dinner. I was pondering the old self-help cliche about peeling an onion... you know, as you go through life, you're peeling the layers of an onion. Layer upon layer upon layer, we peel the onion.

I was curious: what's at the middle of an onion? Why are we doing all this peeling anyways?

I carefully cut away the outside of the onion, leaving the smallest onion "kernel" in tact. I sliced through the middle of it.

Inside, there was.....nothing.

Absolutely nothing. Onions produce seed stalks, so there are no seeds inside an onion. It's just a little, empty space.

That's when I really got angry. What the heck? All this onion peeling is for.... nothing? Just some crummy old onion-scented air? I've been doing all this ridiculous self improvement yada yada so that.... so that nothing!! For no purpose at all!

So, the argument that morning had come out of my own existential onion crisis.

My day proceeded, and I mostly forgot about the whole thing. I came home that night, and there was a horrible smell in the house. Looking for something rotting in the pantry, I discovered an entire bag of rotting onions. They were full of green stalks, starting to grow right there in my pantry.

It seems that, given that I had had this whole existential onion crisis thing, I would have noticed that there were, indeed, onions in my life for the second night in a row.

But I didn't notice. It never crossed my mind. I took the onions outside and threw them away in the garbage can. I did not yet know that I was, apparently, on the path of the onion.

The next morning, I was sitting in the back yard in my garden and it hit me: the onions were onions. The onions I threw away were onions! I ran to the garbage can, tipped the can over, and dug through the garbage to retrieve the bag of onions.

I knew just what to do. I dug a hole and, one by one, planted the already-growing onions. I carefully watered and nurtured them for months to come.

Apparently, everyone knows what the space in the middle of an onion is really for, except for me. I told this story to my friend Virginia Brodie. "Katie, do you know how an onion grows?"

I didn't know.

Virginia continued: "The space in the middle of the onion is for the new shoot to grow. It forms a green bulb and grows out from there. Without the space in the middle of the onion, it would never grow."

Oh, I said.

NLP is the space at the middle of the onion, the place from which growth can occur. Taking an NLP Practitioner class is like bypassing all the layer-peeling and going straight to the center.

NLP has helped me to notice my reactions and change them, and it's given me the ability to dig through the garbage, reclaim the onions, and plant and nurture them. My life is so much longer and fuller because I can peel the layers, knowing there's "nothing" waiting for me in the center.