The Rainbow Seed Story

I received my first huayruro seed in 2003, after I’d told the story of seeing a lunar eclipse at Lake Conchas, New Mexico. I was in a deep trance when I told the story. But that's a story for another day! I didn’t know what the seed was, really, but I felt deeply happy when I received it.

Huayruro seeds come from a Peruvian jungle plant. Wikipedia tells me that they’re considered lucky. And inedible. They probably won’t turn into an actual plant if you plant them in most places – they would require just the right amount of relentlessly humid heat, found in few places other than the Amazonian jungle. If you'd like to see a picture of these red and black seeds, go here.

Rainbow Seeds are a tradition created by Tom and Bobbi Best. How many Rainbow Seeds have been given away over the last 20 years? Hundreds? Thousands? I’m not sure.

So, if you’re the recipient of a Rainbow Seed, you’re part of a global matrix of people who have participated in the following way, or some way like it.

Here’s what to do with your seeds.

First, carry them with you. Whenever you feel a strong feeling of love or connection, imagine sending that love and connection into the seed, filling it with that love.

Second, plant the seeds in the following way. While you’re carrying around the seeds, you may come upon a place so beautiful and full of love that you want to honor it with your love: you can plant the seed there. You can also plant the seed in a place that’s devastated and lacking love. And you can gift a seed to a person that’s full of love or that’s devastated, too.

When you plant your seed, imagine a rainbow leaping out of the seed, imbuing the recipient with your love and connecting the recipient person or place with the matrix of rainbow lights that now covers the planet.

Happy planting!

You Stopped Loving Yourself

You stopped loving yourself.
Was it at breakfast, or when you were five?
Who knows when?

Today is not for when.

Dust off the box and unwrap it.
Let the shining ribbon fall away.
Remove the tape at the seams, carefully,
or rip the paper to shreds.
Peer inside and don't flinch away.

Start with the self that tried to
murder your living. Love that one.
Listen to the self that kept you from
your dreams. Remember to hear the words,
and nod, and refrain from giving advice.
Go on a long walk in the forest together,
you and yourself.
Feel the cool dew on your faces.
Share a knowing look.

Whenever you're ready,
take yourself on extravagant picnics
with pickles and edible flowers.
Watch the sunset to the full on,
black, night sky.

Date a while. No need to rush.
Only when the time is right, move in together.
You'll tie the knot. You'll walk on the beach,
holding hands, saying nothing. When you
disagree, cradle the argument like a newborn
in your arms. Stroke its face and coo.
And the two of you, let your make up be sweet,
and long.

I Hate Positive Thinking

A new pandemic of positive thinking has certainly arrived, at least here in Austin, the wuwu capital of Texas. Everyone has seen the Secret by now (OK, except you -- my one friend who hasn't seen it), and even my dad has heard of Thich Nhat Hanh.

"Pandemic?" you ask. "But Katie, I thought you love and ooze positive thinking?"

It's true.... I do adore positive thinking when used effectively. I love going to Maui in my mind -- and I highly recommend it, too, by the way. I'm a huge fan or the word wuwu, and I use Thich Nhat Hanh's work every day. Part of the NLP outcome frame is to formulate our outcomes in positive terms -- another useful thing to do.

But what if you're afraid of the negative? Some people avoid it at all costs, lurking out of the room whenever something uncomfortable or negative surfaces. Others are angry if you say something negative to them, because they believe it could change the course of their life in a harmful way. They know that language shapes our reality, our possibility, and our beliefs.

More about other people's language later.

I propose that when are afraid of the negative, we miss out on several things.

First, we're missing out on what is. In NLP, we have to start with someone's present state, which contains all sorts of information about the limitations of someone's map of the world. And, if you know how to help the client find it, that present state also contains information about how to transform that limitation into something even more useful for the client -- perhaps even into manifesting their heart's desire. If you skip what is, you miss out on the problem and the solution.

Deleting or refusing to see "negative" things also means that you will very likely miss out on some very important news of difference. If you only look at your own map of the world, there's no road map for other states of consciousness, other ways to reach your goal, other ways to transcend your limitations. And you will need other perspectives, at some point! My friend Spider Joe uses negative or argumentative statements as a reminder to step out of his own ego and into another person's (often contradictory) perspective. From there, he sees some pretty amazing new things!

But Spider Joe is a story for a different day. Back to being afraid of the negative.

Insisting that others edit their speech to delete what you consider negative also means refusing to acknowledge your own role in your experience of reality. Yes, language influences what we think is possible and therefore it influences what we can perceive. But reality doesn't just happen to you. You choose the meaning you're making of "reality." Wouldn't you like to have more flexibility in how you respond to reality? Becoming a creator of reality instead of just a recipient of it means you're actively involved in shifting your own meaning-making towards what's better, lighter, easier.

Learning to respond to what is with increasing flexibility is real positive thinking. It requires acknowledging what is and then, consciously or otherwise, choosing what to make of it.

Here's the thing about positive thinking: Positive thinking is not enough. Action is required, sometimes very challenging action. Just ask Thich Nhat Hahn.

I Want to Be a Vampire

First, a confession.

I want to run my hands through some of that beautifully wonderful vampire hair, my own or someone else's.

I want to wear beautiful clothes and have wisdom beyond my apparent age and know all about classical music.

I want to hang around in the top-most crown of a coastal redwood on a clear day, overlooking the ancient forest canopy and the glinting valley river below, having climbed there by my own, super-strong, vampiric self.

And to have my own sonorous, instantly-persuasive voice. Like a vampire.

I thought you should know.

For the past three weeks, I've been obsessed with the vampire movie and book Twilight. Now that we've established that, onto the story.

First, we meet Bella, a high school junior who has just moved to Forks, Washington to live with her quiet, police chief dad. She looks kind of like a vampire, but she isn't one. She's clumsy, smart, responsible for her age, and feels like a misfit. Bella can flawlessly read people's emotions through their facial gestures and voice tones.

Edward Cullen, her love/hate interest, is part of a family of benevolent-to-human vampires who live outside of Forks and who attend the same high school. The vampire thing is a secret. Edward's super powers include lightning-fast reflexes, the ability to read human minds (except Bella's), and apparent immortality.

Bella has a super power of her own, when it comes to her relationship with Edward: she regularly saves Edward from his own self-hatred. Apparently, vampires can experience a lot of self-hatred because they walk around wanting to destroy humans in order to survive.

So, other than the whole "he's lived a hundred years and she's lived only 17," there's a nice symmetry in the two main characters.

The conflicts:

• Edward wants to both devour and fall in love with Bella (awesome!)
• Bella and Edward miscommunicate often because Bella doesn't know he's a vampire at first and because Edward can't read her mind like he can read everyone else's mind (boring -- miscommunication is my least favorite conflict)
• Some people who know that the Cullens are vampires really hate them (hate has really been overdone lately, but whatever)
• Bella is constantly tripping/ falling/ getting followed by would-be rapists, so Edward follows her around and saves her a lot (kind of fun, other than his occasional annoyed remonstrances for her carelessness)

My favorite detail about these vampires is that they can't show themselves in sunlight because they sparkle like diamonds. If anyone saw a vampire's skin in the sunlight, they would know for sure that these folks are different. And we all know where "different" leads....

Speaking of differences, there are some differences between the book and movie.

In short, the movie is better.

The longer answer: the movie is well-paced and does an artful job of using the symbols of the forest versus the city to establish the animalistic versus the cultivated sides of the vampires. The Edward in the movie doesn't need to control Bella's movements or turn his persuasive vampire gaze on her to get her to comply with his wishes -- those (very creepy!) characteristics are emphasized in the book. And the book is filled with repetitive warnings about Bella's need to "be safe" and the hero's unfounded fears for her safety. Thankfully, the movie only replays these conversations a few times.

I do like that the book lets itself be a teen novel. It's told from Bella's point of view, with a teenage girl's voice. So we get to see very realistic, perfectly paced teen angst, with a vampiric twist:

Of course he wasn't interested in me, I thought angrily, my eyes stinging -- a delayed reaction to the onions. I wasn't interesting. And he was. Interesting...and brilliant...and mysterious...and perfect...and beautiful...and possibly able to lift full-sized vans with one hand.

I find passages like this one simply delightful! The movie doesn't focus on the fact that Bella is a seventeen-year-old girls -- it's the only thing noticeably missing from the movie, for me. Perhaps it plays to a wider range of ages.

A note on teenagers, as a group: they are reliably fierce film critics. They will not put up with anything boring, overly philosophical, riddled with inside jokes (other than their own), or anything that is not mythically and visually stunning. And some teenage girls do indeed seem to cling to this movie -- a lofty endorsement. Every time I've been to see the movie, there's been at least one group of girls that are clearly serial fans of the film. One girl whispered, with perfect timing, every word of the film. One of her friends audibly caught her breath and moaned every time Edward came on the screen.

It's fun to be swept away with passion, even if you're not a teenage girl. It's delightful to go on the rollercoaster ride of emotional yeses and nos. It's pleasurable to feel that archetypal conflict running through your own body.

Ultimately, that archetypal conflict is what makes well-done vampire stories like this one so compelling. Sure, the vampires are cool. Who doesn't want to be passionately desired by someone stunningly beautiful with long, slender, ice-cold hands and perfect teeth? But the draw is more than that -- it's alluring to enter the world of conflicting desires because it's a world we're intimately familiar with, or at least wish we were familiar with. Creation and destruction, gentleness and violence -- we audience members experience the pull of both forces every day. Someone cuts us off in traffic, and we want to kill the guy. Our favorite team wins, and we love everyone. We sit in our gray grid of cubicles wishing for some lofty emotion -- any emotion -- to replace our apathy and dull self-disdain.

This movie asks us to notice the passion and the archetypal tension that we carry around in ourselves every day, just by being human. Will we love or devour the people around us? Will we love or devour the parts of ourselves that are perfect, and imperfect? However enlightened we audience members wish to be in the face of so-called over-dramatized, over-simplified fairy tales like this one, when they're told artfully, we become captive, willingly compliant, and thirsty for more.

Outcomes

In NLP, we talk about a establishing a well-formed outcome with a client before proceeding with change work. A well-formed outcome is a goal that contains specific elements that make achieving it possible and much more likely than a goal that doesn't have those elements.

Bothering with a WFO does several things: the simple process of making sure you've met all the "well-formedness" conditions (yes, they really call it that!) helps to fill in missing information. Filing in the blanks is sometimes enough for the client to experience more alignment with their outcome right away. Establishing a well-formed outcome also brings to light blocks, obstacles, and limiting beliefs that might need attention.

Like many techniques in NLP, the well-formed outcome conditions seem like they should be simple to elicit. They're usually taught to beginners using a series of questions, like "What do you want?" and "What would that do for you?" Because of the apparent simplicity, some people assume that they should be able to complete a worksheet on their goal and move on.

For a very few people, the worksheet approach is completely adequate. And the worksheet approach is a great way to begin to learn the well-formedness conditions. But watch a masterful demonstration of how to use those questions, and you'll see that the practitioner is doing a lot more than asking that list of questions!

Most people discover stuck places and incomplete information even in their answers to these questions. The questions themselves don't contain the full model of everything required for a well-formed outcome. But that's a story for another day.

Back to what getting a well-formed outcome does, beyond filling in the blanks of someone's goal and revealing obstacles.

Taking the time to establish a well-formed outcome also gives the practitioner the chance to listen, watch, and get a sense of the client. A classic NLP beginners' mistake (and, unfortunately, a common mistake of the legion forces of "coaches" that many internet coach universities are currently spewing out) is to move too early to problem solving or running the client through a process. Doing a recipe process by the book is great for some things when you're learning NLP, but as soon as you're ready to work with people outside the classroom, it's time to start looking, listening, and getting a sense of the person in front of you -- well before you decide which process to use or help with brainstorming solutions.