Katie Raver

Attention Composition

2009-06-09T16:51:00.001-05:00

Consider the foreground carefully.

Shiny spider silk or
an airplane's glint.

The constant river rush or
traffic's ever-exhaling breath.

A breeze blows your hair across your forehead --
the trees, too, or
that dry, cool air conditioner air.

Choose what's less important.
Let it go for now.

What you want more of -- go to it.
Bring it in close.
Bother with the angles.
Wait for the light to shift.
Let another leaf fall.

Consider the foreground carefully.

Many thanks to Austin Hikes for Creative Types and organizer/nature hike leader extraordinaire Joe Lapp for taking me on a great adventure and inspiring this poem.

Criteria Meta-Program Sort

2009-05-11T11:52:00.006-05:00

Meta-program sorts describe different ways that people delete, distort, and generalize about what they perceive. You can calibrate someone's meta-program sorts through the words they use. You can also use meta-program sorts to calibrate when certain changes have taken place.

One of the most interesting meta-program sorts, to me, is Criteria. Whose criteria is being used where? I came up with a simple way to think about these, and thought it might be useful to others.


.	Name	Whose criteria is applied to self?	Whose criteria is applied to others?
.	Self	Self	Self
.	Shift	--	Self
.	Simultaneous	Self	Other
.	Switch	Other	--

James Brown Story

2009-05-09T23:08:00.006-05:00

This story has been moved to the new blog: http://katieraver.com/2011/james-brown/ Hope to see ya there! ~Katie

How to Write Fast... And Get Even Faster

2009-05-04T11:06:00.002-05:00

I've written the shortest possible guide to writing fast. Well, shorter than, "write every day for five minutes; repeat." Let me know what you think.

General Guidelines:

Timebox the following steps. Set a time for each one and stick to it. When your time limit is up, you're finished with that step.
You'll improve the quickest if you stop when your time limit is up and move onto the next step.
When you're starting out, just do one or two steps a day for 5-10 minutes each.
IMPORTANT: Take time to feel really good after accomplishing each step!
You must write badly before you write goodly.
If you do this process and repeat it, your writing will get faster and more clear.

The Steps

Brainstorm. Write your topic and all the related ideas down. Don't edit.
Outline topics. Organize your ideas into an outline, like this list. Incomplete sentences, quick blurbs, imprecise grammar are great.
Outline subtopics of ONE topic. Choose an item from your outline, preferably the one you know the most about or are the most excited about. Break it down into subtopics that will create less than one page of text. Estimate as best you know how.
Write one subtopic. Write the content for one outline item, starting with the broadest information and filling in the details.
Revise the subtopic for clarity.
Revise the subtopic for grammar, punctuation, word choice, and spelling.
Revise again. Do this on another day.

The Rainbow Seed Story

2009-03-19T05:01:00.002-05:00

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

2009-03-17T05:52:00.002-05:00

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

2009-03-16T05:29:00.004-05:00

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

2009-03-13T05:33:00.010-05:00

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

2009-03-09T05:43:00.000-05:00

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.

Love Poem

2009-02-12T05:15:00.001-06:00

This love has made me crazy.
I keep forgetting to rise up, to worry,
and I’m dancing around in meadows,
silly and stupid with your ecstasy.

Where were all these meadows before?

Next to you in the car,
the discord of lights and smog
becomes Spring itself.
All of humanity is on the same path, at the same time,
red lights guiding the way.

I only bother to sleep to hold
your hand in those unconscious moments.
Butterflies and moths fly out of my eyes.
Two trees use me as their telephone line.
I try to tell the man watering red hibiscus plants.
He gives me a round stone.

How can I explain this insanity?
I just follow the owl flying overhead,
downtown, at midday. Your eyes glisten,
you hold me close. I’m late again
for another meeting.

More States of Attention

2009-02-11T05:47:00.002-06:00

For the last 6 months, I’ve been working with Nelson Zink’s 12 States of Attention.

Mary Ann Reynolds taught them to me at the September Austin NLP Meetup, and she had been talking about them for some time before that. You can read previous blog entries about Mary Ann’s presentation or how the 12 States have made parts of my life much more rich, especially in settings like the black sand beach in Maui, where I wanted to expand my awareness of the place. You can also read an excerpt from Nelson's Zink's The Structure of Delight and his explanation of the 12 States of Attention.

There are several parts of this model that I’ve wanted to refine, especially about the kinesthetic sense. Broad-External-Kinesthetic is supposed to be what I can feel right now on the surface of my skin (and maybe a few inches out, depending on how you want to do it). But there’s no distinction to describe me remembering a Broad-External-Kinesthetic sensation or planning one. The same thing applies to Narrow-External-Kinesthetic, Broad-Internal-Kinesthetic, and Narrow-Internal-Kinesthetic.

Also, what about one’s sense of where the body is in space, sometimes called the proprioceptive sense? And what about olfactory and gustatory senses?

So, I’ve been playing around with several different ways of organizing these senses to accommodate that. Here’s what I’ve come up with:

Broad / Narrow (stays the same)
Sensed / Constructed (much like the original Internal / External, but this accommodates for the fact that you might construct a kinesthetic feeling, be it internal (on the skin) or external (inside the body).
Visual / Auditory / Kinesthetic – Skin / Kinesthetic – Viscera / Kinesthetic – Proprioception / Olfactory / Gustatory

That makes for 28 States of Attention! I have to admit, I like the simplicity of Nelson’s original model. Are the extra distinctions really worth it?

As I’ve experimented with this expanded model, here’s what I’ve learned. The last 3 types of perception (Kinesthetic – Proprioception, Olfactory, and Gustatory) are “bonus” states. Because they are often far beyond conscious awareness, sometimes they contain very interesting information. Sometimes, they are so secondary to the other states of attention, they provide less useful information.

I’ll probably continue to teach my friends Nelson’s original model, or my expanded model without the bonus states.

Spider Joe's Spirituality of Wonder

2009-02-10T05:01:00.000-06:00

He threw his arms around the tree trunk, gently bit off a small piece of bark and ate it, passionately kissed the tree, and ran off laughing.

My nephew is two years old.

Why did he do this? His world is a mystery to me. There seems to be no future and no past. Things from the past -- learnings, beliefs he's already formed, fears, expectations -- do influence his life. But he doesn't live there.

That's what the Spirituality of Wonder (my new favorite term, coined by my friend Spider Joe) is all about, at least in my current interpretation: flinging yourself into the present moment so thoroughly that you shake off the past and the future, and you look up to see a hawk flying overhead. For that moment, only the hawk exists. And that present moment is full of causes-and-effects that may or may not make sense, but they arise from somewhere most of us long to visit. And some of us long to live.

We use the word "spirituality" because it's hard to find a word that expresses what we're talking about. Think about the last time you were pleasantly surprised. Maybe someone actually planned a surprise for you. Or maybe you were given a gift you didn't expect. Perhaps something random happened, which turned out to be good for you.

Let yourself be absorbed in the feelings of being pleasantly surprised. It's a nice time to linger, isn't it? What were you seeing and hearing? Where were you? Seeing the events through your own eyes, notice the people around you. What were you feeling?

That's the spirituality of wonder, too. It's being completely absorbed, however briefly, in something that brings you wonder, awe, and curiosity.

When do you experience the spirituality of wonder?

Spatial Relations Changework (SRC) and Fanning

2009-02-09T05:31:00.000-06:00

Kathleen Radebaugh’s Spatial Relations Changework (SRC) is a way to finally get your Conscious and Unconscious Minds talking… and sometimes even collaborating.

First, some background. In NLP, we talk about the Conscious and Unconscious Minds. The Conscious Mind is in charge of setting conscious goals and thinking through problems, issues, memories, etc. The Unconscious Mind (or other-than-conscious mind) is in charge of interpreting the myriad details that your Conscious Mind can’t process, and focusing the attention of the Conscious Mind on what’s important. The Unconscious Mind seems to have its own goals and also processes problems, issues, memories, etc.

Many people have had the experience of setting a goal (Conscious Mind) but not being able to get started for some reason, often for an unknown, seemingly unsolvable, or indefinable reason (Unconscious Mind). Many different modalities, hypnosis and NLP included, aim to help the Conscious and Unconscious Minds to work together. SRC does this in a unique way, and I’ll describe my experience of it in a moment.

Second, some information about a recent class on SRC and Fanning that Kathleen facilitated and I attended. There were 11 attendees. SRC is the set of tools that Kathleen uses to help people create new worlds for themselves, and it includes her own renderings of David Grove’s Clean Space, Clean Language, and Emergent Knowledge work, along with some NLP and some of Stephen Gilligan's Self Relations work. Fanning is a shamanic breathing practice that helps to disconnect inappropriate connections you have with a person, place, or thing. Fanning is very much like an NLP technique, and you do not have to believe in shamanic principles (or NLP, for that matter) for it to produce results for you.

First, Kathleen guided us to represent what we wanted to work on. I used a piece of paper, some glitter pens, and some crayons to make a drawing. Then, we started interacting with the paper with Kathleen guiding us through a series of Clean Space questions, reviewing it from 6 different places. Throughout the entire process, we never reported any content to Kathleen nor did we tell her our responses to her questions. We wrote down notes and insights. Then, she asked us to take what we knew from that series of interactions and use it to “fan” something. We repeated this process several times.

What’s happening on the inside for each individual is magnificent. My experience was that SRC is, over and over, requesting that the Unconscious Mind deliver information to the Conscious Mind about what’s going on. The Conscious Mind makes meaning and takes note of this, and the process is repeated. When you add Fanning into the picture, it gives the Conscious Mind the chance to practice taking a small, meaningful action right away (by Fanning) to provide for and honor the Unconscious Mind. For me, the process solidified into an interaction like this:

Conscious Mind: What do you want? What is going on for you? (Clean Space and Clean Language questions from facilitator.)
Unconscious Mind: I want a pony! (Participant’s response to questions.)
Conscious Mind: OK, here’s a pony. (Participant using Fanning based on response to questions.)

Conscious Mind: What do you want? What is going on for you?
Unconscious Mind: I want less traffic in my life
Conscious Mind: OK, here’s less traffic in my life.

Conscious Mind: What do you want? What is going on for you?
Unconscious Mind: I want perfect attendance in 3rd grade.
Conscious Mind: OK, here’s perfect attendance in 3rd grade.

It’s quite wonderful to practice listening to and responding to the Unconscious Mind. Kathleen closed the session by having us write down a series of Action Steps that we could complete soon to further this process.

I left with a lot of insights.

Fanning continues to surprise me because it is such an effortless process that only requires that I do it. Things shift if I do it, and they often shift in unanticipated, unexpected ways that are more ecological and immediate that other solutions I was considering. I also like SRC because it’s so personal, and in a group session, that content mostly stays with each individual. I was in a room full of people doing deep work on their most personal issues, and it was very private. Finally, Kathleen brings her work with Steven Gilligan and his notion of the Field into how she conducts sessions. That means that she “holds the space” for the group and acts to make sure that whatever comes up is given full permissions to express and explore. That makes for a very accepting environment in which to do deep, personal change work.

Advanced Calibration Exercise by Keith Fail

2009-01-16T05:48:00.002-06:00

While we're getting ready to have a great time at the Best Resources NLP Practitioner kickoff in Austin tomorrow, please enjoy this most excellent advanced calibration exercise that my husband Keith created.

Happy calibrating!

Why My Life is So Great

2009-01-13T05:01:00.001-06:00

In my government training job, we were asked to watch a 25-minute video about emergency situations that could affect the entire state, such as a possible global flu epidemic.

That is not why my life is so great, by the way.

I surfed to the video website. I closed my door and put an “in training” sign up. I got my headphones all ready.

And I pushed play.

That’s when something unusual happened.

The spoken audio track was exactly what you’d expect: a dry, unexcited voice reading statistics about death and suffering in monotone.

But the background music was something else.

My teacher Tom Best sometimes puts together beautiful movies of the footage he takes on his international adventures, particularly his extended shamanism explorations. If you’ve ever been the recipient of one of his videos, you know how powerful it is to receive video of the sights, sounds, people, and teachings of a life-changing experience. It’s a strong anchor for the feelings and new states of consciousness you experienced on the trip.

For a particular Peru trip video that I’ve seen many times, he used a unique, upbeat acoustic piece of music for the background to a series of photos. That music is indelibly linked, in my mind, to this series of heartfelt snapshots of happy, contemplative trip participants and the people of a particular Peruvian village. The colors are bright and vivid, the people peering directly at you through the movie. I’ve seen the video many times.

Whenever I watch this segment of the movie and hear that piece of music, I feel very open and happy and full of life.

Here’s the unusual thing: the global flu epidemic movie had that same piece of music in the background.

So when I clicked “play,” that familiar upbeat, acoustic music started. Before I could even make sense of the familiar music, I noticed that the background of the global flu epidemic movie looked a lot like the “filaments of light” that Tom talks about connecting us all.

I heard the flu movie monologue, too, for sure. But I couldn’t help but imagine the smiling, full-of-life faces of the children from those portraits, superimposed over the bulleted slides.

I felt open and happy and full of life… while I was listening to the death statistics from the early 20th century flew epidemic.

I felt my breathing deepen and slow like it would during deep meditation, while I was watching the required supplies for an emergency kit fly across the screen.

This had a strange affect on me. Somehow, I was able to make room for these grim facts along with feeling really good.

In this life, it seems that we will always have our own feelings and states of mind to contend with, and we will always be surrounded by others who have their own maps of what to say when and what makes them feel happy.

When we can choose exactly how we feel and take in the information that is presented by others, we’re doing something worth doing. We’re doing the work of making peace in the world by holding two different possibilities in consciousness at the same time.

To start, all we need to know to begin this work is that it’s possible to hold two opposites in mind at the same time.

To continue, it requires practicing these internal, positive states so much that they become as easy as doing something from the external world, something as simple as pushing the play button.

NLP Class in Austin -- Begins January 17-18!

2009-01-12T05:33:00.001-06:00

Best Resources is once again teaching the NLP Practitioner training in Austin!

Take one weekend , two weekends, or the entire 8 weekend class from trainers who have mastery, integrity, and heart. My husband Keith Fail is part of the training team this year, too.

I'm delighted to be a part of their classes, and I know of no better way for you to heal, transform, grow, and revivify your life than to take Tom and Bobbi Best's classes.

Growing Your Organization

2009-01-07T05:58:00.001-06:00

At the core of every religion, business, family, audience, non-profit organization, spiritual path, board of directors, professional association, and group of people, there's a bright, burning core.

Let's call this the territory.

The territory is where all the experience happens. It's where the members of the group live. It's their prayers, daily work, meditations, playing catch in the backyard, dancing together, listening in awe to a piece of music.

Surrounding that core is a bunch of other stuff: beliefs, perceived repetitive behaviors, stories about why this and that is so, perceptual filters, theories, agreement and argument, mission statements, expected capabilities, financial statements, holy texts, rules of order.

Let's call this stuff the map. It refers back to the territory, but it's somehow different. It's about the territory. It's about the experience. But it's not that experience itself.

NLP has taught me that I can change my map. On good days, I remember this and it's mostly easy now.

On bad days,... well, that's a story for another day!

So, your organization wants to grow? Great. There's only two thing you really need to do. If you accomplish these two things, people will overlook huge administrative errors and typos and weird furniture and sloppy clothes and accents and bad manners.

Help people get to the territory. And then, any time you enter the map to discuss the territory, talk about it in a way that makes the people feel better than they usually feel.

That's it. You do not need a new sanctuary, better-dressed members, more snacks, glossy brochures, a bus plan to bring in people, a class to teach members how to interact with new people, more closet space, leather bound books.... unless those things help people get to the territory and talk about the territory in a way that makes them feel better than they usually feel.

If you miss these two things, your organization may grow a little, if you're lucky. But there is not enough new carpet in the world to compete with direct experience in the territory and feeling good in the map. People are drawn to places that bring them to the territory and have a great time talking about it.

More to come about my own map of how to do this.

What are you thoughts? I'd love to know them. Drop me a line or leave a comment.

Edward T. Hall and Congruence

2009-01-05T05:29:00.005-06:00

Do you know who Edward T. Hall is?

My husband Keith is re-reading a book of his, The Silent Language.

Hall is an anthropologist who originated the concept of proximics (personal space) and was an early writer on cross-cultural differences and non-verbal communication. He's written about westerners doing business in Japan. He did research with the Navajo and Hopi. He's also one of the people who greatly influenced early NLP developers like John Grinder, Richard Bandler, Judith Delozier, and Leslie Cameron-Bandler.

Hall was born in 1914 in Missouri and is still alive. He's been retired since 1977. He remarried in 2004, according to the timeline on his website!

According to Keith, Hall was saying things like this in 1959: "If a person really wants to introduce change, find out what is happening unconsciously and make it conscious." That's an interesting definition of modeling -- in this case, modeling of the problem to illuminate it and notice possibilities for change.

He also coined the term "congruence," which is now a standard part of the NLP lexicon. Today, in NLP circles, congruence refers to a person and all their "parts" being aligned. When we are congruent, our speech, non-verbal communication, and actions all match up.

If you remember your high school geometry class, you might observe that Hall borrowed this term from mathematics. Here's a one page refresher on congruence in math: http://www.mathopenref.com/congruent.html

On a side note: according to Keith, Hall also laid the groundwork for timelines, writing about the distinctions of "in time" (polychronic time, in Hall's terms) versus "through time" (monochronic time for Hall).

12 Minute Intervention

2008-12-10T00:01:00.001-06:00

My first interaction with Jason Dixon involving NLP was a 12 minute conversation.

Before the conversation, I was struggling with an old friend who was moving on. I was sad and confused.

12 minutes later, I was relaxed and open and felt good about my old friend.

We laughed at how fast that went!

Jason did several important things. First, he actually listened, deeply, to what I said. People Helpers have a well-earned reputation for giving advice before understanding and empathizing. He let me "spill" what was happening inside my head, so that he could respond to what was actually going on for me.

I think armchair NLPers (especially those who read books more than they practice!) miss this a lot: because changing a belief with NLP is much easier than other ways of changing a belief, people jump to the conclusion that whenever they notice a limiting belief, they should reframe the belief or pattern interrupt, and that'll do 'er. Unfortunately, these folks also miss the most important thing that must be in place for a short, conversational intervention to work: unconscious rapport.

But that's a story for another day.

Luckily for me, Jason doesn't play that way!

Second, Jason tried several different things and waited for feedback. Utilizing feedback from the client or class is a "must" in my book. Otherwise, they're just following a recipe -- a recipe that I could be following on my own, for myself.

And third, Jason treated me with a lot of heart. It's my belief that all this stuff is just easier with love.

I'm sure he did other things. But I certainly don't know what they were!

That's the fun of working with a skilled NLP coach, even if you know some NLP. It seems as though you just had a deep, heartfelt conversation. And then things change.

I really enjoyed the personal stories on Jason's website. And he has a Law of Attraction and NLP class coming up on December 13, too.

Diving Deeper on Facebook

2008-12-09T05:18:00.001-06:00

Have you ever been swimming with dolphins?

Unless you're lucky enough to already know some dolphins who like you, you begin by going out into the ocean on a boat. Someone climbs into the "tuna tower" on top of the boat. From the vantage point of the tower, you can see patterns in the waves on the surface of the ocean.

If an area water looks like it's boiling, it's probably a school of tuna feeding at the surface. It could make for some good fishing.

Sea turtles often swim well below the surface, where they aren't visible from a tower. But when they do come up for air, their round heads pop up for a few seconds, and then go back down under the water. You can see the small wake their heads create by slicing through the surface for a few seconds, and then the line of the wake goes away. Line, no line. Line, no line. If you see that pattern, you know there are sea turtles there.

Dolphins cut quickly through the water, or play. You can find them by looking for lines in the surface water (bigger than sea turtles' lines) or random splashing. If they jump out of the water, they're really easy to see because they break the line of the horizon. Then, you can spot where to go to find out if they're interested in swimming with some Homo sapiens.

Facebook is the tower. It's the place I can go to quickly see what's happening on the surface of my friends' lives. If I want to only interact with what's on the surface, I can choose to do that.

But I can also choose to go beneath the surface. Based on the surface patterns that I see on Facebook, I can choose where to dive deeper below the surface, and who I want to swim with that day.

Rumi Does NLP

2008-12-08T05:28:00.002-06:00

In NLP, there's a concept called the Parts Model. Whether it's neurologically true or not, many people experience the world as if they had a bunch of different parts running around within them. There's a part that wants to go to graduate school, a part that wants to eat chocolate cake, a part that wants to retire early, a part that wants a new car now.

Each part has a positive intention and behaviors that it's in charge of. Even the part that wants to eat the chocolate cake has a positive intention of feeling good now.

Many times, people experience these parts as warring with each other. "A part of me wants to disown my parents and never see them again, but another part of me tells me I won't follow through with it." These parts are described as "polarized." Polarized parts usually have limited behaviors (in this example, the behaviors are: disown my parents, and criticize the ability to do so).

And sometimes, lots of parts gang up on one part. "Nobody appreciates your stupid whining," parts seem to be saying to a younger, scared part. When this happens, we can be incredibly cruel to ourselves, blaming and shaming a part within.

Rumi describes what happens when we start to appreciate each part and its positive intent. Many people describe a similar feeling of "welcoming everyone within" when they go through an NLP Practitioner class and begin to work with their inner parts in kinder, gentler ways.

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Hildegard of Bingen

2008-12-04T05:09:00.001-06:00

Hildegard of Bingen has sparked my interest.

Hildegard was an anchoress in 12th century Germany. To put her on a global mystics timeline, she died 38 years before Persian mystic Sufi poet Rumi was born.

Hildegard began reporting visions as a very young child. Oliver Sacks has since confirmed her descriptions as a common visual hallucination that often happens just before a migraine headache.

Luckily for us, no one told Hildegard that she was experiencing pre-migraine symptoms.

Instead, she became a student of the Catholic church.

When she was eight years old, Hildegard became a student of Jutta, a Catholic abess. When she was fourteen, she was enclosed as an anchoress, probably with Jutta. Jutta taught Hildegard to read and write, she taught Hildegard the psalms and the liturgy. Jutta was an extreme ascetic. When Jutta died, Hildegard took her place as abbess. Hildegard was more moderate.

And Hildegard was a mystic.

A mystic is someone who relates directly to the divine, and knows it. Many times, they relate to the divine like a lover, writing passionate poetry or music or through ecstatic, untiring dance. Mystics can be unusual folks. I think this is because they must experience the divine through their own map of the world (um, like we all do), and every person's map is different. Some mystics record that interaction with the divine through stories or poetry or music. That's the most personal expression in the world! Because we're all unique, our individual interactions with the divine are quite unique, and they can seem unusual to others.

But that's a story for another day. Back to anchoresses.

Anchoresses lived their lives in a small cell adjacent to a church, called an anchorage. Anchorages typically had 3 windows: one window into the church, in direct view of the high altar; one window through which they could communicate with assistants and scribes and receive food; and one window to communicate with the public.

Anchoresses tended to be very public hermits. Although they lived lives full of prayer and some solitude, they also wrote books and music, and people came to them for advice and prayers.

Hildegard even went on 4 preaching tours, the only woman of the Middle Ages to have done so.

Hildegard dictated the story of her life to her scribe. And she wrote music. Stunning, haunting, transcendent music. Hildegard is the first music composer for whom history has left a complete biography.

And we all go through life like an anchoress, set aside for life here in physical bodies, with "windows" into the world. Our windows are our experiences. It's how we manage what passes through those windows and the meaning we make of those experiences that dictates whether we become more open and connected, or less so.

Why am I so intrigued by Hildegard?

Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

2008-12-03T05:10:00.001-06:00

In his new book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell proposes that people who succeed -- the best athletes, the richest people, the most talented professionals -- succeed not through sheer hard work. They succeed because they happened upon an unpredictably important series of opportunities, only noticeable in hindsight.

More about that in a minute.

In NLP, we use modeling to observe and replicate excellence. Often, "outliers" or people who are extremely successful, don't consciously know how they succeed. They may have suggestions or theories, but if they attempt to chunk down their success and make it useable for others, they often can't do it. Some of the worst teachers in the world are the best performers.

Modeling helps unpack what an outlier is doing, consciously and unconsciously, so that others can replicate their behaviors and beliefs and, hopefully, replicate the accompanying success of outliers. Many core techniques in NLP, such as the Outcome Frame and the Grief Process, come from modeling others.

But Gladwell proposes that it's not what the individual is doing by his or her own power that creates success. (By the way, these self-contained internal processes are often the focus of modeling.) Instead, unpredictably important opportunities come by way of:

practical intelligence
relative age to your peer group
birth year and economic booms
the power of collective support
sheer chance meetings
growing up in a culture of possibility
having the time and motivation to acculumate 10,000 hours of experience in your field
race and ethnicity (and not necessarily the most powerful or "desireable" race or ethnicity)

I like the twist to modeling that this suggests. It means that it's critical to look at all the logical levels in NLP modeling, including Environment.

And controlling the environment is tricky!

I highly recommend reading the book. Malcolm has his usual storyteller hat on, complete with twists and turns in plot. My favorite parts are:

The "10,000 Hour Rule" chapter, especially section 2, which tells the story of K. Anders Ericsson's research about "gifted" musicians. It's not talent, but 10 years of practice, that makes for a master.
"Marita's Bargain." This chapter tells the story of what it takes to escape the orbit of poverty and non-possibility thinking: lots of hard work... and luck.
"A Jamaican Story," which tells the story of Malcolm Gladwell's own grandparents and parents. He told this section with a lot of heart and verve.

His best writing is in "Marita's Bargain" and "A Jamaican Story."

There were a couple of uneven parts. I didn't care for the chapter on airplane crashes and the detailed black box transcripts of the hours and minutes before deadly crashes. He makes a very strong case for the strength of cultural norms in this chapter. It's just unpleasant to read about such tragedy, I guess. My CSI-inclined friends may like this one!

If you'd like to sample some of the book for yourself, he's posted excepts on his website, including a part of the chapter on the 10,000 Hour Rule.

Choose to Feel

2008-12-02T05:04:00.003-06:00

If you enjoy hauntingly beautiful music that takes you to unexpected places, I highly recommend that you join Steve Daniel's email list, where he sends his didgeridoo upcoming events.

My husband Keith and I drove out to Bastrop State Park last weekend. There's a place outside the Austin city limits where the landscape transforms. Scrub mesquite and grasses give way to elm trees and pecan trees and tall pines. Bastrop State Park is in the middle of these tall trees.

Eighty feet high or more, this stretch of pine trees is probably the tallest group of trees you'll find in Central Texas. They're named the Lost Pines because they are "hidden away" in between the Hill Country brush land of Austin and the swamps of Beaumont and Louisiana.

I noticed a bumper sticker on a car during our ride: "Choose to Feel," it suggested.

I liked the sentiment. In a society plagued with distractions, feeling is something we must decide to do.... and that takes some courage. It turns out, there's a very good reason we slip into distractions: it can be uncomfortable to feel.

I wondered what the driver would look like. Keith sped up, and I looked at the neighboring driver.

He had a friendly, relaxed face... and then, I noticed he was didgeridoo player Steve Daniel!

"Choose to Feel," indeed.

The bumper sticker made sense. If you ever wanted to choose to feel and needed a little encouragement, or someone to help you to do that, listening to Steve Daniel play the didg is a good thing to do. He approaches everything from saying hello to blowing the voice of the didgeridoo, with presence, gentleness, and heart.

Steve's didg playing is all about opening and connection. The deep, percussive sound of the didg moves through listeners, taking them deeper and deeper into something very familiar. At least that's how I experience it. Listening to Steve is like a journey inward, yet even more familiar, even more primal, than the journey within. It's the journey back to something we all know, perhaps.

He makes his own didges, often out of hollowed-out agave stalks. At even given moment, he has several didges with him, each with a unique voice.

Steve's didges are surprisingly light. He brought one to a recent Best Resources Night Walking class. Whenever it was time to walk, he just propped a didg against his shoulder and took off.

But that's a story for another day.

What NLP Has Done for Me

2008-12-01T05:41:00.000-06:00

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.

Condor

2008-11-27T05:58:00.002-06:00

Hope you enjoy this one. Preview: on Monday, a story about onions and how NLP has changed my perspective on life... in very good ways.

I was in my front yard. I saw a huge grey bird in the distance. It's the biggest bird I've ever seen. I ran through the house and into the back yard, to get a closer look.

Very clearly, I saw it was s a condor flying away from me. A baby condor flew to me and hovered overhead. I was looking straight up at the baby condor. The baby condor breathed into me, in one full, complete, giant breath! And I felt full of energy and light!

It wasn't a jarring thing.... it was the same thing I've experienced before, only more. It seemed perfectly real.

It was so real that when I woke up, I was confused. Hadn't I just been in the back yard? It took me a moment to realize it was a dream.

Then, I was worried because I thought a whole day had passed.

But in "real" time, I had been asleep only 20 minutes.

After I reoriented myself, I realized I felt really good. I felt that every cell in my body was full of energy. There was even the sensation of energy coming out of my pores, just because there was so much of it.

Living 1000 Beautiful Lives with the 12 States

2008-11-26T05:04:00.000-06:00

Imagine yourself in a place of wondrous beauty, and seeing, hearing, and feeling even more than you usually do. We all have an increased, expanded awareness when we're in such a place. But what if you could measurably, noticeably experience more?

That's what the 12 States of Attention are about. You already use them in some ways. Learning more about the 12 States gives you the chance to use these unconscious processes, at will, whenever you want to "get more" of the scene around you... or within.

Wherever you are, you can take a moment to practice through the 12 states:

visual-external-broad -- notice the big picture in front of you
visual-internal-broad -- close your eyes and remember the big picture you just saw
visual-external-narrow -- look at something specific in front of you
visual-internal-narrow -- close your eyes and remember the specific thing you just saw

auditory-external-broad -- listen for the entire soundtrack that's happening around you
auditory-internal-broad -- close your ears and hear, inside, the soundtrack you just heard
auditory-external-narrow -- listen to one specific sound that's happening around you
auditory-internal narrow -- close your ears and hear, inside, that one specific sound you just heard

kinesthetic-external-broad -- notice what's happening, all over your skin
kinesthetic-internal-broad -- remember what you just felt
kinesthetic-external-narrow -- notice a specific feeling in your body
kinesthetic-internal-narrow -- remember that specific feeling you just felt

(As a side note: There's a lot of wonderful discussion on what, exactly kinesthetic external/ internal is, and how you fit the proprioceptive pieces in, etc. That's a story for another day! I just have outlined one way I'm currently practicing the 12 states.)

Imagine using the 12 States in a cool, black cave with waves at the entrance. Or water rushing down the mountainside in the form of a 50 foot waterfall. Or sitting with friends, staring at the sky. Or watching and listening to a meteor shower.

I feel as if I've lived 1000 beautiful lives. I've had a great time playing with Nelson Zink's 12 States of Attention, especially in Maui, ever since Mary Ann Reynold's presentation at Austin NLP in September. Many thanks to Nelson Zink and Mary Ann Reynolds.

Welcome to the Control Booth of Your Experience

2008-11-24T05:18:00.002-06:00

You don't have to be an NLP rockstar to use what you've learned in an NLP class right away. You don't even have to practice hard or read a million books. Indeed, that's the beauty of NLP: we're already using our brains and bodies and emotions all the time, whether we know a slip of NLP or not. And knowing NLP puts you in the control booth of your experience.

This post is about how I learned the power of being able to change representation systems easily.

First, some definitions.

In NLP, a "representation system" is the way a person represents the world. You can represent the world in pictures (visual), in sounds (auditory), in feelings (kinesthetic), in smells (olfactory), and in tastes (gustatory). We use these 5 senses to experience the present, remember the present, and consider the future.

Some people experience senses beyond these 5 senses, but that's a story for another day.

Most people use all 5 of these Representation Systems, with a strong emphasis on visual, auditory, and kinesthetic information. And many people tend to favor one "Rep System" in a given context. In order to represent the past and future and to sort through the present, we must delete some information (otherwise, what's happening on the inside would take exactly as long as what happened on the outside, but we can all remember an event and play it back in our head faster than the event actually occurred). Representation Systems help us do that sorting and deleting.

For example, when I write, I like to use auditory information (the way the words sound in my head) and visual information (how the words scan on the page). This kind of deletion is a great gift when things are going well. And when it's time for change, trying a different Representation System can be one way to get more information.

Now, onto the story of how I learned about the power of representation system changes.

Just after I completed my NLP Practitioner training, one of my friends complained of feeling overwhelmed whenever she went into busy restaurants. "There's so much going on in a place like that -- everyone is talking and laughing so loud, silverware is clanging on plates, there's just too much input." I could see her eyes move left to right, the classic pattern for accessing auditory information.

I remembered my teacher Tom Best doing a demo with a woman who had a similar dislike of noisy places. He had her remember a noisy experience and then, just as it was starting to become uncomfortable, turn down the volume. Once the volume was almost inaudible, he asked her to turn up the amount of visual information coming in: soft lighting, smiling faces, beautiful food.

It worked beautifully in Tom's demo, so I thought I would try it.

Sure enough, my friend visibly tensed when she started to remember the last time she was in a noisy restaurant. And when she turned down the volume, her face relaxed. By the time she finished turning up the visuals, she was glowing!

After going through the sequence a few more times, and practicing for the future, she was relaxed and curious about trying her new strategy. A week later, she called, excited that "it worked!" when she tried the strategy out at a restaurant.

When I asked her about how her restaurant strategy was working, she had actually forgotten that it was an issue.

The Path of Love and the Path of Power

2008-11-20T05:09:00.002-06:00

Recently, I saw the movie The Kite Runner.

It was beautiful and horrible. One horrible part is that a veiled woman is stoned to death in front of a stadium full of spectators. The story takes place in Kabul, Afghanistan, from the end of the Afghanistan monarchy to the Soviet invasion to the rise of the Taliban.

The beautiful part was the relationship between two boys who fly kites together.

One boy is on the path of power, exploring all the things he needs to do to make his life happy and to live in the complicated world around him. Power is about setting boundaries and making "good" decisions, often in the face of great fear.

The other boy is on the path of love, exploring all the things he needs to not do to make his life happy and to live in the complicated world around him. Love is a state within oneself, and exists regardless of the events happening externally. It's about adding more energy or love to one's own life, often in the face of great fear.

Sometimes, it's difficult for people on such different paths to even talk! But when they collaborate together, beautiful things can happen.

The boy on the path of power recounts a story he's written: there's a man with a magic cup, which will turn tears into gold. The story ends with the man having killed his wife, weeping, sitting on a pile of gold.

The boy on the path of love asks to respectfully ask a question about the story: why wouldn't the man just cut an onion?

Authentic Speaking

2008-11-19T05:26:00.000-06:00

Here's an exercise that Keith Fail developed for a group of Toastmasters, to help them practice speaking with more presence and from the values that are important to each of them personally.

After teaching the prerequisite pieces (see below), he had the group do the exercise. Once they put all the pieces together, they didn't want to stop talking!

This post assumes you know the Circle of Excellence and can use the meta-outcome questions to come up with a core value.

Before Doing the Exercise
Before beginning, gather this information for yourself and a partner:

What is one important value of yours? Use meta-outcome questions to get a really good one.
Create a Circle of Excellence for that value (each partner does so for his or her own value).
Practice "being present" with your partner, looking into each others' eyes, without talking, for 30 seconds, and then a minute.

The Exercise
Standing up, position yourself about 5 feet from your partner, facing each other.

Each person imagines his or her own Circle of Excellence one step in front of them... and then steps in.
After fully stepping into the Circle of Excellence, each person adds "being present" to that circle, looking into their partners' eyes.
Each person takes a turn speaking a few sentences, only as quickly as he or she can hold both the original Circle of Excellence value and "being present" with the other person.

Modifications
You can modify this exercise to be used with increasingly larger groups of people, one person standing at the front as a speaker, with the rest of the group as an audience.

You could also modify this exercise to use it with a couple. The Circle of Excellence could be individual states, as outlined above, or a shared resource state.

Nick Goodness, Storyteller and Haleakala Park Ranger

2008-11-18T05:47:00.000-06:00

As we made our way down Haleakala that day that the Hawaiian chanted up the sunset, we stopped at the main visitor's center.

One thing I love about the visitor's center is that they work hard to keep a bed of volcanic rock blooming with silverswords. This is an important part of preserving the more remote places that these endemic, fragile plants grow. It gives visitors a place to view the blooming plants, without tromping and destroying wilder silversword habitat.

Silversword in bloom, in front of the Haleakala National Park Visitor's Center.
Silverswords only grow in the Haleakala crater and have been endangered
due to pigs, goats, and humans.

Inside, we met a park ranger who made our day!

One of our group members started asking him questions about Pele. He spent quite a bit of time telling us, in vivid detail, the story of Pele, the story of Maui, and all sorts of wonderful things about polynesian navigation. But those are stories for a different day...

A trickle of tourists came in and out of the shop, but he kept talking to us.

I was moved by the generosity he showed -- with his time, and energy, and sharing his knowledge of Hawaiian culture. I gave him one of the globes -- one where the land was represented in red, like the glowing molten lava of Pele.

We asked his name on way way out. "Nick Goodness!" We like that name!

The next morning, he happened to be the park ranger at the summit gift shop, when we returned for sunrise. When he saw us, he pulled the little globe out of his pocket and held it up to the sun, and smiled.

Mahalo nui loa, Nick Goodness, for sharing so much with us!

Stand Up and Breathe Deeply

2008-11-17T05:52:00.002-06:00

That's how an old boss of mine used to start meetings: "Everybody stand up and breathe deeply. Good! Breathe again."

He had been in the military, so he knew how to issue an order that people would follow, even if it was a little unusual in business settings.

Breath is also one important part of rapport.

In NLP, we use rapport, such as matching another person's breathing rate and depth, as a starting place in helping someone get what they really want. Without rapport, it's difficult to help much.

The Hawaiian culture, where I just spent an extended vacation, knows a lot about breathing. The word "ha" means breath and is also the number 4. Ha is in the word for family (ohana) and thank you (mahalo). The word aloha is used to say "I love you," "goodbye," and "hello." On the islands, the word aloha is often pronounced, "ah-low-hhhhaaaaaa," to emphasize the breath at the end.

After spending a month in the land of deep breathing and easy rapport, I ended up back at a typical work meeting on a Monday, on the mainland.

Fifteen people were sitting around a table.... not breathing! Their chests were not moving. When they talked, they were gasping for air between sentences. After about 20 minutes, people began yawning huge, gaping yawns. How did I never notice this before?

Technically, you could say that these folks were in rapport, right? They were not breathing in very similar ways to each other.

But looking around at their faces, they weren't enjoying themselves or engaged, even though we were discussing a project that could save everyone at the table a lot of time and hassle.

And it became instantly obvious why this group often complains about stress and boredom. Spending an hour with your colleagues and holding your breath -- regardless of what decisions were made -- would be incredibly stressful to the body. And not breathing much would certainly prevent you from engaging with the discussion much. It was as if the group was hunkering down for the meeting, hoping it would end as soon as possible.

If you literally couldn't breathe during a meeting, wouldn't you want it to end as soon as possible?

I decided to try a small experiment.

I started to breathe deeply and quietly.

I certainly felt more relaxed, but now I was out of sync with the group. The guy next to me, for whatever reason, started breathing deeply with me immediately.

Most of the conversation was happening between 3 people (unfortunately typical for a 15 person meeting!). If I could unconsciously encourage one or two of them to breathe a little more, maybe the room would follow. Then, I could get some feedback on my guess that breathing would help this meeting become more engaged, so that decisions could be made and the meeting could end.

I knew one of the talkers really well, so I thought I could start with him.

I slowed my breath to match his. Then, I noticed that he was indeed breathing, just very shallowly. I matched his breath for a minute. When there was a pause in the conversation, I took a big breath. He followed me with a big breath. The other two people in the conversation took a big breath shortly after.

A guy down the table yawned.

Somebody paused to tell a joke! I certainly didn't expect that.

The conversation returned to the meeting topic. At the next pause, I took a big breath. This time, I returned my breath to a deeper breathing pattern that matched the speed, but not the shallowness, of the colleague I knew well. Sure enough, he followed me.

The other people in the conversation followed shortly after.

And somebody else told another joke!

After we all finished laughing, I returned my breath to an even deeper breath. Those in the main conversation followed.

The group made the decision it had been dancing around for the entire meeting, and the meeting ended 5 minutes later. Was it really as easy as adding some breath into the meeting?

I asked around for some feedback about the difference between the beginning and the ending of the meeting.

One person told me that the meeting had ended when the colleague I knew well had finally taken control of the meeting.

Another person told me that they were relieved when the 3 main decision makers finally got around to the topic at hand.

Someone else said that he thought the jokes brought a "breath of fresh air" and helped refocus everyone so we could get down to business.

Chanting Up the Sun on Haleakala

2008-11-13T13:13:00.005-06:00

For our trip to Maui, we knew we'd be meeting a group of friends there. So, we took a gift for each person.

We found 15 little marbles with the map of the world on them. All different colors and textures, each one was unique.

I took them to 3 sacred places in Austin:

Mount Bonnell at sunset.

The cottonwood tree by my house at sunrise.

And Home Slice Pizza.

(If you've ever met Shauna and had the number 6 at Home Slice, you know what I'm talking about.)

When we arrived on Maui, I realized I could take them to 3 sacred places on Maui before we met all our friends. On Maui, I took them to:

Haleakala at sunrise. The summit is 2 miles high and the sun rises up through the clouds.

The Black Sand Beach and Birthing Canal Cave at sunrise.

And the porch at Joe's Place, watching the full moon rise with the owner of Joe's, Ed.

I took them to a lot of other wonderful places on Maui, too, like Koki Beach at Sunset, and Alelele waterfall.

When I opened up my little bundle of globes at the Haleakala sunset, something wonderful happened.

Katie at Haleakala sunrise. Notice my left pocket -
it's full of little globes. Photo by Virginia Brodie.

Haleakala is very cold and windy. People gather at sunrise (and sometimes sunset) because of the beauty of the sun coming up through the clouds. Tourists are often unprepared for the cold weather, having only packed for tropical breezes. Sometimes, people are wrapped up in beach towels or bedspreads from their hotel rooms.

This particular morning, a Hawaiian guy in shorts and flip flops walked over to my bundle of globes and proceeded to chant the sun up. His chant was so loud that Keith and Mary Ann could hear him from on top of the nearby hill they had climbed. Keith said the man did a version of the Ha Prayer, a Hawaiian prayer for refining a goal or dream, committing your energy to the goal, and then letting go of the goal.

Each time the man sang the refrain of "Ekahi" (pronounced ee-kah-hee) the sun became visibly brighter.

Then, the Hawaiian man left. As I packed up my globes, I looked around to thank him. He was nowhere to be found.

What Have You Done With My Life?

2008-11-12T11:14:00.005-06:00

Heartbeat Cave. Click for larger version. Photo by Virginia Brodie

Dedicated to all the teachers I met on Maui.

What have you done with my life?

You've taken it, and given me this:
crashing waves;
the rustle of the hala tree;
a bird flies over head;
I see the stars.

I stay up too late and leave the laundry too long.

After running naked along the shore all night, and praising, I'm looking for my clothes.
The wind blows.
The clouds move on.
The stars are out again.

I'll never forgive you.

The Little Flower

2008-11-09T06:02:00.000-06:00

Once upon a time, there was a little flower.

Every day, it woke up early to watch the sun rise. The color of the sky changed from deep navy to a lighter blue. Filament by filament, the sky changed from light blue to a bouquet of pinks and oranges. After some time, the shining, red orb of the sun rose above the horizon.

Every day, the little flower watched this wonder of nature.

Then one day, a blue bird came by. The blue bird had stories of sunrises from far away places. In some places, the clouds were below onlookers. In other places, the sun rose over a beautiful pool of water. And sometimes, when the sun rose, it shined its light just perfectly on a waterfall and its spray, and a rainbow appeared.

The flower listened intently, and wanted to see these sunsets, too.

So, it backed its bags and started on its way.

Sure enough, the little flower saw some sunrises in breath taking places. On the coast of an island, where the stream meets the ocean. On the mountains of Bali, at the top of the Alps, in the Cave of All Knowing. All over the world, the little flower traveled, sunrise to sunrise.

Then one day, the little flower came upon a strange sight: a beautiful, white flower. This flower never bloomed or came out of its bud.

This confused the little flower, so it asked the Wise Old Wwl: “Why is this flower so different?”

The Wise Old Owl had an answer: “Stay up until after the day ends, and you’ll find out.”

The little flower stayed up all day that day, and waited for the day to end. The sky put on a show of pinks and oranges and reds as the sun neared the horizon. Just as the sun dropped out of sight, the little flower saw a burst of green where the red sun had been. It had never seen anything like that before! And the sky settled into lighter and lighter colors, loosing color completely to the deep blue of the night sky.

The little flower watched the white flower. Nothing happened, so it decided to stay up a little longer.

As the night sky darkened, the little flower saw the stars come out, one by one. There was no way the little flower could sleep at such a magnificent moment as this!

Still, no change from the white flower.

The little flower noticed a change in the sky. It was beginning to get brighter. Was the sunrise coming again?

Sure enough, the sky brightened, but there were no pinks and oranges. This time, everything glowed with a white light. The stars got dimmer.

Just as the moon reached the horizon, the white flower, ever so slowly, began to open.

Petal by petal, the luminescent white flower opened. It saw the little flower, watching it in wonder, and smiled.

Together, they sat silently, watching the orb of the full moon rise above the horizon. They basked in the moonlight.

The little flower was filled with joy! Seeing a sunset, and the stars, and the moon, and a night-blooming flower – these were a lot of new experiences for a little flower to have in one day! What a wonderful, lucky life it had!

The little flower thought it might burst with gratitude.

Sure enough, the sky began to change, much like it had every day of the little flower’s life. Deep navy turned to lighter blue, then to oranges and pinks. The luminescent white flower wordlessly closed its bud and went back to sleep.

It didn’t quite know why, but the little flower knew it was time to go.

Before departing, the little flower left a small stone next to the white flower: a red, red stone – the color of the sun at dawn.

And the little flower packed its bags and started on its way.

Maui Photos

2008-11-07T07:52:00.005-06:00

View of the island of Lanai from the
Lahaina restaurant Cheeseburgers in Paradise.

For those who want to see 'em, here are our Maui photos.
http://picasaweb.google.com/katieraver

The only explanation I'll add (beyond the captions) is that:

Week 1: we took photos like normal people

Week 2: our brains melted. We took NO photos!

Week 3: all our photos are of leaves and flowers and rocks!

So, I think that means we had a good time.

If you really want to see photos of "week 2," when we were there with friends, click on the links to Mary Ann and Mikki's photos. The link is in the picasa sidebar.

Aloha!

Hosmer's Grove on Maui

2008-11-02T19:09:00.004-06:00

For the first part of our Maui trip, Keith, our friend Mary Ann, and I stayed at Hosmer's Grove.

It's a campground located at 6500 feet, on the slopes of the big crater mountain on Maui, Haleakala. More about Haleakala later.

Hosmer's Grove is in a cloud forest. There are tall trees all around the campsite. Every morning and afternoon, you can watch the clouds come down the slopes of Haleakala. As the clouds reach the campground, it starts to rain. And the grove is much cooler than what most folks think of Maui; it's in the 70's during the day and down to 35 or colder at night.

Around 1900, Ralph Hosmer decided to conduct an experiment in growing lumber trees on Maui. He planted many species, including the pine, cedar, and eucalyptus trees that have survived all this time. The trees are quite beautiful, and the air smells fine. There's a soft carpet of pine needles underfoot. But the trees don't grow quite right -- the soil isn't perfect for them, and they would need a deeper soil line to really thrive. But they survive.

With a very Hawaiian attitude, this area has been turned into part of a National Park. Although folks go to great lengths to eradicate invasive, harmful species (there's a fence at the park to keep goats and pigs out -- they eat eggs of defenseless endemic birds and disrupt plant life), they leave newer species that are not harmful. Indeed, they use such a place as a way to educate.

There's a short trail through the area around Hosmer's Grove. It takes you on a tour of the different types of trees that Hosmer planted.

Photo: From the native shrubland, you can see a cloud moving over Hosmer's Grove.

Then, the trail winds through native shrubland, where 'ohia, native sandwood, and koa grow. These plants are important to limiting erosion and support endemic honeycreeper birds, found nowhere else in the world. There's an outcropping of rock, reminding you that the Hawaiian islands were formed by volcanoes. Everything in this area looks healthy and robust, in balance

I like to stand on the seam between the tall trees and the native shrubland.

Back Yards and Front Yards

2008-10-29T20:12:00.002-05:00

After being on the island of Maui for the past 3 weeks, I’m back on the mainland! Over the next few weeks, between NLP updates, look for stories here about my trip. Aloha!

When I was very young, I would go with my Granddad on early morning walks.

He would soundlessly wake up at 4 a.m. every day. He’d get his dog’s leash and his dog ready to go, and we’d be off, walking through his sleeping Albuquerque subdivision.

They had sidewalks. Some people had lawns made entirely of rock. There were evergreens of every sort. There were mimosa trees. Some people had a tiny patch of grass in their front yards.

Granddad knew everyone in the neighborhood. He would point out each house and tell me stories about the owners. He would tell me about the flagpole they installed and how they hit solid rock when they were digging the hole for it. He would tell me about the cats in the neighborhood.

He pointed out one house with a perfectly coiffed lawn and landscaping. There were steps up to the front porch, and the house was set back further than the other houses. They had a friendly St. Bernard and grandkids. They had suffered through diseases and disease treatments. I imagined that people like this must be very tall and stout.

We rounded the corner and were back at his house, ready for breakfast.

Granddad had a great backyard. He had a clothesline – something I’d never seen anywhere else. He had a small flat area, and then a terraced step all the way around the outside of the yard. And there was a shed with all kinds of tools in it.

The fence wasn’t a fence at all. It was a cinderblock wall about 4 feet high. You could easily see into the neighboring yards, with their extensive vegetable gardens and little dogs.

In one back corner, there was a staircase. Granddad was a woodworker, so he probably built it. It fit perfectly between the place where the two walls met.

If you climbed it, you could meet the folks who lived there. They had a beautiful back yard, with lots of plants to hide in and around if I wanted to be by myself. If I wanted company, there was a giant dog, or the kids who lived there would play with me. As long as I knocked on the back door, the tiny grandmother who lived there said I could come in anytime. We would talk while she rolled the dough for a pie and the oven warmed up. Sometimes her husband would come into the kitchen and talk, too.

One morning, I asked Granddad to show me where the tiny grandmother lived. He showed me the familiar house – the one with the perfectly appointed yard and the people with sorrows and a St. Bernard.

This is one of the many experiences I was hoping for in Maui: connecting with old and new friends in ways that helped me “forget” their front yards and the assumptions I had about them. I wanted to see their back yards by interacting directly with them – beyond assumptions – and get on with just being friends and enjoying each other.

While I was there, I met with a group of 15 advanced NLPers at Tom and Bobbi Best’s workshop. My mom was there. My good friends Mary Ann Reynolds and Virginia Brodie were there. There was a group of 4 Austrians there, too, including Daniella. And I met some people with the strongest Aloha I’ve ever seen. I look forward to sharing stories about these people and the beautiful place of Maui soon.

Mana and Maui

2008-10-22T08:32:00.001-05:00

When you have a few minutes to really relax into what Maui is like, check out Mary Ann Reynold's post about mana. She made the trip in December last year, and we're in Maui together right now.

http://mareynolds.blogspot.com/2008/02/maui.html

Hana Aloha Festival Lu'au

2008-10-17T19:31:00.002-05:00

While we're in Maui, enjoy reading about the first real lu'au we ever attended. The same Aloha Festival may be going on during part of our trip, if we're lucky. But dates often change due to weather and other community matters in Hana.

The Aloha Festivals are local Hawai'ian culture events that take place on all the islands, across different dates. In Hana, where we spent most of our time on Maui, there is a parade with horses, lots of kids and ti leaf floats. There is a lei making contest. And there is a Lu'au.

We happened upon it 5 years ago, and we were the only haoles there, besides the local herb grower. I will never forget watching the progression of hula dancers and the deep gratitude I continue to feel for the experience they gave us.

First, the keikis (children) show what they've been learning. Hula is usually taught by a teacher giving instruction and correction, and students listening carefully. Students do not ask questions. The keikis are incredibly cute, and considered a cherished part of the community.

Groups of students continue coming on stage, dancing, and then sitting near the stage to watch. They watch all the students who are older than them. By the time the older teenagers are performing, you're watching a very technically proficient group of dancers. Both boys and girls dance. They look like classic Hawai'ian beauties (indeed, they are!) and they can hula!

The real masters of the hula, though, are the grandmothers -- big, polynesian women in their 50s, 60s, and beyond, wearing long skirts that amplify every curve. They hold the Aloha for the entire community. When they step on the stage, even little babies are quiet for a moment.

And then, they begin to dance.

Their hula is beyond technical perfection. With every movement, they are opening your heart -- indeed the heart of the entire community. As you watch, completely attentive to their every movement, your heart begins to expand beyond your body, to the entire community, and beyond. This is what the people of Hana are about -- the spirit of Ohana (family) and Aloha.

2008-10-08T06:21:00.004-05:00

Through the end of October, I'm twittering my trip to Maui: http://twitter.com/katieraver

See ya back here in November!

Last Walk

2008-10-01T18:18:00.000-05:00

The last time I saw Granddad Raver, he came to visit my family where we lived in Keller, Texas.

He was healthy, and he still camped and traveled long distances. It had been two years since my grandmother had died. He brought his dog Jenny and slept out in his RV, hooked up through the garage.

I was 19. He was 84.

We went for a walk one morning on the nearby trails. The trails in Keller are remarkable, especially for a small bedroom community of Fort Worth. They wind through parkland and woods and little meadows, all smack dab in the middle of suburbia. If you know just where to step off the trail, there's a dry stream bed where you can lay on your back at sunset, watching the fireflies appear, one by one, against the darkening sky.

I don't know if I knew he was going to die, or just sensed he had important things to say to me. But I paid attention. He re-told some of my favorites stories, one by one: about how he and Granny Kate met, about his adventures as a road grader, about getting bucked by a bull while crow hunting.

He talked about how much he loved farming, even though he had left it behind as a young man for road construction. He'd take a big breath in, as if he were smelling the dirt right then, and say, "Katie Ann, turning the earth and smelling it, planting the seeds and watching them grow, there's nothing like it."

He even talked about the death and destruction he witnessed in World War II -- something he'd never told me about before.

At some point on our walk, we sat down under a blooming pear tree, pink blossoms floating all around us, slowly falling to the ground. He signed, and with a slow, gentle smile, looked right at me. "Katie Ann, when you're with someone for 50 years, you miss 'em when they're gone."

The Inez House Pocket Door

2008-09-29T17:33:00.000-05:00

When you were a baby, someone held you a looked into your eyes with love. Maybe it was your mom, or you dad. Maybe it was the nurse at the hospital. Or perhaps for you, it was someone else entirely different. They held you, knowing you were full of potential and choices. They cooed at you, telling you the mundane, or explaining the extraordinary.

This story is about one of the people in my life who looked at me with great love: my Granddad Raver.

He was born in 1912 in Nebraska. He came of age in the Great Depression and World War II. Remarking back on his childhood, he used to say, "I must've been cold and hungry at some point, I just don't remember it. Maybe that's what 11 brothers and sisters are for."

Granddad Raver was 37 when my dad was born, and 65 when I was born. One foot in the Victorian period, he did not develop a conscious interest in better communication, unconditional love, or learning to develop children's curiosity and confidence. Those were things for younger generations.

He had exactly one game he played with us as kids. I assume he made it up himself. He had a giant, black vinyl chair in the living room, positioned to see both the TV and the front door. During the commercial for Judge Wapner, he would get up from his chair.

With a twinkle in his eye, he would announce to the room, "I sure hope nobody sit in my chair while I'm gone." He would leave the room and I would dash over to his chair, climb in, and wait patiently. When he returned, he would pretend not to see me and sit on me, complaining about his lumpy chair.

I thought it was the greatest game ever!

And of course, he showed me his dentures one time. That was pretty wonderful.

We lived in Texas growing up, and he lived in Albuquerque, so we saw each other once or twice a year, at most. He lived in a house on Inez Street, walking distance to the library and the Furr's, where we would share banana splits. But that's a story for another day.

Between the street and the front door, you had to walk through a corridor of evergreens, probably juniper. I remember the strong scent.

One of the first things we did upon arrival was go to the pocket door between the kitchen and the dining room. Granddad Raver would flip open the little metal latch on the end of the door, pulling the pocket door open and revealing a paper height chart. Each grandchild would stand, back against the pocket door, and he would mark with a pencil their height, labeling the line with a name and usually a date or an age.

Even after we had been there a few days, and the newness of the pocket door had worn off, I remember flipping up the latch myself, and pulling out the pocket door. With my finger, I would trace the previous measurements of myself, the other grandkids, and even my dad, uncle, and aunt.

Happy Anniversary to Us

2008-09-28T08:46:00.000-05:00

Keith and I are celebrating our 6th wedding anniversary today, and in October with an extended trip to Maui. Happy Anniversary, my darling!

For our first anniversary, Keith and I went to Maui.

The first day we were there, we knew something special was happening on this island. We sat on a little patch of green grass at our hotel, basking in the moonlight and watching the ocean. We breathed the deepest we'd ever breathed.

The second day, we drove the Hana Highway, a 50-mile stretch of narrow road that makes some 250 hairpin turns. We smiled a lot that day with our co-journeyers John and Julie. There were waterfalls. And taro fields. And rainbows. At one stop, Keith thought to himself, "huh, I'm a little hungry." A giant avocado immediately fell off a tree and rolled across the street, stopping at his feet. He stooped down, picked it up... and ate it.

Then, we arrived in Hana.

We had been trying to pry information out of our teachers Tom and Bobbi Best about how to prepare for the trip. How much does it rain? Are there mosquitoes? What kind of shoes should we bring? Each time we asked a question, no matter what the question, they would reply with something like, "Well, when you pull into the park, you get out of the car and stroll down to the black sand beach. [Takes a deep breath] The sun warms the rocks, which warm you. You listen to the pulse of the ocean going in.. and out.. in.. and out... The breeze blows across your face. You smile."

Whether we asked about typhoid shots or backpacking gear or anything, they gave us the same answer.

And now we know why.

Hana is so enchanting that when you arrive, you are a different person.

The place, the land itself, insists with infinite gentleness that you relax. All the details of mainland life fade away. The place itself assures you that you are completely loved and that the universe is indeed a good place to be. The land is so alive, it provides anything you'd ever really need. And when you have all the love you could ever want, somehow, the precise material that your raingear is made out of becomes a distant concern.

Steve Martin's Born Standing Up

2008-09-26T18:47:00.002-05:00

I adore Steve Martin's work. I grew up watching his brilliantly nonsensical movies informed by classic literature and art. I revel in his physical comedy, and I had a good time watching Picasso at the Lapin Agile. Don't tell anyone, but as kids, my brother and I watched Three Amigos more than Sesame Street, and Lucky Day was our favorite.

I didn't know why until I read this book.

If you want to know more about the history of American stand up comedy and its transition from stages to screen, or Disneyland, or magic shops, or Orange County, California, there's plenty for you in this book. And there's so much more. Martin shares his journey to stardom - which turns out to be a series of peaks and valleys, gaining elevation with each iteration.

Of course, his self-deprecating humor is where it all starts: "persistence is a great substitute for talent" he tells us. And I enjoyed the stories about how he developed and tested material. The real message of the book comes through in Martin's own self-awareness. He writes about his anxiety attacks, his brilliant strategy for handling hecklers (which I will be using in a meeting tomorrow!), his rocky relationship with his father, the healing powers of Carl Reiner, and what is was like to be with each of his parents as they died.

If you only read a few pages (come on, read the whole book!), read the first and last chapters. In the first chapter, you'll hear a clearly-defined writer's voice that is recognizably Steve Martin's, distilling the details of the book into refined, compact punches of truth. In the final chapter, you'll read a little about his resolution with his parents. And if you read the chapters in between, you'll know a little more about how a person makes the journey from an isolating childhood to exchanging words of love with his father as a man.

If he's willing to share, I hope to learn more about the post-stand up years in the next book.

I couldn't put this book down. It was an easy read - I bought it yesterday morning and am writing this review tonight. I think I continue to delight in Steve Martin's work because it exemplifies something he said of Carl Reiner in the book: "He had an entrenched sense of glee."

Mary Ann Reynolds & The 12 States of Attention

2008-09-25T18:23:00.004-05:00

NLP Practitioner Mary Ann Reynolds spoke at last Tuesday’s Austin NLP Meetup. She blogged the exercises and stories for her presentation, and the links below lead to the related entries, or websites for Tom Best and Nelson Zink.

Mary Ann Reynolds managed to succeed at the impossible task of engaging advanced NLP students and beginners, all in the same room – by using a foundation of existing NLP materials, making them her own, and expanding upon them.

And she did that with Nelson Zink’s 12 States of Attention. After hearing Tom Best read from Nelson’s book The Structure of Delight during her NLP Practitioner class, she bought the book and started playing. She took a Nightwalking class. She researched how the eye works. She started practicing peripheral vision on the Austin greenbelt. And she started experimenting with the 12 states.

Mary Ann did several things that new presenters could learn from. First, she did that thing we all know we should do but never actually do: she gave herself plenty of time to prepare – months, in fact. She also got together with an experienced speaker and talked through her ideas. Nice. She copiously wrote out each of her exercises and stories for the night. And she did a practice run, by herself, to work out timing.

Very elegantly, she started out by talking about a recent trip to West Texas, lingering upon each of the 12 states. I do love a good isomorphic story.

One of my favorite exercises was the astonishingly simple Rapidly Moving Through the 12 States. It’s an easy way to practice specific examples of each of the 12 states, and could be done in a minute or two every day.

She also did a brief hypnotic induction about, I assume, the 12 states. I really can’t remember anything except a very clear vision of myself and my friends on the beach in Hana, Maui, under the full moon, brimming with joy. That was certainly worth a little amnesia!

One of the things I adore about Mary Ann is her unapologetic demeanor. The 12 states of Attention and Nightwalking are… a little weird. Really, anything that expands the filters with which you take in the world, that literally expands your ability to perceive – could fit in the category of weird for many people. And Mary Ann simply pays it no mind. She puts on her “peripheral training device” (a baseball cap with a rod attached to the bill, suspending a glow-in-the-dark ball out in front) to show people how it works. She describes the 12 states as if she were describing car mechanics. She has you stare at your thumb nail for a full minute. And she does it all with a twinkle in her eye, knowing that you’ll discover something wonderful, too.

Her confidence and presence are certainly unusual for a first-time presenter. She even had a couple of good belly laughs during her presentation! I don’t know where this petite, poised powerhouse is headed with NLP or presenting, but I sure hope to be there for what’s next.

Winding Road to Pecos Wilderness

2008-09-11T22:05:00.002-05:00

What happens when I write a story after reading Nelson Zink all night.

Every summer, I went camping with my granddad in the Pecos Mountains.

He was a tall man, perfectly bald, and he favored coveralls. He had work coveralls and dress coveralls. Some of his coveralls even had his name scrawled in cursive embroidery on the front pocket: Donald E.Raver.

He was a quiet man.

We would load up his suburban, a giant behemoth vehicle before SUVs were common, and haul his RV up from Albuquerque, past Santa Fe, through the tiny town of Pecos.

We would begin our ascent to the Pecos Wilderness from there, the suburban crawling up the circular mountain gravel road. The trees changed from cedars to aspens. The air got cooler. The sun was a little brighter up there.

When we arrived, we’d creak open the doors. It was quiet up there. Just birds singing. And the start of the Pecos River babbling over smooth river rocks. It’s a tiny creek at that altitude. It held so much beauty and happiness for him, that’s where he chose to pass from this world to some other place. But that’s a story for another day.

In the mornings, it was cold. Sometimes we had a fire. Sometimes, he made us warm, grilled spam sandwiches with mayonnaise. They taste good in the mountains.

If you wanted to get time alone with granddad, you had to get up early. He usually woke up around 4am and took a walk. That was the best time to be around him, because with just him around, things were very still.

Once, I ended up going camping with him by myself. Who knows why. I was a shy girl around most people, but I guess I had a lot to say on the inside. That trip, I talked and talked and talked and talked. For days. He didn’t say much. He just kept getting up at 4am, talking walks, going fishing, making spam sandwiches, and I went right along with him, spilling my every thought. He listened.

And then, after the third day, I had said everything. I had expressed every passing thought, every curiosity, every little thought I had had for years, every insightful 10-year-old observation – I had said it all.

That’s when I started to see things very clearly.

When he was done cooking breakfast in the morning, he would start to lean in towards the river, and look that way, and I knew it was time to go for a walk. Sometimes, he would turn towards his fishing pole. That meant we were going to walk over to the lake and go fishing. When he put his hand on the rock beside him, that meant we were going to sit there a while and I could sit by him if I wanted to.

I would sit by the stream, watching the water flow over the rocks, the sunlight reflecting white light off the water. Tiny fish would swim through the rocks, in the current. If we waited long enough, a bird might fly down right in front of us and grab up a fish. The aspen leaves glinted in the sunlight on the trees, like shiny coins hanging from the trees.

After we sat a while, granddad would reach into his pocket and take out a red apple and his knife. He’d wind that pocket knife around and around the apple, separating the peel from the apple in a single piece. Then, he’d hand the apple to me and let the red spiral stretch out vertically, like a spiral staircase to somewhere out there, somewhere important, some place worth going to.

Yin & Yanguage

2008-09-10T23:32:00.003-05:00

This last weekend, I participated in Kathleen Radebaugh’s Yin and Yanguage: A Metaphorical Exploration of Creative Process.

I didn’t know what to expect, exactly. But I know Kathleen pretty well, so I knew it would be heartfelt and probably about deep change, or the beginnings of deep change.

From a selfish perspective, I also hoped it would involve her telling stories and putting me into trance. She’s great at these two things. More about that later.

The theory or history of how this class was developed is easy to describe: Kathleen is an NLP Practitioner, she’s done extensive work with Steve Gilligan and his Self Relations/ deep trance work, and she’s the third biggest fan I’ve ever met of David Grove’s Clean Language, Clean Space, and Emergent Knowledge. Add in Kathleen’s bend towards deep change and her recent explorations into her own masculine and feminine sides, and voila, you have Yin and Yanguage.

But what do you actually do in this class? That’s a little more difficult to describe.

Before we get to that, let’s talk results. The classes are purposefully small, so there were 3 of us participants. By the end of the class, I had more awareness of the balance in my own life of yin and yang (there’s not much, thanks for asking!). One participant had started to rewrite his life purpose, which has been the same for over 20 years. The other participant realized she had a limiting belief about flow and productivity being exclusive of each other, and she had started to revise that belief. None of us were thinking much about any of those things when we arrived.

These changes occurred in a 3 hour class.

Next, let’s talk metaphor and trance. I would lick the word crumbs off Kathleen’s fingers, she’s such a masterful storyteller and hypnosis guide. Kathleen is an accomplished novelist and storyteller – of both the literary and the vernacular kinds. And she’s spent years actually practicing hypnosis. The thing we all think of doing when we’re taking the NLP Practitioner series of classes – “hey, I could record my own voice and then put myself in hypnosis,” – she actually did that, over and over, enough that she achieved the outcome of those trances, within a year: she successfully sold her Florida house in the midst of a housing bust, got rid of most of her possessions, and moved to Austin.

Add those skills to her latest passion: David Grove, Penny Tompkins, and James Lawley’s work. She’s only taken a day class in these topics, and she is indeed “self taught.” But she doesn’t just sit around and read books. She uses what she learns to practice on herself and anyone else she can get an audience with who really wants personal change. She’s self taught in the way that means “she actually taught herself” instead of “she has no clue what’s going on because she’s only read books.” (As a side note, she does have immediate plans to take classes with the wonderful, talented, and informative Penny and James in England.)

So, you can tell I understand what she’s up to, mostly. Or at least I have a map of it :)

Besides understanding what she’s doing, I also happen to think it’s a very powerful class for personal change.

I’ll attempt to describe how the class actually works. Everyone arrives and mills around and says hello to each other. Kathleen welcomes folks and issues a simple set of instructions involving a box, a number, and you doing some writing/ drawing or something of that sort. You do some arranging of those items per her direction. Then, Kathleen uses her magical powers of metaphor and deep hypnosis to take you into trance while you create something -- anything. The class oscillates between creating in trance and arranging in space, creating in trance and arranging in space.

This class is not for people who prefer lengthy descriptions of why they’re doing something. But, if you want to spend a few hours with that dear friend, your right brain, knowing that any response you have is just right, this could be the class for you.

That’s a bit of a lame description, isn’t it? Let’s see….maybe something metaphorical...

Imagine yourself walking in a beautiful, verdant forest where you feel perfectly safe and fully at peace. Take a moment to look around and notice the bark on the trees, what’s beneath your feet, how the sunlight is coming through the trees. Every leaf, every bug buzzing across your path, every forest bird call, even the sunlight dappling through the forest canopy, and the sound of your own footsteps reminds you of your innate ability to create, and create you do.

When you work with your life issues, goals, dreams, and blocks in that space, so much can happen.

Home Slice Pizza and the Dangerous Food Movement

2008-09-09T22:21:00.006-05:00

I would drive to Home Slice Pizza in Austin traffic.

In the rain.

Or hail.

On a bicycle.

Carrying a live chicken.

It’s that good.

You must go there. Order the number 6 – sausage, ricotta and roasted red peppers. Get the big one.

No matter how much you have, you will want more. So it makes sense to have some for later. And it's great cold, by the way.

It’s the kind of dish that in most restaurants, you would hope that someone had specially crafted such a combination, but you know better. Mostly, such things are just put together for menu appeal, with mediocre ingredients and an okay-ness, a passable-ness to them.

Not this time.

The tomato sauce on this pie is perfectly crafted to pack a big tomato flavor. Remember what your grandmother’s tomatoes tasted like? They’ve condensed that taste into a perfect, chunky pizza sauce.

The blobs of ricotta – who knew ricotta could have so much flavor? – hold the sauce on. The roasted red peppers are on top, soft but not too soft.

And the crust. This is not your typical thin crust. The crust is chewy, in a pleasant way, and there is no hard, inedible layer on the bottom, like what I usually get when I order in pizza. The pies come sliced big, so you have to pick up the slices and fold them to eat them.

Do not use a fork. And know that you will get something on you. Some warm, gooey, wondrous ingredient is coming for your shirt. Just relax. Food that requires protective barriers can be good.

When I finished eating one slice of this sacred food, I truly felt that I could love anyone. I thought back on all my enemies, one by one, all the people who have wronged me, and I could not imagine a single one walking through the door and me not loving them.

High on pizza endorphins, my husband and I languidly strolled through SoCo. We were nice to strangers. Dogs looked amazingly cute, every single one. Even drunk college students were quaint and entertaining to us in such an altered state of universal compassion with all humankind.

I was reminded of Liz Gilbert’s transcendent pizza experience in Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia. She even talks about how some people in Italy are blasé about politics – partly because the politicos are so out of control, partly because the food is so wonderful.

After eating Home Slice’s pizza, I can see how this could happen. We could call it the Dangerous Food Movement. You go in, you partake of food composed with such precision, such love, it is designed to make you feel good.

And you don’t just feel good in the moment, you feel good later, too. We’re not talking a bag of flavor-coated chips here, or something that distracts you from your misery. We’re talking food that actually changes your misery, that elevates it into something else. That lasts. We’re talking food that gets you to pick up the phone and call your best friend, who you haven’t talked to since last month when she forgot to pick you up and you had to ride your bike in the rain with the chicken.

But the Dangerous Food Movement just starts with one bite. You feel so good that you eat this kind of food again later that week. Maybe you try the #7 - white clams, garlic, pecorino romano. That second time, it only takes a couple of bites before you finally start to forgive your sister for moving away. Then it's the special slice of the day with spinach and garlic. Before long, you find yourself eating healing food all the time.

Soon, you’re not complaining at all. You greet people with genuine warmth, look them in the eye, and ask them about their mother, really wanting to know.

You try the #1 Margherita. The mild terror that used to be inside of you dissipates, a little each day, until it’s gone.

You start to actually care about things outside of yourself. You go through your day noticing all the wonderful things, like how your co-worker just wants to laugh a little, or how your boss’s eyes shine when he talks about learning to become a pilot. You go for the #5, the classic, pepperoni and mushrooms.

Suddenly, you’re taking actions to help people, instead of just complaining or theorizing about the people who need help.

Maybe, you’re even ready to help yourself or let yourself go for that big dream. The #2 takes you there - eggplant parmesan on a pizza. After you’ve been eating this way a while, maybe you even love yourself enough to let yourself fail at something…. And try again.

Certainly, I do see how this kind of food could make you forget about some things, and focus on others.

To paraphrase the Sufi poet Rumi:
Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a pizza.
I'll meet you there.