If you missed part one of this tip, you can read it here.
Last week, I shared what we’re up to when we engage in a transformative conversation with our clients.
This week, we’re going to take a fresh look at what we’re up against – what takes us out of our full creative potential when we’re not in touch with that deeper part of ourselves, and what makes it difficult at times for both us and our clients to see it for themselves…
Part Two: What We’re Up Against
Back in my days as an NLP trainer, I used to finish our practitioner trainings with this story:
| Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who was trapped inside a prison with invisible walls. To pass the time, she would blow bubbles from a small bottle of bubble mixture she had been given by a great wizard. With practice, she became quite skilled at blowing larger and larger bubbles, and when they caught the light just so she could lose herself in their reflective beauty for hours at a time, imagining herself inside, carried away from her lonely prison.
Since she had nothing but time, she decided to build a bubble machine that would blow bubbles for her without her even having to do anything to make it happen. At first, this seemed like a wonderful thing, but as more and more bubbles were being created, she found herself increasingly overwhelmed by all that she could see. Some bubbles still gave her the feeling of freedom she would have when she imagined herself outside the prison walls, but others began to scare her as she would imagine herself trapped inside forever or falling to her death when the bubble burst. She tried to avoid looking at the scary bubbles and only focus on the ones that made her happy, but it was an endless task, and in the end she would just get tired and fall back asleep. One day, almost drowning in an ocean of bubbles, she had a sudden insight. Instead of trying to sort through the bubbles, she could turn off the machine that was creating them. With a burst of hopeful energy, she looked away from the bubbles and back towards the machine. It was difficult to see, but she felt her way until she found the switch. For a time, it seemed like it hadn’t worked, as old bubbles continued to float around her and almost suffocate her with their presence. But sooner than she thought possible, the bubbles dissipated until only a few remained. It reminded her of when she had first begun blowing bubbles, and how beautiful they were, and how easy it was to lose yourself in their reflected light. As the last bubble popped, she looked out through the invisible walls of her prison and a new thought occurred to her, one that she had never thought before. What if the walls of her prison weren’t invisible? What if they were imaginary? What if there were no walls at all? Tentatively at first, she reached out past the edge of her world until she discovered to her delight that there was no edge to her world. And she laughed and she cried and she laughed again, for she realized she was already home. And she lived happily ever after… |
While I have written extensively about the principle of Thought over the past few years, I continue to be amazed at how the same innate power that creates my reality can so comprehensively and invisibly obscure the deeper, impersonal reality inside of which our personal realities unfold.
And this is what we’re up against in life and in the transformative conversation – we lose sight of the fact that we are living in the feeling of our moment by moment thinking, and think we need to address the content of those thoughts in order to feel better and have a better experience of being alive.
If we are “empowered” we try to change the world; if we are “enlightened” we try to change our thinking. But what makes the transformative approach so unique is that the first and most important shift we make is neither in the world or in our thoughts but rather in our consciousness. As we see and understand more about what’s really going on, that new understanding transforms our experience and enables us to see opportunities that were previously hidden from us and dissolve problems that were created at a lower level of thinking.
Like flicking the switch on the bubble machine, each shift in consciousness allows us to see the illusory nature of our thoughts and we wind up with less on our mind and more space in our life. And into that space, our deeper wisdom – the universal Mind – comes bubbling up to give us peace in our hearts and fresh, new thinking in our heads.
We realize that we are infinitely creative, completely free, and already home. Nothing’s changed, but everything’s different. And that is the very essence of transformation.
With all my love,
 |
