hypnoblog Alan Anderson, C Ht

Everything that we think we believe about the world we live in is encoded in our mind as a belief or a memory of an experience . In NLP we think of that belief system as our “map” of reality. That map is built up from the time we are born with information collected from our five senses of audio perception, sight, smell, taste, and feeling (both emotional and physical). When we tie our shoe, we don’t stop to think about how to tie it, we just tie it. We do that by accessing our memory of “tying’. This is very helpful to us because we don’t have to stop and think about how to tie a shoe, we already have that knowledge. An even more important aspect of this human ability is extrapolation. Once we know how to tie a shoe we have that ability encoded in our brain so when we come across a similar challenge in life, say a need to tie a bow in a sleeping bag cover or package, we have that experience in our memory to access, so we transpose that knowledge (or mental programming) to the new challenge.

Our ability to transpose information from one experience to another is very valuable to us because it allows us to solve problems that we have not come across in the past without relearning all of the aspect of creating a solution. Another example is; if we already know how to write with a pencil and paper and are handed a pen to write with, we find it easy to use our knowledge of writing with a pencil to write with a pen.

We make this type of cross connections all the time in our life. The problem that we face is when our mind makes an inappropriate or less than useful connection.

If, at some time in our life, we feel sad and our mommy gives us a cookie to make us “feel” better there is a distinct possibility, depending on the emotional impact of the moment, that our mind will make the connection of; “the way to feel better when one feels sad, is to eat cookies”. Because this type of accessing happens below our conscious perception, we rarely stop and think, “I feel sad so I’ll eat cookies to make me feel better.” Further this pattern might be generalized to “eating makes me happy”. The next thing one know you could find themselves wondering why they are not able to stop overeating.

It is important to notice here that most of the time these automatic reactions and connections serve us very well, and further, that we can create pathways that we want to improve our lives.

The really good news is that we can unlearn behaviors. Being aware of how the mind works for and against us will take you a long way to understanding how to change unwanted behaviors and reactions. If you find that you have automatic behaviors or reactions to life’s challenges you may find it useful to seek the help of an expert hypnotist or NLP practitioner to assist in creating more useful programming.

That’s it for now. Happy blogging.