InExcellence

The InExcellence Blog

News, views and updates by the team

The Intro to NLP Workshop in Pune

I do not have to do what I have always done

Doing the 'Introduction to NLP' course with Sneha and Poonam has been an eye-opening and a delightful experience.

Sneha had a very friendly training style and she encouraged everyone's participation in the exercises which made the sessions truly hands-on. As the course progressed, we were able to look at our personal situations objectively and identify rational solutions.

The course has introduced new thinking patterns and better problem-solving abilities in me. On the work-front, I have put into practice some of the NLP theories like rapport building, behaving flexibly, being assertive etc. and have found them to be very effective.

NLP gives me the ability to choose how to respond to any given situation, I do not have to do what I have always done. NLP shows me how I can try out new ways of thinking and new ways of being, how to experiment and find out what works for me.

NLP also teaches me to become more aware of my own feelings and emotions and to learn that I are in control of them, they don't just happen to me. Our ability to get on with people (to establish rapport) and to communicate clearly can make a huge difference in our lives. NLP teaches me how to build up rapport with different kinds of people.

I intend to continue learning more about NLP and practice it regularly.

by Allmas Mullah, participant

A great sense of hope, excitement and positivity

I came to Pune without any expectations, thought I would just 'see' how it goes.

The first day of the course was engrossing and interesting. The exercises that were conducted by Sneha were revealing and forced me to look at my thoughts and behavior in a 'new light'. The importance of building rapport to have a good 'relationship' with others was demonstrated really well. Clean questions showed me how to involve myself in conversation and into the other person's world without sounding obtrusive and opinionated. The first day for me ended with a lot of positivity and excitement at the thought of what the subsequent days would bring.

The second day was more intense with the exercises on identifying our problems and how to go about solving them. The exercises gave me a lot of hope and the feeling that no problem is unsolvable! The presuppositions helped me realise and guided me unobtrusively on a new way to look at the happenings in and around my life.

The third day was the most intense. The exercise of reframing brought about an internal shift I thought never existed within me.

Overall I am extremely glad I did this course.

The trainer, Sneha, played a very very integral part in my enjoying this course and 'seeing' myself and the world around me in a new way. I am left with an amazing feeling and a great sense of hope, excitement and positivity. At the end of it all I am full of new learnings and discoveries within myself, some pleasant and some not so pleasant. However with excellent guidance and personal attention from Sneha I sailed through the feelings of sadness, harsh discoveries and happy revelations.

Poonam in her unobtrosive way and utter kindness 'pushed' us along to discover more and to be comfortable with ourselves

All in all an excellent effort and I do look forward to doing the next level and hope that it happens soon.

by Prieti Dey, participant

Life-changing revelations

The two words that come to mind when describing our pilot programme 'Introduction to NLP' are flexibility and trust. The build up to the programme was exciting; there are cultural differences between training in UK and India.

For instance, in India, it is considered common practice to invite the participants to meet the trainer prior to the training programme. A new concept for me as in UK, I usually would meet the participants at the start of the actual event. After running the first day of the program at the nearby 5 star hotel, it seemed more cost effective to continue with the programme at Poonam's home. The hotel did not even charge us cancellation.

Poonam's home became a lovely conducive environment to run the programme, with home cooked food and coffee and snacks available practically every hour. This I believe set the scene for the participants to be fully involved in the programme and seemed to give permission for them to work beyond their comfort zone.

The programme, within a small group, was in itself intense. However, this allowed me to respond more directly to each participant's needs. Through this process, there was a lot of sharing from the participants and it confirmed, once again, how effective NLP could be when put in practice. For some of the participants, there were, what I would call, life-changing revelations. As a result of the NLP processes and the trust that was established in the group, I do believe that life long friendships have been cultivated. Even though the programme would finish at 5pm, the laughter and sharing would continue into the evening.

As an NLP trainer, what was the learning for me? Irrespective of culture, religion, age and gender, people do have similar issues to contend with. Can I cultivate and maintain a good relationship with people that are important to me?

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one” CS Lewis

by Sneha Khilay, trainer

Do Not Think of a Pink Elephant

Photo by Jef Poskanzer

Or... Where one puts one’s attention...

NLP (short for Now lets Play or Neuro Linguistic Programming) is a fascinating set of distinctions for understanding human behavior and building models of excellence and mastery in any field of human endeavor.

One of the basic presuppositions of the model is that everyone lives in their own inner world and that we all build maps of the world out there, beyond our perception, in order to make sense of our surroundings and to live our daily lives. It makes the powerful insight that we do not share the same reality although we think we do.

NLP is about many things and one of the things it is, is an understanding of differences in where we place our attention.

Imagine walking in a wood. You might think anybody who walks in that wood would have the same experience. There would be trees, birds, fresh air, greenery and any body there would experience that is a similar way. Yet that is not so.

Photo by Jasmic

Consider the differences between a poet walking through the wood – or a forester.
Or a pair of lovers, or a mother pushing a pram with a crying baby, or 10 year olds playing on their bikes, or a ornithologist watching birds, or a composer like Beethoven who walked through the Vienna woods humming to himself and writing notes in a note book, or a policeman keeping an eye out for trouble, or a homeless person wondering where they could spend the night, or an old couple talking on a bench talking about their grandchildren or a developer who is wondering if the wood would be a good place to build some new houses, or a road builder planning to drive a road through the wood. This applies to anything and anywhere.

What we see, don’t see, choose to place our attention on, choose not to place our attention on will profoundly influence our inner experience.

Remember when you were going to buy something, like a car, a computer, or a dishwasher, or a bicycle. Do you remember that in the days before buying and sometime after, you kept seeing the product being driven (a car like a Ford or a Honda) or being used by friends (a computer or dishwasher.) These products were always there, it was just that we never noticed them; we never put our attention there.

So where we place our attention creates our reality. Yes. The sober truth is that we all live in our own reality and are always directing our attention in different ways.

Therefore a crowd of people wandering around in an airport waiting for different flights might be thought to be having the same experience. Not so like the experience of the wood, some people might be smokers and are worried where they can have their next cigarette. Some might have children and are wondering how to keep their kids quiet and entertained. Some might be business people thinking of their upcoming meetings at the end of their flights, whereas others are going on holiday and are looking forward to a week’s relaxation and fun. Others might be airline staff like pilots, thinking of the bad weather they will have to fly through, or the cabin crew thinking of a cabin full of demanding passengers upset because of a potentially turbulent flight.

Photo by d'n'c

We are always choosing where to put our attention.

If I say do not think of a pink elephant, or a black cat, in order not to think of these things one has to think of them in order to make sense of the sentence. Another way to put this point is that what ever we say or mention is the message we give ourselves.

We are all great experts in knowing what we don’t want and letting ourselves know that by repeatedly saying and thinking about that. “I don’t want to feel upset anymore every time my mother, wife, husband, son, daughter contradicts me.” “I don’t want feel those feeling of anger towards my boss/mother in law, neighbor next door etc.” We might wonder why we then continue to feel upset and angry. That is where our attention is. That is what we continue to create in our lives.

Imagine having the belief that the world is a dangerous and frightening place. If we have that belief then we will notice all the disasters, the murders, the abuse, economic collapse, war, disaster etc. If we have the belief that the world is a beautiful place then we will notice all the beautiful things that are every where like a baby on a bus laughing, or bunch of flowers in a flower shop, or the colors of the dress of a passing woman.

This why endless articles, programs, discussions and presentations about bad things tends to become self-fulfilling prophesies. “The economy is about to collapse.” “ Recession is here” “prepare for the next terrorist attack” “the war on terror”. These act like viruses or thought viruses, as they are known in NLP because people hear them and then in their internal reality they quickly multiply like real viruses in terms of negative thoughts and imaginations. And because mind and body can be thought of as one entity negative depressing thoughts immediately cause us to feel bad.

We read everywhere that a major recession is upon the whole world. It is certainly true that the globalized economy has some big faults with it, and the media daily puts out gloom and doom. This quickly becomes the thing that millions of people focus on and of course this feeds into the general negative situation.

Photo by Son of Groucho

NLP has modeled a powerful communication technique, which is to pace peoples experience first. Like saying yes the situation is bad and then adding what is called a lead which you could give a suggestion like “And what can be done about this?” or” how could we go about making a positive change with this situation?” A question like that gets people’s attention by firstly acknowledging their fears and then leads them to think of what actually might be some solutions for a positive resolution of the situation.

The human brain is infinitely resourceful if provided with the right stimulus.

It is certainly resourceful for many people creating hopeless and depressive futures. Yes some people are very creative at doing such things as imagining a number of disastrous futures and picking the worst one and then assuming that that is the one that will definitely happen and then having feelings about that such as fear and anxiety. It is actually much easier than one might think to use such an inventive imagination to also imagine powerful and desirous futures that could be the focus of attention that would allow us to notice what could be possible in our lives even if the world economic situation is not as beneficial as we were lead to believe it was not so long ago.

When companies go into crises usually about loosing money or not making enough they do one, two, or three things. Often all three . They dismiss the boss, they reorganize everything or/and they sack a lot of their staff. Sometimes it works usually it doesn’t.

The business world easily gets obsessed with such phrases as “Where’s the problem?” “Problem solving, trouble shooting and crises and conflict management.” The attention is firmly placed on what’s wrong and that helps to perpetuate that. If one chooses to put ones attention on what’s right, what works well and how could we make things better then the attention alone will help create more positive possibilities.

There is definitely a danger of living in what is called a “fool’s paradise.” This is the situation where you think or hope everything is good, working well and everything is “fine”. And then something suddenly happens and disaster strikes. History is full of such situations. The recent financial situation seemed to suddenly appear almost like a Tsunami wave that came out of nowhere. Or the seemingly sudden attacks of Hitler’s armies in 1939 and 40, or the sudden terrorist attacks on and after Sept 11 2001. Everything is fine and then suddenly it isn’t.

I believe it is possible to choose to place ones attention on a situation, or a company, or a country, in a way that doesn’t pre-label or frame your attention to be in a certain way, like what is the problem, what is wrong here or what is the danger? A powerful and very helpful choice of perspective could be “What is going on here?” Like looking at all the people in the wood or the airport and asking that question – “What is going on here?” “What is happening here?” it is like taking a distant perspective to see all the different ways people might be experiencing the world.
From this perspective or choice of attention, many things become clearer without the pre-judged or pre-created label. Then a much fuller dare I say more truer (not that one can ever know the truth) perspective emerges from which future plans and actions can be taken.

Photo by cfishy

If NLP is about creating models of excellence taken from where ever it exists, in the behavior and attitudes of human beings, then the idea of where one chooses to place ones attention and developing the ability to consciously choose this becomes one of the major elements of what the nebulous word “wisdom” might mean. And certainly in today’s complex and fast changing world it is one of the most important parts of what it means to be a successful, powerful and effective leader, especially in the business and corporate world.

by Roger Vaisey

(Roger Vaisey will be co-leading the Business Practitioner Training in Mumbai from Feruary 14-28, along with Greta Mildenberg.)

Walking the Talk

These are life-changing moments and in reflecting at these crossroads, I have decided to leave my job as Vice-President of a software company.

Like many other Indians, I'm recovering from a trance… a trance caused by unbelievable onslaught of a terrifying nature… recovering from a taste of man the destroyer…

Photo courtesy of NDTV

The anger of Indians, especially of those dwelling in Mumbai, has been showcased on camera. With fanned animosity and pointing fingers, the angry young men and women gave vent to their instinct for revenge.

Most of the vociferous attacks were targeted at politicians. But in a democracy, politicians are what we, the people, choose to make of them. If our politicians are corrupt and power-hungry, is it not because we have colluded in making them what they are, first by electing them to power, and then seeking favours from them?

But true to image, even as the war against terror raged on, some politicians found opportunities therein for self-serving publicity.

Snubbed by the father of the NSG commando killed in action, the Kerala Chief Minister said, "Even a dog would not have visited the Unnikrishnan house had it not been that of a martyr."

Not to be left far behind, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi castigated women "with lipstick and powder on their face" for holding peaceful demonstrations against the alleged failure of politicians to protect citizens from terror.

Vilasrao Deshmukh, on his part, initiated a 'terror tourism' trip to the Taj Mahal Hotel with Bollywood celebrities, while Narendra Modi opened his bountiful purse to the family of the slain security officer, which the family refused to accept.

Photo by Greg Younger

The government, however, preferred to look at the situation as part of a global issue. The Foreign Minister, Pranab Mukherjee, sharing the podium with Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State of the USA, indicated that terrorism was not just a national issue, but a global problem experienced in voluminous doses even by the super- power.

Some philosophize stating that life is made up of the opposites: male-female, positive-negative, good-bad and so on. Hegelian dialectics can also be brought in to sound more scholarly: thesis x antithesis = synthesis, which is also applied to material development. Religious people would touch upon the providence or destiny to explain the inscrutable act of merciless killing.

So many perspectives, so much verbosity, very little action, if at all.

In the varied ways that we reacted to the carnage in Mumbai, each one of us has revealed ourselves for what we really are. Our every reaction can be linked to the subjective structure we have well developed within us. Its time for introspection, an examination of who and what we are in relation to terrorism.

Operation Cyclone was only an emergency operation, very painful but successful. However, where is the cure for the malady?

www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/11/29

In fact we need to own responsibility for terrorism and go to the very root of it. It is said that the seed of terrorism, resides in each one of us, just the ways in which we strike may be different.

In an oyster, the formation of a natural pearl begins when a foreign substance slips into the space between the mantle and the shell. It irritates the mantle. It is as if the oyster has got a splinter. The oyster's natural reaction is to cover up that irritant to protect itself. The mantle covers the irritant with layers of the same nacre substance that is used to produce the shell. This eventually becomes a pearl.

The human mind, like the oyster, experiences varied intrusions. A scorching glare by a person of influence to an impressionable child can slowly transform the hurt child into a destructive force. A single act of recognition of talent can encourage a child to become a benevolent leader.

Of course, there are also instances where bad experiences inflicted upon people with healthy background brought out the best in them. Aurobindo became a spiritual leader when he realized that he could not stand against the military force of the British in the struggle for freedom. Mahatma Gandhi identified Ahimsa as a strategy to overpower the military prowess of the British. Nelson Mandela chose the path of reconciliation.

Terrorists, in my opinion, are also victims, wounded children who have been shaped by twisted adults. It is parents and teachers that sow the seeds of terrorism by their behaviour and treatment of children and by the toxic conditioning they impart.

Terrorism is the reaction to a hurt that is harboured in the mind until it snowballs into multifarious proportions as it matures, encouraged by the reinforcing environment and gets translated into nefarious activities. Grown as an institution, it can mentor professional terrorists and engineer attacks outmaneuvering all defence systems. Terrorism is meant to hurt others in the worst possible way and usually it is innocent people that become the target.

Photo by chadh

The twin towers of WTC appeared as the symbol of the economic power of the USA. So the attack was, perhaps, meant to hurt the pride of the USA. Indian Parliament House was aimed at as it represents the political power centre of India. Mumbai has been considered the economic capital of India and so it got targeted.

The terrorists are usually pitiable youngsters who are bereft of the healthy breeze that blows from various directions enabling them to resonate their thoughts with other world views. They do not know how to step into the shoes of others and experience life in its varied perspectives. They have never had a chance for dialogue. Like Mowgli, the hero of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book, they have not had the chance to live the real human experience.

"If a child is loved and cared for, he or she will be a hopeful person even if bad things happen. So it is with adults. Without hope we do the same thing everyday as if habits were rituals to fend off demons of fear. We stop growing, becoming rigid and intolerant. It is what terrorists hope we will become – like them denying life and embracing death," opines Pierre Lavalle, a Canadian therapist.

"It is much easier to scare millions of people than to inspire them. It is easy to commit to a fundamentalist view that absolves one of responsibility to think or make well-judged decisions. It takes great courage to continually challenge one's beliefs to grow beyond them. It takes great strength to resist the calls to match violence with violence."

Let us stop the blame game. Let us take steps to prevent the future occurrence of terrorism. Let us start from the very beginning! Let us conscientise the parents, let us train the teachers, let us empower the managers, let us look at ourselves. Let every citizen be aware of the responsibility to society and be responsible for all occurrences.

Let us walk the talk. Its time for action.

Photo by cervus

Peace Dialogues
As I said at the beginning of this piece, I have decided to leave my job in the software company where I have been serving as Vice President and devote enough time to serve the cause of peace and brotherhood. I shall use my time towards establishing a constructive peaceful world using NLP.

· Neuro Linguistic Programming helps people to understand the structure of their subjective experience and restructure it, if needed, to attain the excellence they seek.
· With NLP we can understand the behaviour of others and take them along various perceptual positions in order to develop understanding among people of all walks of life.
· It helps us to know others' thinking patterns and filters so that we are enabled to build rapport with them easily.
· Through NLP we can increase the choices we have until each one of us can achieve a win-win situation.
· NLP helps us to be the difference that makes the difference in our personal, professional and social life.

Have you defined your role in this world shared by billions of people?
Your thoughts and actions are valuable and can inspire others!

by John A. Joseph

NLP comes to Pune

Today Pune awoke to the mystery and magic of Neuro-linguistic programming as the ad for the December 2008 NLP courses appeared in Pune Mirror, Times Of India's latest add-on newspaper.

Calls poured in, inquiries and enrollments, from a wide range of people .... which is as should be, because as the fore-runner of applied NLP, Robert Dilts says, "the applications of NLP are as varied as the people that use them". We at InExcellence look forward to facilitating this revolution in personal and professional development.

Even as Sneha Khilay flies in from the UK and John Joseph flies in from Chennai for the Pune workshops, Peter Kennedy and Cheryl Sklan rue that they could not be here for the launch. They write-in that they are very much with us in heart and spirit, and hope to follow-in soon to lead their own specialised workshops and trainings.

Meanwhile Greta Mildenberg and Roger Vaisey are scheduled to conduct the Business Practitioner Training in Mumbai in February 2009 and Lisa Brice is planning her Horses for Course India itineray too.
As a therapist, I personally look forward to Clare Jones' Marketing for Holistic Practitioners as I see the immense need for this work.

And I am specially keen about our Leadership workshops coming as they do in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and the sentiment of the people right now. There exists a huge vaccum for leadership as our jaded and corrupt politicians trip over each other in short-sighted power struggles. I see people wanting change, willing to put in the action but waiting to be lead.

NLP gives us the tools to not only lead ourself and others out of the mess we find ourselves in, but also the power to heal our past, present and future. As we become congruent and live lives aligned to the well being of ourselves, others and our little planet, we become naturally constructive, creative and caring. This raises our competence to higher levels of excellence in who we are, how we interact and whatever we do.

This also works incredibly well in an economic down such as the recession as it crystallises our usp, the talents, qualities, knowledge and experience that are unique to us. With NLP we have the means to ride the wave, take all ups and downs in our stride and use the turbulance to our benefit, change lanes if we need to. It gives us a clarity of vision and clears the path to our goals.

by Poonam Gurudayal

Redefining the balancing act as a working woman

It is a well known statistic that there is a far higher turnover of women employees. Some people say that women want it all – education, professional skills and a career plus marriage, family and children, all within a wider network of friends and colleagues.

Getting a satisfactory work–life balance can be quite a challenge, particularly as the demands and priorities change throughout your life – early on there’s education, starting a career and getting married, with individual family and career ambitions becoming increasingly different and varied as life progresses.

Photo by Nina Hale

This often influences companies to view women as short-term, unreliable employees and in a recession situation can make for higher vulnerability for lay-offs. In such a situation it is critical to focus on your individual strengths, skills and resources. Networking and a clarity of goal and ambition help you identify gaps in your skill set – both hard and soft. Considering your resources, in the widest sense, enables you to further your career more effectively, whether that involves a promotion, a change in direction or even leaving work completely. In turn, this helps achieve the best work–life balance for you.

A Women’s Development Course gives you the opportunity in a protected space to step back and take an objective view of your career and personal ambitions. This is invaluable at various points in your life – when starting a career and setting initial goals, when returning to work after a break and perhaps considering a career change or part time work or when you need to review and re-focus your goals mid-career. Or even when you’re near the end of your career and you want to identify areas that will take you into retirement role.

Research has shown that lack of confidence and self-belief are two of the main factors that hold women back in their career. This is particularly in relation to your skills and abilities and the contribution you can make in a working environment. Eleanor Roosevelt once suggested that if someone made you feel inferior, you had to give them permission to do so –ultimately your self-belief and confidence depends on you! Women’s Development Courses concentrate on the softer skills like maintaining self-confidence which is essential to make the most of yourself and your career.

To make the maximum benefit from a development course it is necessary to start with creating the preparatory soil, identifying your strengths and priorities. Also, be prepared to be honest with yourself and others about your feelings and be willing to think about how you can work on these areas – whether to maximise effectiveness or work on a less developed skill set. This is highly relevant when you need to hone management skills to help you to take on a significant promotion and the new responsibilities this brings.

And in turn, it is critical to be respectful and supportive of the issues and aspirations of fellow course members, as you share and work through your particular concerns and issues– remember they will be supporting you! This creates a model you can follow in the work space with colleagues and gives perspective to the necessity of building long term, supportive networks.

Also, considering and reflecting on recieved feedback, which is just another point of view, often more objective than your own, can be a real help in putting your own “obstacles” into perspective. The experiences of other women and their challenges and solutions can work as motivational and inspirational models.

Of course, you have to work to get the benefits out of any workshop, but I have yet to meet a woman who has not benefited from the valuable opportunity to reflect and re-focus on career and life issues.

by Sneha Khilay

(Sneha Khilay will lead a workshop for women on December 13-14)

I didn't get where I am today by .....

It's strange sometimes, how random thoughts enter your mind and eventually, after some strange process, emerge as a notion which can help you make sense of your world and the world around you!

I was walking, or more like striding out, on a beautiful autumn day in a nearby park. The sky was a vivid blue and the trees had their last few days of leaves with all the varied hues and tints you could possibly ask for.

It lifted my spirits to be amongst the all pervading beauty of those leaves and trees as we head towards our wintry and darker months.

And yes, my spirits did need lifting after a week in which there was a continuous stream of bad news stories, whether about the numbers of people being made redundant, the tragic death of a young child in London or the raging wars criss-crossing our fragile earth!

But there had been one major highlight during the previous week when I had facilitated a conference of 120 health service professionals at a nearby major city. The theme had been about building a new team and organisation to provide even better service, especially with competitive providers coming into their market. There was a strong sense of déjà vu amongst many in the audience … encapsulated by one person as, "Another day, another change". On closer investigation this 'change fatigue' was born out of a lack of self confidence about their ability to use their undoubted talents to 'cope with yet another change programme' !

So we decided to do an exercise which asked people to write down their successes and failures and establish the causes for these by attributing them to either internal (to them) or external (to them) factors.

It was quite amazing how few people took credit for their successes (sometimes putting them down to luck or to other people) and tended to blame others for things which were anyway outside their area of influence. The net result was that for many people their self esteem and confidence was very low which might be contributing to their negative thinking about the next phase of change.

The research, on what psychological theory calls 'attribution', suggests that if we can effectively internalise our success (I’m good at this etc) and deal with failure by firstly reflecting internally (this is a one off etc) and then externalising appropriately (I didn’t have enough information etc) then we can raise our performance to another level and develop our potential to cope with change effectively.

This doesn’t mean we don’t need to take responsibility for our performance, when we have not met our objectives, which are within our control. In this case we might attribute this effectively by saying that, “We may have failed on this occasion but have learnt a number of things which will enable success next time”.

And then, as I was kicking the autumn leaves along the pathways I remembered a famous quote from an old British comedy ‘The rise and fall of Reginald Perrin' which seemed highly appropriate to the experience at the conference and my overwhelming sense of the increasing numbers of people who lack confidence in their ability to influence their situation.

There was a character in the comedy called CJ who was a senior manager, with a very large ego, who would often say…..
"I didn’t get where I am today by ………" and then add a phrase, such as, "... not knowing all the answers"!!

It got me thinking about using this phrase to encourage people to attribute their successes and failures in a more balanced way which would enhance their sense of control over their destinies.

So mine might be……

"I didn’t get where I am today by not writing blogs which stimulate people's thinking and enable them to develop their talents and confidence".

Try it out and have fun with it……and see your confidence and self esteem grow….a bit like the leaves on the trees….. next springtime!!

by Peter Kennedy

Healing the body-mind with NLP

I was at the Bihar School of Yoga doing the yogic studies course, when existence decided it was time to show me that indeed the body holds memories ... that the mind and the body are truly one.

I was not new to these concepts, having been a yoga practitioner for many years, having trained in Acupressure and practiced Reiki, but I’d never personally experienced the miracle of body-mind language.

It was a lower backache that brought me the gift of this insight. The history of the backache made so much sense in hindsight. This backache was a known horror that I thought I’d defeated by learning a particular yoga asana 15 years ago.

All my life I’d been a very healthy person, no doubt the gift of regular yoga practice, then I got married and within 2 years the lower backache surfaced.

It was an off and on backache so I didn’t think much about it until I visited my in-laws for a few months and the backache came to stay. My in-laws were very nice people and I had a very lazy life, no tension, so why the backache? I was very diligent with my yoga practice and attributed the backache to the surya namaskars that I had been practising.

It got so bad that there were many mornings when I would be hunched over like an old woman until mid-day when the sun would uncurl me. I was mortified and it was not only about the pain, but also at the loss of control, physical vulnerability and self-image.

One day a friend taught me ardha shalabhasana which had helped her backache. Within 3 repetitions of the asana the backache was gone. I was so relieved that the backache had disappeared and that I was in not in pain anymore. And I was excited that it had happened with a yogasana. Being very much into yoga, I wanted to help myself using yoga.

I did not learn anything more about the backache at this time, other than it could be helped convincingly through yoga. I was just so glad that it was gone that I never performed surya namaskars for 15 years after this and watched all practices and body movements to ensure the backache never had a chance to take hold.

However, it always hovered at the edge of my consciousness. Now here I was, at my Master’s ashram, ritually initiated, fully afloat in the vibrant energy field, learning my lessons in more ways than one. It was a physically, mentally, emotionally demanding and intense time of working, witnessing and watching oneself and ones patterns.

My back started twinging but I ignored it. There was so much to do, such fun to be had. The doctor at the ashram advised bed rest and my teachers said that a few days of solitude in bed would be good ... but there was no keeping me in my room, alone.

Finally it came to a head. One weekend I just couldn’t get up and was forced to stay in bed. I was surprised at the number of well-wishers I had. Ours was a large batch of students from 23 countries, most of them healers and practitioners of various healing modalities. Everyone wanted to help, it was like being hungry and at a large banquet! I was willing and happy to try all kinds of therapies, being also professionally curious to see how they worked and to see what really happened on the inside.

I’d had clients take and be helped by Reiki and Pranic healing treatments, but I always attributed that to God’s grace, and wondered how the treatments really worked. I wanted to experience the A-ha effect that one reads about.

By Sunday afternoon I was beginning to give up. Despite all the pulling, pushing, poking, prodding, despite being much pumped full of light, nothing was working.

My last hope was an Australian friend, Ruth. She was a registered nurse, an NLP practitioner and an aide to a physician who practiced NLP too. She had done this for 13 years. She massaged my back and kept talking to me. The massage was wonderful but she kept asking me if I was getting any pictures and I wasn’t.

After a few hours, when the massage had to come to an end, there was only one image that kept coming to mind, one that I was hesitant to talk about because I simply could not relate it to anything at all.

It was an image of a woman vigorously massaging an infant pulling at its arms and legs to straighten them. Her hands seem a little hard and rough and I disliked her. The infant is crying loudly and angrily. I see my mother and my grandmother pop in to enquire about the crying but the woman is able to reassure them send them away. This distresses me immensely.

I had expected a more straightforward ‘image’. Ruth helped me to explore the image, to understand it in simple direct words that immediately felt so right.

It was a manipulation at all levels ... physical, mental and emotional ... a helplessness under the nose of ‘authority’, further compounded by my inability to express any of this.

Ruth then asked if any of this applied in my life just now ... and bingo! Things just fell into place, uncovering an age old pattern of behaving most unlike ‘myself’, simply because my emotions were involved.

The next moment I experienced a miracle ... the pain was gone, as if had never been there! It was so hard to believe, so awesome, so real! This was no second hand tale I was reading about, only I knew how bad the pain, the helplessness, the fear had been ... and now it was gone. It was like being resurrected.

The greater miracle was the one of understanding. The insight into my pattern is my talisman. The backache doesn’t threaten any longer, it has become a true friend. If I ever feel a twinge in my back, I look around to see how I’m feeling manipulated, where my emotions are involved and what I can do about it. Once the situation has been acknowledged there is never a debilitating backache.

I still don’t know much about NLP, I hope to learn, specially about this body-mind aspect. I’ve been teaching yoga for 10 years now, going deeper into the practices and the theory to see how it is linked to or supports other healing modalities. Perhaps it was my years of yoga practice that helped me to access the magic of NLP so readily, like the beautiful flower that blooms when the soil is ready.

By Dharmapriya Sinha

(Dharmapriya Sinha will be leading regular yoga sessions during the InExcellence Practitioner Training in December 2008)