Imagine that you’re sitting with a group of spiritual seekers, eyes closed, feet flat on the floor, hands resting in you lap. Your breath is easy and comfortable. Someone begins speaking, guiding you on an inner journey through light, love, wisdom, guides, angels, freedom.

You follow the journey and are lifted out of your ordinary life of woes, worries, frustrations, stress and the demands of living. You float, speak with wise unseen beings; you enter worlds where all is beautiful and powerfully peaceful. For a few minutes, you forget all else.

The speaker calls you back. The light fades, you remember where you are, sitting with the others in this place. You bring with you, these elevated, expansive feelings of beauty. You remember words of wisdom, encouragement, and comfort offered during your journey. Imagine that you’re sitting with a group of spiritual seekers, eyes closed, feet flat on the floor, hands resting in you lap. Your breath is easy and comfortable. Someone begins speaking, guiding you on an inner journey through light, love, wisdom, guides, angels, freedom.

You follow the journey and are lifted out of your ordinary life of woes, worries, frustrations, stress and the demands of living. You float, speak with wise unseen beings; you enter worlds where all is beautiful and powerfully peaceful. For a few minutes, you forget all else.

The speaker calls you back. The light fades, you remember where you are, sitting with the others in this place. You bring with you, these elevated, expansive feelings of beauty. You remember words of wisdom, encouragement, and comfort offered during your journey.

Now it is time to leave the group, to go home and re-enter your life as it is. Your everyday mind returns and your everyday emotions flow back into place. You remember your journey, but it no longer embraces you. It all fades away and you are, once again, as you were before. So you return the next time for another “shot” of bliss because it is your haven of peace and clarity.

You may attend a workshop that promises balance, clarity, and breakthrough change. While you are there, you are energized, hopeful, excited about new possibilities, eager to move through life empowered.

Yet, in the days that follow your ordinary life returns and the enthusiasm and determination to live your life differently fades. You are pretty much the same as before. You may have a few new buzzwords and can talk about method or technique but it holds no real power.

Lot’s of Promise, but How to Attain

How is it that the “promised land” can be glimpsed and experienced for a moment but not grasped and embraced to have lasting impact on our lives?

The keys to the Kingdom are given to us but we don’t really know how to use them. One of the”keys” we are taught is  “Let go and let God.” Great advice, but what does that mean? How can we really do it? We aren’t given the answers to those questions.

We are told everything is love but haven’t a clue about how to transform that from a platitude into real, ongoing experience of life. How often do we really walk around with total consciousness of ourselves as spirit living in a body rather than a body and mind that has a spirit?

Of course, there is no shortage of seminars, workshops, trainings, and books promising “health, wealth, and happiness.” The trouble is that so many of these things turn out to be just more New Age blandness with no real and lasting substance.

How can we move beyond the illusion that clouds our experience of the cosmic realities? What is the secret to experiencing ourselves as spiritual beings temporarily residing in physical bodies? How can we separate true spiritual wisdom and knowledge from the chaos that resides in our brains and emotions?

It’s one thing to be told that the ego and karma holds us in its grip, preventing us from letting go of worry, fear, sadness, anger, frustration, stress, and darkness. We know that there is a way to live life in balance, peace and empowerment.

We know there are ways to really help others. It’s another thing to really be able to do it. It’s a bit like being watching a film of people climbing Mount Everest versus really climbing it. Real learning and change happens in step-by-step processes that address the components and elements that our “material” mind is about. But how?

You can be told that you are psychic, skilled, talented, capable, worthy of love, powerful, creative, or any number of other desirable qualities and abilities. But, unless you experience it at all levels of your being, you won’t completely believe it. If you don’t completely believe it, you won’t express it in your life. If you don’t express it in your life, it may as well not be true.

This is where NLP comes in

This is where Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) comes in. It doesn’t promise anything other than the keys and the instructions on how to use those keys. NLP is the “DNA” of mind and emotions. NLP takes mind and emotion and breaks them down into their elemental parts. It gets to the core of what makes us tick. Then it give you instructions on how to take them apart, reassemble them, adjust them, and add to them in ways that really get you what you need and want to live that balanced, spiritual life.

Want a short example? Let’s take the “bane” of spiritual living, guilt. We are told so often that guilt is unspiritual. That it is one of the things that we must overcome in order to live a life of pure love. As a psychologist, I was taught to help people get in touch with their guilt and express their feelings about it. This accomplished a temporary relief, but no real progress toward helping people experience permanent change in their expression of guilt. Plus, it sometimes led to people trying to suppress their feelings of guilt. This, of course made things worse.

Guilt

Guilt, as any NLP practitioner knows is a signal that we have violated our own standards—our beliefs of what is right in the world. It isn’t the guilt that needs to be changed. What is required is to examine the beliefs about what is right and good for us. To examine whether these standards are worth keeping or changing.

Also, guilt is a useful emotion in certain circumstances. Imagine if we never had a way to know when we have violated our standards. People without appropriate guilt are called sociopaths and are capable of unspeakable horrors.

When our standards are understood and integrated in a balanced way with the rest of the parts of our mind and emotions, we are unlikely to violate them.

Affirmations

Another example more directly related to spiritual living is affirmations—manifesting. They are supposed to work—every time. Why don’t they?

We are taught that if we see it, feel, know it, and believe it, the affirmation will manifest. The trick is getting to that state of complete belief and holistic experience of what we are affirming.

The problem is that if what we are affirming has any opposition, objection, or concern from any other part of our subconscious (the most powerful motivator we have), it will be sabotaged and cancelled.  Doubt is not something that can be erased just because we want to. We must know the components of that doubt.

Most of the time we are not even aware that these subconsconscious objections, etc. exist. We are not aware that when we say our affirmation there is a quiet echo within us that cancels or dilutes the results of our affirmations.

NLP practitioners know how to listen for those echoes and how to address them so that the affirmation can be fulfilled completely and fully.  An NLP practitioner also knows when it is right and good to adjust the affirmation to something that is even more beneficial than the original.

NLP is not a “feel good” balm to escapism. It is the building blocks of our mental and emotional existence. It can be applied to spirituality, business, relationships, emotional issues, and everything else that makes us a living, breathing, manifestation of the universe.