Patterns of Physical Transformation

You change an unconscious program by programming something new and more useful. If you've ever gotten a new phone number it is not necessary to purge the old programming that presents you with the old phone number. All you have to do, is practice the new phone number a sufficient number of times and then, the new number is the one that leaps to mind. Changing patterns of physical functioning, is the same easy pattern. All it takes, is practicing the new pattern. How many times depends upon the skill used.

Learning is basically about getting your unconscious mind to store something for you and then make it available to you at the appropriate time. This holds true whether it is a bit of information like "what is the capital of Japan?” or when you have a can in your hand and a can opener in front of you. The information or the pattern of actions and the emotions and posturing all come flooding out if they were programmed in successfully. Some people exhibit better skill at learning certain kinds of things than other people do. This is largely the result of which unconscious programs they use to learn these things with. Dr. Richard Bandler has written and teaches with incredible depth and thoroughness about how to learn what is worth learning and to notice those sensory observations that make a difference. Many of these ideas which we apply to physical process were things that he has been teaching for thirty years. Some of these ideas Dr. Bandler got from Moshe Feldenkrais, who used these ideas in his hands-on-work but he was not as clear in describing how it worked. We have much in common in our concepts of working with people, chiefly that helping someone to function better is a matter of learning. People learn different kinds of things at different rates, and reprogramming your unconscious mind about aspects of your physiology is no exception. This is where the skill comes in. Different people applying the insights and understandings of Dr. Feldenkrais or Dr. Bandler have different skills of noticing and therefore feed back different bits of information. We've all been in a situation when we want our friend to remember some event. We start giving clues like," do you remember that time when we saw that show?” They respond by looking blankly. We continue," you know, that show with that guy that you like in it?” They respond," what guy? " And you continue giving clues, specifying various details until, all of a sudden, their face lights up in recognition and they say" oh, yeah, yeah, I know what you're talking about". At that point, all the information comes flooding back into their conscious mind and they may know more about it than you do even though, a moment ago, it seemed they knew nothing. If you know how this person's mind works, you can make a better guess about which clue or clues will cause the magical transformation from not knowing what you're talking about to totally getting it. Our hands-on mode of working functions in just this way. We seek to bring out your unconscious mind's full understanding of healthy functioning and then raise the question" what will be even better than this?” Clues work only as well as they are engaging and intense. Getting the person's attention and presenting your clue clearly is important. Choosing the clue that will get the intended response is the real art.

Our job, in working with you, is to notice whatever we can notice that seems to be less than optimal functioning and then to communicate that information through the nervous system to the unconscious mind that's in charge of running all the functions and then to notice if in fact you begin functioning better. The unconscious mind is monitoring everything through the network of sensors that are built into the body. These sensors respondnues to output the same ineffective pattern to your physiology that it was doing before it was so rudely but temporarily interrupted. So all too frequently the very same problems recur in the very same way and the person gets stretched or adjusted or drugged in the same way on and on. But each time the process works a little less well as your unconscious mind learns how to accommodate to the interruption. This results in people stretching every day and not making any progress and people going out of adjustment minutes after their adjustment and drugs that progressively stop working. By coaxing the change from the unconscious mind rather than inflicting the change consciously, we are able to notice an evolution in the person's functioning. Now while it's true that we don't feed back just one bit of information and have the person respond by becoming perfect instantly, it is true, that working in this way, people become more responsive to this type of interaction. People learn at very different rates whether we're talking about cognitive learning or whether we're talking about physiological learning, and therefore there are enormous differences in how quickly and thoroughly people improve. It also makes a tremendous amount of difference what the person thinks that they want. If someone is paralyzed in their legs and wants to dance, they may not be happy if the results of our interaction are that the muscles of their legs are more relaxed and that there's somewhat better coordination passively between their legs and the torso. When someone is content with any sign of improvement they are much more likely to be delighted. We coax changes for the better, sometimes they're small and sometimes they're larger and sometimes they are hugely dramatic. Whatever they are, we continue coaxing more of them, and when you have enough of them accumulated, then at certain points the change is significant. We are training your unconscious mind to pay better attention to specific areas of your functioning. This learning is progressive. We are not, however, the only influence to a persons functioning. We have an advantage, however, because we are systematic and relentless. Occasionally we find ourselves working against some other factors that are tearing down the person's health. Sometimes we make progress anyway; sometimes we are only able to slow down an otherwise quickly disastrous progression. We never know how responsive the person is until we start to interact with them and then we never know how responsive they're going to become as we continue to interact with them, so this makes it quite difficult to predict exactly how the person will be at sometime in the future. All we're sure of is that they will function better than they would have otherwise. And the question I would like you to ask is, "what would be better than this?” And then, "what will be better than that?” And "what will be even better than that?"