Metaphorically Speaking
One of things that I love about NLP is that we use, explore and we teach using metaphors. Metaphors are stories, stories with a meaning. The meanings can be fairly obvious or even a little deeper so that the significance of them only bubbles into your conscious mind at some later date. People of all ages have used the power of metaphors to teach, to inspire, to entertain and to prise open the locked cabinet of the conscious mind placing within it the seed of deeper understanding.
We all carry around with us the story of our lives, the narrative of our world view, the epic tales of our forebears and ancestors. But how much of it is true? How much of it would we like to be true? How much do others want us to believe? And how much is good old metaphor?
The stories we tell ourselves matter, because our present behaviour is often based upon what we think has happened in the past. If you carry around with you a life story that tells you that you are a victim, then maybe you will act like one. Equally, if you tell yourself a story about yourself as a success then you will act like one too. The good thing is that you can actually change the story of your life. NLP, Time Line Therapy® and Hypnosis all contain techniques whereby you can effectively change your story. In fact Time Line Therapy® contains techniques, which allow you to let go negative emotions, like anger, sadness, fear, guilt and hurt from memories in your past and to change beliefs that you have about yourself that you made from past experience.
We have stories about ourselves as individuals and we also have stories that we share collectively. In the same way some of our collective stories can be changed too. We can let go of negative emotions from conflicts long gone, which even today scar our lives. We can understand how we all share a common lineage regardless of how we choose to label race today. We can also appreciate that we are united in our exploration of the mystery of this experience, that we call life, rather than divided by differing attempts to make sense of it that we have inherited from the past. In fact as we do that, what we will discover is that some of the most powerful stories that we have inherited were in fact originally metaphors and not intended to be taken literally at all.
Personally, I think that when we re-connect with the meaning within these metaphors we will have a paradigm shift which will carry us forward. The clues are already there for us left behind to poke at our consciousness, for us to solve like some giant crossword puzzle. The clues are in our science, our landscape, our history, our stories, and our language. Maybe some of them are held in universities, libraries or museums still waiting to be discovered. Most importantly of all some of them are carried around inside of you, so that if you knew how you could uncover the meaning of them for yourself; so that you can shift your own personal paradigm, a shift that will carry your life forward; I know you can