This changed the way I do hypnosis and coaching forever.

As with most decisions in my life, it wasn't a single event that contributed to the decision but rather a series of insights over time that brought me to a much deeper insight.

In an interview, Milton H Erickson said once: "Do not look at all those technique's people say I am using but rather focus on the willingness of the patient to change. "

With all the material out there discussing and demonstrating all his technique's it just seemed a matter of learning them all. Naturally, there are underlying principles that can guide you choose the right technique at the right time. 

Milton's advice seemed not practical at all to learn what he was doing.

Then I found another piece of advice Milton said to somebody that wanted to learn what he was doing. "Don't try to copy me as many do. Find your own way of doing hypnosis."

So in a way in order to be more like Erickson you have to be more like yourself and less like Erickson. That's right. 

It's like a Zen teacher telling his student to act more natural and in order to be more natural the student "tries"  to be more natural and in doing so fails to be more natural. 

I like zen very much If you didn't notice it yet. 

Zen teachers love to put students in a catch22 situation. 

I remember a difficult situation for myself when a fellow hypnotist asked me what I thought trance was. How that I would define trance. I didn't  know. 

Now I would say that there is no such thing as "a" trance. Just like consciousness is not a monolith but there are as many consciousnesses as that there are emergent properties for each way the brain has to let neuro networks communicate with other neuro networks that makes us aware of what just happened. 

But that doesn't explain yet how I define trance. 

And defining is the challenge. 

How a client defines his or her problems, how you define a good outcome for a coaching session, ext... It's not the problem that is the problem but how we relate to the problem. 

My problem was that I was not happy with how good I was in hypnosis.

Something was bothering me and I can be very critical at my own skills. 

I like to be as close to the source as possible to learn something and reading Stephen Gilligans, who was a student from Erickson himself, book: The Legacy of Milton H Erickson revealed something about Erickson's approach that I recognised. Something like a zen teachers mindset. 

There seemed to be 2 crucial factors in the way he communicated with his clients:

Or he put two classes or categories together of thinking

or he split one class, unit or category in two or more parts. 

Or in other words, he seemed to split or combine units of awareness and thinking. 

For example, he would make the problem a part of the solution. The symptoms as part of the cure. 

Or he would make you aware of how one seemingly single action were different actions that are orchestrated to make it seem as one fluent and seamless action. 

He would point out that there is a difference between thinking and doing and between doing aware and unaware. And every time you thought it was simple he could make it complex and when you thought it was complex he could make it simple, simple isn't it? 

But what does that accomplish? 

It makes our brain reevaluate and recalculate what it should include and exclude in a certain neuro-network. It makes our brain think outside the neurological "boxes" we made over time and create new ones. This demands more neuroplasticity than in our usual state of mind and that is exactly what happens when we enter a trance. 

Trances are, for me then, the states of mind that happen when we are in new territory, in every way you want to define territory, and the current neurological "box" or "boxes" does not contain the necessary resource or answer to the challenge presented in the new territory. So the brain has to reevaluate its borders and relationships between neuro-networks to come up with a sollution. 

As usual, it is neccesary to say that this is only one defenition of trances and that "the map is not the territory."

This relates to whole brain learning and even to Provocative changeworks/coaching/hypnosis ext...

When a client expects that provocative coaching is aggressive being gentle and easy is what could be the right provocative action to get results. It challenges what we believe to be right, right? 

As a fellow hypnotist and friend (Michael Perez) revealed to me: "Erickson did not say "That's right" every time he wanted to reinforce an action that he wanted to promote in the client but especially when the client did the reverse of what he expected." 

So many clients just want to please the coach or hypnotist but Erickson would encourage the reverse.

The client, in that case, had to reevaluate what was "right" and "wrong" in this new situation. 

That person is trying to be natural. (natural according to who?) 

Until just like the Zen student, that person figures out that there is nothing to figure out, hehe. 

I just needed to laugh at this. Humor is just one way to reveal to yourself that you can act outside the catch22. 

Have fun :D 

My beef with self-help books

"Did you see the girl with the telescope?" 

What is the difference between feeling safe and being safe?

What has this post to do with why birds sing and where trees grow? 

We come back later to these questions. 

I was asking for feedback about a book I wrote but didn't publish.

It was a self-help book.... full of exercises. I thought people would love a practical book instead of all those books full of fluff and almost no practical use. 

I was wrong. 

A good friend of mine pointed out that people use self-help books like talismans. 

They read it once and keep it close to feel empowered. 

I wonder if I asked people how many self-help books they read that really helped them, how many or few that would be. Even if they felt it helped there is a big chance that it was only a good feeling and nothing more. 

That's what I fear most....

Thinking you are fine while the house is burning down, in a manner of speaking. 

Thinking you made it while you still are unsafe. 

It's something that makes for great horror movies. 

That's not what I want to share with people even if it sells very well. 

The truth is that exercise is almost always necessary to create change because the best changes that stick are habits. You can make exercises fun by making it games and you can scale them down so it gets easy to start. 

Rewards are overrated because we feel the most rewarded by internal sources like the feeling you have when you overcome a challenge or when you have finished something. 

Willpower is overrated because it works like a battery. It works fine until it is exhausted and then you feel less motivated than even before because you feel you failed. It's not reliable. 

Many self-help books deal with problems on a superficial level instead of a systematic level that sees you also as a part of a system, in an ecology. We operate on many levels and systems at once. We are whole and a part of a whole at the same time. 

How we define ourselves and what are goals are is dependent on who is with us at that time. It is dependent on the groups we are part of and the peers we have. 

My beef with many self-help books is thus that it is self-centered. 

My second beef is that it tells you it's going to help you. 

I am not even sure that this post is helpful. Better double check that and see if it has value for you.

It's not because something is useful that it is useful for everybody. Every situation is different. 

You see, I have given you the responsibility to make sure you get something out of this.

How can anybody learn something or progress when the responsibility of that change is given to somebody else? 

Until there is ownership of the results and progress no meaningful changes can be made. 

That's why quitting smoking or start sporting or changing any other lifestyle or habit is not likely to stick when you do it because other people asked you to or pressured you into it. 

There is some structure in giving information that helps people process it better and that is slicing it in bite size bits. That is why this blog post is in divided into paragraphs of max 3 lines. 

We learn and remember more when there are a few open related questions made before the material that is presented or material to learn. It helps us look for structure and helps us focus therefore more. 

Did you see the girl with a telescope in your mind or did you see yourself looking to the girl through the telescope? 

How do we check if we have accomplished something?

How do we look for greater patterns when a simple correlation seems not present?

It's all about relationships and feedback. It's about seeing the bigger system to understand a subsystem and zoom out to find the greater ecology. 

What is needed to remember, understand and apply what we learn is thus in short: 

• Open questions before the material.
• Bitesize information.
• Exercise.
• Ownership of decisions and progress.
• Understanding how we operate in multiple systems at once.
• Understand that how we relate to things changes how we define things.

and 

• Summarise what is learned. 

Those are a few things that could help you.... help yourself. 

Have a great day!

In Living memory.

What do we know about the world around us?
The map of the world around us in our head and gets updated from time to time.
The map of the world is all we have of the world. You could say it is our world.

When you are at school or work and you think about your front door you have an image in your head of that front door. You could maybe tell from that picture what color the door has as well as some details of that door.

You can even see things that aren't there. Just like when a house number is cut out in wood, you recognize what is missing.

We rely on our memory all the time. When we automatically open a door we do so many little movements and trust that all doors that look the same work the same. Those generalisations save us time and energy. Our muscle memory is something so crucial to how we operate in our day to day life and job that when we would lose it we wouldn't be able to do the smallest thing.

Sometimes people lose one kind of memory but maintain another kind of memory.
So people can lose their short term memory but maintain their long-term memory or they can lose their long-term memory but maintain their muscle memory for actions they did over and over again over the years.

People with retrograde amnesia lose events and information that happened before an incident or disease (often temporal) and people with anterograde amnesia lose the ability to create new memories from the moment that the amnesia happened.

Short term memories are, what I like to call, liquid, the activation of neurons and neuro-networks by electrical and chemical communication in a particular direction.

Long term memory is structural, due to the constant activation of neurons and neuro-networks there is a structural change in the hippocampus. The network has changed.

I remember ..... being taught, due to the religion I was in then, that God remembers all of us to the smallest level of detail and that it is because of that, that He can resurrect people on judgment day.
Now my beliefs of what God is and what Judgement day is and the resurrection has changed drastically.

Studying Kabbalah, I learned about the "4 worlds":

Assiah, Yetzirah, Beri'ah and Atziluth. These can be translated to

Action, Formation, Creation and Emanation. Or in other words

A Archetypal world, a formative world, a creative world  and a material world.

Now, instead of me trying to explain it somewhat decent let me show you how a master like Lon Milo Duquette explains it:

You see how things come from something big and general and go to the specific and material.

This idea together with the idea that we are God, we all are part of God, as God is the unified consciousness of all consciousnesses, this reminded me of my old belief in God's infallible memory. 

It made me feel like this "me" I am experiencing now is just a projection of God's memory and we all live in God's Living Memory. It makes me feel like the real me is this archetypal idea that creates a sort of cookie cutter that pressed me in this illusion of separated conscious being. 

But then again, consciousness can only be experienced separately. Borders need to be in place in order to experience anything! Experience can only be had when there is difference. Form leads to function. With no borders there can be no function. In order to maintain life the body needs to sense it borders so it can regulate and maintain in a tolerable range of homeostasis. 

Seeing this world and ourselves as a projection seems what far-fetched, I admit but it makes me think again about quantum physics, the theory of the multiverse(s) and how everything is metaphor.

(For more information about how everything is metaphor you can take a look at my post about magick here. )

There is this quote from Aldous Huxley: 

that makes you think of how relative our idea of where we are and what this world is.

Immagine holding this quote in the back of your head when you think about the 4 worlds , the spheres of the tree of life, the Qlipoth and any other map we have in our head. 

In the end, don't forget to have some humor. we know little after all. 

Laugh and Smile, maybe we are God's muscle's after all ;) 

Why we often misunderstand people's personalities.

Do you love to watch reality tv, shows about relationships? Do you sit on the couch and like to tell other people why that person in the show is really likable or maybe totally not?

What makes that person so likable or unlikable? Is it maybe that we are trying to gauge the personality of that person? 

How do you define somebodies personality? How do you define somebodies personality in a relationship? 

We can go round and round but in the end we all give out a first impression that is really strong and we all place much importance to the first impression we got from people. 

The Halo effect sometimes makes us think that one attribute of a person defines that person completely. 

We are often too quick with judging a persons personality as something on its own.

We are often too quick with judging a persons personality by how they behave in a relationship.

As if that behavior is independent of the changing relationship and the other person/people in that relationship.

"OMG he is so weak." 

Maybe that person is responding submissive to that situation in that relation because the other person is too aggressive. 

The coping strategies that we use depend on the situation, the options we have, the risks we want to take, the outcome we have in mind, ext ...

"She is such a bitch" 

Maybe she is responding in such a way to defend herself from being seen as weak. 

If so how come that she needs to defend herself from others options.

Maybe the partner was responding aggressive to what that person sees as sings of weakness.

You begin to notice how all we perceive is a moment in a process while we tend to see that moment as the whole process of changing relationships, actions and reactions between different people. 

The halo effect seems to be present on this level of perception too. 

On a more macro level we see this too in how we think aout the "national character" as a fixed thing. 

This can be further studied in "ecology of mind" by Gregory bateson, from page 98. 

(link to book online) 

The more we can open up what seems like fixed things into open omgoing proccesses the more we can see how things really operate. 

Our understanding grows and our understanding of people grows with it.

All kinds of love.

So many love songs and so many definitions of love.

What borders are there on our concept of love? 

Where does it stop? 

Not so long ago there was a article about Louisiana: "Louisiana Upholds Ban On Oral Sex, While Necrophilia Remains Legal".

It seems that laws about sex and love aren't that easy. Some laws aren't revised for decades until some taboo seems to be broken and people get upset.

In a time where norms and concepts change faster and faster we could easily be trapped in a slippery slope fallacy. 

In earlier times the kind of romantic love that we know of now didn't even exists or was forbidden.

Marriages were arranged and were for political reasons. Research have shown nevertheless that people in arranged marriages are quite often more happier then those out of free will. 

Now LGBT people seem to have most of the challenges concerning marriage. 

People ask themselves if children raised in same-sex marriages could be missing crucial parts of their education and development. 

The titles went from "Kids of gay parents fare worse, study finds, but research draws fire from experts"  to "Child Abuse Rate At Zero Percent In Lesbian Households, New Report Finds" 

Now there is this article "New Study On Homosexual Parents Tops All Previous Research." that concludes : "The articles by Marks and Regnerus have completely changed the playing field for debates about homosexual parents, "gay families," and same-sex "marriage." The myths that children of homosexual parents are "no different" from other children and suffer "no harm" from being raised by homosexual parents have been shattered forever. "

With flashing titles for scientific research and bold claims as conclusions I suspect that the debate is hot as can be and I suspect that is not yet over. 

I don't think that raising children should be seen in such a black and white way and put a number on from 1 to 10 in efficiency to be honest. 

And as a friend mentioned to me on facebook, the people that fund a research can influence the results of the research, or as he responded to the New study mentioned above: "American Christian group funds the study and you get what kind of results? "

Transgender people have some difficult challenges too. 

I remember people telling me that homosexuality was unnatural, you know the kind of people I am talking about, but there is quite a list of homosexual animals out there when you want to counter that argument: List of animals displaying homosexual behavior.

You would think that with this diversity it couldn't get more complicated .. but it does.

There is still a lively discussion about porn and if it is damaging to the brain for instance. 

Young people in Japan date less and less while virtual relationships rises. 

This makes me think of a scene out the matrix where a program expressed his love for its daughter. 

And that is the question that will change how we think about love. With AI being more and more effective and sex robots being made will how we think about relations change too? 

It seems like our definitions of what a relationship are and of what love is, is changing over time. 

We can only wonder in what wonderful and strange directions love will take us. 

Are you trapped in your own stories?

Stories are being used trough the ages to convince and persuade people.
Mostly by people who already have the most power.

Some stories come from people who are professional storytellers and other from fishermen at sea who wanted to explain natural phenomena with a supernatural explanation.

We like to follow stories as guidelines for our life. The stories of Jezus from Nazareth and of Mohammed are two stories that are followed by many people. Not as if there is one story for each guy, the more people you ask the more versions you hear.

After a messiah figure is gone the message can be used to fit every cause people desire.

We like heroes and think we are the protagonist in our own story. We like to feel in control.

Joseph Campbel studied mythology of different cultures all over the world and found a common thread wich is called the monomyth.

The Wachowski's showed us in the movie "The matrix" how such a story can trap us.
They used Joseph Campbell monomyth and then showed how it is a trap in the end.

George Lucas used the monomyth also when he made Starwars movies. He didn't realize how it was a trap.

This still comes from the idea that we are in the center of everything. That we are exalted above the rest of the earth and this universe. 

This creates blind spots in our thinking. Not only that but it can be fatal for us as species when we fail to notice the full ecology of the systems we are part of.  It will leave us very vulnerable for sudden changes. 

A great example is in the comic : "Crossed" (1-5) written by Alan Moore. 

So I give a story as example of how stories can trap us and can give us blind spots in our thinking and understanding.

It seems like the only way to alert people of the danger of clamping to stories is by stories.

That's why we shall make this like a Zen story. 

In Zen there are masters who have authority and who oversee the process of the students.

Portraits of those masters are originally almost always done as a caricature or joke. 

And that's how the master wants it because it is all about authority.

The stories that a Zen master uses to teach Zen are, when one is serious about learning what Zen is, not to be taken serious at all.

Having this kind of humor and self-relativisation keeps us alert and helps us avoid and get out of such narrative traps. 

So in all seriousness, don't take this blog post too serious. 

For more check out: The case against Mythology

Why the best content is not about you.

I have been thinking a lot about content creating.
I like creating content for people and share information that helps people in their life.

The question you could ask yourself when you create content is wether you like to create content just for you and share it in the hope that other people will like it too or to se what gap there is in the market, see what the audience wants and create that. Another question that comes with that is, is there a balance between the two that can be made?

This comes with another set of questions that are closely related to the previous questions. Questions about stability and money. Do you want to make a living with your content creating or is it just as a hobby?

All these questions can be considered when you create content and will change what content you create.

There is also another way of looking at it.
Creating a tribe.

When you have found your personal mission in life, what you want to put in this world, something that you can offer to the community, to mankind maybe, a change that you want to make, you can create a community around it.

This is why I started this blog.
To show how everything in life is connected.
And to inspire people.

When you think about what you want to do for others it will be more easier to create shareable content. It's not about the content creator, it's all about the community.

On the other side, knowing how your persoanal story motivates and inspires other people is crucial in communicating your personal mission. Well, now it's not only your personal mission but a shared mission with the community, the tribe.

Contributing to a community is the most sustainable way to create content.
Know what tribes you are a member and know what tribe you can lead.

With this in mind we can learn to improve content along the way.
I hope to write content for you as long as possible and improve as much as possible.