Dreaming Dreams While Awake
Just looking at children playing , absorbed, attentive, fixated, present to what it is they are doing and then I notice my tendency to BE distracted, even while doing those things I have been looking forward too, the weekend stuff!!
My mind wonders, flits and refuses to STOP long enough for me to put all of my senses into what I am doing. Who was it who said we need to ‘lose our minds and come to our SENSES’!! Wake up, even, I guess he could have said.
The weekend gone was the last time I will deliver training to a fantastic group of people on my first ever NLP practioner training, an experience which I shall enjoy reliving again and again. What a fantastic couple of days, Milton Erickson was our subject and I confess my favourite subject, loads of wickedly good experience was had by all.
One task that was set before the group left for the evening on the first day was from the book ‘Turrtels All The Way Down’, by Dr Grinder.
I gotta be honest i think i got the exercise wrong. I asked the group to ask their unconcious mind for a metaphor for the days training, something they could dream about, then as they were going alseep they were to ask their unconcious to anchor the memory of the dream to them looking at their hands. That was it. Below is a written account of what Liz ( a member of the prac group came up with, it is amazing, truley).
I came up with a camera with an amazing zoom function and an awesome memory card. I have to tell you that to start with I was rather disappointed … I like poetic metaphors … I’d wanted something like a dew drop covered web to show the interconnectedness of all things …
I don’t do visual do I? Cameras are about pictures (although I can hear the sound my camera makes when I use the zoom lens and sense the way it feels as the weight shifts) but mainly cameras produce things you can look at – and that’s not my thing. But as I look at my hands my dream returns and I start to see the way the metaphor works …
It’s about chunking up and chunking down. Its about association and disassociation. It’s about having the ability to examine things up close from the comfort of not being in the picture. Its about stepping back and seeing the big picture (and this camera can zoom out for miles … and miles … this camera can take me into space and across the universe … this camera can give me insights into how I see the world and my place within it and all the time I know that the map is not the territory and the picture is not the event or the person.) And I can lend this camera to other people, or talk them through how they can use their own and what they see through their lens will depend on where they are standing.
This camera is about the importance of integration of different parts. It’s about how things can seem different depending on the light. How positioning can change how you feel about an image, how the frame you put around a picture changes the meaning of the composition. What you include or leave out of a shot changes the way you feel about it.
It’s about the advice that all the great photographers give – that you have to develop good rapport with your subject and to take lots of photographs – they might not all work but one of them will.
Coming up with a metaphor that I didn’t think fitted is a message in itself. Because it does work – learning to trust my subconscious is really significant for me. The negative developed in the dark room so often reveals details that were not apparent in the day light.
The picture was upside down – it’s not 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. It’s the other way around. You can do this without sweating. It’s about the vast untapped resource of the subconscious that memorises, organises and arranges countless tasks for me everyday, recording my life in minuet detail and generating a million possibilities, standing by me, loving me, even when she’s been misunderstood and denigrated and she’s happy to hold the information however it’s going to be processed but she wants me to know – she can do pictures.
It’s about waking up to the fact that I sometimes forget to take the lens cap off.
Thanks Liz.
July 26th, 2007 10:00
Yes, Liz’s metaphor is brilliant. It sums up what it is all about really. At the moment I seem to have lost my rose-coloured lense and am struggling with a sepia tones one! I am only just learning how powerful is our mind to see things the way we choose to see them. To believe that other people, circumstances, the weather, anything other than ourselves, are NOT responsible for how we choose to turn up in the world, is a biggie. See you at the weekend!
July 26th, 2007 10:12
Yes indeed. Some times when training young people, i tell them that every morning I take a cord that runs out from my rump and i plug it in to the mains. Then i shake like a mad thing, shouting at the top of my voice ‘I AM IT TODAY’!! it’s not my mum, it’s not my dad, etc etc. I AM IT!!
See you the weekend.