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NLP & Hypnotherapy in Essex
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August 9
Fear of flying
It's a common enough fear and it can be dealt with swiftly and effectively; but is it actually a metaphor?
What if it's a metaphor that people use to mask a more profound fear of flying; that is a fear of soaring like an eagle, over the landscape of their habitual concerns and all that keeps them landbound?
Consider this: Chris, not his real name, simply cannot get airborne, his terror is so great that he is reduced to a quivering, tearful wreck just by setting foot on an airport.
The thing is, he'd had NLP to bust his phobia and it had worked. He'd gone away happy, eager to fly... and puzzled. So over the next few weeks he puzzled and puzzled over where the fear had gone and how he could find it again.
And you know what? He sought and he found. He got back to being the man whose reputation for blind terror of flying preceded him.
Still, he wanted to bust his phobia again. This time he acknowledged a need to control his world. Clearly, that's not an option for airline passengers.
In every other area his life was going pretty well. In fact there were great new developments on the horizon in his personal and professional life. The rosy future lay almost within his grasp. The only hitch was, you've guessed it, his fear of flying. Every part of Chris's brighter and better future hinged on his ability to get on a plane and travel without fear: his future wouldn't fly if he couldn't fly.
To dispel his phobia of airoplane travel a second time took a mere fifteen minutes. Only time will tell if it resolves or aggravates his anxiety.
Fear of flying is a semi-respectable kind of terror.; it doesn't have the same connatations of wimpishness as does a fear of,say, creepie crawlies and there is, of course, an element, however small, of real risk.
Is there a risk associated with flying, that is soaring, as a person? Not really. There is the old adage that pride comes before a fall, but that is about pride not success or achievement.
There is also self-sabotage, which all right-minded people know is bad news - although that's not to say they don't practise it. The great thing about shooting yourself in the foot is that if there are no witness around to see you do it, people will probably be dead sympathetic when they watch you hobbling around.
Because you'd surely be soaring like an eagle if you only could, wouldn't you?
September 1
My mama told me: "there'll be days like this".
Is there a better way of looking at things than Murphy's Law? When sh*t happens, it's down to us to choose how we want to respond.
Ok, she didn't really. A staunch believer in Murphy's Law, for my mother every day is a "Murphy Day".
In fact, it was Van Morrison who intoned "There'll be days like this" and it's all about the really good days, the days when "everything falls into place like the flick of a switch".
Maybe it's my black sense of humour, or maybe it's old conditioning that makes me sing it, usually when events start to slide off the beaten track.
Monday-Tuesday was one of those times. Good old Life-Made-Simple was gently challenged by a series of mishaps. First an Alexander lesson I gave in the basement room of a clinic I work in took a slightly unlikely direction when the ceiling lights fused, leaving just the security light and a table lamp that threw out slightly more light than the average candle. (Enough odd things happen at that clinic for an entire sit-com, which I hope to write one day.)
Then there was the knotty problem of my wardrobe. This year I replaced a geriatric summer wardrobe in a couple of frenetic days in Rome. Last Friday I noticed sedition in one pair of the Roman trousers; they sported a ripped seam in the derriere area. But a girl - even a girl who can't sew - can work round that.
And a girl will plan her wardrobe. So last thing Monday night, I was happily ironing trousers for an early start to a distant workshop on Tuesday morning, only to discover that all the Italian trousers had sprung ripped seams in much the same place. Since my weight remains unchanged, I can only put it down to cotton fatigue; built in obsolence. The Roman woman is only meant to wear her clothes so many times before they walk.
It then became necessary to trawl through the geriatric stuff looking for lightweight, decent trousers that would colour coordinate with something to wear on a long hot drive. (Note: Alexander teachers so rarely wear skirts, that it is rumoured they are concealing piano legs rather than human shins.)
The workshop was wonderful and on my return after initially laying low, Sharon Shih Tsu - she is of the brindled shag pile coat - was wonderfully playful, growling menacingly and killing her green plastic frog repeatedly. (Her other toys cowered in terror: the plastic ham, the yellow plastic rugby ball, the little, white furry dog handbag were all terrified that they would be next.) To see a photo of Sharon Shih Tsu click here.
Later,as I pottered around preparing a meal I mused on how cute Sharon's puppy behaviour was... until I went to get something from the freezer in the garage and found I had a very wet foot. Sharon had broken housetraining BIG TIME, despite a 6 am walk. I was lucky my foot was only wet.
(Sharon very, very rarely breaks housetraining, because Canine Dowager Duchesses take themselves far too seriously for that kind of behaviour.)
It struck me at that point that a fair few little mishaps that had befallen me, all things beyond my control. At that point I could have concluded that 'it' always happens to me:
- at the clinic
- with trousers (it has happened before,once, when I was actually working with a client)
- with Sharon
And then I could have gone on to enumerate all the other 'it's' that 'always' seem to happen to me.
Instead as I cleaned up the garage floor, I thought about how I had chosen my response.
- Rather than catastrophizing, I acknowledged that I had stepped in the lesser of the two evils.
- I remembered that these were small blips in an otherwise great day
- I put some distance between myself and the noxious substances by donning a pair of latex gloves.
It's only now as I write about it that I realise the significance of the object lesson Sharon taught me- in the most literal sense: sh*t happens; sometimes the dimensions are Shih Tsu sized, sometimes they're Great Dane sized. Still, the principle remains the same: t's what you do about it, and how you do it that matters.
Just today a client was telling me about St Mary's Church in Krakow. It has a tower where a trumpeter calls the hour. Every day, every hour he plays the same tune and always breaks off at the same point. The tradition dates back hundreds of years. It was in the 13th century that a trumpeter was calling the hour when he was struck in the throat by a Tartar arrow and died. From that day on, in the tower of St Mary's Church, the tune has never been played in its entirety.
As a preventive measure that's pretty extreme. How often do we make unnecessary deductions and introduce unnecessarily extreme measures into our lives. (Given Sharon's little laps, should I assume that henceforth I will always have to cork her before I leave the house???)
As regards my little canine teacher, while I didn't like the lesson, I didn't punish her. Because once she'd done what she'd done, she let go of it: it was in the past. (The puppy playfulness was probably her way of making amends, but that was the end of it for her.) I could have punished her for her crime, but it was too late by then. She would just have felt affronted and would probably have retaliated. Sharon does not respond well to anger.
Of course, it's different with people. Visiting anger and punishment on them is much more productive than visiting it on a canine member of the family.... Isn't it? :-)
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