Ordering Our Life (NLP)
This is a powerful tool that liberates us from past patterns and energises the present moment. It may be repeated after the experience of something important that is taking long in becoming the past.
- Choose a routine behaviour
First choose a simple, “neutral” action that you repeat every day of your life, such as washing your teeth, having a shower, etc.
- Observe the location of the images
Present
Recall or imagine yourself doing this action today.
Where is the image, even if it’s blurry?
Indicate with your hand where you see the image: in front of you, close, far, on the right, on the left, behind you, inside your body, etc.
Past
Now imagine that you remember yourself performing that action a week ago, where is the image of the memory?
Indicate where it is with your hand.
Now imagine yourself performing that a year ago, where is the image?
Now imagine yourself 10 years ago, then 20 years ago, then in your teenage years, then in your childhood. Where is the image?
Adapt these time frames to your life, in order to cover every important stage.
Future
Now imagine yourself performing the action in a week’s time, where do you see it?
Do the same for a year’s time and five years’ time into the future.
- Changing the order of your life
Changing this temporal organisation of your life, performed by the brain, involves a deep modification that unbalances all the stability we have achieved thanks to our adaptions, protections and loyalties.
Therefore, we will do it with great care. The result will be a great liberation that we are going to notice in the medium term and long term, sometimes in the short term.
We will pay attention to any discomfort that may emerge, since it will be a signal that we cannot leave it as it is, and we will follow the indications presented in this exercise to improve the situation.
Respecting what is
I say the following:
I honour the current organisation of my life.
I give thanks to it for being the way it is.
I ask my unconscious (or guide, or higher energy, or…), with respect, to keep in a safe place and in a way that is fully available, all the knowledge I have acquired thanks to the current order of my life, so that I may use it every time I need it, thanks.
Wait 4 or 5 seconds.
The process
Imagine all those images as if they were pictures in a single film reel that starts with the time of your birth, in the past, and ends with your death, in the future.
Observe all the turns of the film reel.
Now, if you are right-handed, stretch out your left arm sideways to the left, horizontally, and say to your unconscious:
Dear unconscious, order my whole life in the easiest and most productive way for me, for my highest good and development.
For example, putting all my past along my left arm and beyond, and my future in front of me towards the right.
Look at your past on the left (without seeing any particular image), and your future in front of you, for a few seconds, to notice how you feel. You must achieve feeling fully comfortable with the change.
If you feel some discomfort, ask your unconscious the following:
Dear unconscious, adapt this reorganisation with the greatest flexibility and creativity for my highest good.
If necessary, ask to have all unpleasant memories put in black and white and very small, and the good memories, with colour, light, big, and if necessary, more within sight.
Improving our perception of life
Rate your past, your present and your future from 0 to 10.
Now we will change your perception so that the scores above reach the maximum you can achieve today.
The past: Look at it with deep respect and gratitude, even when you don’t understand it all yet.
Paint it in a salmon colour, or another colour that is more pleasant to you. Now rate the feeling this past produces in you, from 0 to 10.
The future: you will notice that is has changed on its own. It is preferable that it is located in the right side of your field of vision. Its representation is less precise than the past, and it may include obstacles that shall be respected. Introduce anything that may make it more attractive: depth, light, colours, warmth, sound or music, smell or perfume, landscapes.
And rate the feeling that your future produces in you, from 0 to 10.
The present: now turn to the image of the present in front of you. Modify it if necessary so it looks as big, bright and attractive as possible: modify its colours, blur the image a little perhaps, or the opposite, make it very sharp; introduce warmth, air, something in motion, sound, smell, objects also, landscapes, people, like it was a piece of patchwork.
Do the above until the present is as attractive, stimulating or encouraging as possible.
Notice that your past is not in front of you as before, it does not impose itself on you. Your present can now be fully creative. And whenever you need any resource, it is you who decides to look back to that past and what it taught you.
Regarding your future, it has now been freed also. And when you look at your present, you can see the future from the corner of your eye, as an incentive, as something that drives you to keep moving forward.
Rate the feeling that your present produces in you, from 0 to 10. And keep that feeling.
The exercise is over.
- Observations about the disorder
It often happens that a tough time from the past has remained in front of us, in the area of the present, because there was much to be learned from that time. But this created a tendency to repeat it.
Some of us adapted to something difficult by burying its memory or that stage of our lives in the ground, or hiding it behind us. It was a way of protecting ourselves, yet it prevented us from learning anything from that time.
Other times were experienced so intensely that their memory was still inside our bodies: it was impossible to distance ourselves from them, it was impossible to open up to something new; we were filled with the past.
The future was on the left, instead of the right, as something that already came to pass. That is, there was no future.
Or else the past was on the right area, invading the future: our future consisted in repeating the past.
Adaptation of the tool presented in Change Your Mind –And Keep the Change. Advanced NLP Submodalities Interventions, by STEVE & CONNIRAE ANDREAS, 1987, Real People Press.