Twitter had been binned already, and as I searched for the ‘delete account’ tab, the status of a female friend caught my attention:

“Thinking of Haiti tonight and grateful for simple pleasures in beautiful Vancouver.”

Haiti?

Back in my days of playing with various shamanic practices I’d considered going there to take a look at voodoo. Luckily, some well-intentioned friends put me off with tales of kidnapping, violence and extreme poverty.  Kids were eating mud-cakes to fill their bellies. Did I really want to be subjected to that kind of experience?

Haiti?

My curiosity set me Googling…

I don’t watch TV and only rarely read the newspapers, a choice that comes at times with its own disadvantages.

Therefore, when news of the January 12^th, 7.0 magnitude quake that hit Haiti at 16.53 was being watched by most of the world, I…was doing an ostrich impression.

Four months later, I was watching YouTube videos that showed men, women and children staggering in deep trances, or sitting stunned next to vast piles of rubble (formerly known as homes). They’d just lost everything in their already poverty-stricken world.

What hit me most were the reports of the death tolls: over a quarter of a million people dead, the entire population of British cities such as Plymouth, Wolverhampton or Nottingham.

I make a conscious choice even now not to fully comprehend two hundred and fifty thousand lives gone in so few seconds.

Seconds is all it took for me to write to my Canadian friend on Facebook. “Hey Guin, I’ve just read your post, how can I get involved in helping …?”

“…Sean Penn? What, the actor? You’re joking aren’t you?”

Petionville IDP (Internally Displaced People) Camp is a tent city and home to approximately fifty thousand Haitians.

It’s set up upon what previously was a private golf and country club and has been managed by Hollywood superstar Sean Penn through his own ‘JP Haiti Relief Organisation ’ since the spring.

Arriving to what is little more than a worn out, giant wedding marquee, filled with a random assortment of camping tents, to be met by somebody you’ve seen in some of your favourite movies is… weird.  Then, a moment later you remember where you are, you see all of the incredible work that the man and his team have done, and movies and Hollywood become irrelevant.

Home for fifty thousand plus

I traveled to Haiti as a team member of IMAT (International Medical Assistance Team), a collection of doctors, nurses and paramedics from mostly the USA and Canada.

Having worked in a number of large organizations over the years, I am aware of how challenging it can be for groups of newly introduced professionals to find their rhythm as a team, and to avoid conflict until that rhythm is found.

Maybe it’s the size of the task in Haiti, or maybe it’s that a certain type of person is called to work there, but I was impressed immediately by the abilities of my team mates to hit the ground running and to work in such relaxed synergy together as to give the impression that they had been a team long before that first day.

As the “Psych Guy’” my own intentions for Haiti were, and still are, to offer the most effective methods for assisting with recovery from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

It’s clear that there is a collective trauma being suffered by the Haitians that is often hidden behind a mind-boggling resilience and gratitude for whatever small mercies are offered each day.

I say mind-boggling, because I have no idea how I would get through those days, not if I had suffered the losses and struggles that so many of the people there have and continue to endure.

On day one at JPHRO, my assistant, H, and I took over what had been the dentist tent.

H transformed the sign over the entrance from, ‘Dentist’ to ‘Psycho’. I wasn’t sure which of the titles terrified the Haitians most.

A day or so of watching pained reactions to our Psycho sign was enough for one of the nurses to kindly paint a happy face that remained as the symbol for our work there.

And what work.

In two weeks we assisted nearly two hundred people between us. The most common complaint being that of pain that had no obvious physical source.

A class of symptoms that I actively seek out to assist with.

An effective NLP pattern that I’ve been taught by my mentor John Grinder is called ‘The Healer Within’. It’s a mostly linguistic process for accessing the client’s healing potential at the unconscious level. The process involves talking directly to the unconscious mind, often to stunning effect.

I continue to enjoy the memory of my translator’s face after the first application.

My first client was an old lady who had pain throughout her body from both before and after the quake. Slowly, she hobbled in to our tent on a stick.

NLP is not something that many Haitians are familiar with, so we framed the process for her with the suggestion that the body has an unlimited potential to heal itself. She agreed with this, and then followed the steps of using her pain as a signal for communicating directly to that healing potential.

Ten minutes or so later and she was standing without her stick, unable to find any of the previous symptoms that had existed throughout her body.

This was an event that I am familiar with. However for the old lady and to the surprise of my translator, we had just performed a miracle.

And we repeated such pain-relieving ‘miracles’ hundreds of times. Not I hasten to add, due to our own special powers, but thanks to the genius structure behind the original pattern.

Over the short two week period that I worked in Haiti I was presented with individuals who were expressing symptoms of limb paralysis, blindness, anxiety, pain, depression, panic attacks, rashes, lack of appetite, fear of the dark, trauma from rape/violence/the quake, and even a lady who had crawling sensations all over her body that she assured me was caused by a voodoo curse.

I agreed whole-heartedly that she did indeed have bad spirits all around her and that it was her lucky day, as I had learned counter spells in the Amazon during my time there.

The relief that she expressed after I took her through a cloaked (in a little voodoo terminology) NLP pattern was enough to justify my entire trip.

Before I went, lots of people asked me what the hell I was heading to Haiti for? At times, I was asking myself the same thing.

My answers were pretty vague. “I saw what a friend was doing down there and decided to get involved…” Or, “ I guess I just feel like seeing how I can assist with the skills that I have.”

I once also made the mistake of telling John Grinder that I wanted to go and “help as many people as possible”. His response was one of contempt for my statement and he suggested that I sounded like a pre recorded tape loop.

Only after Haiti did I pretend to understand his response. Ask me now why I am going back to Haiti in the next couple of days and then for much of next year and the simple answer is,

“I am selfish”.

What you give is never as much as what you get

Until Haiti, I had never directly seen so much suffering by so many.

Maybe those neurons in my brain known as mirror neurons got all fired up in response to the suffering. They are the sites in the brains of us primates that are responsible for that rare mammalian emotion known as empathy.

In Haiti, I attempted to give as unconditionally of my skills as I am able.

In return for my efforts, I was filled with a feeling of happiness and aliveness that I have never experienced before.

Ever.

Even as I closed the lid on a cardboard box containing a deceased baby, or listened to yet another teenage girl who had lost both parents and feared being raped. Even when I broke down in tears whilst assisting at the general hospital, throughout it all, I knew that I was somehow privileged to be receiving an experience that was and still is, so life changing, so humbling, and so compelling, that for a moment, I almost dropped my agnostic viewpoint to give thanks to whatever screwed up god was listening.

Almost.

Haiti?

Yeah, it’s the most self-serving place that you could ever visit.

Your intention may be to give and to help restore the place to what we in the west might (one far off day) deem acceptable.

But ultimately, if you go to assist, YOU will end up being the receiver.

It’s you who will be treated by the people as if you are a long lost member of their family.

It’s you who will be hugged by a seemingly endless line of kids that you’ve never met before.

It’s you who will be thanked by old men and women who have nothing to offer after a lifetime of hardship except pure gratitude.

And it’s you who, like me, may find that after Haiti you no longer feel affected by what the economy might do, or how house prices rise or fall, or whether the end of the world is nigh or not.

After all, right now, in Haiti, the apocalypse has already happened.

Reassuringly, in the wake of the four horsemen, Haitians are still laughing, they are still smiling (often the most beautiful of smiles), still loving and it would seem, at every opportunity, still finding small things to be grateful for.

If you’d like to volunteer to help in Haiti or to donate then please visit:

www.imateam.org

www.jphro.org

A couple of middle-aged ladies knocked on my door this week, and as I opened it they asked me,

“Sir, are you worried about the trajectory that the world is taking?”

And without waiting for a response from me,

“Have you noticed how all of the things that man has created are beginning to crumble all around him?”

“And why?”

“The bible says…”

At this point I stopped them with, “ NO”.

“ Sorry Sir?”

“I said, NO”

“ No what?

“No, I’m not worried about the trajectory that the world is taking.”

“Why would I worry?”

“As far as I can tell, worrying never created a worthwhile solution to any problem.  Did it?”

What followed was a lengthy discussion with regards to the danger and absurdity of beliefs, and after thirty minutes of my questioning, my new friends attempted to shuffle away.

Me:  “Before you go, please tell me where it will be?”

“Where what will be sir?’

Me: “ The judgement day you’re talking about?  Where will old JC actually land and create the orderly queues of six billion to be judged and marked with a guest pass to heaven, or a refusal stamp to hell?  I’d like to know so that I can make sure I have my plane ticket in advance.  So, where will it be?”

“Where ever god decides it to be … and we will pray for you”

Pray for me?

Jesus, talk about clichés!

The inhabitants consisted of myself, an assistant who was breaking a rather long and heavy dependency upon Marijuana use, and a very good friend who had been distant for many years (fifteen or so) and who had in that time developed a serious crack-cocaine and Heroin habit.

An NLP colleague asked me before the off, “I take it you’ve juggled live hand grenades before then?’

My answer, “No, I guess I’ll have to learn the hard way”.

It would seem that where drugs are concerned, ‘the hard way’ is often seen as the only way.  Hence my requirement for a cottage that was as far from distractions as possible.

I imagined screaming, puking, shaking and finger-nails being dragged down the walls.

The experience really could not have been any further from that image.

My client with the crack addiction, we’ll call him ‘R’, was in his own words, “shi**ing himself” about going cold turkey in a place where there was certainly no chance of getting his hands on more gear.

If you put the term ‘Cold Turkey’ into Google, you’ll find a number of Boxing-day recipes and also a description of the term as: ‘an expression describing the actions of a person who gives up a habit or addiction all at once — that is, rather than gradually easing the process through reduction or by using replacement medication’.

With the level of contempt that I harbour for Psychiatric drugs, this was precisely what I had in mind.

Initially, R and my assistant, both went through a set of withdrawal symptoms that seem typical of long-term drug use. They lost track of their thoughts, they suffered hot and cold sweats, mood swings and irritability.

Should I just let them sit and go through these states in ‘proper’ cold turkey fashion?

No way, I’d prefer that they suffered an even more traumatic class of experience.

So I took them rock climbing!

This is a great video on YouTube of John Grinder talking about how to deal with alcoholism: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5qvyIHUk4I

John suggests that rather than forcing the addicted person to actually give up their particular stimulant, they should in fact be allowed to carry on taking it until they find another form of activity that fullfills the same positive intention of the Unconscious.

Let me elaborate a little.

Our unconscious mind is superb at many things, such as keeping you alive and well. What it does not seem to be able to do (without help) is decipher the difference in whether behavior is positive and desired, or negative and undesired. If the over riding role of the Unconscious is to keep us (itself) safe (after all, we’re talking about the most advanced neurological system that we know of, and which has so far enabled us to become the most dominant species on Earth) then it will do that in whatever way is made most readily available.

It will take the shortest line to a tree when a tiger is coming.

What does that have to do with addiction?  Imagine that you have experienced some kind of trauma in your life.  It may be as far back as bullying at school or more recently being in a job that you hate, not that you’ll ever the know the real cause of your need, because it’s improbable that there could be just one cause.

Either of these experiences sets up a day-to-day stress response in the body that, in effect, is telling your system that you are under some form of attack.

Now you drink a glass of wine or smoke a spliff and … there is a numbing or distancing from the stress response that is registered by your unconscious as a perfectly viable way of coping with the unwanted experiences.

This becomes the shortest line to the tree. The problem is, such direct lines also come with their own set of problems.

What then is the solution? It’s a simple one (not to be mistaken with easy) that involves finding more desirable and resourceful activities that have a similar effect on the unconscious as the drinking or drugs (or shopping or sex or whatever the coping mechanism is).

In my own life, I’m more than aware of my need to be regularly stimulated to high levels.  Put me in an office with emails and paper work for a whole day and I feel like I’m going crazy.  Or I’m guessing that I would feel that way if you could ever keep me there long enough to find out.

Drugs and Alcohol have an undesirable effect on me. So what do I do? I climb, I train in the gym, and I work in a profession that allows me to get out on the streets (or Welsh coast) and come up with odd, sometimes crazy solutions to a consistently new set of clients and their problems.  Neither my clients nor their issues are ever the same twice. This is my dream work. If however, I undertook work that I hated, then I can see very easily how the traits that benefit my lifestyle could end up taking me towards less desirable alternatives.

So, instead of sitting inside attempting to NOT feel bored, I do activities that are meaningful to me and keep me wide eyed until I’m eyes shut.

So it was with R and co (except in their cases they assumed that I wanted them to not take any drugs (I never even mentioned abstinence) for the week and therefore chose to go the aforementioned Cold Turkey route).

Each day I dropped them both into two hundred foot high sea cliffs with only one way out and no assistance from me, accept the odd suggestion that my hands were too cold to hold the rope.

How do you have a drug craving when you’re hanging by your finger tips in a gale force wind, with the guy at the top laughing at you and asking where your craving for crack is right now?

In this context the craving is not gonna happen.

As well as utilizing cliffs in our game, we also dealt with more mundane, everyday activities, like cooking, cleaning and making our beds. These were all new events for two men that had never bothered to do such things in the past.

After a week of constant, resourceful stimulation, both of my charges were not only (at that moment) free of their cravings, they were also looking at how their new experiences were applicable to other areas of their lives.

Best of all, two and a half weeks after our trip to Wales, both of them are still finding more resourceful ways to do what drugs previously did for them.

Are the cravings gone in such a short time? I doubt it.

Do R and my assistant now have direct experiences to validate (consciously and unconsciously) that their need is not for drugs, but in fact for a more active, participative and meaningful life?

Yes.

So now the responsibility lies with them both to ensure that they create just that.

I feel a void coming between us.

This picture triggered me to think of a number of relationships whose communication are just like the gap in the middle!

No, I’ve not gone mad (as far as i know?), in fact i am attempting to do the one thing that helps keep me sane.

It’s Monday morning and in my head i have the following kind of dialogue kicking in: ” Must create the various blog links that my web guy suggested”. ” Must confirm dates for our retreat we’re running in September”,  “Have i checked all of the outstanding invoices?”. ” How much time do i have to read, ‘ an introduction to cybernetics?’.  ‘Have i booked the two hypnosis courses that i want to attend?’. ‘How can i ensure that friday’s filming for our new TV show is not too extreme as to be unfilmable?’.  ‘I must respond to three emails from my mentor John’. ‘Will the contract ever get sorted for my new flat?’.  ‘ I really must write the next chapter of my NLP book’. ‘I really must write about the blog subjects i have planned’. ‘ I just want to go climbing today’. ‘Shit, i’m hungry again already’. ‘ Should i chase up the business in Malaysia that called last week, or wait for a few more days?’. ‘Do I get out of the markets this month or ride out the storm?’, ‘ Do I have enough images for my lecture at Lord’s next month?’. ‘Should i use images?’. ‘Oh dear, i haven’t meditated in days’…

Honestly, that’s just a snippet of what my monkey mind had to say this morning. And then the last point – about meditation – became a solution…

I switched my phone to silent and used the ear protectors to cut out one sensory channel (sound) from my world. Then I closed my eyes and another went. Next i pressed my tongue in to my mouth and followed my breath. Bliss.

I found some freedom, if only for a few minutes.

Then I’m back calmer and more relaxed.

I’ve now set to the A3 with my pens and put everything down on paper to be sorted and ticked off in a way that doesn’t require my mind to juggle chainsaws all day long.

But I guess you don’t have twenty minutes in your day to close your eyes and breathe – right?

Not even if it can ensure that you get more done by the end of it?

By the way, the red ear protectors are not a necessity!

In fact, nearly all of my clients have confirmed to me over the last six years that change ONLY happens in the moment.

Every time I help an individual transform a phobia, an eating disorder, a confidence issue, a traumatic memory (that comes with full recall of the feelings), or many of the emotional issues that people come to me for help with; I notice that in our time together, there is a moment when the person’s unconscious lets go of the old pattern and state and happily accepts the new alternatives. Such shifts are clear to anyone practiced in observing state changes in their subtlest forms and are in fact the most important signs that tell us where next to go in our work as NLP practitioners.

Last week I had a near suicidal forty year old in my office who was suffering from something he called “depression”.

Unfortunately for him, an expert (I think she was called a Psychiatrist) confirmed that he did indeed have depression and that he was “required” to take a nice little cocktail of pills to keep his issue in check.

Someone suggested that he see me before diving into the chemical soup, and a only a day later, he was glad that they did.

My new client’s state was certainly one that people like to label ‘depression’. It was slumped posture, slow speech patterns, reports of feeling lost and in a “black hole”. This and getting out of bed at midday to stare at a computer screen with no intention or motivation for the day ahead. This is becoming an all too familiar pattern for many people in the western world.

I asked him, “How do you know you have depression?” His response was, “I’ve been told by my psychiatrist”.

Me: “Do you always take another persons opinion when your life is at stake?”

Him: No, but what else can I do?

The answer to that question was swift and dramatic. I used the following patterns so that he could stop ‘doing’ depression, which is a very different perspective to ‘being‘ depressed.

I made his depressed state stronger and stronger through provocation and once I could calibrate that this state was fully activated, I then used a simple hypnotic pattern to regress him to the very first time he had experienced it – the very source of his emotional state.

The memory (whether it’s actual or metaphoric is not so relevant in the process of such change work) was one of being abandoned in his play pen at a very early age. This was also the source of his “black hole” metaphor and “a sense of empty, abandoned hopelessness”.

I asked my client to find a place in my office which best represented the play-pen he had been abandoned in all those years ago. It turned out that my fireplace (with it’s accompanying dust!) was just the spot that his unconscious most associated with.

It was there, on-and-off for the next forty-five minutes that he crawled from the old “depressed and abandoned” state, then stood and walked to the corner of my office that is reserved for playing New Code games.

The New Code games that we often employ as a tool in our interventions are the most elegant way of generating highly resourceful states in the individual. Once these high performance states have been achieved we can then associate it with the context of the old unwanted states. The effect is often nothing short of magic.

The result for my client was that in approximately one hour, he had gone from contemplating suicide, to now contemplating what he is going to do with all of the new found energy and love for life that is suddenly his.

And he’s taking no medication whatsoever.

If you or someone that you know is suffering from an emotional issue, no matter how severe it has been diagnosed as. The following will always hold true: Under the correct conditions, change happens fast. Change happens in a moment. Because change is all we are at every level of existence.

What could allow you to start changing?

I made none (so have none to feel bad about breaking!) and have instead been working away on my bigger life goals each day, with an awareness that at least one step every day (actually many on a good day!) will get me there in the end.

As some of you will know, I am in the second week of a month long method acting course here in London. Why? Partly because I was referred to it as a tool to augment my presenting skills, partly because there is a thespian in me jostling to get out, and mostly because I love new challenges, particularly in fields that I have no previous experience in.

In case you don’t know, method acting is the craft of developing an awareness of a character that allows the actor to as-best-as-possible experience the thoughts, impulses and emotions that the character themselves might have had.

Notable actors that use method are DeNiro, Pacino and Streep to name but a few.

(Er, method acting at it’s best!)

My first week in class has been focused on learning approximately five minutes of script and also investigating the life around the character that I am to become.  It’s challenging due to the multiple unconscious actions, gestures and voice tones that my character could potentially have and that I need to consciously express in my five minutes on stage.

That of course, and remembering my lines at all times!

From a 3^rd position (Google: ‘perceptual positions, NLP’, if you don’t know what this is) I can evaluate my performance and I’m currently pretty average at the whole thing! Acting a role with similarities to Mike Weeks would be one thing; acting as a 28-year old filing clerk from New York in the 1950’s is an altogether different task. Which of course is the whole point for me. I get to take on a challenge that requires me to find new methods and state choices throughout.

Getting the subtleties of the character is the real craft and ‘being’ that person for a short time, as opposed to acting ‘like’ him.

What this week has also done is given me a whole new level of respect for those actors that I have watched and casually thought, “ I could do that”.

Like any skill, acting needs to be worked on with focus, attention, discipline, persistence and thoughtfulness. It’s these requirements that get me so excited in each class and is giving me a similar experience to my early days in climbing and learning NLP.

Whether I ever ‘tread the boards’ or use the skills I am developing in the context they were created for is (to me at least) not so important.

What is important is that I am learning new ways of learning, placing myself in challenging and uncomfortable situations, and above all, honoring my desire to actually do one of the things I have always been curious about.

Action I keep telling myself, really does speak louder than words.