Paul McKenna and Me

Paul McKenna and Me 12: Phobia Day, Part 2

By Matt on Wednesday, March 9, 2011

The thing about phobias is that they can be of anything. And the other thing about phobias is that you can’t fake not having one.

If anyone has ever wondered whether at least some of NLP and hypnosis works, then they should talk to a phobic, and get an understanding of their fear. They should watch how the phobic’s skin goes pale, how their eyes widen and become utterly fixed on the thing they are afraid of – whether that thing is physically in the room or in their imagination. They should maybe watch the phobic break down and cry at the very thought of the thing that is causing the fear – or at least get the sense of what their personal boundaries and limits are. Then they’ll understand what a big deal a phobia can be.

It’s also worth understanding that some phobics are fine to see their object of fear from 20 feet off, while others can’t even bear seeing it at all. Someone with a fear of heights might be fine at 1 metre, and a wreck at 2. But whatever the truth, there will be a boundary beyond which the phobic can no longer contain their fear. They will quake, they will shake, they might run for it, they might cry, or they might faint.

A Giant Tarantula — Phobias: Sometimes our fears might seem a little blown out of proportion

Whatever their response, they can’t pretend they’re not afraid. So, when, at the end of a 20 minute NLP session, someone suddenly shows you that they’re not afraid any more, then they really aren’t afraid. There’s no trick. to them touching the thing they feared. It’s just that the phobia has gone.

For many, that’s the clincher with NLP. That’s the thing that suddenly makes you realise – if you ever had any doubts – that NLP really works.

As we walked into the room on that day, there was a kind of excited buzz about the whole Phobia Day phenomenon. Yet that excitement was also mixed with an almost childish fear. It was the strangest vibe, to feel in the room.

Soon, Paul McKenna arrived and started to talk about how to get rid of phobias. No doubt about it, he was funny, and he was smart. He began, straight away, undermining our sense of fear, while at the same time playing with our emotions in other ways.

After a while, he got a thumbs-up from the side of the room. The promised animal handler, Glen, was here, and he had bought some seriously scary creatures. A snake and a spider. And big.

So Paul asked for someone with a fear of spiders. A woman near to me put her hand up and said that, yes, she was frightened of spiders. And so it was that to the room’s applause, he took this pale and shaking woman on stage.

The techniques he used were straight NLP techniques. The first thing he did was to gauge how frightened she was of tarantulas – and the fact is that she was pretty terrified. He got her to give her fear a number. On a scale of one to ten, just how terrified was she was she? Well, she was right up there at number ten. Then he asked Glen to come into the room. Glen was a strange-looking individual, it struck me then. I didn’t realise at the time that there was a certain sense of theatricality in the way he presented himself that sent an unspoken message of authority to people who saw him.

He wore a kind of pale brown shirt with various badges on it, and epaulets, that made him look like a major in a tropical country. As if, whilst putting down a native uprising and being superb with the sabre, he also happened to have brought back from the land of Johnny Foreigner the odd snake or two. That uniform, I suppose, gave reassurance. It told people that he know what he was doing.

What he was doing right now was walking toward the girl on the stage with the plastic box in his hands, and a great big spider, splay-legged pressed up on the top inside corner of the box, as if it were trying to get out and get at her. I felt the hairs on my neck go up as I watched, and I saw her eyes widen.

“Stop,” she said, suddenly, and Paul McKenna gestured to Glen to stay back, and go out of the room.

Now he did his thing. The first thing he did was get this girl to find “one point” – a trick that Paul had lifted from aikido that is designed to give you more stability. Immediately she reported that fear level in her body dropping.

The next thing he did was spinning. This is the NLP technique in which you imagine and visualise the way that fear is moving in your body. You take it out of your body and flip it around so that it is going at a fast rate, and then imagine the feeling re-entering your body. And somehow, for some reason, it changes the way that you experience the feeling.

Now the woman’s fear was at seven, and dropping. “Shoot white light down your legs,” Paul instructed her, and she found the fear dropping and dropping.

Now Glen brought the spider back in again, with a big smile on his face (Glen’s that is. I couldn’t see the spider’s smile from where I sat).

We all looked backwards and forwards, between him and the drama that was about to unfold on stage as he advanced…

Paul McKenna and Me

Paul McKenna and Me 11: Phobia Day, Part 1

By Matt on Wednesday, March 2, 2011

One of the events that had been trailed throughout the whole length of the course was the event known as Phobia Day.

I had seen footage of the day on the Paul McKenna showreel on the net. People handling snakes, and going up to do public speaking – neither of which I thought was a particular problem. I mean, we all know that snakes are lovely warm things, right? I’ve handled them, they’re dry, they’re slightly scaley and they are utterly beautiful. Public speaking… well, getting up in front of a whole crowd and speaking… that’s just the same as getting up in front of one person and speaking. If you can do it 100 times to one person, then pure mathematics says that you can do it once to 100 people. Right? So these were phobias that I considered utterly ridiculous.

But on the showreel there were also the spiders. I recall footage of a gigantic spider the size of a man’s hand being lifted from a glass case and placed in someone’s hand. And when I had watched it, I had felt myself shrink inside, as if the little shadow that was my soul was withdrawing inwards to the darkest recesses inside. My heart pounded, my knees quaked – and I just didn’t know what to do. The spider was utterly terrifying. As it walked, stretching its long brown/yellow legs with a slow, menacing movement, I recalled all the nightmares and imaginary horrors of my childhood. I remember the spiders in Mirkwood in Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”, and their monstrous mother in “The Lord Of The Rings”. And all the times that my own mother had been reduced to a quivering wreck by a sudden move on our worn red carpet by the fireplace when I was a kid. “The Valley Of The Spiders” – a short story by H G Wells… that one had really got me. Spiders were scary.

When I was a kid, my brother had picked spiders up without fear. He had brought them, cupped in his hand, for me to look at. But seeing my fear, he had then decided what a good game it was to wave them near my face. My sister was the same as me. It was, to be frank deeply annoying.

So it was that on that Saturday, as I walked into the Ibis Hotel in Earl’s Court, that I thought I had all this history on my shoulders, carrying it around like a pile of baggage. What was different, though, was that I didn’t have the deep sense of dread on me that I had expected to feel beforehand. To be frank, my head was so cleared out of rubbish already, that I didn’t quite know what to make of the day at all. However, I did have a sense of quite deep resignation to the day. And it was with that sense of resignation that I went back into that room where so many strange things, so many amazing transformations had happened already – not just to myself but also to everyone in the room – this time to face my fear.

I walked in with some anticipation.

Paul McKenna and Me

Paul McKenna and Me 10: Take-Off

By Matt on Tuesday, November 9, 2010

On the very first day of the NLP Practitioner course, Hazel had gone up on stage with Richard Bandler, and had her bad memory removed. We had spoken about it later. She could still remember the bad memory, but the strong emotions that had been attached to it were no longer present. She had been freed from the horrendous emotions that were the result of a highly manipulative and abusive relationship.

That first day, her eyes had changed colour. From a dull grey to a light, bright blue. Her skin tone, the way she held herself – everything about her had changed. The effect had been so strong that I had even asked her if she had put in blue contact lenses in the break after she had been on stage. It was a spectacular change. The fear had gone, and the confidence had come in its place.

Nevertheless, there were other things that she wanted to deal with. Getting rid of the bad memory was only part of the equation.

In my interview with her in preparation for the constellation hypnosis, Hazel had said that she wanted to become a successful NLP Trainer and teach so many others the things that would empower them and give them a better life. But there were things that stood in her way. A non-supportive family and an ex-partner who was still trying to make her life hell. Even though she now knew he was powerless, he still cast a shadow over her life – and she would be required to have some connection with him because she’d had a daughter by him.

She saw her resources as her personality, her determination and the skills she had learned to take control of herself through NLP. It was a fairly straightforward combination of factors.

As she sat infront of me now, with James sitting off to one side, I began the hypnotic induction on her, all the while my mind racing with ideas. And as she relaxed and I saw her move deeper down, into trance, I felt myself dropping down, too, joining her in that swirling half-conscious state.

117319main_jsc2000e10522_cockpit_strip — A Cockpit, Surrounded By Machinery

It was then that I began to have an auditory hallucination.

As I began my tale… once there was a little witch… a white witch… who found herself trapped in the dungeon of an evil magician, staring out from the bars of a cage and only able sometimes to see the stars and the skies… something strange began to happen in my head.

The work that Paul had done with me: “Turn it up, double it, turn it up again” had at the time presented itself to me in my mind’s eye as a bank of lights in some kind of sci-fi machine – as if a 1970s airing of the cult tv series Doctor Who was being run in my head.

There was machinery in there, in my head.

I could hear the low hum of energy running through a grid in my mind, and then I had the fleeting image of a control room, filled with banks of switches. It was as if I was in a power station somewhere, or bizarrely, in the cockpit of an extraordinarily powerful aircraft. I could hear the click of hundreds of tiny relay switches being flicked over in my head, and I seemed to get the image of hands flicking more and more switches and someone saying “check” as those hands moved.

The low hum grew stronger, until it finally sounded as if the whole of that strange room, that powerplant and cockpit, had been flooded with power and white light. A deep, low, earthy hum that seemed to vibrate the core of my being, and which at the same time seemed endlessly and ultimately powerful. It was as if I had discovered a massive spaceship that had been mothballed for a long time, and now was at last being dusted off to work again. I eyed the banks of lights and switches with wonder. Had they always been here, and I just hadn’t noticed?

All the while, on the outside, I continued to talk – a stream of metaphors about a little white witch who one day recovered the book of spells that the evil magician had taken from her – she was handed it through the bars of her prison by a wise old wizard. And so she went about secretly collecting the things that she needed, using her magic arts to gather them to her. A pole of hazel wood, and the twigs to make a broom. A wand that she learned from the book how to wield with a power that made her invincible. And all the while she would stare up at the stars and at the moon. One day, she uttered a single spell and broke down the walls of her prison, and found that it was nothing at all, except a pile of words, and that squirming in the pile of words was a sickly, squirming weak old frog who she trapped in a box and cast in the sea, forever.

On her broom, she took to the sky, and flew upwards and upwards towards the light of the full moon, and she became a star, hanging there, the brightest in the sky – and acted always to shine her benign light, this Witch Hazel, to guide those who were lost and take them to safety. Because she was the brightest light in the sky, whom the lost blessed and loved.

And as I told this tale which was, after all, a simple but beautiful tale, I felt a tear drop from my eye and run down my face. All around me I could feel and hear the power surging, I could see the night sky from the windows of my ship, and knew that I was about to launch on to my own journey.

Then the room of the hotel came back into being. I looked at James. He was sitting looking at me with his mouth wide open, as I guided Hazel back from trance.

“Wow,” he said. “I don’t know what just happened. But wow.”

Back in the room, I felt suddenly deeply excited. “It’s about using archetypes,” I told him. “It’s about just plugging into the archetypes and using them exactly how you want to use them. You are completely free to do it. And – God! – it’s so easy. It’s so goddamned easy!”

Hazel, out of her trance was smiling at me with the most radiant smile.

It worked. The ability to just think on the hoof and tell a story from nothing. It was mine again!

Paul McKenna and Me

Paul McKenna and Me 9: Constellation

By Matt on Tuesday, October 26, 2010

The day went a darn sight better after that encounter with Roy. But I still felt as if I wasn’t quite in my body. Later in the day, I was sitting in the audience when Paul was discussing a particular NLP technique, and he came over to me and asked how I felt.

“I feel like my head is fucked,” I commented in front of the 400 or so people on the course, into his microphone.

He looked at me with a steady gaze, and then instead of interviewing me began to basically future pace me: that is to set out how it was going to be for me over the next few days. How I was going to learn this and do this, how I was going to feel better. He only pointed the microphone in my direction in order for me to agree with him… which was a good idea because I didn’t have anything coherent to say.

We pushed on, through the day. I was in this little whirl, inside myself – doing the NLP exercises, calmer now than I was before, but still confused, and still with that strange sense of not really knowing where I was or who I was. It was extraordinary.

Then, later on in the day, something unusual happened.

Michael Neill was on stage in the morning, teaching us about a type of hypnotic metaphoric approach called “constellation hypnosis”.

The constellation. — Constellation hypnosis: how to create a new picture of the future by joining the configuration of situations, events and desires in the client's life in a different way...

Essentially, in constellation hypnosis, the hypnotist finds out what the client’s current situation is, and then what result the client wants. Then he asks what things are getting in the way of the client getting those things and are preventing them from achieving their wishes, and finally asks what resources the client might have to help them get to what they want. This is the constellation of the client’s life – the inter-relationship between the different elements of their personal story. It is the hypnotist’s job to take this information and distill these various elements down and convert them into a fairytale. The purpose of the fairytale is to help the client realise that by drawing the relationships between the different elements in the story in a different way to the one currently experienced, that the client will begin to see a different picture – one of overcoming and empowerment, rather than helplessness. Thus the power of the story.

It was the strangest thing. As we were told what we were to do, I began to feel a sudden sense of panic rising inside me. Here I was, on this course, on which I had hoped to rediscover my writing ability, my sense of play in creativity – and now my bluff was being called.

I interviewed the woman I was working with, and then completely lost my nerve. We were working in threes, and when we sent Hazel out of the room to discuss what we were going to do next, I said the guy that I was going to work the ideas of the story out with: “James, I’m sorry, you do it. I just don’t think I can do this.”

James looked at me in surprise, and then began to sketch out some ideas. But even as he did so, I began to feel a sort of spin of excitement in my body. A completely new feeling, as something light began to move in my head. Hazel walked back into the room, and sat down. And then James moved to do the hypnotic induction.

I couldn’t help myself.

“James,” I said. “Let me do this…”

Paul McKenna and Me

Paul McKenna and Me 8: The Filters of Perception

By Matt on Tuesday, June 22, 2010

The confusion I felt on that day continued into the evening. The night floated by like a dream, and I felt a sense of dislocation from my body, as if I was newly fitted into this flesh, and didn’t quite know how it worked yet.

And so it was, in this little dream that I found myself meeting up with friends in a little restaurant in Chinatown, and sitting having a meal. I was off my head, it seems. The evening floated by and I struggled to engage with my pals. It was as if, as the old phrase goes, the lights were on but noone was home. The thing is, it was as if I wasn’t even in my own home. I felt as if I had woken up and I was in a house that someone else had been living in for a long time. I wandered around, wondering who had moved the furniture round, who had been using the place for so long. The sense of alienation was quite strange. Metaphorically, it felt like my body was heavier than I remembered it when I last used it, and whoever had been in here had not really looked after it. I had muscles that I hadn’t used for ages, that I didn’t even know how to work any more. Potential lurking. A swirl of uncertainties, as the old story I had told about myself for so long had gone.

Again, I felt how I imagine a prisoner might feel when released on to the streets after a long stretch inside. The hometown is the same, but that house has been knocked down, this one has been extended, another one has a tree in the garden that has grown and grown. It was familiar territory, but all new at the same time.

And the same was true of my friends. For a while I felt as if I wasn’t really connecting with them. My mind was filled with the trainings I had had with Paul, Richard and Michael – and I seemed to not really “get” what these guys were telling me. We sat and had our food, and the evening drifted by before I said goodbye to these dear friends and made my way home. It was my first journey out in public after the hypnosis, and it felt weird.

I slept at Nicola’s house that night, who had been acting as my host for the week. And I slept lightly, with my mind overwhelmed. And I woke up troubled and highly sensitive and went back into the training across London, bemused. Moving in a dream. Confused.

Back in the training room on the Thursday morning, people came up to me and asked how I was doing. I felt shaky and uneasy. People speaking to me was a kind of a pain, and I told them in no uncertain terms that I needed to be left alone. Someone even, bizarrely, asked me for an autograph, saying that their kids loved “The Bill” and they wanted to give them a little keepsake.

I slipped out of the room and disappeared into the streets of Earl’s Court, down through the market on a bright sunny spring day, the air bright and fresh and cold around me. The sounds on the streets, the rumble of the buses, the squeak of the taxis’ brakes, the press of people with their beating hearts and the patt-patter of their feet on the concrete, the reflection of early morning sunlight off the deep red edifices of London buses, swinging by in a golden arc on the walls, the cracks in the paving slabs, the succulent flesh of brightly glowing oranges like balls of flame on the market stalls, the soft yellow of bananas, the mangos with rich and sweet pungent smells, the people all around me: Lebanese, English, Arab, African, European – moving like ants, like the swirl of water, like air, touched with fire, alive, shining, bright. I was overwhelmed with a torrent of impressions and sensations, as if someone had torn off the filters of perception into my mind and the whole, rich world was pouring in one single, sensuous, crazy hit. I was going mad. The world was brighter, and brighter still, and the sharp edges of buildings, of cars, of people’s faces seemed to have been drawn with the finest pen, or engraved in the air – hard – sharp – clear – more real than I had ever experienced before. The world was pushing in on my senses, moving closer and closer, and I felt myself struggling to breathe.

I pushed on down the streets, my movements jerky as if I was a machine. The soft machine, the blood-filled, heartbeating, airbreathing, lifetasting machine with a driver at its top. It was a dream and hyper-real. It was everywhere and nowhere.

I walked the streets a while longer and then returned to the Ibis Hotel. I remembered that I had tried to write a letter to Paul McKenna that morning, telling him that something had gone wrong with what he had done. Telling him that I felt weepy and weird. But I had not been able to string a sentence together. I was sure, so sure, that something had gone terribly wrong.

I was pale and drawn in the mirror as I got back into the hotel. I then went and spoke to one of the assistants – a guy called Roy.

“Something’s gone wrong,” I told him as I sat in a chair and snivelled. “It’s gone wrong. I feel weird. Really weird.”

Roy looked at me with kindly eyes, but maintaining a calm sense of detachment. “Nothing’s gone wrong,” he said. “You were on stage yesterday with two of the greatest hypnotists in the world. These things don’t happen for no reason.”

“But my head. My head. I can hardly think.”

Roy blinked at me from behind his glasses. He wasn’t warm or overly kind, but just straightforward matter-of-fact. “This happens with clients from time to time,” he said. “I get people call me up after they have seen me. They tell me their life is all messed up and they’ve been hit really hard. Then it all calms down after a day or two and they are so much better. You need to understand that your unconscious mind has been given a task to do by Paul. It’s telling your conscious mind to shut the fuck up while it gets on with it.”

Somehow, that helped. He looked at me with intention as he said it, and somehow it helped. My mind quietened down a little, and I felt myself submitting to the process going on inside me. It was strange. A little piece of reassurance was growing, right there in the heart of me. Like a little star coming out at night.

The first one. One to wish on.

A friend in the room, George, came and sat next to me. He looked at me in concern and I answered his questions in a desultory and staccato manner. After a few minutes, as the lesson started, I realised that I couldn’t go on. I slipped out of the room and disappeared into the streets of Earl’s Court, down through the market on a bright sunny spring day, the air bright and fresh and cold around me. The sounds on the streets, the rumble of the buses, the squeak of the taxis’ brakes, the press of people with their beating hearts and the patt-patter of their feet on the concrete, the reflection of early morning sunlight off the deep red edifices of London buses, swinging buy in a golden arc on the walls, the cracks in the paving slabs, the succulent flesh of brightly glowing oranges like balls of flame on the market stalls, the soft yellow of bananas, the mangos with rich and sweet pungent smells, the people all around me: Lebanese, English, Arab, African, European – moving like ants, like the swirl of water, like air, touched with fire, alive, shining, bright. I was overwhelmed with a torrent of impressions and sensations, as if someone had torn of the filters of perception into my mind and the whole, rich world was pouring in in a single hit. I was going mad. The world was brighter, and brighter still, and the sharp edges of buildings, of cars, of people’s faces seemed to have been drawn with the finest pen. The world was pushing in on my senses, moving closer and closer, and I felt myself struggling to breathe.

I was pale and drawn in the mirror as I got back into the hotel. I then went and spoke to one of the assistants – a guy called Roy.

“Something’s gone wrong,” I told him as I sat in a chair and snivelled. “It’s gone wrong. I feel weird. Really weird.”

“But my head. My head. I can hardly think.”

The first one. One to wish on.

Paul McKenna and Me

Paul McKenna and Me 7: Confusion Is The Doorway To New Understanding

By Matt on Wednesday, May 26, 2010

I returned to the NLP session in the afternoon, and continued feeling pretty much overwhelmed. Richard was demonstrating different techniques of hypnosis in the afternoon, and I sat in my chair like a zombie. People moved around me during the breaks and practice sessions, and I joined in – but it was as if the whole day was now no longer real. My consciousness had completely altered.

People seemed like projections on a wall. My body felt distant, heavy and numb. I was on the outside of it trying to get back in. It was a feeling I used to get when I was a child walking with parents in crowded places: a sense of dislocation from the flesh, as if somehow I was not experiencing the world with my nerves and all the clunky machinery of the body – but more like I was a ball of air and that my sensations and thoughts moved through it unconstrained, without making any reference to the body whatsoever. I was giddy at times, at others confused. People flitted around me like shadows, and I didn’t who they were or what they looked like, but only what emotions they caused in me.

At times I even lost sight of who I was and where I was. Richard was demonstrating a particular hypnotic technique at one point in the afternoon, and he stood with his back to our part of the room. I craned to see what he was demonstrating. Without thinking I called out: “Richard, I can’t see. This whole half of the room can’t see.”

He looked up surprised, clearly himself surfacing from a trance.

“Huh? What?”

“This part of the room – we can’t see…”

“You want to see?” he answered straight away. “Then come up here.”

I felt a shock suddenly as the real world seemed to rush in on me. “Oh shit,” I said under my breath. The last thing I wanted was more of what I’d already experienced. I went on to the stage with a real sense of nervousness.

escher — The World Stopped Making Sense...

As I climbed the steps, Richard reached out his hand. I was ready for him. As he tried to do the handshake interrupt hypnotic induction, I kept aware of what he was doing, watching him lift my hand up in front of my face. My defences were up.

But not for long. Richard adjusted immediately, and with a deftness of movement he brought his fist down dramatically but very gently on my forehead. “Sleep!” And with the gentlest and most precise placing of thumb and forefinger, closed my eyes.

I felt myself drifting again. I was pleased to block the world out – after all I was now standing at the front of the stage facing the audience again. I dropped down, content with knowing that I needed to do nothing. The world could just get on with whatever was happening in the NLP class, without my conscious input.

And so Richard demonstrated on me the hypnotic induction he was thinking of. It was performed by moving the arms of the client in a particular series of points and withdrawals, moving first the left and then the right arm like pistons.

“You’ll see from this close, that’s for sure,” said Richard before he did it. That was no lie, even though my eyes were shut.

Once it was done, Richard told me to make my body go stiff. I felt myself tense a little, but that was all. He placed his hands gently on my back and on my chest and push, testing to see how compliant I was. He could clearly tell that there was something not quite as responsive as he wanted in me, and so he just seemed to fudge a few lines:

“When you open your eyes, you will go back to your chair and do whatever you need to do to learn as much as you can, and to bring more joy into your life.”

And then he sent me back to my chair.

The rest of the afternoon slid by in a dreamlike series of images and sounds. At the end of the day, Richard performed a final trance on the whole group. I can’t remember much of it, but when I came back from it, I was a wreck.

I didn’t want to step outside the room. I felt lost again. An assistant approached me and took me to a side room, where there was a big leather sofa. I lay on it and sobbed for about three quarters of an hour, completely at a loss as to what was going on in my head. I wanted to just roll up and sleep for a hundred years, so it seemed.

But that wasn’t possible. After all, it was my birthday. I was due to meet friends in the middle of town.

And the fact was that I had no idea how I was going to handle it.

Paul McKenna and Me

Paul McKenna and Me 6: Birthday Tears

By Matt on Monday, May 10, 2010

I sat there on the stage as Paul continued to move fast. He asked me, while I was in this strangely heightened state, to run a series of visualisations. In one, he told me to pick a writer that I really admired. To look at that writer and see how they moved, see how they talked, think about what I admired of their work. When I had done so, and had a clear image of what that writer was like, he told me to step into that writer and experience the world from that writer’s point of view.

He told me to notice really clearly what it felt like to be that writer, and to notice what learnings I could take from the experience. I remember I chose Graham Greene. Paul asked me to allow the learnings I could take from being that writer to “encode into my neurology” so that I could take those learnings with me into the future.

I did the same with another writer. Who else should I choose but William Shakespeare, this time? And finally there was Louis De Bernieres, whom I have admired for years.

The next part of the trance had me visualising sitting in a room with a script that I was working on, and finding that I was with the agents and editors of writers that I really admired. We were all sitting and watching a movie of something I had written, and I found myself entering the minds of those agents and editors, to get a sense of what it was that they really wanted. Again, I was invited to take these learnings and “encode them into my neurology”.

Then Paul asked me to visualise myself writing. “Do you work with a computer or a pen?” he asked. I opted for the computer, although I told him that I work with a pen as well. Paul told me to see myself working at my desk, or wherever it is that is most comfortable for me, and feeling how easy it is to write. To experience the feeling of ideas coming to my mind easily and quickly, and seeing myself enjoying writing a wonderful piece of work. He told me to see myself day after day, and then week after week far into the future as I built up the experience, noticing how each day seemed easier than the one before.

Then he took me through the process of working the manuscript up, correcting it, tidying it, submitting it – and finally having it published. He asked me to take inside myself and keep it there, so that I always held a clear expectation of what the future would bring.

Next, he asked me to visualise the cover of my book, and to imagine holding it in my hands. What colour, he asked, was the book? Then he asked me to imagine, as I held it in my hands, seeing the title page. And there it was: my future work in my mind and in my hands.

And that is about as much of the trance as I remember. He did, at some point tell me that I should integrate the changes into my lfe only at the rate and speed that was appropriate for me. Then he put me down deep again at some point, and finally, after much intense imaginative work, the session was finished, I was blinking at the crowd, and Paul was saying to me.

“So, there, how does that feel?”

I was out of my head. I could only think of one thing. The question he asked me, I ignored, because what struck me now was that this had happened pretty much as I had imagined it would happen, now, on this day, with Paul. It was, I realised, a really significant day for me.

“Today is my 40th birthday,” I answered without answering his question.

The audience looked surprised and confused by the answer. Paul gestured to give me a clap, and suddenly he was announcing with a whirl of friendly patter and talk that it was time to break for lunch.

I stood on the stage, not knowing what to do as a swirl of people started to move by me. It seemed as if I could feel all of their eyes on me, as if my consciousness had somehow been massively expanded or as if I was hallucinating on some wonderful and terrible drug. I saw someone come from the back of the crowd and shake my hand, and say he was Ben, and I heard him ask me how I was. But I just wanted to pull away from everyone, but didn’t know what to do or what to say. It was all so intense, and the room seemed to be a nightmare of overwhelming sensations, sights and sounds.

Then two faces appeared from the crowd and two arms seemed to gather me up. The pair were a blonde woman called Wendy, and a bald man called Stephen.

“We’re going for lunch. Do you want to come for lunch with us?” They asked.

I felt like a child or an animal. My brain wasn’t functioning how it normally did – and I went on an instinct that it was okay to trust them. I wasn’t processing information, analysing and responding as I normally would. It was as if I was a savage, a creature of little understanding. So I followed them along like the little animal or the lost child I had become, and we went to a restaurant at the far end of a long road. And all the while I could hardly say a word, and I looked around me with eyes that seemed to be seeing the world for the first time. There seemed to be no comprehension in my mind. Just an overwhelming sense of confusion, and grief and pain and anguish.

A little later I was sitting in a cafe with them drinking some fruit juice. And I wept and grizzled like a child as I drank it through a straw.

Paul McKenna and Me

Paul McKenna and Me 5: Birthday

By Matt on Tuesday, April 27, 2010

By the time I got to the Ibis Hotel on my birthday, I had a really strong sense of expectation going through my body. I was wired, and I wasn’t sure why.

A friend had given me a little cake with a single candle in it for me to have that day, and I had brought it with me, a little physical reminder that life is sweet. There was a bustle around me of people, and that strangely growing sense of excitement that was inside me was starting to bubble up. My senses were all switched on in a way that I hadn’t had since maybe I was a kid.

The training started in the usual way – with a lot of joy. Paul did his thing on stage. Getting us to laugh and enjoy ourselves. Getting us to deal with stuff, and telling stories about treatments he had done on people. Then he demonstrated a technique called swish patterning and asked us to go ahead and perform it on each other.

I’d had a little nagging voice in my mind that had started to tell me that I was going to speak with Paul that day. That I was going to make a change. And so it happened that when we broke to do the exercise, I went over to him and said:

“Paul, can you use this technique on creativity? Because I’ve had writer’s block for 13 years and it’s been a complete fucking nightmare.”

“Yes, yes, absolutely,” he said. “I’ll get you up in the next session. Great stuff.”

What was weird was that it was like I had stepped out of myself when I asked him. It was as if I was now entering a different reality, by simply seizing a moment and acting on it. I went and did the swish pattern exercise we were shown with a growing sense of anticipation. There was a weight of expectation pushing me from the inside. Paul’s reputation, the changes he was able to make in people, the results he got. My remembrances of seeing him on the box, of considering writing to him to see if he could help my mother, all of that history of being aware of him as a public figure – likeable but aloof – seemed in that moment to crystallise. Wow. He was going to do some stuff with me.
When we resumed our seats he started a preamble in which he explained that the technique he was demonstrating could be used for all sorts of applications. It could certainly be used with creativity. As he spoke, he gave me a friendly and reassuring smile, I remember clearly his pale face, and the eyebrows raised, the head nodding slightly, a friendly smile on his face. And then he called me up on the stage and asked me to sit next to him. He was on my left hand side, and he began to ask me what it was that I used to write.

I told him that I used to be a scriptwriter for The Bill but that things had fallen apart and I had stopped writing. He talked a lot about tv shows and how he loves police dramas. He told me one of his favourite cop shows was The Shield, and I found myself, as he talked, becoming slightly disoriented. He wasn’t particularly doing anything, it seemed to me, but the unfamiliar experience of being on stage, his talking, the bright lights in my face seemed to make me glaze over a little.

“Tell me, what do you do when you sit down to write, now?” he asked.

“Well, it’s like I can’t make a decision. I start to write a word, and before I have even got to the end of the word I ask myself should it be this word or this word. Why this word? And I start again. I never get anything done…”

He told me about the Walt Disney creativity strategy. He said that it was vital that the Creator should be allowed to create without any intervention. Walt Disney had a special room for being creative where anything was allowed. That is the room of dreams and invention. Then, when the Creator was finished for a while, he would take the work to another room, which was the room for the Realist, who would sit and work out whether or not the story hung together and had a realistic chance of working. It might then go back to the Creator for more work. Only when most of the work was done, would the script be taken to the room of the Critic. The Critic was there just to make sure that all the edges were rounded off, and that everything work properly. Once again, the Critic might send the work back to the Creator. But in the creative room the Critic was not allowed.

I nodded, seeming to understand what this was about. It was about switching off critical voices. Then he asked me if there was a particular event that had really caused the whole block to happen.

“There is,” I said. “I had an argument with a girlfriend,” I lifted my hand as if to gesture that there was an image of her there, in front of me. He put his hand exactly where I had just put mine and said:

“Just there?”

I nodded, and he quickly pulled “the image” away towards the far end of the stage. It was deeply disorienting. It really was as if the picture I held of her in my mind was shrinking down. He quickly asked me if she had said anything in the argument. She hadn’t really said anything special. She was Spanish, and she had just shown disapproval. But the sentiment I had got from her was that my work was complete crap. I told him: “She said my work was a load of shit.”

He mimicked the sentiment in his comedy voice over and over again. It was utterly ridiculous to hear that sentiment said in that voice, and I laughed out loud.

Paul then walked back to me across the stage and got me to perform an NLP swish pattern on my belief in myself as a writer. There was a thing I was certain about, like the sun would come up tomorrow, right? Where, he asked me, in my field of vision did I experience it. I pointed straight ahead. And when I saw myself as a successful writer, where did I visualise that? It was in another place. He quickly got me to fire the image of me as a writer off onto the horizon, then brought it back in right in front of my eyes. We repeated the exercise several times, and then, again, he moved me on to more of the process.

Then he told me to go into trance quickly. Relaxing down. I was pretty disoriented at this point, and I found myself gladly going down at speed. He was acting with real pace, now.

He told me to take myself back to a time when I was really deeply creative, and to go inside and really experience that memory again, now. To get the feeling from the visuals, to make it real, and to experience it all over again. Then, when I had built up that creativity in my mind so that it was strong, he asked me to do the same with other memories. To build up the creative feeling so that it was really strong inside me. I can remember, in my heightened consciousness, doing the classic squeezed finger anchor so that I could get this feeling back when I wanted to. It was weird though, because my head was spinning like mad at the same time.

Then he asked me to go down deeper in my trance, and to go along a corridor in my mind, until I found the door marked “Control Room”. I opened the door and went inside, and he told me to find the control panel marked “Creativity”. I found it, and it was covered in dust. There was a dial on it, that I could turn. He asked me what level my creativity was at now, on a scale of 1 to 100, where 1 was low and 100 was high. “About five,” I replied.

“Okay, so I want you to turn it up. Turn up the dial, keep it going. Keep it building up and up.”

It was weird, it was like I could hear machinery starting to turn. After a while he asked me: “What level is it at now?”

“About 15.”

“Okay, well I want you to double it. Got that?”

I nodded.

“Now double it again.”

He walked away from me, I could hear him going down the stage, giving the audience the show that they wanted, too.

I visualised lights stacked one on top of another in two square columns on either side of the control panel – like something out of Star Trek. Each square light lit up, one after another and I seemed to be in a room of utter stillness, while at the same time I was on stage in a hotel conference room in London. I could hear Paul’s voice in the distance…

Then I felt something start inside me. A great big welling up of grief that rose up through my body, flooding my mind with despair, pain, anger, frustration and hatred. I tried to control it and push it down – but it rose up and up – higher and higher until I let out a lonely, desperate cry and opened my eyes a little to see a tableau: Paul, whirled around on his heel staring at me, leant forward, watching my face, and out, beyond the lights, the audience in utter silence, some with their jaws dropped.

I wept, loudly and uncontrollably. The anger, the hatred I had nursed for the deal I had somehow got out of life, the broken dreams, smashed aspirations – all of this now surfaced – everything I had ignored for so long as I coped with life. My dreams. My hopes. They were twisted things, it seemed – crushed by life and by my own mistakes.

Paul moved quickly. “I can see this means a lot to you,” he said and then came in close.

“I’m going to tell you how to get rid of this once and for all,” he said. “Here’s how to do it. I want you to hold out your hand and visualise all the bad feeling coming out of you and gathering in a ball on your hand. Do that now.”

I did as he said, imagining all the badness coalescing there, on my hand, a great swirling mass of malice.

“What colour is it?” he asked.

“Black,” I answered.

“Well, keep it coming. And don’t you dare stop until every last piece of bad feeling is on your hand. And when you feel the last piece of badness come out from you, I want you to nod…”

I sat there for what seemed an eternity, visualising all this ill feeling coming out of me. I was desperate. I felt so deeply alone on the stage, and utterly miserable as more and more of this blackness gathered itself in an imagined ball on my hand.

Meanwhile, another part of my mind was saying: “This is bullshit. This is complete bullshit. Utter bollocks.” And still the blackness swirled.

Then, Paul asked me again: “Is that all of it?”

I nodded, and before I could think of anything else, he knocked my hand so that the ball fell to the floor, and then he stamped where it fell.

And it was then that I knew that something strange was going on in my head.

Because as he stamped, at that very point, I saw a huge pool of black ink splash and then spread across the stage. The hallucination was so powerful that I blinked two or three times to make sure that my eyes weren’t deceiving me. And it was still there, but overlaid on it was the real stage, the blue floor and Paul, looking at me.

I sat back in my chair, as if I was exhausted, wondering what would happen next.

Paul McKenna and Me

Paul McKenna and Me 4: Laughter and Dreams

By Matt on Thursday, April 22, 2010

The effect of the training was cumulative over the days of the Practitioner course. One of the things that Paul McKenna would do with us in the morning was to get us all to laugh heartily. It was fascinating watching him do it. There’s no doubting his natural facility to play the crowd, which I think he had partially learned from experience, but which was also just a part of him. Those years as a disc jockey, then the stage and tv hypnotism had given him this excellent aura, and a supreme confidence in working the audience. So often I had the sense of watching a brilliant showman doing what he did best.

The laughter sessions took different forms. We were tranced into humour at times, with Paul taking us in our minds to a castle of laughs where we were shown to the dungeon. In it, there was a crazed scientist who approached us and told us: “I heff vays of makink you laugh”. And with a progressively hysterical and crazed trance, in which Paul led us by going there first, we found the place in ourselves from which we laughed really strongly, and then shown how to capture that laugh so that we could unleash it whenever we wanted with the use of an imaginary laughter button. It was a genie in the bottle, a piece of magic that we could conjure when we wanted it.

At other times, Paul would simply demonstrate on a subject one of the NLP techniques we were there to learn, and we would follow along. He always managed to make their problems seem ridiculous. Not just to us, but more importantly to themselves. We had entered an alternative world in which problems were dissolved away in minutes. Meanwhile, Richard Bandler continued his training, telling long looping stories that never quite finished. Rip-roaring tales of confronting people who wanted to pick a fight with him, mentioning the names of people he had met. Buckminster Fuller, Anton Wilson, Gregory Bateson, Milton H Erickson, Stephen King and Gerald Schwartz – a man who was convinced that he was Jesus Christ, until Richard had his way. And always there was humour in these tales.

We laughed a lot that week. We started the days laughing. During the mornings and afternoons we oscillated between learning new techniques and then practising them on ourselves and others. And what was fascinating about it was that when we did the techniques for getting rid of rubbish from the past, for setting goals for the future, for getting rid of bad emotions quickly, then even though we were practising them, the psychological effect just seemed to grow and grow inside of us.

I remember going out with people I met on the course late into the night, then getting home to the place where I was staying and going to bed, and just like on that first night, finding it difficult to sleep at all. Waking with a start into the silent hours of the London night, and seeing the clock hands wind slowly by. Waking and reading, and then drifting off, but being so emotionally heightened that sleep could not claim me easily – as if I was standing on the shore in the night, but unable to easily launch into the sea of dreams.

When dreams did come, they were odd, for sure. I experienced the strangest dreams, and at times I awoke from them aware that they were having the strangest effects. One time, a dream just seemed to stay with me in the waking state, as if the boundary between the world of sleep and the world of the conscious day had started to collapse. The images of the dream were overlaid on my waking field of vision. At other times, I was consciously aware of a mad rush of dream images flashing before my eyes as I brought the hurtling images of dreamland and all its high speed processing back into the world of the wakeful – image on image on image piling in front of my eyes rather than fading in the daylight, like a kaleidoscope of other worlds and other symbols.

The emotional effect was instantly noticeable. We had repeatedly done swish patterns and submodality work to make our problems smaller and further away. We did hypnosis to take us into trance, and we did spinning to build up and stack good feelings on good feelings. And then there was more and more laughter.

I began to lose track of time. I awoke, I caught the bus and the train and ended up at the hotel. For the first few days I wasn’t bothered by what time I arrived, but as the days went by, I found myself increasingly keen to arrive early and get in the front row. To watch the hypnotists close up and see the changes they were making. There were times when we seemed to be waiting with our faces pressed against the glass of the lobby doors, excited to sign in and find our places on the front rows, as if the trancey effects of hypnosis on stage might spill out on us because we were nearer the front.

At times I caught women in the bar after the day’s session fantasising about the trainers. “Which one do you fancy?” “Paul, definitely Paul.” “Oh, for me it’s Michael Neill.” “What about Richard?” “Richard, he’s an old man..!” “Yes, but so sexy. So commanding.” “Yes, but what about all three of them?!” The woman who spoke’s eyes lit up, and the other three she was talking with squealed with delight.

“Oooh, yes.”

And the days went on. On my way to the hotel in the morning, I found myself smiling at strangers on the tube, and laughing at the ridiculousness of the world. The pointless huddle in the rattling carriages. On the second day, I saw a woman weeping on the underground. A pretty, darkhaired woman, several months pregnant, and looking desperate. Tears making her mascara run. And I wished I could go over to her and do what Richard had done with the women on the first day – except that I didn’t yet know how to make the changes he was going to show us how to make. I got off the train and smiled at her, and even that act she seemed grateful to me for. But, I thought, how much more amazing could I have been, if only I had know what to do?

And all the time, Paul and Michael Neill and Richard Bandler worked on us. And it felt as if, in all of us, there was the unravelling of a ball of knotted wool, the unfurling of a flower, the opening of our hearts, as our minds and our beings became attuned to better things than what we had known before. This was a new world we were moving in, it seemed. A world of bright fun and joy, a world of optimism. A world of laughter.

And still the days rolled on, until I woke up one day and it was my 40th birthday.

And I had the strangest feeling that on that very day, my life was going to change.

Paul McKenna and Me

Paul McKenna and Me 3: Trance Journey

By Matt on Sunday, April 11, 2010

And so the training commenced, each day usually following a similar pattern: Richard Bandler frequently taking the stage in the morning and regaling us with stories that were outlandish, but just feasible. Tales of schizophrenics cured by meeting them in their model of the world and then taking the logic of their model to the limit. Tales of Richard discovering how some of the world’s masters in personal change did what they did. Tales of liberation, of hope, of laughter, of violence and irreverence. Story on story on story – scintillating, shifting, continually holding our attention and taking our minds down new paths that we hadn’t previously considered. And underneath it all, a continual message telling us how to make the problems that we might face in our lives feel less relevant, less obstructive, less real. And patterning, with his talk and with his jokes, a new way of thinking.

It was as if Richard Bandler, in the weaving of his stories was weaving for each of us an alternative reality. Getting us to make connections in places that we wouldn’t previously have made connections – so that the things that seemed at one point able to hold us back were somehow no longer important, while at the same time those previous “blocks” offered us new opportunities to grow and to expand as people. We were shown how to seize new opportunities as they came to hand, and to live a life in full rich Technicolor, with opportunities continually opening themselves to our minds. Realising that where we thought there was only one option, one way to behave, there was a multitude of choices, and that it was down to us to take the most useful ones. But Richard actually said very little of this. He just told stories, stories and more stories about the way the world is, could be and will be.

: A trance journey through a frozen landscape

His lessons were hypnotic, scintillating, captivating, hilarious and uplifting. At the end of the morning session on the first day I already felt a sense of complete wonderment at what I was experiencing. This from me: the guy who had been the compulsive mistruster, the analyser who took things to pieces.

It felt to me as if, at last, I was having the academic approach to life that had been drummed into me at university, finally and irrevocably dismantled. It was wonderful. A liberation and a wow factor. An adventure and a realisation. All in a hotel conference room in London.

In the afternoon, Paul McKenna and life coach Michael Neill worked with us. Paul continually worked up the feel-good factor inside of us – teaching us how to make ourselves laugh whenever we wanted to, taking ourselves to a place of comfort and ease at the centre of our beings where all things were possible. He spent time showing us how to laugh ecstatically at life in general, an approach that he was to do each and every day. How good ten minutes of laughter is for the soul! I had had no idea, that just by choosing to laugh I could take control of so much more of my life. As if the chemicals that were released in my brain at such ecstatic and delirious moments could somehow dissolve the pain of the previous years. Dissolve my frustrations, dissolve my limitations and cause the brain to somehow reboot and start running more positive, delightful life-oriented routines and sub-routines. Life was just brighter and more fun. The realisation grew in me each day.

The process was disorienting, too. At the end of the first day, Paul did something that he was to repeat every day: a trance. Talking in his hypnotic voice, taking us down through layers of relaxation to a place of stillness and quiet where the creative, imaginative and regenerative processes of life could start to provide a new interpretation.

I remember, on my first day, as Paul wound up the afternoon session, he invited us to go into trance in our chairs. I had done this so many time before with the CD and with Paul’s voice, that I thought it would just be another CD session – but with the novelty of Paul actually being there. Just a little chance to let myself relax deeply.

And so he began to talk, and he went through the usual routines of getting us to relax, and count backwards from three hundred, and getting us to notice words, to notice noticing words… and so on.

After a while I was moving through a snowbound landscape. I was on a sleigh being pulled along a road, and on either side of the road or country track, were icebound trees glistening in the blue light of the ice blue sky. Everything around me was still, and strange, and silent, and frozen – a frozen landscape that was beautiful. And the sleigh moved on in the snow, and I could feel the cold wind against my skin, and there was a blue line across the horizon, a thin pale blue line in the pale blue snow that was the horizon. And on the horizon was a building – perhaps a dacha or a house – I don’t know what it was, but a building of some significance – and I was moving towards it in the snow. I could hear my breathing in my ears, and the steady slide of the runners on the ice, and the gentle pad pad pad of the hooves in soft snow. I travelled on, becoming aware of a sense of purpose that I didn’t understand. A sense of feeling an emotion that was utterly true, utterly sure – and yet having no sense of what that emotion could be attached to – except to the blue landscape, and the cold snow stretching smooth away for miles beyond the trees lining the track. There was no danger here, only the place itself, moving by me, not fast, not slow, just a steady dream-like glide. I seemed to be travelling for hours, wrapped in furs. And I felt a deep sense of calm and contentment, a detached focus, in a way that I had not done for years…

Quickly the scene faded, and I was back in the training room again, and Paul was winding up his hypnotic induction.

I was staring at the carpet beneath my feet – a rich red and green in contrast to the blue white that I had been experiencing. I didn’t know where I was for maybe ten seconds, because that other snowbound world had seemed so very real – and this one, this one was the dream. I tried for a moment to draw the other place back into reality, but then realised that this was the reality that I was to have, now, and that other had melted away – its images as strong in my memory as joy in childhood.

It was a moment of deep deep trance in which – I don’t know – maybe I had started dreaming. I had never known anything like it before, this waking dream. It was amazing.

When I went home that night and got into bed I couldn’t sleep for hours, lying and staring at the wall, and feeling energised and vibrant. Eventually, I closed my eyes and slept for about two hours and awoke refreshed and contented.

Something new was going on in my mind.

And boy did it feel good.