CHAPTER NINE  
REBIRTHING AND NEURO-LINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING 

Just as significant differences exist between Rebirthing and other conventional psychotherapies (including the expressive primal-type sorts of therapies), significant differences also exist between Rebirthing and Neuro-Linguistic Programming.  Significant similarities also exist.

Like Rebirthing, Neuro-Linguistic Programming allows people to decide how they want to be and enables them to develop ways to be like that, on call.  So Neuro-Linguistic Programming (which from now on Icm going to call NLP), obviously exercises the Will and expands and empowers it.

Like Rebirthing, too, NLP techniques work quickly, in fact, even more quickly and indeed more surely in their immediate effects than Rebirthing.

But I have some serious objections to NLP that lead me to prefer Rebirthing as the therapy I practice.

One objection involves my relationships with the people who practice each of these approaches.  I feel a radical difference between my ties to them, even though in both cases, the people are lively and seem to be enjoying themselves, exuding an aura of self-confidence and joy in life, a feeling of personal power.  Generally speaking, also, they're very good-looking: most people at meetings of Rebirthers or NLP'ers are normally well-fleshed and healthy looking: there are very few people who are slovenly, undernourished, or outrageously obese.  Both Rebirthing and NLP seem to produce or attract people who are excellent manifestations of physical health.

But I feel there's an immense difference between Rebirthers and NLP'ers in the quality referred to on the streets as "heart."  There seems to be a major difference in the amount of compassion and feeling of identification with others produced by the two approaches.

This difference was apparent to me after my first weekend workshop involved with NLP, contrasted with my first weekend workshop involved with Rebirthing.

Following my first Rebirthing experiences back in 1978, I found myself extremely closely tied to a couple of dozen people who had been strangers less than a week previously.  I really cared about them and I felt that they really cared about me.  We, as Sondra has said, looked on each other with eyes of love.  After all these years, I still feel that same closeness.  And not only with the people I met then, but also with the thousands of people all over the world who have attended my workshops or Rebirthed with me on a one-to-one basis.

By contrast, following my first NLP weekend workshop, I felt absolutely no connection whatsoever with anyone in the room.  Instead I felt even more contained within myself, actually more distant even from people I had previously felt close to than before the weekend started.  I never made any new friends through NLPCneither through that workshop nor through the several NLP workshops and training programs which I attended over the following year.

Of course, it's possible that my desire for a close-knit loving, supportive, forgiving society (which I do find in Rebirthing groups) is itself a manifestation of some old yearning for union which I haven't adequately dealt with.  Who knows?  Time will tell.

I don't want to seem to be doing a disservice to NLP, for I have an immense respect for it and for its teachers.  Yet it also seems to me as if the NLP technique is less likely to alter imprints.  Instead, it seems similar to learning to be or becoming a very good actor: The person decides on the role he wants to portray, how he wants to appear to others and to be in his own self; and then, by employing triggering techniques within himself, establishes that state of being whenever he Wills.

This is despite the persistence of imprinted tendencies which mitigate against his spontaneously being that which he is Willing himself to be.  It is the difference between a studied and a spontaneous production.

Thus, to me, the results of NLP are less profound, less "real," than Rebirthing.  The exercise of the Will in NLP seems to be in opposition to previously learned or programmed tendencies.  It doesn't seem to alter the deepest aspects of belief systems, the imprints from pre- and peri- and immediately post-natal periods of a person's lifetime experience.  It seems instead merely to allow the individual to behave as if those imprints no longer exist, when indeed they still do, at least on some level.

I think the NLP'er is maintaining both positive and negative simultaneously, although one is in the ascendant and is being expressed, while the other is being suppressed or repressed and isn't apparently manifest.

The easiest analogy is the difference between washing your face to get old dirt off and then putting on makeup or simply putting on new makeup, covering up the old dirt.  Obviously the question is, which do you want?  Do you want to be clean or do you want to look good?

I'm an inherent of that old clean-but-neat school which said that if you're clean and healthy, you look better than if you're all painted up.  But, of course, that's not necessarily true.  And there really is no necessary contradiction between being clean and neat and healthy, and using some makeup to point up the special characteristics of the self that you want to dress up a little.  So please forgive a somewhat poor analogy.

My point of view is that, whatever it takes to change your mind is okay.  If it's truly changed, everything is fine.  However, nothing is improved if you're simply deluded into believing and manifesting something without simultaneously letting go the old negative.  I don't see how there's any significant improvement over all of the societal structuring, the education, the modeling, the dictating that have already been present.  I see NLP'ers just using a better technique for covering over the real self with its mistaken belief systems, not allowing those negatives to come through, but not having corrected and eliminated them.

Along those lines, I wonder what people who have been in NLP for ten years are like, and I wonder what they'll be like in another ten years.  I want to know if NLP ultimately ends up increasing neurotic tension or not, since its techniques seem so similar to the usual ways in which the ego learns to be defensive and to keep down libidinal negatives.

The people I know who have abandoned Rebirthing for NLP certainly seem to be happy with their lives.  Generally speaking, they're vivacious, they're occupied, and they seem to be happier than they were when they used to be limited by their old fears and other negatives.

So, my objections to NLP as a short cut for getting you to where you want to go may eventually have to be set aside if it turns out that this way of changing the self, in terms of behavior and inner state of being, doesn't produce any increase of neurotic tension.

I often use some NLP techniques with my Rebirth clients, particularly in helping them reinforce specific affirmations.  I frequently use NLP techniques to help my Rebirthees anchor a particular positive thought to their breath, so breathing becomes the trigger for thinking that affirmation and consequently arriving at a particular positive state.

For example, let's say I have a Rebirthee who complains about feeling stupid and not knowing as much as he ought to, feeling generally inferior even though he has had an adequate education and is performing at a reasonable success level.

He wouldn't be feeling stupid and inferior if he felt he knew what he needs to know to deal with his life.  My aim, therefore, is to help him feel as intelligent and capable as he appears to be.

So I use the Rebirthing breathing as a trigger in a way that's highly similar to what the NLP'ers do.

                I give him first the affirmations:

•             My breath is my connection to Infinite Intelligence and Wisdom.

And:

•             Every time I breathe in a full, satisfying fashion, I feel empowered to be intelligent and wise. 

Then I give him such affirmations as:

•            The more fully and freely I breathe, the more intelligently and wisely I size up a situation and understand how to solve problems.

Or:

•             Breathing fully and freely lets me see what needs to be done and how to go about doing it.

Another affirmation is:

•             My connection with Infinite Intelligence and Wisdom enables me to see clearly what a problem is and how to go about solving it.

And:

•             As soon as I understand what it is I need to do, I set about doing it in an intelligent manner.

Such affirmations connect consciously breathing a full breath with a desired thought in the mind, a thought which empowers him to proceed intelligently and wisely and with dispatch, so that he handles his problems as they come up, and he ordinarily feels satisfied with his progress through his daily life.

But I don't use state dependency the way an NLP'er does.  For example, going back to the person who says he feels stupid and generally inadequate, an NLP'er working with him would ask him to recall a time in life when he felt very confident and knew he was acting intelligently and wisely.  The NLP'er then would ask that person to enlarge on that state, would ask him to pay attention to how his body feels and acts, and to remember being in that state of intelligence and wisdom.  Then, while the individual maintains that state, the NLP'er would have the individual establish a trigger by making a gesture or touching some part of his body.  He would have him tell himself that hereafter, whenever he touches that spot in that way, whenever he activates that trigger, he will reinstate the same state.  He will feel intelligent and wise.

So, for example, having gotten the individual to recall a time when he was totally competent, really proud of his intelligence and of how wisely he had acted, the NLP'er might have him touch his right ear with his right forefinger.  From then on, whenever the person starts to feel inadequate, all he has to do is touch his right ear with his forefinger of his right hand and he'll instantly shake off that old feeling of incompetence, and, equally instantly, he'll reinstitute and reinstate the state of feeling completely in charge of himself and of the situation.

Hypnotists might say that in each case what the person is doing is giving himself a post-hypnotic suggestion which allows him to feel a certain way so long as he's carrying out a specific actionCin one case, breathing fully and freely, in the next case, touching his earlobe.

But I see a big difference.

The big difference is that with breathing fully and freely, the person is actually empowering his Mind/Body and not merely tricking it, especially if he uses release affirmations, for example:

•             With every breath I let go all old negatives I've been storing in my body, mind, heart and soul.

And: 

•             With each breath, I deepen and widen and perfect my connection with Infinite Wisdom and Intelligence.

So I believe the Rebirther isn't simply covering up an old inadequate feeling with a new positive feeling.  Instead he is putting in a new positive feeling and directing his mind to let go the old negative feeling.  He is replacing one with the other.

I always tell my Rebirth students about NLP techniques and I give them a quick demonstration of how these work and can be used.  I suggest that they use NLP techniques to make it easier for themselves and their clients to use affirmations and to do the breathing, since, obviously, however good a technique may be, if it's not utilized it's not going to produce any results.

(In the same way, to me, people who say they are Rebirthers but who don't do the breathing strike me as being something other than Rebirthers.  And something similar could be said about people who say, "Well, I just believe in the breathing.  I don't like using affirmations.  I don't want to have to change my mind that way.")

                In summation, I don't mind using NLP techniques to enhance and facilitate the Rebirther's use of the breath and of affirmations, but I am unwilling to abandon the spiritual foundations of Rebirthing in favor of the purely practical, pragmatic base of NLP.