Sliver

Underneath the framed certificates on the wall of my last apartment in Sherman Oaks, pinned to my cork bulletin board, was a picture of me.  Three states and several homes later, I’m searching through my stuff looking for it, because it means something to me.

A crowd of people is clustered around the extended right arm of a young boy, about nine or ten years old.   I am holding his left arm out, away from his body and I am whispering into his ear.  His eyes are large, glowing red from the camera flash as they are fixated on his left hand.

It’s kind of a strange picture if you don’t know the story behind it.

It all really goes back to the fact that I am a compulsive reader, and since I discovered NLP, I bought and devoured every book on the topic I could get my hands on.  In the early days, although I tended to fall into a deep restful sleep every six pages or so into “Tranceformations,” I read so voraciously, often my reading would outpace my learnings during my practitioner training.   Occasionally, overwhelm would set in.

Now this is the point where I beg to differ with those people who insist to people in practitioner trainings that “you can’t learn NLP from a book!”  When I understood something, my Walter Mitty world kicked in, and I became “Eileen Bertie – Super NLPer.”  I immediately tried out every pattern I could comprehend on several people, even if it was only in my imagination.

I would visualize myself in all sorts of situations, mostly crises, where I swooped in, doing on the right thing,  at the right time, with the right permission/ecology and all the precision-cum-success of Richard Bandler ( and in fact, I still have a  tiny Richard Bandler who sits on my shoulder and provides critique and advice in his style I have learned from many books and videos).   And still, my reading sometimes outran my comprehension.

And from heaven knows where, the solution I chose to deal with the overwhelming stuff was to put myself into a meditative state.  thank my unconscious mind for being an accurate recorder of the information I read.  I may not comprehend it now, but I know it will surface at exactly the right time and the right place.”   Part of me thought it was kinda silly, but anything was worth a try.   And, when someone challenged whether or not I was wasting time reading so many books, I told them about my strategy and their response was  “B*** S***!”  My response was always a shrug.

I found my self doing lots of inconsequential little NLP processes, successfully.  Nothing dramatic like, “Eileen Bertie – Super NLPer,” though.   I finished Practitioner, assisted at a couple trainings, took a Masters.   And slowly but surely, NLP started to become a natural part of my life.   Most of the time, I didn’t even think about it.

Somewhere along the line, I had gone to the baby shower for the daughter-in-law of a good friend.   The shower was held at one of the studio rooms of my friend’s ballet studio, and it was a great family party.  Family, friends, kids all got into the games and the magician.  Once the entertainment part of the party was over, we started to have cake and punch and the kids began to entertain themselves by running circles around the perimeter of the studio.

All was convivial until my friend’s young nephew cried out.  Running his hand along the barre, he had suddenly acquired a sliver that seemed to be an inch long and an eighth inch wide, smack in the middle of the palm of his right hand.  His family, including his aunt, a nurse, began to assemble tweezers, needles and a variety of stuff, meanwhile maintaining an emotional tone that had his breathing getting higher and higher, and more and more shallow.  As he watched them prepare to “operate,” his eyes opened wider and wider in what seemed to be fear.

Something in my mind clicked, and I grabbed his left hand, gently pulled it as far from the body as it would comfortably go, and started telling him about a story I had read about people who were truly special.  These people, if they were injured in the hand or foot could look at the opposite hand or foot and see a magical mirror image of the injury.  But, for these special people, instead of having pain in the mirror image, beautiful colors would appear instead to represent it.  I asked him what color he saw in the palm of his left hand.

Some of the family looked at me like I was nuts.  But when he answered with a color, I began babbling anything I could to keep him focused on his  left hand instead of his right.  Fortunately, my friend who was hosting this little shindig is a fine NLP trainer, and with her collaboration, we even managed to swim smoothly past the well meaning,  “how bad does it hurt, honey?” questions.

Babble, babble.  At one point, my friend felt we were under control enough for her to grab her camera and snap a few shots of this memorable event.   And today I am glad she did.

I look at the picture, and I now remember a page in a book I read very early about Bandler having a friend who injured a hand an needed stitches in an emergency room. The friend wasn’t given painkillers because the staff saw what they thought were needle marks on his arms.   Bandler grabbed the guy’s good hand, covered it up and said something like “don’t look at it, it’s too horrible.”  And the guy got stitched up all nice and neat without drugs to help to kill the pain.

Well, this whole experience had to have come from the book I read.  My recall strategy isn’t perfect though, because I simply cannot remember which book I read the story in.  Do you remember reading it?   Tell me where it is if you do.

What’s important, though, is that I had the right piece, at the right time, with the right permission and ecology.    The precision was also impeccable.   The young man got rid of his sliver (I later found out he did have a medical phobia).  And thanks to my friend, I got a picture. And I had no time or awareness of thinking out what to do.

I saw the picture every day.   The voices in my head say different things about it on different days.    “It works!”  “You CAN do it!”  “Trust your unconscious!”   All these and more, spoken sometimes proudly and loudly, sometimes in an awestruck whisper.

Each time I think about that picture, I know that they speak the truth.

Trust that sliver of knowledge to be there, right when you need it.