Playing with Light by Leslie Nipps

Thank you to all of my clients and supporters for your courage and growth in 2011. My business has grown a great deal, and you are the ones to thank for that.

See below for a thank you gift, and go to my events page for news about some exciting events in early 2012 (a day-long Constellation Facilitator Training–finally!).

Here, I offer you a different kind of gift, a meditation/poem/wool-gathering about the times we are in, and how we are invited to take our proper place in them. Many, many blessings.

Solstice, Yule, Christmastide, New Year:
The world accepts the truth on press…
Light is growing.

And I can no longer maintain my stance
of lack, of loss,
of who the Hell Am I to live,
to love and to embrace the Light.

Our pain, our hard, hard place;
we think it resists the Light.
But we are untricked when we realize:
That’s where the Light starts.

Untricking, maybe that’s the name of the Great Work.
Who knew?
And Who told,
when we finally found out?

We love that One with all our heart.
And finally, become one with the One who tells,
And become ourselves a teller of the Great News.

Just let the darkness last a little bit longer,
just long enough,
so we finally know for sure
that We are undoubtedly the Light.

My gift to clients and their friends–use by 12/31/11!

Make an appointment before 1/1/12 for a private session or constellation scheduled anytime between now and the end of March (the first quarter of the year), and you can have that appointment at the old 2011 rates.

Just send me an email with the phrase “Yes, I’d like to take advantage of this offer” in it, and we’ll make an appointment at the 2011 rates. And if you forward this newsletter to a friend and they respond before the end of the year, I’d be delighted to include them in this offer as well.

So, what is the change?

2011 Rates:

• individual 2 hour session: $185
• public constellation: $165 (includes $25 deposit)
• three sessions: $485 ($160 per session)
• six sessions: $900 ($150 per session)

2012 Rates:

• individual 2 hour session: $195
• public constellation: $185 (includes $35 deposit)
• three sessions: $525 ($175 per session)
• six sessions: $990 ($165 per session)

See you in 2012!

Light Coming Through by Leslie Nipps

This is a season for a different kind of intelligence. The more I think about it, it is during the winter holidays (at least in the northern hemisphere) when the Unconscious seems to have more say over our lives and insists on sharing its wisdom. It’s a different kind of intelligence, though, as Carl Jung and many others have noticed. It’s an intelligence that communicates through myth, image, religious story, ritual and emotion, and it is much bigger than any one of us.

If we want, we can give this season of the larger Unconscious more authority for guiding and teaching us.

That’s so much easier said than done, though. Because for many, this season is unbearably painful, a time of

• remembering losses and things not accomplished;
• being once again drawn into the circle of family in ways that aren’t as nurturing as we instinctively know they ought to be;
• struggling with Seasonal Affective Disorder and Vitamin D deficiency;
• being immersed in a crass consumerism that upends the deeper meaning of gift-giving and enjoying material pleasures.

Do any of these sound familiar? What would it mean if these maladies and distresses were themselves signs of unconscious intelligence erupting into our ordinary, conscious lives? What if each one of these “problems” was a sign of positive wisdom, coming through in our bodies, emotions, family dramas, and practices (lovely and unlovely) of this season?

One of the presuppositions of both NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) and Family Constellations is that everyone is motivated and powered by Love. We are delighted when that Love shows up congruently in happy family gatherings, delightful religious services, and just the right gift discovered, given and received. But the instinct to Love, when disrupted by pain and other threats to survival, can start to show up incongruently, in suffering, emotional unkindnesses, compulsive and mob-like behaviors, and empty practices and rituals. This is a human tragedy. But it matters to still see it as powered by the desire for and instinct to Love.

That Love, even when incongruent, can be seen and celebrated when we become sensitive to the movements of unconscious intelligence. This season, it begins to share more space with conscious intelligence, perhaps in response to the darkening, perhaps in response to our collective call to it to come help us through.

In NLP and Family Constellations we partner with the Unconscious, see it as a friend and collaborator in the work of Love and Sanity and deep Wellness. We recognize it is always, year round, the more powerful actor in the search for happiness and goodness. This season, see how your own unconscious—and the greater Unconscious Spirit beyond you—through myth, ritual, song, dance, emotion and family, is wanting to tell you your true story of Joy.

If that seems impossible to see in the problems of the season, I invite you to try a session or a constellation to gain access to the Intelligent Goodness at the heart of these problems—it is always there, waiting to be seen and celebrated.

Honoring the Ancestors by Leslie Nipps

It’s the tenth anniversary of one of the most important dates in American history. All of us lived through it, one way or another. It deserves notice and respect.

But would you like to remember in a new way?

• A way that includes all of the various players in the event?
• A way that acknowledges the pain and heartbreak, but also inspires hope and joy?
• A way that turns violence into healing?
• A way that restores the humanity of all of us?

Over the years, constellations have proved to be a powerful vehicle to memorialize, honor and transform major human tragedies. The Holocaust. The Native American genocide. Slavery.

Constellation work:

• Allows the invisible to be seen.
• Restores the dignity of both victim and perpetrator.
• Releases descendents from responsibility for relieving the suffering of their ancestors.
• Bestows life upon all of us as our birthright.

9/11 also needs this kind of seeing. On September 11th, we will have a 9/11 constellation along with our two Family Constellations. It will include all of us, and bring deep healing to our national trauma, still unfolding. It’s free to attend.

It will take place Sunday, September 11th, 6:30-9:30p, at Rudramandir, 830 Bancroft Way, in Berkeley. To RSVP email lnipps@gmail.com.

Rest

Do you wish you had more rest in your life? Not the temporary kind of rest, meant to discharge a year’s worth of stress just so that we can fill it up again. The kind of rest or release that is permanent and life-changing.

In this season of summer vacations, long weekends, and special excursions, the idea of rest comes to mind. I’ve been thinking about it a lot myself as I look forward to my vacation at my family’s old summer home in Rhode Island (yes!). It turns out that “rest”—the permanent kind—is an important idea in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).

Stress is natural, and so is release. If we step out on to the curb and are narrowly missed by a car, our fight/flight response kicks in, we have a huge increase in hormones that tighten our muscles, and we step back before we’ve had a chance to register consciously what we are dealing with. Then, we’ll stand there for a while, feeling our heart race, our muscles jumping, sweat in our hands, and a dizzy feeling in our head. Fairly quickly, though, we notice the threat is gone, our heart beat starts to slow again, our head clears, and we say a word of gratitude that we are safe and can continue with our day.

The first half of that equation is generated by what is called our “Sympathetic System,” and the release part comes from our “Parasympathetic System.” We have complex systems in our bodies intended to regulate stress and relaxation for our long-term survival. Usually, these systems work remarkably well for us.

But humans—especially children—face an overwhelming array of life challenges to which our Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Systems haven’t had time to evolve. The many and heart-breaking difficulties posed by modern living are not well-suited to these systems of stress and release. Alarms get triggered…and they don’t get turned off. A trauma or an ongoing pattern of pain is experienced in childhood, the stress response kicks in, and it never gets released, even though the threat itself (like the car) is now long past.

The stress responses are the problematic patterns we experience in adulthood, whether it’s an employment issue, relationship problems, overeating, or chronic anxiety. These are the Sympathetic Systems set into action and never eased by the corresponding Parasympathetic Response. No one ever told that part of us that the survival threat is past, and now it’s stuck on “go.”

Many modalities provide awesome stress relief and relaxation. But NLP has a unique way of finding the precise trauma or childhood pain pattern that is still in stress mode. From there, we can respect the Stress Response of so long ago—intended to keep you safe and well—and then stimulate the Relaxation Response so that the perception of threat can be released…permanently.

I invite you to experience the power of NLP to give you deep and life-changing rest.

We'll Meet in the Sun by Leslie Nipps

Your life is torn up in ways you are unable to understand. Therapy and meditation have not significantly changed the anguish you feel. Some of us in that situation come to realize that we are entangled with the suffering of our ancestors.

Bert Hellinger, the founder of Family Constellation work, worked with the Zulu peoples of Southern Africa for twenty years. During that time, he had a fundamental insight: for the Zulu, proper relationships with the ancestors is every bit as important as it is to have proper relationships with fellow living members of the community.

Pretty much everything in our western society insures that we will get out of proper relationship with our ancestors. In Mexico, families have picnics with the dead in cemeteries on the Day of the Dead. In Japan, Shinto family leave food for the dead to eat on their altars. In very devout, traditional Roman Catholic families, you might pray that dead relatives grow in holiness after death, and ask for them to intercede on your behalf.

How would we modern Americans even notice if we’d gotten out of order with our dead relatives? Unconsciously, we continue to be in relationship, for good or ill—it’s inevitable, part of our make-up—and we can’t help but be involved with and related to our dead ancestors. Unconsciously, we remain connected to their suffering, their sins, their tragedies, their heartbreaks. And if one of those lives seems especially relevant to us, we will reach out energetically to help, or include, or somehow save those who have gone before. All unconsciously.

These unconscious gestures are ultimately unworkable. They are an expression of an improper relationship with the dead, whose sufferings, after all (unlike ours) are now over. We are trying to help, and as the smallest ones in the ancestral system (Family Soul), we cannot help.

When we do try to help, we bring suffering into our lives. For instance, one common entanglement involves ancestors who suffered great deprivation, perhaps to the point of starvation. In our unconscious attempt to help, we might develop an uncontrollable hunger. It shows up as a simple but very painful case of compulsive eating. But until we unveil the source of our unconscious attempt to re-include the lost starving ones, we might find ourselves utterly unable to change the behavior that is causing us so much suffering.

In Family Constellation work, we don’t try and change the compulsive eating. Instead, we bring the client back into proper relationship to the ancestors, bowing to their past suffering, honoring them for their lives, and noticing that their suffering is now long over. Clients find their proper place again, and find their behaviors changing subtly as they acknowledge their ancestors properly.

Join us for a Family Constellation, and find out how proper relationship to your ancestors can heal deep devotional pain and suffering, and bring peace and new life.

Where the Beauty Starts by Leslie Nipps

Most of us have experiences of childhood pain that linger so deeply in our hearts we can’t imagine ever healing from them. We want healing and peace, but some part of us thinks we might be betraying that younger version of ourselves that so wanted things to be different if we allowed it to be over and in the past. It’s a strange thought, but many of us are holding out for the possibility that we can make things turn out better in the past.

Logically, we all know that’s impossible, and search for ways to allow the past to be in peace. How do we find a way to give ourselves peace about the past even while admitting it could never be any different than it was?

It turns out we can change something about the past, but it’s not the people, places or events. We can change the meaning. In the end, it’s all about the meaning, anyway, and much less to do with the actual events than we tend to think. What did it mean that our father neglected us? Is it that he didn’t care about his children and found us to be a burden? Or is it that he was trying to make his own father proud by working himself to the bone and be a father who brought security to the family?

The first is a killing kind of meaning. In that world of meaning, you might need to spend your time trying to figure out whether you are worthy of your father’s love and avoiding being a burden to anyone ever again. In the later world of meaning, your father loved you the best he knew how, and was desperately trying to be a good son to his own father, which endears him to you, and releases you from any negative meanings about you and your life.

Both NLP and Constellation work effectively “install” these new meanings in ways that transform and stick. They respect the old meanings we made, but invite us to step with courage and gratitude into something that raises the dignity of everyone involved—our parents and ourselves.

We learn that what healing requires is not “approval” (we can’t be expected to approve of what is often objectively horrible human behavior), but rather “consent,” which is based in the recognition that as long as we protest against these people and events being the truth of our past, we are protesting our own existence and ongoing liveliness.

When we consent to the experiences of our life, we say “yes” to our lives, to our self, and to the miracle that manifested in the improbability of our being born at all. NLP and Constellation work invite you into this transforming experience of consenting to your life, and falling in love with it anew.

Fenceline by Leslie Nipps

You’ve had this problem for years. It shows up at work, in relationships, and in your internal emotional life. You’ve done lots of things to make it better, and some of them have helped for a while, but it still seems pretty stuck. You want help, but you are reluctant to get into therapy (again), because the process seems so slow and you don’t want to keep going over all the old stories. On the other hand, you’ve done your share of quick fixes-exercise or hypnotherapy or weekend workshops-and you want something deeper, more permanent and meaningful. You want your problem taken seriously, but you don’t want to focus on that; you prefer to be focused on your goals and your future.

You want real change.

Can Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) help people make profound, life-impacting changes? The simple answer is “yes.” But it’s worth knowing just how NLP does that.

Have you ever had these kinds of thoughts and questions as you’ve struggled with your issues?

• I think this problem is going to be with me forever
• I don’t know how to be myself
• I think I may be living someone else’s life
• What is the purpose of my life?
• I wonder if I need to change everything to be happy
• I’m not living the life I was meant to live

Questions and thoughts like these indicate something more complex than a simple behavioral issue: you are trying to work out change that has to do with your very sense of self-your identity. Who am I? What am I doing here? Most of my clients, at some level, are working out these kinds of questions.

Now, let’s imagine that NLP changed your identity to one more congruent with your sense of self in a single session. If suddenly that was done to you, and you got a whole new identity, it would nonetheless feel utterly alien and simply not you. There’s a word for people who suddenly and rather completely feel like they are not themselves anymore: “crazy.” We feel crazy if our identity changes too much too quickly. It’s not, frankly, a nice thing to do to someone.

So when we are trying to do change work with our identity, and transform it so that it is more congruent with who we really think we are in the world, we have to do it slowly enough so that we can re-adjust and feel good about the changes. When we do that we come away with the sense of a new freedom, possibility, lack of limitation, and  fulfillment, rather than a sense of instability, insecurity, and ungroundedness.

Now, even good change will usually have some quality of instability. The parts of us that have felt like they’ve been doing a good job of managing our previous sense of selves (no matter how unhappy that sense of self may have been), now feel like they are out of a job and rather confused. Some internal re-adjustment is usually necessary, and it can feel a little weird, slippery or uncertain. But it’s within a range that makes it okay, and it’s accompanied by a sense of hope and possibility that is deeply satisfying. This carries you until the confusions work themselves out and you can’t remember what it was like to be any different than you are now.

How long does this take? There’s no good answer, but if the desire for change is big enough, it rarely takes less than three months, while most people feel substantial change by the end of six months. That may seem like a bit of time, but for those of us who spent years in therapy, six months can feel like a miracle. Besides, your former experiences deserve the respect not just to transform them overnight; we’ve had our experiences for a reason, and allowing some time for them to work themselves out seems like simple decency and respect to ourselves and our complex lives. Finally, although the changes may take a some months, clients always feel some change happening by the end of a session that reassures them that things are on the move, and shifts that matter are taking place.

This NLP approach is what really works for those big life changes. I invite you to give it a try. Call me for a free thirty minute phone session so that you can experience how my work creates real change that lasts.

Birds in Their Proper Place by Leslie Nipps

Money and work go to the heart of our experience of being fully human.

Purpose, value, an authentic sense of “prosperity,” sharing who we are, exchanges of energy: these are all necessary and proper for a balanced and meaningful human life. When we feel these elements present in our lives, we feel like we are contributing something that matters and we are part of the cycle of giving and taking that is essential to all life. We can have a sense of security that isn’t merely an accumulation of “stuff” or a refusal to engage life vulnerably.

Perhaps the current vogue term “sustainable” is one of the best recent concepts for the kind of life we all long for and which is our earth-based birthright. It provides for a rich engagement with the world, purposeful living, appreciation for limitation, and an instinctual reckoning toward place, purpose and balance.

If it’s all so proper, then, why for some of us, does it all seem to get so blocked? Why for some people does it all flow so naturally and simply, and for others it’s an ongoing struggle?

Success with money and work is not just about one thing. It’s a lovely balance of a variety of basic human capacities. Here are some things absolutely necessary to a thriving vocational life:

• An equal capacity to both give and take.
• A willingness to be visible, seen, and responded to.
• A commitment to the idea that there is no failure, only valuable feedback, and a willingness to accept all kinds of feedback.
• A sense that there is “enough” and that we are “enough.”
• An awareness that we are inherently valuable and worthy.
• A capacity to belong, fit, and have our place in the world.
• A sense of proper boundaries—what is our responsibility and taking that up, and what is not our responsibility and leaving that be.
• A capacity to honor and celebrate that our roles are not the same, so that we can enjoy our own and others’ individuation, while imagining our capacity for interdependent and creative collaboration as the only way to “getting the job done.”

Most of us would immediately assent to the propriety of all of these concepts. But the insight of NLP and many other models of consciousness is that functional belief actually works unconsciously, behind the scenes, shaping our experience regardless of our “common sense.”

If there’s a block to any of these beliefs at an unconscious level, vocational and financial thriving becomes nearly impossible. Some of us, for instance, have a difficult time allowing ourselves to be really seen and visible in the world. Or we are unconsciously trying to take responsibility for things that are not ours to address. Or at some level, the idea of failure is so intolerable that we will not allow real risk and exploration on the way to vocational thriving.

It is possible to change these unconscious beliefs, however. If modern neuroscience has taught us anything, we now know the immense capacity of the human brain for fantastic adult learning and change. Some of us have made these changes by applying intense willpower and gradually re-habituating our unconscious to new beliefs through affirmations, ritual practices, intense trainings, etc.

NLP offers a quicker path by directly engaging the unconscious, and asking what is so very valuable and meaningful about the older sets of beliefs and meanings. When we’ve adequately appreciated the intention of the old beliefs, we can offer our unconscious “updates” through exercises that communicate directly with our unconscious, allowing it to say “okay” easily to the new belief.

Want to see how it works? Come to my upcoming workshop “What’s Belief Got to Do with Money & Work?” February 20th, 4-6p in Oakland. It’s free! This is another in a series of “NLP Appetizer” workshops. In two hours, you’ll find out what unconscious commitments are keeping you from your vocational thriving, and begin to replace them with beliefs that support what you want. Register by going to Money & Work.

"Context" by Leslie Nipps

Family Constellations unentangle family pain and allow love to flow freely again.

But many participants wonder: What effect does it have on a client to have a constellation done?

This turns out to be a great question, because constellations effect healing in ways that are truly unique and, for most of us, pretty counter-intuitive.

The vehicle for constellation work is “the Field,” a web of energy and life that holds everything and everyone. As a result, constellations always work on whole systems. There isn’t anything about it that is surgical, focusing in on one small section of a client’s experience. It always brings new life both to areas of life we hoped for help in, and in areas that can be entirely unexpected.

Some examples:

• A client who asked for a constellation to address relationship issues reports that in the weeks after her constellation her conversations with her father have been loving and patient in an entirely new way.
• A woman who was hoping for more engagement with her life suddenly received a gift from an aunt with whom she had not communicated in years.

After years of facilitating constellations, I’ve noticed that constellations work on at least these three levels on behalf of clients:

1) Constellations always provide fantastic “ahas” and insights. They help us to see the family connections, blocks, sufferings, and expressions of love that we cannot normally see in our everyday life. Constellation work provides a kind of “MRI” for the soul of the family, so now we can really see, for instance, that the enmity between our father and his brother is an attempt to express love, and that, indeed, everything in our family is an expression of love. These insights are themselves life-changing.

2) Clients of constellations experience internal shifts and changes that are not limited to the effect of an insight. Healing is directed right at the client. A burden is put down, or the responsibility for a choice is taken up. Clients reach for their parents for the first time, or bow to their ancestors’ suffering. This changes us. Sometimes this is obvious by the end of a constellation, and other times it becomes clear over time. But clients know they are different in their worlds.

3) Finally, constellations affect the entire Family Soul. For healing to happen for the client, shifts in the family system need to take place so that the client can experience life differently, too. This is not “play acting.” When a war is part of a constellation, and the formerly unpeaceful dead find peace through the work of the constellation, this isn’t just a story—now these dead ones know peace. Living relatives—parents, siblings—are affected by this work, too. It isn’t a direct correlation; we cannot know how the changes will show in day to day life. But the whole system has been affected, and this will create new possibilities for the client which are fairly impossible to predict.

It’s this last level of change that is new to most people, and is often hardest to believe until you actually see and experience a constellation. When you do come to one, you feel the way the energy is moving, and most people have a deep sense that something much bigger than those of us in the room are being moved along with it.

In the end, it is not so different than the conviction of Catholics that praying for the dead helps them and us. Or, the beliefs of billions of people who conscientiously attend to their relationships with their relatives, living and dead, through their religious practices. Indeed, that is where Bert Hellinger, who created Family Constellation work, found his inspiration—with the Zulu peoples of South Africa, who know that the dead are not dead to us, that we have a responsibility for right relationship with them, and that transformation is available to all of us.

Click here for more information about constellation work.

Click here to see upcoming constellation dates.

Contact me at lnipps@gmail.com to ask questions or to talk about having your own constellation done.

On Donder! by Leslie Nipps

The world is happy and joyful and…you are not.

Or, at least partially not. Instead:

• • • • • • • You dread seeing your family, or
            • You just can’t feel that seasonal “joy,” or
            • You procrastinate on all your holiday “duties” and feel like a failure, or
            • You get stressed beyond your normal tolerances, or
            • You plain get lonely and depressed.

What the heck?

I could tell you all the usual tips for getting through it all more sanely and happily, but I suspect you know them already: take care of yourself, slow down, be willing to say “no,” and remember you aren’t required to go to any family gathering that you know won’t be good for you and/or your spouse and/or your kids.

But why is it so difficult for some of us? Some sources are obvious: if we had a trauma at this time of the year, or when this season reminds us of someone we have lost, or we are so deprived of relationships that no one invites us to a party or their holiday celebration, well, no wonder we feel so low.

But for some of us it seems harder, perhaps, than it needs to be. NLP says that no matter our external circumstances, we are always making unconscious choices about our experience. Something in us values the experience of distress this season, and it somehow meets an important need.
What need does your distress feed for you? Most everything comes down to a few basic needs critical to surviving childhood:

• Safety
• Being loved
• Belonging
• Having a stable, coherent identity

If that is the case, then some of our distress makes a great deal of sense, having been created during our childhood experiences of trying to establish these needs, often in chaotic and difficult environments. Distress unconsciously can provide some very important things:

• For some of us, perhaps, itmeets our need to feel invaluable, necessary and worthwhile.
• For others, it provides a need to feel unworthy so that others, ironically, can be okay in comparison.
• Or perhaps deep down you feel your authenticity (identity) is challenged by “going with the flow,” and if we think everyone else is happy, we’d better be distressed to prove we are “being real.”
• Perhapsbeing alone is a great solution to the pain of being rejected.
• Or maybe finding safety, strangely enough, hangs on assuming everything is unsafe, and expecting threats.

Do any of these begin to ring true? If so, I hope it begins to provide some respect for your holiday distress, which is your unconscious brain doing it’s best to take care of you.

At my upcoming workshop, “Surviving & Thriving with the Holidays” on December 11th, we’ll uncover the unconscious beliefs creating such distress, and do some change work so you can have the experience of the holidays you would prefer.  For more information and to register, go to Surviving & Thriving with the Holidays.