The visual squash is one of my favourite NLP processes as it is powerfully transformative yet easy. You can use this process for working through a conflict that your logical mind has become stuck with. Should I do this? Or should I do that? The magical aspects of this process originate from its unexpected and uncensored 'permission' to allow your mind to wander and wonder around subject matters that have become static and infertile.

I was on the last session of the NLP Practitioner course and this was my last process of this long weekend. My colleague encouraged the acknowledgement of the 'conflictual' parts and each was brought out into the palm of alternate hands. A show down ensued between the Inca Wall representation of one aspect of the conflict and a sand coloured 'morph' charcacter whittling a piece of wood into the shape of a whistle in the other.

The Inca wall was forbidding and very dark. It seemed heavy with the past and weighty in its firm, bleak aspect. By contrast the morph was flexibly playful and accomodating in his behaviour and musicality. I felt a foot pressing aginst the wall of my tummy and knew this to be a baby 'morph' eager to join the elder morph...the sandiness became significant as I invited both aspects of this problem to meet....after initial relcutance the sandiness started to colour the darkness of the wall and it began to fall away so that the conjoining image became a beach like place where I was aware of a most powerful Turner like light that drenched this beach in golden dazzling colours..illuminating the preciousness of the sand and of time and the possibility of the'morph' family gently regathering themselves into their easeful shapes...and in the background there was a magnificent bearded benevolent Blake-like 'God' figure whose light joined with this beach and timelessnes...the heat in my hand became intense and the whole of my body 'shone'...

Very helpful( no content needed) and emotionally cleansing...

and LOVELY morph figures..

Many thanks to Steve who asked gently prompting non-judgemental questions and to Peter and Lynn for a superb course at excellenceforall...

ffice:smarttags" />A Special Place: VAKOGfficeffice" />

Let your mind wander to a special place and take your mind around this special place. Be aware of everything around you and the feelings and moods that being in this special place generates. Take your mind around the details of this place. Look up and gaze above you. Look around to the side; to your left and right. Breathe. Be aware of your feet.

1)   What colours can you see and feel?

2)   Are there any sounds you can hear? Where can you hear them? Are they far away or inside you? What about the tone?

3)   Are there any smells in this special place? Can you describe them?

4)   Where are you in relation to this special place? Can you move nearer? Is it more of a picture to you? If so, is this picture moving or still? Or on and off?

5)   What feelings are there around this place? Where are these feelings? Are they in you? Are they in ‘things’? Once again, consider if these feelings are static or if the change or move?

6)   What colour is the place? Why?

The stage was alive with the purple light of pure camp magic! The audience was enchanted by floating crystal skulls and the Aussie Priestess of High Camp singing for her supper!

Sailors re-eancting some Gene kelly, Sinatra old movie with the help of John Paul Gaultier designed uniforms that had many a chap in the very throes of admiration...each song took the upbeat audience further into Kylie's world of staged magic....and the culmination of pleasure through 'On a night like this' and the powerfully affecting neo-ballad rendition of 'Believe'  ecstatic...

apparently this show has cost millions and the audience loved it..and Kylie's colourful series of personas that guaranteed I left smiling and with a skip in my step. -

Some enchanted evening...

Geisha girl to leather bikette with just a hint of Rampling's famous outfit in that film...

My daughter loved it and so did my friend.....

Go girl!

STUCK?????

Are you dissatisfied with your writing on some level?

I love helping to inspire others to realise far more potential than they may even realise that they had!! If you feel that your work is rather jaded, dull or just safely academic then ring me or email me with your current idea and I will suggest ways that your writing could be more inspired and original. Flexible thinking can be a revelation for your own confidence as well as a grade enhancer!

The hand held for the world and the companions to see and weep...David Tennnant wiped off our screens and hearts by a dalek of most evil intent...the hand held brightly fading...

 ....like Durer and Michelangelo....

who will the Doctor become? How can we cope with his loss?

Dare I guess at a  female? The FIRST female Dr Who in braodcasting and inter-gaxlaxial history...if so the best kept  secret in the BBC ?

A fabulous episode..a collage of goodbyes...brave Harriet PM RIP: 'exterminate!!' ...more enduring adulation for her stand against galaxical pressure and combat than Gordon Brown can ever hope to rival????

Who can succeed David Tennant....Angelina Jolie. Anna Friel???? Or will he regenerate even as himself again, so he canget his girl and  marry Rose?!!!

And must admit that Captain Jack with his two lovers..and sub-machine gun and Rose with her weapon to save the world..sublime!

More adrenalin on a Saturday night than most forms of resusitation!!

Death makes convention irrelevant. The complexity of grief makes everything a possibility,  except of course for the resurrection of the dead. This story of Enright is  delivered through the surreal tonality of the left behind-and- lost protagonist Catherine.

Catherine has buried her mother and spends a working weekend in the company of her boss, a known philanderer. Yet her seemingly incongruous decision to consummate her  'attraction' to this male is made 'askew' to both the reader and eventually the protagonist. This is rendered  through an oblique narrative which ultimately offers up a meeting and symbolic image which  'quenches ' out her reckless, self-destructive  choice and allows Catherine a power and choice that her mother's terminal illness had obliterated. Catherine's fragmentation or in NLP terms her incongruity, is altered through a strange happening that instils congruence and catharsis.

' Oozing over the concrete ball was a dripping,black, velvet swarm. Clumps of bees fell from the jagged edges, or crawled back up the gatepost to rejoin the mass...The bees were bristly and soft, and their tiny legs clung to her fingertips as she shook them back into the mess of black wings. She watched them until she could not tell them apart. Then she started to cry. '

Catherine moves the bees safely away from their elected resting place, completing an action literally that she had yearned to undertake metaphorically with her mother's cancer. Catherine's spontaneous and 'natural' decision to rehome the bees is tender and without fear. She is courageous and empowered. She can heal a potentially dangerous event through her intervention. Enright has the knowingness here to 'find' the image to convey the hopeless impotency of grief and the ways we may attempt to reedit and revisit the unthinkability of death. I was deeply impressed by the apt surreality of this image and the visceral sensitivities represented. Unlike some of the  stories in this collection which seemed too idiosyncratic and singular to be intimate, this affected me powerfully and with a resonance that remains.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KE2orthS3TQ&feature=related

The best song of the year and the hypnotic insinuation of the 'yeah yeah yeah'  ensnares from the beginning. Something slightly metallic and edgy about Duffy's voice too and makes the audience compliant begging for Mercy Mercy Mercy!

Seductive 60s with edge of dominance!

A fabulous video too...narrowed eyes, slight swivel of the hips and a look of arrogance and disdain!

The path was interrupted by  traces of charcoal.  Small pieces of black that would ruin my special shoes. I knew this was where they had been and stopped for a time inhaling the mossy damp air and holding my head sideways like a dog sniffing for the last hint of her; her code. 

 When I believed she had left me I had spent that afternoon mauling her left behind shirt, desperate to resurrect her through the scents of her body, ferreting out the deep unsweet raw emanations from her skin. Now here, on this summer path, I had become a hound, a curious relentless creature with just this mission, to hunt her down, to hold her without fear  and never, never let her go.

 Lime green, balsam, a metallic edge to the air and then the lily of the valley disappearing through the trees just to the right of me. The air was layered with promises of her and each steady step I chose became almost a sexual act as I moved nearer her physically, tracking her through her smell, her trail. From the first time we met this had been the way of our relationship, our scented adventure. For scents bind us, they tell us stories we have to hear, they sweeten life itself.

The tenderness of your fragranced flesh - I can read the air.

I am an embalmer of your scent.

Let me tell you my story then, our story and for that I will have to begin not at a beginning but in a room that is almost an aside, and then you, like me, will find her.

Reunited! A time-bending, mind -bending concoction of revisitations of Dr Who adventures all remixed through the alternative possibilities of a what if' series of scenarios where all life has taken an/other turn and events hurtle towards an apocalyptic ending...BUT for Rose Tyler and Donna who is bearing a time violating scarab on her back..sucking out the destiny of the world...

A scorching episode with pace, surprises and enough intertextuality to appease the  most postmodern viewer...

Next week the return of Captain Jack and Sarah jane too...feasts galore...but can Dr Who save the world from the big BAD WOLF?!!!! Donna knows!!!!

I loved it!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXjRYlZvOlQ&feature=related

Ever since I met ya, seems I can't forgetcha
The thought of you keeps runnin' through the back of my mind
Every time I'm near ya, I get that urge to feel ya
Just touchin' you and lovin' you makes ev'rything right
(Tell me how ya feel, baby)
I never knew love before (oh no)
Then came you, you, then came you
I never knew love before
Then came you, then came you
You

Now that I have found ya, how did I live without ya
(I don't know, baby)
It's plain to see you're all I need to satisfy me
I'm so darned proud of ya, I wanna sing about ya
(Sing it, sing it, sing it, baby)
All I know, ya made love grow by touchin' my hand
Oh-uh-oh I never knew love before
Then came you (you), then came you, ooh
I never knew love before
Then came you (ooh-ooh-ooh), then came you
Hey, hey, hey, then came you

A wave from Philly! Have always loved Dionne Warwick's voice..only rival to Aretha for me with her version of 'save a little prayer' ...captures perfectly the revelation of meeting a force of gravity ..'soul mate' ...'then came you' ...absolutely!