My Blog

Dear Frank,My very dear friend and mentor. I am mailing you from the south of India. It is warm. I am sitting on our balcony in the house we rent in amongst some of the very poor people who live beside the backwaters. I have rarely met a more friendly and smiley people. Each morning the women carry their pots to the standing taps on the roadside to fill up for their days supply of water. Today they were filling up more than usual so I suspect that the water supply is about to be cut off for some time. And sitting here I am seeing you and June so very clearly in my minds eye. And I thank God for the difference that you have both made to my life with what I have learned and continue to learn from you Frank and what I learn from the love that you have shown June throughout all the time that I have known you and especially now. Oprah Winfrey is quoted as saying she is where she is because of the bridges she encountered in her life. And those bridges were people. You are one of my bridges Frank and you continue to be so as you face this biggest challenge of all - the losing of a love so close … to another place .. where she will be waiting for you. It is you who has the challenge of being with that loss from this earth and you are showing me the grace with which to be with that. Frank you and June are in my prayers and continue to be so and I thank you for all that you give even at this very intimate and emotional time.Love SueSome people may only see the outrageous and the provocative and yet to be that there has to be this grace and love underpinning it all. Thank you for sharing your love with us all.

I regularly teach about surface structure and deep structure in language. The surface structure being about the ‘off the top of the head, intellectual ways in which we might regularly engage in conversation - without thinking’ Surface structure is the result of what we do with our actual experience the output from the way in which we generalise, distort and delete the truth in order to make our daily thinking and communicating practical and manageable . However it is important to be able to connect with that deeper truth of our experience for example when we want to experience the richness of the moment or when we want to model what is really happening. It is important to know how to do this if we want to coach someone or to model the excellence that exists below the surface in every person and every situation that we encounter. There are many ways in which we can learn to do this for ourselves and for others.I have just returned from a short trip to Trivandrum where we stayed at an Ayurverdic resort perched on the hilltop above an expanse of fishermen boat lined beach known as Coconut Bay. The views of the miles of sand backed by palm trees and the infinite horizon of the Arabian Sea are breathtaking. And yet as we approached this resort in the taxi from the station alarm bells started to ring as we saw the line of expensive tourist shops lining the road to the entrance. Not many but enough to know that the environment in this immediate vicinity was not designed for locals but for visitors with a much higher income than the local villagers. Once inside the resort our fears were compounded as we watched European and American and Canadian tourists stroll around the grounds in what would be considered extremely revealing and disrespectful clothing in any of the native towns and country in this southern part of India. These visitors were most likely getting a wonderful holiday and superb Ayurverdic Health Care but they were not getting an experience of the truth of the Indian people and their way of life. And I accept that this is probably not what they came for. What concerns me is that our desire to be fussy with our bodies, fussy with material things, fussy with notions about others keep us at the surface structure of life and removed from the rich deeper truth. To truly model others experience and the gifts that they have to offer we need to be able to let go of our addiction to our existing way of being - to be cleanly open. The drink bearer cannot fill our cup if it already brimming over with water … to be filled we need first to empty that cup so that we can receive what others have to offer.  Modelling is not just an NLP technique it is a way of learning to embrace the differences that exist in the world and to live as one.Sue

Having flown to Cherai to be with hubby who is teaching a Maths course there I had to deal with the change from country beach life in Kerala where we have been for almost a month now to the big noisy city life in Chennai on the opposite coast. I realise how quicky and easily sheltered we can be from the truth of everyday living. No power cuts there or no water cut out. Here in Kerala I am reminded of the importance (and shortage of water) when I see the neighbouring women take their pots to the nearest stand pipe every morning.  We fortunately have a tank which has to be fillled every day. And power cuts are the norm but you would think that power supplies were infinite staying in a large hotel where business tourists prop up the bar in their airconditioned vaccuums… rarely glimpsing life on the streets outside. This desire for protection from the truth is distorting our world .. and I am a culprit too. I could not resist the luxury of a hot perfumed bath and the cool temperature controlled nights while I was there. Now I am back.. I check the power supply light as I type  - ready to switch off the fan if it fails and switches to standby (and it is luxury to have that), I only run water with the plug in the sink or into a bowl so that I can reuse it.  I admire my neighbours in their palm roofed huts and their daily routines fishing for their daily meal.. Maybe we should all live that commodity and luxury free life for a while .. maybe we will have to soon… permanentlySue

Was it really three years ago when I broke my hip.  I remind myself sometimes that I have some rather large pieces of titanium in my body that were not there before.  I still expect them to set off the security alarms in the airport but they never do. Their invisibility is on a par with my experience of my health and flexibility now. I thank a great team at St Mary’s teaching hospital in London and Swamiji for his yoga and Garet Newell for her amazing healing with Feldenkrais and my own determination to recover. I set myself the goal of being able to sit cross legged on the floor which I was not able to do before the accident but now I can. And I was reminded of what a gift that it when a friend commented recently on seeing a photo of us not quite cross legged but relaxing at the end of one of the programmes here in India of what a gift that is and what progress has happened in these years…  I modelled successful recoverers including David Moncoutier who returned to the Tour de France after the same kind of break and he did so within the year. So we begin to plan our bike tour in Provence.. Age and accidents are just facts.. they are not the experience…Sue