Over the years, many things have happened to me, I have had many experiences, I have visited many places, some have been good, and some have been bad.
My life is and has been a rich tapestry, and the work as I look at it is unfinished, for I know my work of art has a long way to go.
As I look back at this tapestry, my mind goes back to when I was a young lad.
At the back of the family home, at the bottom of the garden, was a field, not large, but a place full of fun, it was our play ground. It was uncultivated, just a few well trodden paths crossing beds of short coarse heather, with their little mauve flowers which attracted many bees gathering the nectar and pollen.
Beds of heather in Isabella’s Plantation Richmond Park
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Little did I know that this learning would become useful to me in my future life, in my training of NLP.
I realised then at that early age, that these images I was seeing in the clouds, were only clouds, that it was my mind that was making a meaning out of them, creating an understanding. I did not understand about the way the brain, how it deletes, distorts and generalises to make meanings of our experiences. I did not know about George Miller and his 7+/- 2 theory of how much the human mind can take in at any one moment, I did not even know there was such a phrase as transderivational search, where we have to go back in our memory banks, our filing cabinets of past experiences to get an understanding of what is happening to us.
I did not know that one day as I sat down in the heather on a cushion of soft grass, that a bee had chosen to rest there too, and quite rightly, it stung me, right on my bottom.
I ran to the house in extreme pain to my mother, and she pulled down my short knee length trousers, my underpants to reveal the bees stinger, still embedded in my bottom. She quickly used a pair of tweezers and removed the sting, and applied a medicine to remove the pain.
Do not ask me if the cure had any scientific bases, I still do not know. I knew mother had the power to remove pain, I believed in her abilities.
The medicine was a small, blue, round, rock like block, contained in a piece of muslin clothe. It was used on wash days to put into the whites only wash, to make the whites look whiter.
Blue Dolly Bag
Once applied, mother paraded me up and down the street, pulling down my trousers to show the housewives my blue bum.
I still remember my embarrassment to this day.
But now I laugh at the incident, the pain of the sting has long gone, the embarrassment now is just funny, I do not dwell of the negative, in fact I have changed the past, my memory now is funny. It is of a small boy with his trousers round his knees, being pulled up and down the street, with a bum the colour of the summers sky. I even giggle at the thought of it.
It is an attitude of mind. I could dwell in the negative, and have a phobia of bees, of blue dolly bags, or wash days, but I choose to change my memory, my history, and so my attitude to now and the future changes.
And so, as I look at my rich tapestry, there are times where I have been hurt by people, done wrong by them, where I had done wrong to others, where there have been times and had bad experiences, and it is my attitude to know that those times are in the past, finished, and like the clouds, I can change them to become whatever I want.
Today, many things have happened already that tells me that if I go into the future with a positive attitude, good things will happen, as I forge a new partnership into my trainings.
I know I will not need to show my blue bum again, because what ever has happened in the past is finished with, I have learned from those times, once bitten twice shy, and a new era has started, as one door closes and new door opens, and I am willing to go through the door with a smile on my face and happiness in my heart.
Note:- Blue bags can be obtained from Retonthenet