In this weeks Friday Guest Post Andy Lucas, who assists clients to empower themselves, discusses the topic of empowerment in more detail.

The source of personal power?

by Andy Lucas

I was recently chatting with my friend Karen, also a coach, and we were discussing empowerment. The conversation arose because I mentioned my strong desire to help clients do things for themselves. I like to help them develop an understanding of their mental processes and an ability to manage and steer those processes with ease. In a nutshell I aim to help clients “empower” themselves.

In various fields of mind therapy we hear talk about the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious minds. And I often wonder if and how we can use that idea to empower people.

Many forms of conventional counselling and psychotherapy endorse sustained intervention over weeks, months and often years in order to restore unconscious patterns to conscious awareness. Maybe that work has a place, but it doesn’t appeal to many of us coaches especially if we want our clients to avoid depending on us, and if we want them to be self sufficient in their change and development. I guess most of us are hoping to achieve change in a relatively short length of time without engaging our client in prolonged soul searching.

Various schools of hypnotherapy encourage us to bypass a client’s conscious mind, and its apparently limited understandings. And instead they tell us to speak directly to the client’s unconscious mind. They say the problem is being performed by the unconscious, so we might as well get this unconscious mind to produce the solution too. Supposedly there is no need to get the conscious mind involved, because it might get in the way.

Western style hypnotherapy is not alone in working with the so-called unconscious mind. Many shamanic traditions have a long colourful history of using trance states, such as journeying to the underworld, to uncover the source of problems and to seek solutions in an altered state. Some even use plants to induce the states chemically. The purpose of these trances is to draw things out of unconsciousness and restore them to some level of awareness, consciousness.

Eastern teachings adopt other approaches, often giving even greater value to consciousness and discouraging “sleep walking through life” in a state of illusion and unconsciousness. These teachings, such as Tibetan Dream Yoga, implore us to operate sustained awareness of our subtler trance states – our habitual thoughts and perceptions. They encourage us to undertake a discipline of self-awareness, noticing the full extent of our dreaming, not just the dreams at night but the ones in the daytime too. This reminds me of the NLP presupposition: “The map is not the territory”, emphasising the distinction between the “real world” and our internal representations of the world. I guess Tibetan teachers are urging us to do whatever it takes to retain awareness of this distinction. Maybe we can benefit from observing our dreaming more often and even becoming more active in the authoring of the dreams. It is this active involvement that characterises the teachings of Tibetan Dream Yoga.

Other traditions offer further contributions to the consciousness debate. Hawaiian Huna, teaches three aspects of the mind – consciousness, unconsciousness and superconsciousness. It regards the unconscious mind as a route to the superconscious, which in turn operates as a kind of inner wisdom and source of solutions. Huna, like NLP, tells us we can reprogramme ourselves, we can design our mental templates.

Meanwhile schools of yoga and tantra teach about “pure consciousness”, a steady, still level of consciousness undisrupted by habitual thinking (samskaras) and inner chatter. Yoga teaches body awareness leading to mind awareness and/or breath awareness leading to mind awareness. I have even read of prisons successfully adopting yoga therapy to rehabilitate offenders. During deep meditation aspirants of Yoga Nidra are encouraged, among other things, to imagine a golden egg in the centre of the mind and to say to themselves something like: “I am not my body. I am not my thoughts. I am not my emotions. I am that golden egg. I am pure consciousness in itself witnessing all of this.”

Even within western approaches we discover more nuanced ideas about consciousness. Transformational Grammar and NLP help us recognise the words “consciousness/unconsciousness” as nominalisations, nouns describing actions. Is consciousness just a construction, a way of giving form to the processes we observe? Maybe consciousness is just being aware and unconsciousness is being unaware. Perhaps it’s as simple as that.

Meanwhile the distinction between two minds, the unconscious and the conscious, is often used as a metaphor for the difference between the functions of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. If I ask you to let the conscious mind do X while the unconscious mind does Y you probably accept it as a useful suggestion, an opportunity to think about something in two different ways, laterally versus linearly or creatively versus logically.

So why does it matter whether consciousness is an actual thing or just a way of describing what we do? I think it probably does matter (rather than being matter), because as coaches we value action, we encourage clients to be the cause of their effects, maybe even the conscious cause of their effects. And none of us wants our clients to become dependent upon us. I mean do we really want our clients to believe their behaviour is so unconscious they have to keep seeing us every time they want to change their life? Do we think everybody is so incapable of dealing with stuff seemingly outside of awareness that they have to get professional help on a regular and permanent basis? I don’t imagine many coaches believe that. I would rather enable my clients to develop greater levels of awareness so they feel more able to help themselves.

I’m not sure how easy it is to fuse all these different notions of consciousness. Yet I am convinced they each offer something useful to help our clients empower themselves. The acid test for me in how I treat consciousness or unconsciousness with a specific client is: “Will my client have more choices?”

As long as we acknowledge that “consciousness” and “unconsciousness” can be a variety of different imprecise notions, rather than rigid facts, we have tremendous opportunities to take our clients on great adventures in their amazing minds. Or, to put it another way, if we have more choices so do our clients. And if they have more choices perhaps they empower themselves. I hope so.

About the Author/Further Resources

Andy lives and works in Brighton. He is an NLP trainer (Society of NLP), coach, hypnotherapist and meditation instructor with a particular interest in Hawaiian Huna and Yoga Nidra.

Visit www.springtomind.co.uk for more details about Andy’s work.

Books that Andy likes:

Trances People Live – Stephen Wolinsky

Yoga and Psychotherapy – Swami Rama et al

Mastering Your Hidden Self , A Guide to the Huna Way – Serge Kahili King

The Tibetan Yoga of Dream and Sleep – Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

The Structure of Magic – Richard Bandler & John Grinder

The World of Shamanism – Roger Walsh

Yoga Nidra – Swami Satyananda Saraswati