L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.
If NLP is about “running your own brain” and Representation, then Neuro-Semantics is about the Frames and Frames-within-Frames that form the larger mental contexts within which the Representations occur. Represent a crisis event in your life and that gives us some information, but what does it mean to you? How do you interpret it? Frame it?
“Just an event that once happened.”
“A Cause that Determines my Future.”
“Something to learn from.”
“Something is wrong with me.”
We use frames to create meaning. Frames of reference give us an interpretative structure for evaluating the events and ideas we represent and so invite us into the governing meta-states. This distinguishes “meaning” at two levels.
At the primary state level where we experience the Stimulus ―> Response world, “meaning” arises from association. We call that anchoring. What is linked or anchored to what? To answer the questions, What does “work” mean? What does “saving” mean? What does “spending” mean? What does conflict mean? ― We find out what states, emotions, experiences, etc. are linked to those words.
At the meta-states levels we experience a different kind of reality, one above and beyond the Stimulus ―> Response world. We enter into a framed matrix of ideas, concepts, beliefs, and understandings that comprise a Matrix of our Mind. This gives us Contextual Meaning. What is classified as what in your mental world? What categories exist there?
Do you have the mental category of “failure” as a classification for some events? If so, then what does it take to put an activity into that class? How many things do you have in that category? Is it easy or difficult to classify something as “failure?” What about “happiness?” How does your frame that classifies events as members of that class work? Do you go there often or infrequently? What about “wealthy?” What about “feedback?”
We all live easily and naturally and unconsciously inside the Matrices of our Mind. Inside our frames we don’t notice the frames as frames. More typically we confuse our frames for “reality” and just “feel” the map as if it were the territory. That’s why waking up to the Matrix is itself like “taking the red pill” and falling down Alice’s Rabbit Hole into a Wonderland where mind creates our internal world.
Yet when we master this mechanisms of the Matrix and become a frame master, then these higher level meanings become subject to our control, rather than we being pushed around and dominated by them. That’s why in Neuro-Semantics we ask such questions as:
What meaning would you like to give to this event or idea?
What frame of mind would empower and enhance your response to X?
What frame of mind would you like to wake up in every day for the rest of your life?
And what frame of mind would support that frame?
It’s meaning all the way up … AND it is meaning all the way back down to neurology. That’s why we are neuro-semantic in our very nature and why meaning is not just a thing of the mind but inevitably becomes incorporated and embodied in our very muscles, perceptions, and actions. Neuro-Semantics is a model about how this works and it offers a set of processes for moving up and down the levels of mind, bringing Great Principles and Concepts down to the body as well as trancing all the way up to the highest levels of abstraction and trance to create Great New Inductions.
In Neuro-Semantics we mind-to-muscle great Ideas, we blow-out excuses, we develop better relationships to ideas, we jump logical levels in a single bound, we play with the fluidity of the levels as we layer new textures into our states, we open up matrix systems of beliefs and understandings, we tame the dragons that lurk in the dark corners of old matrices of pain that no longer serve to enhance our lives, and we take charge of the pleasuring that enriches the entire neuro-semantic system.