Transformational Teachings from Counselor Jane Ilene Cohen

Dear Jane,

Since our last visit in mid-May life has continued to accelerate forward.

Business wise I’m still in a ‘process’ of sorts yet financial stability improves with each passing day. In early May I contemplated a long trip to break away from the daily routine and find fresh air. Everything came together. As a result, I spent all of June in Italy.

Most of my time away was spent just enjoying the moment with no particular agenda. Yet new ideas for business were constantly circulating. This mental process of ’sharpening the ax” was productive
because preparation and well thought out planning is best for important decisions. In respects similar to what you offer people…it was an opportunity to step back and look at life from a new perspective. It
stimulates the mind into alternative realities. What an experience.

My attitude toward others and life has risen to a new level. Relating to others in a genuine, sincere manner brings huge dividends and the smiles w/laughter (when available) are priceless. Being able to enjoy yourself and those around you brings about a tremendous sense of calm and confidence. I very much like this balance. And with respect to business, years of unique training are now coming into focus. For a long period of time these skills were out of favor with the mainstream. The world has shifted significantly and now I’m perfectly positioned for this new environment.

The ‘unique training’ I mentioned includes time spent with you in private consulting as well as the group sessions. It is a cumulative process. There is no other way I could have learned these lessons anywhere else. Thanks for being you and offering a few of us your insights and transformational attitudes about life.

- Jered.

In a brief email update to Jane, Jered said “Business is moving along well…Life is good.”  Jered hasn’t been having NLP TimeLine Therapy sessions with Jane for a while as it appears we have cleared what we need to clear for his ability to create financial abundance.  It now seems a matter of Jered putting this all into practice.

Jered’s Phone Update:

Jered told Jane that his business is going well. He’s finding that human and other resources are opening up. He finds himself drawing closer to other people, and because of that he’s finding more of an overlap of skills and experiences. He is finding resources that he never noticed before, but were there all along. Or maybe it’s now he’s more open to taking advantage of them, maybe because he’s feeling more open to other people.

Because Jered’s projects were so small before, they couldn’t financially support a team of people. But at the same time he was really needing a team to make the projects work. Now the scale of his projects are getting larger, which allows him to bring in more people to help him.

He feels like he’s coming alive.

Highlights of Jered NLP TimeLine Therapy Session 5-4-09

(Client’s name is changed to protect his privacy.)

Overview: Jered is saying he thinks his difficulty in doing things like meet deadlines and due dates has to do with him being an “in-time” person. He thinks this causes these things to not take on the significance they should, and causes him to not make his obligations important enough to meet the terms of his agreements. He thinks part of the problem he has functioning in business is because these kinds of things are just not natural for him to do.

(“In-time” and “through-time” are NLP definitions of the two main ways people inherently organize time. “In-time” people go with the flow, don’t like closure because they want to keep their options open, don’t like planners, calendars and watches, and often have a hard time being on time. “Through-time” people decide how they want their life to be and make it that way. They feel anxious if they don’t have closure, and love planners, calendars and watches. They feel insulted if people are late.)

Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s Teachings: “The rule of thumb is life is meant to work. And even though logically it looks like that kind of functioning would be more difficult for an in-time person, it’s just a shift in approach. It’s perfectly possible for you to be able to flow in the way that you need to flow for your business and have it work, if there are no unhealed issue in there. You may not see or be able to figure out, from the current ground you are standing on, how that would work, but it’s never about the nature of who you are, or the way time inherently is, or the way life is that’s causing the problem. I’m half in-time and half through-time, so I can understand both sides of it. And when I’m in my in-time mode, and things are flowing right, it all works. When things are not flowing right, it doesn’t work. And there’s a reason why it is or it is not flowing right. And that has to do with whether there are unhealed issues or not, which cause you to be in the flow or not in the flow. In-time people need to be in the flow. Whatever way of relating to time is natural to you, there’s a way for it to work in relation to other people and the world around you. Whether it’s one kind of timeline or another kind of timeline doesn’t not inherently cause a problem.”

(Jered was saying that he feels fears and doubt, related to functioning in the world, but he doesn’t know exactly what about.)

“There seems to be a separation for you between where you are, and where the world is — a lack of alignment. The challenge for you is to have your internal experience come into alignment with that which is outside of yourself, whether it’s people or deadlines or whatever it is. It is necessary to intersect your internal world with the world outside of yourself in order to meet obligations, to do what you need to do to survive, to stay within the law, etc. You’re afraid that you can’t do it because your internal world is not hooking up easily with the external world. For some reason, intersecting your reality with the reality outside of yourself, is a struggle for you. And that can be really frightening, because you might not do what you need to do to survive. Or you may not do what you need to do to follow the law so you don’t get arrested. Or you may not do what you need to do to make a friend, or to be on time to something that really matters to you. It could be frightening if you don’t feel confident that you can intersect with the world outside of yourself to make things work. I promise you that it’s not about the nature of life. There’s an unhealed issue in there. And we can get to it. And we can clear it.”

(Jered is saying he is unconvinced that unhealed issues are the basis for all of these problems.)

“Because I’m documenting this on my blog, when we clear things, and you shift, and you see that things work that you thought could not possibly work, it’s going to be down in black and white. This whole work is a demonstration that life is meant to work, and that’s one of the things that excites me so much about it. The only thing that keeps life from working are the unhealed issues. Clearing limiting decisions is an evolutionary process, it’s an expansion, it’s a straightening out, it’s an aligning.”

(Jered was saying he can’t see how it could work.)

“You’re looking at the problem from within the frame-of-reference of the ground you’re standing on. And the ground you’re standing on is distorted by the limiting decision, which makes it appear impossible. You can’t solve the problem from the distorted ground that you’re standing on. So I have to figure out what the distortion is that you’re standing on that is making life not work for you. Whatever the outside obligations, deadlines and things along those lines are, they represent authority to you, which causes you to disconnected from them. Your internal experience is not in alignment with the external authority making demands on you.

The parent’s job is to help the child relate to the external world, so that eventually they can function in relation to the external world. There’s some really significant way that your parents didn’t do that. They were actually preventing you from relating to the external world. They had a very limited way they wanted you to function, within their limited perspective that felt really stultifying to you. The way your father set it up, if you functioned from your own understanding and experience of reality, you wouldn’t be following the rules, so he’d punish you. So you have to do things in a way that doesn’t make sense to you, by understanding what he wants you to do from his point-of-view. And if you do it just the way he wants you to do it, from his point-of-view, which makes no sense to you, then you won’t get punished. But if you do it in a way in which you’re really engaged in it, using your intelligence and creativity in making it better, he’d punish you. So there’s no alignment between you and the authority, in terms of meeting an outside obligation. This would make you rebel and avoid getting into the territory where you’re connecting with a deadline or an obligation. Because to you it’s painful and it’s against yourself. You don’t see it as something that you can work with, that is a positive experience, in which you can bring your real self into the picture, and connect with the external obligation or deadline. No wonder you avoid it.”

The limiting decision Jered cleared: “Authority restricts him from being himself.”

The first event in which he made the limiting decision: He was 5 or 6 years old. It was early morning and time to wake up, but he’s still asleep. Father came and said it was time to wake up, but he didn’t want to. So his father poured a glass of cold water on him, which was a shock to him. Jered then made the decision that his nature rhythm or cycle was being disrupted by the outside world, and he was out of sync with it. Just a few minutes more of sleeping would have put him in sync with everything. But being pulled into it was very unpleasant. The reason he had to get up was the bus was coming. Sleeping a few minutes more would not have made him late for the bus.

Transcript Excerpts of Jane’s Teachings during the TimeLine Process: “You interpreted your father as the outside world because he’s the one that woke you up. But in this situation the real outside world was the bus, that was coming at a certain time, and that was the actual reality requirement. And you would have had time to sleep a few minutes longer, and still made the bus. Your father was just the intermediary, misinterpreting the situation for the purposes of his own unhealed issues.

To you, your father represented authority, which is a person who is an intermediary between you and the outside world. Now, just because your father was in the position of having control and power, and he was acting like the authority, doesn’t make him the authority. Authority is a concept, beyond any individual person. Authority is supposed to represent truth. That’s why you give them the power. And your father, in this moment, was not doing that. He wasn’t representing truth. But because you made this limiting decision, from that point on, you have attributed everybody who appears to be in the position of authority, as being unreasonable and out of alignment with you. But the real authority is truth and life and the divine; the real and larger power, which defines reality. And in this event, you were perfectly well in alignment with reality and truth. And your father was out of alignment with reality and authority. He was functioning from his own unhealed issues from a dysfunctional place. The decision you made is that the authority restricts you from being yourself. And then you confused the authority with the outside world.

This is very similar to Bennet. He has also avoided authority, probably for similar reasons. He’s a very one-of-a-kind person like you are. And both of you have restricted, to a very large degree, the possibilities you could do in life because of this. You’re had to reinvent the wheel over and over again. You create the whole life that you live in, completely different and completely done by you, and you haven’t gotten to use all of the wonderful things that have been developed by other people, that fall under the category of authority to you. So you have been separately and stubbornly only doing the things that you’ve devised in order to keep your independence from authority, which has totally restricted you, probably especially in business. It’s caused you to be limited to what you already know. I’m sure it’s restricted you in every area of your life, personal and business.

Transcript Excerpts of Jane’s Teachings:

“To summarize: The issue is you’re trying to present yourself in a way that is acceptable by the norm on the one hand, but above the pack on the other. And what has symbolized that for you are your intellectual abilities and you being a pilot, because those were the attributes your father had that both stood out and were acceptable in the social setting you grew up in. What you have been hiding is the part of you that is really just you, that you decided was not acceptable in the context you grew up in. Because you don’t think it is acceptable, you present a false persona instead. And that false persona puts people off. It creates a separation.

At this point I think the direction to go in is to understand what it is you are hiding and why. I think that it may have to do with you being so sensitive and vulnerable.

I don’t know how much you are aware of how very vulnerable and sensitive you are. This presents particular challenges for the personality. As far as I can understand from my own personal experience, unhealed issues are harder for a person who is so sensitive and vulnerable. I’m very sensitive and vulnerable myself, and because I had a lot of self-hate, somehow the two got confused and I felt sensitivity and vulnerability as a liability; but eventually I got to perceive that aspect of myself as a finely tuned instrument, and it’s a matter of learning how to play it. Being especially sensitive and vulnerable might present a particular challenges for a man because of the social ideas of what being a man is, although not so much as it used to be. But when you were a child growing up (which is when this whole thing got formed in you), the social context was probably pretty prejudicial against males who were sensitive and vulnerable.

It’s not that you have to stop having these attributes, but rather you have to clear whatever causes you to use your sensitivity and vulnerability against yourself. So you can glory in it, be out there with it in joy and happiness and power. So you can use it to create what you really want in your life, in the fullness of who you are.

(Jered said one way his sensitivity and vulnerability causes a problem for him is when someone wants him to do something he doesn’t want to do, because he is very sensitive to other people’s needs. He then avoids the person, because otherwise he would yield to their wishes. He, in general, keeps himself hidden so people can’t take advantage of his soft spots.)

The sensitivity and vulnerability is not the problem. Unhealed issues, i.e. limiting decisions, are what is the problem. Sensitivity and vulnerability is a gift and so we want to get you to the place where you can receive it and enjoy it as a gift.

The difficulty for you in this could be both the results of you not being able to keep your boundaries because of your sensitivity; and also just being seen as so vulnerable and sensitive, in itself, because you may feel there is something wrong with you. (Jered said the problem isn’t him being seen that way, but what it causes him to do that hurts himself. He doesn’t think about the sensitivity and vulnerability, in itself, as being an issue.) That’s because you’ve created such strong defense systems against this. You just disengage, which causes your sensitivity and vulnerability to not feel like a problem. Except that disengaging itself is a problem.

The issue in front of us is fairly straightforward; i.e. if someone wants something from you that you don’t want to give to them, you just avoid them. That’s pretty straightforward. But other things you do such as the way you use your intellect, which pushes people away, it’s more subtle, and what’s underneath that is, at the moment, less clear. It has to do with the persona that you created for yourself that feels acceptable to you, but which separates you from other people — it keeps people away from your real self. You have an artificial personality, from which you relate to people most of the time, that gives you a sense of being acceptable and above the mundane. That’s your preferred way of relating. And you do it much more than I think you are aware of, and being in the group* will help you become more aware of that.”

Further Overview leading to the TimeLine Process: Jered said it is easier for him to purchase properties than to sell them (thereby receiving money for the project), because its hard for him to receive in general.”

The limiting decision Jered cleared with TimeLine Process: It started out as “He is not worth receiving anything.” It turned out to be “When he wants something that’s really important to him, from someone, he’ll be rejected.”

The first event in which he made this decision: He was 3 years old in his living room. A man was working on the TV to fix it. Jered was very curious about what it was all about. He wanted to see what the guy was doing. But he evidently was getting in the way and the man said, “Go away! Get out of here when I’m working.”

Jered’s Phone Call to Jane, the next day, about the results of his session

(Jered said that what Jane said about his sensitivity and vulnerability being a gift rather than a problem was a very significant reframe for him and had a large impact.)

Excerpt of Jane’s response: “Everything that’s really you is a gift, and that, you could say, is the basic message I keep getting across in the group*. Every thing that is a defense system, is a mask that gets in the way of the real gift you are to others. People don’t seem to recognize the value of who they really are, but that’s where your real contribution is. People think their false persona is what is valuable. But it’s what gets in the way. It’s what stops the real, living juice.

(Jered said that bringing these things that you don’t want to see, up to the surface, so they can come into people’s awareness, is what the group* does.)

* “Shifting into Your New Consciousness” group experience, which Jered recently started participating in.

(For information about NLP TimeLine Therapy, click here.)

Beginning Overview:

Jered said that repetitive, mundane stuff needs to be done to sell his property, and he hasn’t found a person to do that for him. He has recently been going to a business counselor who is helping with how to find someone. It’s taken all this time to get help with this matter.

Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s Teachings:

“You did find someone who seems to be helpful, and that’s great. But you think it’s just an accident, after knocking yourself out for years and years and years, trying to find a solution. But it’s not just the luck of the draw, or some kind of a random thing. There is something going on in you that has been blocking this from happening.

(Jered was saying he thought Jane thought he should be doing the everyday, mundane work himself.) “I’m not telling you that you should be doing the mundane stuff. I’m totally for you getting someone to help you by doing that for you. You’re interpreting something backwards. And that’s why you’ve got it confused. Whatever this is, it probably relates to why you’ve had such difficulty finding people to do it for you.

In your childhood situation you were surrounded by the mundane. And your father being a pilot seemed to be the route out of that. And because people hid behind the every day tasks, and made that be a limitation on the whole experience of life, and tried to force you to do things in a mundane way, that whole aspect of life was torture to you, because it meant putting yourself into a small place, limiting yourself. And you wanted no association with that, so you rebelled against it. So, you’re in a power-struggle about this. Rather than relating to things the way they are, you’re trying to fight some unseen person to extricate yourself from this.

The aspect that we’ve done a lot of work in clearing has had to do with you not accepting the way you were different, and that you were really down on yourself about and hid. And now the other part is confusing because it seems like the same issue, but it’s not. It’s your investment in being perceived as being different, which is not the same thing as accepting the uniqueness of who you are. One has to do with the reality of who you are, and the other has to do with getting yourself to be perceived in a certain way, having to do with who you are not, as a substitute for who you are.

So you created a ‘uniqueness’ that has been a construct, in order to stand out from the mundane. And this was being a pilot and your intellectual knowledge — the way you use your mind, the way you use words, putting them together in an intellectual way. But this way of using your mind has more to do with proving yourself to be above the pack, rather than the intellectual thing itself. And I think you have probably lost potential business partners because of your approach to including you being a pilot in the deal. This thing that you have manufactured to be different, is off-putting, and pushes people away. It creates a separation because it’s an artificial construct meant to prove something about yourself.

I’m in no way telling you to not use your intellect or to not fly, but we have to separate these things from their dysfunctional symbolic meaning of raising you above the mundane world, because it is handicapping you. What you should be developing, instead, is the true uniqueness of who you are, that you have felt is unacceptable. And although that part of you is out there more, it’s probably not yet out there in its full expression, expressing from the true uniqueness in you. That’s where your genius is really going to come out, rather than leaning on these symbols of what separates you and makes you feel acceptable. This is very important. What I’m saying is your intellectual ability, and your ability to fly are not what make you unique. They are not what pull you ahead of the pact. They are not what separate you from the norm. That’s not where it is.

It seems that the attributes your father had, are the attributes that you feel are both different and acceptable (his intellectual abilities and his ability to fly). So those are the things you’re really invested in, in order to make yourself be extraordinary. And at the same time, I’m wondering if you were actually very different than your father, but didn’t feel the aspects of you that were different from him would be acceptable. Focusing on these areas that enabled you to feel both different and acceptable, has formed and limited the avenues in which you thought it was possible to expand. And some of the paths you closed are really very unique to who you actually are, but feel more of a risk to you because they expose who and where you actually are. Whereas the way you use your intellect is not an act of revealing, because it comes from a defensive place. It’s a proving, rather than a revealing. And with something that’s a proving rather than a revealing, there’s no way to expand and create something that’s your unique contribution.

It’s also disconnecting, because it has to do with you having to be different. When you are in a teaching mode (or expressing your expertise), which you were in a section of your original website, it felt to me too much about yourself, in a way that didn’t connect with others. It was almost combative, as if you were challenging someone to disagree, rather than being connected to a truth larger than yourself. A person who has knowledge and really is motivated to teach is enfolding the other person, really feeling where they are at and then speaking to where they are at, rather than bombarding them with their perspective.

Some defense systems work more effectively than other ones. And it’s hard for people to give up defense systems that seem to serve them. And the flying and the way you have used your intellect are things that make you feel acceptable, important, above the pact, not mundane, and that you have something unique to offer. It has a lot of goodies there for you, and it doesn’t feel risky. But it is having repercussions that you’re not consciously aware of, which is why I suggest you get into the group (“Shifting into Your New Consciousness”) so you can get more feedback and see how this way of relating is affecting other people and what kind of responses you’re actually getting.

(The group brings out the unique expression of each person. What’s been coming up recently in the group is that people like to be seen in a particular way that has to do with their defense system — rather than revealing who they really are, which they have been, to varying degrees, hiding. And so the process is penetrating through the defense system and bringing out the real gold, the real valuable being the person has been squelching down. And the other members of the group become quite intuitive and then able to see through each others’ stuff as well. The group gets to be very powerful in terms of being aware of and supporting each others’ real selves.)

In order to release this investment, we need to release what is still keeping you from really being out there with who you are, that we’ve been working on getting you to accept more and more of. You have been able to avoid revealing very much of who you are because you’ve had these substitute symbolic attributes (flying and intellect) that you have been leaning on as your value, as what you have to offer as your way of being in the world. We’re dealing with the ground that you are standing on at a very deep level. So this is shifting the whole frame-of-reference, which I think is very important for getting you unstuck.

So to summarize: There is having the courage to reveal the uniqueness of who you are (and many people have limiting decisions against their true selves, which can cause no end of problems). And then there is the defense system of trying to be different on purpose, which is not a vulnerable revealing, but an investment in proving that you are not a part of the limited, mundane world of your parents that you grew up with. The being different on purpose is not the same thing as revealing the uniqueness, which is far more of a challenge and takes far more courage. So that’s the area we need to open up.”

(Note: We didn’t get to a TimeLine Therapy process in this session, because getting to the limiting decision was so embedded in Jered’s defense system, that clarifying what the limiting decision is took the whole session.)

(For a description of “TimeLine Therapy,” click here.
For a description of “limiting decisions,” click here.)

Current goal: Jered being able to bring a team together to work with.

For the kind of projects Jered works with, a team is essential. But he has been unable to find the right people, or for one reason and another he’s never been able to put together a team that works for him. And so he has had great trouble bringing his projects to completion in order for him to pay back investors and bring money in for himself.

Part of the issue in working with other people, is that Jered feels at the mercy of anyone who has resources he needs.

Transcript Excerpt of Jane’s Teaching:

“You set up situations in which it would be common courtesy for the other person to respond in a certain way that would give you what you need. To you this gives you leverage, and you are very ridged in how you think the person ought to behave. And then you stand on your high horse if they don’t do it.

I think this is because you won’t be vulnerable in relation to your needs, because you think having needs for someone makes you weak, and it gives them all of the power. So instead you find a way to leverage this, setting it up so there is a social code that they should follow, so that the social code then puts pressure on them to give you what you need, rather than being in an actual interaction with the person in which you are vulnerable.

Basically you’re seeing yourself as powerless. You are seeing yourself as needy and without rights. It doesn’t occur to you that you are valuable to the other person, and that they would be willing to accommodate you because they want what is of value that you bring to the table.

The place for you to stand on is truth, which is the ground I’m talking about that you don’t stand on. You don’t trust that if you do, you will get what you need. It’s just a matter of revealing the truth of where you are. In other words, there are certain things that really are unacceptable to you, and there are certain things that you really need to happen. And that’s just standing on truth. It’s not a power-struggle. But because you don’t trust truth, you fudge on it, and give yourself away in order to get what you want from the other person. You’re leaning on your own manipulations rather than the power of truth.”

The Limiting Decision Jered Cleared during the TimeLine Process: “He (Jered) is powerless.”

The first event in which he made this decision: Just before he was born.

Transcript excerpt from Jane’s Teaching during the TimeLine process:

“It was a whole new dynamic that you didn’t understand about. You had no idea how much power you actually had, just by your beingness. You crying had a huge effect, because people have huge power in relation to each other by the emotional impact they have on each other. And you had huge emotional impact; all babies do. But you just didn’t recognize that as power. You weren’t even thinking in terms of interpersonal power, because when you were in the womb, your survival didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything interpersonal. It seemed to be strictly a physical system that required nothing of you. And so you had no idea how powerful the interpersonal impact people have on each other have is. Therefore when you were being pushed out of your secure support system in the womb, being completely physically vulnerable, you made a decision that you were powerless.”

New possibilities have been opening up for Jered, and one of them is he was invited to speak on a radio show about his expertise in real estate. He also has begun a website, so that he could start putting out there what he has to offer.