You know the agony of not knowing what to do, or the frustration of scattered thoughts, or the regret that follows unreasonable reactions?
Well, what if that was never an issue for you ever again?
Going META is the process of becoming aware of your thought stream, without being washed away by it, and in that ‘special’ awareness finding clarity, focus and choice.
Going META in NLP means ‘stepping outside of yourself’ and gaining a fresh perspective. It’s the process of detaching from your current point of view and expanding your perception to that of a dissociated observer. It’s like becoming a fly on the wall who sees the big picture and doesn’t mind what it sees.
Going META is simple and natural when you’re already disciplined in not taking yourself too seriously. When you know that your thoughts about yourself, another, or any situation are only a story that your mind tells you, and not necessarily the whole truth, then not being affected by those disempowering thoughts is easy.
So the first trick to successfully going META is to accept that any point of view is never the final answer. The map is not the territory. Our internal representations (maps) are always subjective, and it’s our internal representations that determine our thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Accepting this fact means gaining greater freedom over how you respond to people and situations.
So the next time you don’t know what to do, or you have scattered thoughts, or you sense the tendency to want to react in a harmful way, go META. This means snapping out of your thought stream, and observing it flooding your head. It’s only your head, don’t worry, thoughts are harmless unless you believe them. Believing thoughts is when they affect your body.
Just through observing thoughts for a moment or two, they loose their intensity and you are less affected by them. Simply watch those thought bubbles come and go. As soon as unresourceful thoughts pass, you spontaneously connect with thoughts that are more useful or productive. Through observing thoughts, as opposed to believing them to be true, you may even find yourself in a thoughtless, yet resourceful state from where your wise inner guidance has the opportunity to bring any necessary solution to mind.
Going META, as explained above, might be the ‘no brainer’ that seems obvious, yet the application of it tends to have much further reaching benefits when actually used, instead of taken for granted.
Applied Open Awareness is another simple way to establish the META perspective.
Written by Jevon Dangeli – NLP Trainer & Coach, MSc Transpersonal Psychology
