Letting Go

Every day you're dying,
Yet some days I feel fine,
Every day I'm dying,
Yet some days you feel fine,
Every day there's weather,
Yet some days the wind blows hard,
Every day I think these thoughts,
Yet some days I let them go,
Like so many colours,
Like so many shades,
All the tones,
All the gradients,
All the textures,
All the fragrances,
All the moments,
All the spaces,
All the fragments we have,
Yet some days I let them go,
In the play of the relative,
Do we find our experience of life,
That which we love and crave,
In the play of the relative,
Do we define a concept called 'I',
Yet one day will 'I' let go.

(Increasingly, as I study hypnotic communication and how this can be used in coaching, I realise that poems are essentially hypnotic scripts. Poems use a lot of the techniques of hypnotic communication to confuse the conscious mind and therefore to open up a channel of communication with the unconscious mind or minds -the many 'mini-minds' as they are referred to in Havens & Walters fascinating book 'Hypnotherapy Scripts'. This simple poem contains some good examples of these techniques. First, it uses a repetitive number of what are known in hypnosis and NLP as 'universal quantifiers' - words such as 'every','some','all'. Universal quantifiers are vague and non-specific hence they prompt the reader to seek for their own interpretation of the words from their own deeper meaning - it is the unconscious mind that provides this meaning by throwing up a picture, a sound or a feeling into the reader's conscious mind. In hypnosis this is referred to as a 'transderivational search' whatever that means - ha, ha. The poem also contains what linguists refer to as a 'lack of referential index'. In plain English what this means is that in the phrase 'Every day you're dying' it is not clear who the 'you' is - is it referring to the reader? Is it referring to a friend or relative of the poet? Is it being used as a generalised term to refer to all people? Again, it is not clear hence the reader is prompted to provide their own meaning and the unconscious mind will provide that, hasn't it? ('tag question') Then there are things known as 'nominalisations' and an example of this is the noun 'weather' - weather does not exist in the real world, it is a made up concept. You can test for 'nominalisations' by asking the question 'Could this noun be put into a wheelbarrow?' A book can be placed in a wheelbarrow but the weather cannot and neither can love or learning or knowledege, etc. The poem also has an 'embedded command' within it 'let them go'. The idea of embedded commands is that by this stage the conscious mind is well confused, the reader is in a mild trance and therefore this command goes straight into the unconscious mind bypassing the filters and biases of conceptual thought. You are much more likely to obey such commands than if they are presented directly to your conscious mind. And then there are metaphors - in this poem the weather is used as a metaphor, the changing weather that never stays the same and therefore is continually letting go. It would all be very clever if these words were written by the conscious mind but of course they were not and that is what ultimately makes for the difference between machines and man. Now let go.)