Well, in a classic case of “be careful of what you ask for”, I was just about to learn the answer to this question, but first I’d have to experience, thoroughly, my own remarkable unhappiness for a number of consecutive years.

At what was about to become the climax of this experience, I began to study a practical approach to Meditation and Internal Martial Arts, including Tai Chi and Yoga, with a pair of outstanding teachers.  At first, and like most beginners who aim to learn something new, the revised and enhanced patterns for thinking and moving challenged older neurological patterns that had become comfortable enough to be settled down deeply within the lower part of my brain.

The confusion and resistance generated from this collision of neurological forces pushed me to seek and discover a far more efficient way to learn new things.  Over time, I discovered that while many teachers were busy providing “content” for students to memorize, digest, understand, and then finally utilize, other teachers were simply helping students experience the “principles” their brains were already wired and prepared to accept and utilize without substantial confusion or resistance.  For myself, this proved to be the personal revelation I needed to break free and finally turn my brain into the self-learning machine that it needed to become!

I began to develop an internal system with power to convert information from traditional teaching vehicles, including textbooks, videos, and lectures, into the kind of principle-based information system a brain needs to learn quickly without substantial confusion or resistance.  Using this enhanced platform, it then became easy to decode, develop, and make practical use of the eastern concepts requiring advanced utilization of the body’s mental and physical design that had become the focus of an educational journey.

In the end, it was surprising to finally discover that a measurable portion of folklore about meditation, tai chi, and yoga “masters” being able to have a clear and focused mind, healthy feelings in the body, and a resourceful state of quality and appreciation in life, could really be true.  Consistent with my principle-based approach to generate healthy, happy, and successful feelings, and instead of thinking that everyone needed to be studying meditation, tai chi, and yoga to experience quality and appreciation in life, I simply concluded that each person must align with the greatness of their mind and body’s natural design until “greatness” itself could automatically become their experience.

It was a simple formula to have in mind, and I knew from experience how this practical approach worked, but now I was asking myself the question, “How am I going to help other people learn to control their neurology and achieve enhanced levels of quality in life, especially when I know from experience that relatively few people become willing to study and learn the practical forms of meditation, tai chi, and yoga, for which I had become a teacher?”

The answer turned out to be quite simple.  While I had been teaching students to exercise and express the design of the physical body in a multitude of ways, even to the point of teaching runners how to apply "fa-jing", tai chi’s spring-like emission of relaxed power, to natural running (see Tai Chi Running), I had only been teaching them how to control their mind using the one basic mind-state associated with meditation and mindfulness.  It’s true that I was teaching them how to generate a useful combination-state of focus, relaxation, and awareness, but I still wasn’t showing them how to use this mind-state as a powerful stepping-stone to get to the next level.

Personally, I had already been experimenting with an intuitive set of “thinking technologies” and had actually used them successfully to overcome one the most difficult periods in my life, but it wasn’t until after I had been introduced to Richard Bandler’s incredible work in the field of Neuro-Linguistic Programming that I began to realize the value of sharing similar technologies with other people, including students and clients.

I knew that a truly unique and life changing door had opened, and I went on to spend many years studying and learning from documented achievements of masters within the world of personal change including Richard Bandler, Milton H. Erickson, Virginia Satir, Frank Farrelly, John Grinder, and many others.  Again, I utilized the same internal system I had developed to convert information from traditional teaching vehicles into the kind of principle-based information system a brain needs to learn quickly without substantial confusion or resistance.  Building from the unique platform I had established previously, it seemed natural to generate a therapeutic model for the growth and development of greater mental and physical health that would include principles from both western and eastern concepts for how we can be in charge of our neurology, become the director of our experiences, and finally generate the kind of quality and appreciation we all need in life!

Once I had learned to generate a clear and focused mind, healthy feelings in the body, and a resourceful state of quality and appreciation in life, other people began to notice and comment with kind, encouraging, and intriguing compliments as one person did when he wrote, “I wish I had just a small portion of what makes you tick.  I’m sure it would resolve many of my problems.”  From that point forward, I knew I had discovered first hand what other masters in the field of personal change had been teaching implicitly and explicitly for years, that a healthy and resourceful state within the mind and body naturally leads a person to recognize and make better and better choices in life, and that these healthy and resourceful feelings could be developed within the mind and body of anyone who wanted or needed to create and enjoy a better life for themselves!

After studying and learning from some of the most technical, creative, and intuitive masters in the field of personal change, like Richard Bandler and Milton H. Erickson, I knew I had discovered an incredible set of tools needed to actually recode neurological connections in a client’s brain with near surgical precision.  I began to realize that it was possible not only to alter and eliminate unwanted symptoms, but it was also possible to help people recode these neurological connections in ways that could help them step into alignment with their own unique design to experience a clear and focused mind, healthy feelings in the body, and a resourceful state of quality and appreciation just as I had, but without a specific need for meditation, tai chi, and yoga practice.

As a practitioner, one of the things that makes my work so interesting and challenging is the simple neurological fact that each person comes to me with their own unique neurological brain and body, and that each path for them to experience full potential is a different one.  This is exactly the reason why an EffortlessBodyAndMind model for the growth and development of greater mental and physical health was designed to be flexible in it’s application and continuous in its growth toward greater health, happiness, and long lasting success!