People@Heart

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The Concept of Personal Freedom

by Mahboob Momen

Published in Medium Magazine, May 2008

Working alongside Dr Richard Bandler is like working alongside a ‘Living Genius’ and I have been working alongside Richard since 1993... When I became his Personal Apprentice I experienced a Paradigm shift in my thoughts, attitudes and consciousness. Working with him on a book of cases studies (to be published) and the primary research it has involved has been like doing the equivalent of PhD in all his work! Not just NLP, but ‘Design Human Engineering’ (DHE), ‘Neuro Hypnotic Re-Patterning’ (NHR), ‘Shamanics’ and many other human potential technologies he has produced.

So writing this series on ‘The Possibilities of Human Potential’, the thing that comes to my mind is Personal Freedom! This is the entire purpose of Dr Richard Bandler’s work.  So when writing these articles, on my mind is how can I help you find the possibilities & the potential of your personal freedom???

But what is Personal freedom? Richard says “it is simply the most important expression a human being can have”.

I have been working with Reidun Havnes in Scandinavia since 2006 and the one comment I have heard most from Scandinavians is:“I’m alive, but I’m dead”

I don’t know if you know anybody like this? It strikes me that in the Western world, where we have more personal freedom than ever before it seems that the more we have, the less actual freedom we perceive ourselves to have.

People are just not using this freedom to set their minds free!

Instead people fill their freedom reliving sad moments of their lives; disappointments, anxiety, fear and failure. When challenged with difficulties (instead of drawing on positive resources) they draw upon the misery in their past; things that tie them to the bad events.

I am not saying life is always easy! Let’s face it, the reason we have ups and downs in life is because we are born and that is it! But you can bet that we will have good times and bad times. We will meet good people and bad people. We will have great experiences and terrible experiences. We will all have moments of absolute triumph and joy and moments of abject failure (where we feel that not one friend in the world is around). This is our lives! It is filled with the good and bad...

Given a 50/50 choice between thinking negatively and thinking positively, people tend to side on the negative???  It is like we have chosen to live in prisons of impossibility. We fill ourselves up with negative resources (victimisation, procrastination, fear of failure) that do not free us. Add to this people who look at the world in black and white, who then (not surprisingly) make limiting choices.  Think of the unhappiness we create, how this affects our relationships, how we generate loneliness, create self pity, fear and doubt... all because we limit ourselves.

In reality all the resources we have are all that we need to get everything that we want in life. Our ability to get what we want simply rests on how we see the world and what stop’s us, from getting what we want, in life, are the beliefs we have created for ourselves.

If we are truly to achieve the possibilities of our human potential, a horizon that is immeasurable and unquantifiable, if we are ever to get into our ships and sail the vast consciousness of our universe, to find the keys to life itself, we must first find the keys to our personal freedom.

I’m telling you humbly, the key to your personal freedom (and how you can use this to create your dreams) rests on how you use your mind to create your reality. You can look at the world in many different ways just like a kaleidoscope... You remember the kaleidoscope? If you just look at the kaleideoscope in one way, all you see is one shape. The moment you turn the kaleidoscope, everything you see changes; the shapes and possibilities are endless. It all depends on turning the kaleidoscope. Our minds are no different. We can ‘turn’ our subjective experience so that we get more useful information of our environment and in that act we flood our brains with the chemicals that set us free to grasp the potential that is available to us. We can break the chains of our past and build the road to our personal freedom.

Your experiences in life will only teach you that which you choose to learn and in that choice is your key to personal freedom. NLP and the works of Dr Richard Bandler give you those keys... and open the doorways to the possibility of your human potential.

Momen’s Acid Test - Do you need more personal freedom? Do you want to find out?

• Find a quiet place to sit & reflect
• Visualise your life just as you are...
• Fast forward your life, keeping you exactly as you are with all your strengths and limitations, exactly as you are today
• Now, fast forward visualising your life to the time when you are about to go off to the next adventure. That’s right – we know we will all die one day – long away may that be.
• Now from that point, standing at your funeral, looking back at your life, and from this position I would like you to ask yourself; “Are you satisfied with the way that you have lived?”
• If your answer is no I would like you to ask yourself; “how would you liked to have lived and what is the difference between this and how you live today?”
• If there is no difference and you are fully satisfied with who you are, then you are living to your true potential. You are living with personal freedom.
• But if there is a difference this defines the prison that limit your mind

Momen’s Law – Regaining Your Personal Freedom

• Learning to make better choices! People or things do not make you do things! Your freedom is to choose how you respond in a ways uninhibited from negative past or current experiences.
• Changing your consciousness & how you look at the world! Changing your consciousness and your senses internally gives you higher quality information (of what is happening in the world around you)
• Creating greater personal flexibility! Using this higher quality information (of your environment) you can respond with greater flexibility to your present.
• Deciding to make your time count on earth! We will die one day and the time we have we cannot spend again, so ask yourself - “Who am I? How do I want to live? How can I make my time count on earth?”.
• Creating powerful & motivating internal states! Fill yourself with powerful internal states (of confidence, happiness, joy, motivation, determination) that propel you into the future that you want...
• Living your life with passion and permission! Allowing yourself to find your potential and being passionately committed to this while giving yourself the permission to live your life to the full in synchronicity with your environment

People@Heart is lisenced

by the Society of NLP

I’m not saying bad things are not going to happen. We all have our summers and we will have our winters. This is our life! We will meet the love of our lives and we will sometimes fall into despair. But this is our life! If we only focus on the winters of our lives the only choice we give ourselves is to create a winter of our future; “Please stop this craziness, use your mind right”.

If you treat every moment of your life as if it is magical you will find every moment of our lives become magical. You are God’s celestial being on earth and with that you have been given the responsibility to find the best you, you can be, as his representatives on this earth!

The reality is there is no limit to the possibilities of our potential. Understanding this is personal freedom. It is your birthright. It is how God truly wanted you to live. Think about it.

The articles over the next 12 months will be designed to support you in your personal journey by providing new ways of looking at old things and even newer ways at looking at new things. May this help you find the path that is your destiny. If you have any questions email me on: mahboob@peopleatheart.com and please do email me because the more you talk to me, the more I’ll be able to come back to you with unique answers.

Yours in service...

Mahboob