A Breif History of Taylor
Where it all began and how my life became about helping people
My twenties and thirties
My forties so far and how I began to practice NLP
After I watched The Secret and everything began to change
I knew that NLP and Law of Attraction were a great match
...and then the Chronicles of Creation were born
Where it all began and how my life became about helping people
On April 11th, 1979 I had my first major mystical experience. I was 16 at the time and I was so transformed that my driving focus became sharing that experience with others and helping them to create similar experiences for themselves. Over the years, my interpretation of that initial experience has changed many times. My methods for sharing it have changed many times. So has my language for describing it. The core experience remains the same. I surrendered to the universe in a profound way and had an experience of being totally reborn.
Ever since that first rebirth experience, my life has been largely focused on helping others. Sometimes I fed them. Sometimes I helped them move something heavy. Mostly I talked to them in ways that helped them think more clearly and create the experiences they wanted. I noticed that most people's happiness was dramatically affected by the quality of their relationships so I began to study relationships.
My junior year of high school I spent my study hall hour almost every day, counseling a senior about her relationship with her boyfriend. They later married and he supported her through nursing school. Years later my father was in the hospital and dying, and this same woman was the head nurse of the intensive care unit where my father was being cared for.
She came to me and asked if there was anything at all she could do for me to let her know, because she wouldn't be a nurse if not for me. Seeing my confusion she explained that she believed that she and her husband would have broken up several times over during that last year of high school, if not for my influence. I knew then that part of my purpose on this planet was to help people create more fulfilling and sustainable relationships. Little did I know that once my grand vision started coming into focus, this would be a relatively small part, although still a part needed for the success of the whole.
My twenties and thirties
Over the years, I've made myself available to many people who needed life or relationship coaching. I got referrals from friends that resulted in me coaching total strangers. I even received one request from a person I knew, but barely so, to make an emergency house call during an argument that looked like it was leading to the end of a relationship. Through it all, I never thought of this work as a job or charged money for it. Even when life coaching began to gain a lot of popularity, I simply continued what I had always been doing, and never thought of calling it coaching or charging.
I did learn a lot along the way, both from the people I helped and from reading and studying a wide variety of books on psychology, relationships, change, and applied meta-physics of all sorts. All this raised my skill at helping others create the lives they wanted, as well as helping me shape a life for myself that I enjoyed more and more each year. The one notable exception was a period of depression following the end of an overwhelmingly enmeshed, ten-year relationship.
I lost my best friend, my romantic partner, my business partner, and my near-24-7, joined-at-the-hip running buddy all in one fell swoop. I'd heard several watered down versions of the Law of Attraction along the way, but being diluted to the point of ineffectiveness, they did not attract me. As such, I had no idea that my grief had become self-sustaining, and it took me almost two years, and the loving support of some friends, to find my way out and back to a life that got better and better.
My forties so far and how I began to practice NLP
Then one night a couple I'd known for years and never seen even bicker, decided to bring a relationship meltdown they were having to my living room. A lengthy, intense and effective session eventually lead to their departure in a much more stable state. Afterwards, my partner Rebecca, who had never seen me in this role before, looked at me and said, "You're really good at that! Why don't you do that professionally?" I said that I didn't agree with many of the accepted models taught to professional therapists and psychologists, and that I was not personally inclined to hang out a shingle based solely on my own experience, even though at this point I had been helping people by talking to them for well over 20 years. She asked if there were any other methodologies that I found more acceptable, and I immediately remembered a web site I had found recently for NLPU.
I had read about and experimented a bit with NLP over the years, and liked some of what I saw, but had never pursued training because I had not found teachers that I was resonant with...that is until I discovered NLPU. I attended there soon after, and have since been certified there as an NLP Practitioner, Master Practitioner, Consultant and Trainer. I have been identifying as a coach since then, and have formalized some of my practice, working with more strangers than before. However, by this time my grand vision had been growing for years, and I knew this was not what I wanted to do full time, so I only attracted as many clients as I could work with while maintaining a day job, and most of those were close enough to the poverty line that the work was pro bono.
For the next couple of years, I coached part time and continued making a living with contract IT work. It paid well enough that I could take off time to go to NLPU or to plan and teach my own workshops, but it was neither my passion nor my mission. My life was back to getting better and better. It had been for 6 years. But I still believed I had to work very hard to finance it all. Then a wonderful thing happened. A contract from which I was expecting 3 to 6 months of full time plus work, suddenly and unexpectedly shrank to the point that I could no longer rely on it as a significant source of income. Very quickly, I was out of hours to bill and had no new income stream lined up. It was also about this time that I finally got around to watching The Secret.
After I watched The Secret and everything began to change
The DVD had been in my possession for weeks, but I had been very busy with work, and then with frantic updating of my resume and compilation of a list of businesses to send it to. A friend who I asked for an opinion suggested a total overhaul and restructuring of my resume and I could see his reasoning, so I delayed sending out the one I had just updated. During that delay, I watched the Secret and it added a few missing pieces to things I had been learning for many years.
I experienced several subtle but pervasive changes in my perspective, and one massive change in my attitude. I immediately realized that sending out my resume and doing computer work for yet another corporation was not what I wanted to do at all. In fact, the idea was so unappealing that it seemed like a cop out. I realized that what I did want was to start devoting all of my time to the things that I incarnated in this body to do. Once I was contemplating that possibility, I felt a rapidly growing sense that it was time to make that leap.
I made a choice that the portion of my life in which my real work had to take a back seat to making a living was over. A new portion of my life has begun - one in which I focus entirely on my passionate desire to make a difference for the rest of humanity. As I began to apply all that I had learned in my daily life, I discovered that my NLP skills were very well-suited to making it easier to apply the law of attraction effectively. Application of the law of attraction requires the ability to make - and follow through on - choices about what you focus on and how you feel about it. It seemed to me that this is where many people get stuck.
I knew that NLP and Law of Attraction were a great match
Many people feel like they have little choice about what comes into their thoughts, and even less choice regarding how they feel about the events of their lives. NLP empowers people to choose what they want to think and feel and make it so. The version of NLP that I learned at NLPU is Systemic NLP and New Coding. It has built in to it a deep respect for the sovereignty and ecology of the individual. I realized that my next project was to use my NLP skills to help people working with the law of attraction to more easily and effectively choose their thoughts and feelings.
I had the inspiration to create a first work of some kind in this direction and distribute it feely over the Internet. The focus of this work is to use NLP to empower people working with the law of attraction. My intuition is that many thousands of people will find my work useful enough that they will happily send me enough money collectively to abundantly support me while I created more works. The numbers that came into my mind was one dollar each from thirty-seven thousand people within the first week or so after sending out e-mails. I got stuck on one thing though.
I'm confident of my NLP skills and my effectiveness as a life and relationship coach. Still, applying the law of attraction - this version of it anyway - was very new to me. My own integrity compels me to be forthright about that inexperience. I thought at the time that inexperience was a disadvantage that decreased the value of what I had to offer in relationship to applying the law of attraction. It took about a week for that to change and get my thoughts about this moving forward again.
...and then the Chronicles of Creation were born
I was standing in line at the DMV with a book that I grabbed on impulse on the way out the door to read while waiting in line. The book was Tools for Dreamers by Robert Dilts. I flipped though the book and started reading something that caught my eye. The chapter I selected started out talking about how the details of applying a skill tend to pass from conscious awareness into unconscious competence as the skill develops. The better a person gets at something, the longer they've been doing it, the less aware they tend to be of the details of how they do it. Because of this, veteran experts are often not the best teachers. They set a great example. They are the ones to watch and model in order to learn how to be as skilled as they are. But they are usually not the best at explaining or answering questions about how they do it.
This was the missing piece I was waiting on. I realized that my lack of experience with the law of attraction was actually an advantage. It meant that I had an opportunity to observe my own learning process and share it while it was fresh and still conscious. Combined with my NLP skills for modeling how anyone does anything and then teaching it to others, I had something uniquely valuable to offer. More inspiration came rushing in and the Chronicles of Creation were born. The intent of the Chronicles is to share what I learn, create, and discover as I go. I know that this involves sharing my stories of learning, teaching the NLP tools that I develop, as well as testing and reviewing many of the videos, CDs and books available from others.
I don't yet know how long the chronicles will be, or how much will be video, sound or text. I don't know if the chronicles will be given away freely in their entirety, or if I will in some sense sell them. I have had a thought of possibly charging one dollar per chapter released for internet access to the chronicles as they come into being. That thought is not yet fully in focus however. Perhaps it still needs some missing piece or slight adjustment to be totally in alignment with my being and my intent. I do know that creating the chronicles and offering them to the world is my inspired action of the moment which will move me into the future I have chosen to create...a future where my feet are now and forever firmly on my path, and my life work is truly beginning.