NLP Time Lining

Introduction

Most often than not, the frames set in our childhood affect our adult lives. When certain old patterns of thinking become outdated or useless, they might start creating trouble in our modern life. Time lining helps to get rid of these old and useless thinking patterns, and reframe our minds into a more innovative thinking using Neuro-linguistic courses.

The tools of Neuro-linguistic Programming and time lining techniques can be used to heal a person from painful memories using the person’s own resources. When the painful memories are healed, the person can forgive the people who caused the hurt. A complete healing can only occur after a total forgiveness. This can be done using Neuro-linguistic courses.

In Neuro-linguistic programming, the process is usually more important than the content. In time lining, we need to find out the how our brain codes time, distinguishes between the past, present and the future. Naturally, the brain possesses some way for identifying the distinct events in our life and ordering all the events on the scale of time. We also use the language of time in our language with statements such as “I look forward to meeting you”, “I wish I could go to the past and change that event” etc. Our brain recognizes the difference between past, present and future events, and orders them in time and space plane.

As an experiment, think of an activity you do regularly. It can be anything like driving, brushing teeth, walking etc. Imagine a time five years ago when you were doing this activity. Then imagine doing the activity two years ago. Think of last week, today and then next week. Think of doing this activity two years from now, and five years from now. Now note the differences in each of this individual imagination images. Note how they differ in color, panorama, movement, dimension, brightness, perspective etc. This is known as Neuro-linguistic submodality coding, and it helps the brain to distinguish between the past, present and future.

How the Brain Processes Neuro-linguistic Submodalities

The brain uses the Neuro-linguistic submodalities to understand which activity occurred in the past, present and future, and how they were ordered. This power of the mind is an unconscious process, and it codes the memories so that they are placed on the time line. In Neuro-linguistic programming, this collection and organization of memories is called Time-Lining. Once the memories are organized on the time line, they can be easily accessed or recollected. This can be done by undergoing Neuro-linguistic courses.

In the Neuro-linguistic Time-Line Therapy training meted out by Tad James, a common question asked is how you know it is “you” when you get up in the morning at look at the mirror. If we did not have any collection of memories of the past, and their order of how we look, sound of feel like, we would be looking at a stranger in the mirror.

The basic presumption of Time-Lining is that our memories in the form of pictures are ordered in a linear manner. Since time is usually seen as moving or flowing, we associate time with a metaphor such as some quality or characteristic. Memories can be stored on a line, which could be straight or curved, folded or bent. Once you have individual memories of your routine activity, see if you can draw a continuous imaginary line joining each of these events. This will be the Time-Line for your specific activity.

When we consider time as a line, we are usually employing the visual submodality of brightness, color, distance, focus, size and location. The most important factor of the visual submodality is distance, since it tells us how far or near in time the activity happened or will happen in relation to the present. When a greater distance is perceived, the activity is far away in time as per the present. Other visual Neuro-linguistic attributes also indicate the age of the memory, and whether the memory is of the past or the future. The brightness and focus attributes signify how far away in time the memory is. For some people the past is dark and gloomy but the future is bright and clear. For some, the future might be bright but not focused enough or lingering near the horizon.

Some people use auditory submodalities, but it is difficult to access different memories at the same time using this submodality. Kinesthetic submodalities are also difficult to use since they are not very precise. People who use the auditory or kinesthetic submodalities have trouble differentiating between memories in the past, present and future. It is therefore advisable to switch to the visual submodalities, since visual coding is much more precise and is the best way to access, analyze and change memories. This can be learnt using Neuro-linguistic training.