Clare Hall came for a Life Alignment session with me, and as a result wrote an article for Country Calling. She talks about her experience here.
Life coaching is a concept which I've had on the back burner for many years. But it wasn't until two male friends mentioned Caroline Mann, a coach based near Tisbury that I decided to take the plunge. Both friends had visited Caroline after hitting challenging patches in their careers – both described the coaching experience as profound and life-changing. What's not to like about that?
My own difficulty – on the surface anyway – was that I have been writing but never finishing a book for a sobering number of years. I thought some kind of self-sabotage was at the root of it and told Caroline this on the phone. 'Almost certainly,' she said, in a cheerful, matter of fact way that made me rather look forward to my appointment. Cleary nothing was going to shock her.
In the flesh Caroline is a warm, instantly likeable person. She specialises in Neuro Linguistic Programming, a kind of therapy which harnesses the power of positive thought. I started talking to Caroline about my problems with writing, she asked me a few gently probing questions and soon I was talking about a bereavement I suffered at 21 which knocked me sideways and that I had never properly dealt with. Unresolved grief, Caroline called it. She explained that she could help me to release it but I would have to come back for a session of something called Life Alignment.
And so now really this becomes a story about something else because although the personal coaching session was helpful I realised that my issues would never be fully resolved until I faced up to that buried trauma from all those years ago. Which is how I found myself lying on a bed, two weeks later revisiting memories so painful I've blocked them for more than 20 years.
Through the kinesiology Caroline identified my thyroid and stomach as the places where I was physically imbalanced, even naming yeast fungus, the allergy I've suffered from for 20 years. There were more tests and then she came up with a year – the one when my mother's ternimal illness was diagnosed – and 3 words selected from more than 2000 which I found to be extraordinarily revealing.
With Caroline's help I used these words to piece together a story which gave me real insight into my behaviour and self – none of it rocket science yet somehow it's not always easy to recognise your own truth. I found this process incredibly intense and meaningful, a bit like speed therapy.
Then it was time to revisit those painful memories and though I cried for an hour, it was actually a relief to finally allow myself to go back there.
When Caroline described life alignment to me she said she would take the trauma away from the memory. There is a scientific explanation for this identified by the biologist Bruce Lipton who discovered that cellular memory holds patterns and then repeats them. In layman's terms this means your cells recognise a trauma and go into a spasm each time the memories come around again.
Driving home after what I can only describe as one of the most powerfully affecting two hours of my life, I tried to revisit those memories I'd been so scared of. And the strange thing was the pain wasn't there any more, just the memory, just like Caroline had said.
NLP coaching and life alignment can work for all kinds of issues – from challenges at work and unrealised ambitions to past emotional traumas. You leave the session with a daily exercise to practise – a combination of deep breathing and positive visualisation which is surprisingly effective.
Only time will tell if my novel will ever get THE END stamped across the last page. But in the meantime I feel unusually calm, as though a layer of tension has been stripped away. And it's a nice place to be.
Christine Hurley came for a Life Alignment session with me, and as a result wrote an article for About My Generation. She talks about her experience here.
To be frank I wasn't at all sure that my life needed re-aligning but I was intrigued to find out more about this relatively new therapy that, till now, I had heard little about. In the broadest sense, all I knew about Life Alignment was that it is supposed to seek out the root causes of imbalance in the body, identifying blockages that can cause physical and emotional problems, restoring the body to a state of healing and well-being.
This sounded like just the thing for me. Having recently emerged from a gruelling year of cancer treatment, and with a great desire to stay firmly in remission, I was very interested in anything that would remove any deep-seated stresses or buried anxieties that could have contributed to my illness.
When I met up with Caroline Mann, who is a Life Alignment practitioner, she expanded more on the theory, describing it as a holistic healing system that works on an emotional, physical, mental and spiritual level to remove fears, self limiting beliefs and phobias. She believes it can help improve our health, our well-being and even align us with the environment in which we live.
Caroline explains, we are the sum total of what we have experienced in life so far. Events that may have long been forgotten – both good and bad – are stored in our cellular memory. Values and beliefs that our parents have instilled are all there along with unresolved emotional traumas. These have accumulated over a lifetime and are mostly beneath our conscious awareness. Our lives are a reflection of these beliefs and thoughts – we become what we think. They have become our habitual, default, ways of seeing the world and acting in the world. Some of these may continue to work well for us but some may be self-defeating and self-sabotaging.
The vibrational pattern of these attitudes, beliefs and experiences are held in the body at a cellular level. If an experience had a negative impact on us, we may hold onto the energetic negative charge in our bodies. Life Alignment is a transformational system that homes in on the trapped negative emotional energy and releases it. Physical, emotional and psychological health is restored.
Through a process of kinesiology and dowsing, the Life Alignment practitioner can unearth these blockages and access an inner intelligence and wisdom to release them. Like peeling back the layers of an onion, it gets right to the core of the issue and helps you let go of the negative block and restores the body to well-being. In so doing you are able to live the life that you choose in line with your own values rather than accepting the beliefs of others that you have taken on over the years.
Caroline warned me that such blockages do not always surface and that I might just find the process very relaxing and restorative rather than enlightening. Ever the sceptic, I thought this almost certainly would be the case and rather wondered how we were going to fill an hour-and a-half finding this out.
In fact, the time passed incredibly quickly from the moment I settled myself onto the couch. I became so relaxed that I was not entirely aware of what Caroline was doing except that she was using a crystal pendulum and I felt a deep warmth as she touched various parts of my body. By sensing my physical reactions she came up with a date and several words that could be significant to me.
When she asked me if the year 1976 meant anything I was quite shocked. As it was the year I was married it certainly was significant. Although I thought it quite incredible that of my sixty odd years she should come up with one so pivotal, I also couldn't see that this was going to lead anywhere. Was my husband a source of deep negative energy? I don't think so!
Further gentle probing from Caroline reminded me that, although the year contained great happiness, it also harboured a lot of emotional trauma. My mother and I had totally different views on the type of wedding I would have and we quarrelled bitterly. We compromised but were barely speaking on what should have been one of the happiest days of our lives. It caused a deep rift at the time, but not for long. The bad wedding day memory faded, we were reconciled and within a couple of years life went back to normal and my mother became a doting grandmother to my children.
As Caroline led me back to the months preceding my wedding, I could feel the pain and tension as if it were happening all over again. I felt acute anger and wondered why I hadn't been more assertive. Now, in my own mature years and as a mother myself, I found her behaviour unforgiveable. But, with the greatest of respect to my late mother, she had bossed me around for most of my adult life and I had always put up with it.
Just as I was completely immersed in this miserable scenario that took place nearly forty years ago, Caroline began to prompt me for some positives in the situation and I was soon telling her about my grandmother who was on my side and had always unconditionally supported me. Although the process took a while, in a nutshell, Caroline in a most kind and soothing manner, got me to focus on my grandmother's love, which I had also long since forgotten.
When I finally surfaced from all this, I felt so calm and peaceful and quite incredulous that I had spent the morning re-living events buried way in the distant past. The calmness and well-being remained with me over the next few days and I had an increasing sense of clarity about my hidden demons.
I had always suspected that the agonising stress I suffered organising my daughter's wedding had not been at all good for my mental or physical health but till now I had no idea why I had found it all such a trauma. After the Life Alignment session I realised it was probably my determination to recreate the perfect wedding day for my daughter as I had been so scarred by the imperfection of my own. And we all know that, hard as we try, nothing is ever perfect.
Also recalling other words that Caroline had suggested to me, such as honesty and femininity, I was able to put a few more pieces of the jigsaw in place. The most important thing was that none of this seemed to matter any more and I felt ready to put my own and my daughter's wedding into the family archives and move on.
For me this was an issue resolved but I am sure that I could benefit from another session or two as I probably have a few more negative blockages that could do with re-visiting. Caroline has such an empathetic and gentle approach that I would thoroughly recommend her practice. And, as she is also an NLP Master Practitioner and Life Coach, Caroline can offer clients expert guidance on the more practical issues of getting their life back on track.