FAQs
CSI can be difficult to explain in any succinct fashion. It can sound pretentiously scientific, and freakishly woo-woo at the same time. Following is a list of common curiosities about the process and its components, and I hope the explanations serve to satisfy the questions.
What are “belief systems”?
Can I change my belief systems myself?
What are “parts”?
What makes the CSI Program unique?
What are “belief systems”?
Belief systems are the “laws” we live by—programmed ideas about cause and effect, about ourselves and the world around us, handed down through cultural and familial influences and rooted indelibly in the psyche between birth and seven years of age. In addition, we come into any given life time with karmic or past-life beliefs, and these are carried in a similar fashion in the psyche, but with the added clout of a centuries-old disposition.
Neuro-pathways are clusters of neurons grouped together in the brain that “record” the meaning of different experiences via emotional and physical responses, environmental variables, etc. Hundreds of precise chemicals called information substances connect the neurons in each group as an electrical path, and these pathways form an uncompromising physiological network that contains and supports the belief systems in the psyche. Once a pathway has been set, any time a similar circumstance or situation arises, the same chemical cocktail is released in the brain and the pathway fires in the exact manner it did at its genesis.
Translation? You can tell yourself ten ways to Sunday that you will NOT feel like a humiliated five-year-old the next time your boss talks to you in that tone during a staff meeting. But by virtue of the neuro-pathways programmed to that same tone from your overly critical father growing up, the belief that you are in fact a worthless little kid who can’t do anything right will be instantly triggered, overriding your staunchest personal will; the corresponding pathways will fire automatically, and your internal emotional reaction will be identical to the five-year-old’s. Every time.
The bad news? We can only create a reality that corresponds to our belief systems. That’s the Law of Attraction at its purest. The human psyche is wired for survival, and the only true safety, accordingly, is what is known or familiar. Simply put, the human animal needs to be right. So, our reality morphs automatically to oblige our programmed ideas about it, materializing whatever is necessary to prove the validity of worthlessness, or loss, or mistrust, or whatever other constructs might be hidden in the recesses of our unconscious mind. In other words, working for a tyrannical boss is not a fluke for the grown up humiliated five-year-old.
The good news? We can only create a reality that corresponds to our belief systems. Yes, the repeat is intentional. That truth, like any other, holds both a blessing and a curse. The curse is obvious. The blessing is twofold.
First, you really are THAT POWERFUL! You really are physically manifesting everything that you hold as a belief in your unconscious mind. And second, you only have to look at your current reality, and the people that inhabit it, to see what your unconscious belief systems are potentially made of—good and bad. All around you are the signposts that point the way to true change and ultimate empowerment… and that awareness alone is gold.
Can I change my belief systems myself?
It is possible to change some of the neuro-pathways that support your belief systems through a behavioral process, i.e. the old “twenty-one days to a new habit” regime. It takes twenty-one days to build a new neuro-pathway in the brain through consistent, repeated action. However, since belief systems are programmed into the emotional center of the brain, if you attempt to access them through a conscious thought process, such as self-help exercises, conscious habit building, or positive thinking, you are engaging the intellectual and physical areas of the brain, leaving the emotional landscape, and the parts that inhabit it, unexplored, and unchanged. (For more on “parts,” see the following question.)
Plus, if you only create a new pathway, without acknowledging and unplugging the old one first, your psyche will ultimately be caught in a dilemma of having to choose which path to follow. Hmm, let’s see… twenty-one days vs. a lifetime… based on the aforementioned survival instinct, the old will likely win in favor of the new.
This is not to say that self-help exercises and positive thinking are for naught. They are one of the most powerful resources available for both awareness and growth. The key to their ultimate success, however, lies in aligning your unconscious beliefs with your conscious, or chosen, thoughts and actions. If all you change is your thinking and your doing, the majority of the neuro-pathways are still going to be hard at work, undeterred in your psyche, enjoying their customary chemical happy hour while wreaking unintentional havoc on your external world… no matter how diligently you’re “thinking” and “doing.” But if you align your belief systems with your desired reality, your thoughts, actions, and your world will follow accordingly.
What are “parts”?
The “parts” are the sub personalities of the human psyche. Everyone has multiple personalities. Someone diagnosed with DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly classified as Multiple Personality Disorder) suffered trauma or abuse as a child, typically sexual in nature, and the natural process of the psyche became the escape mechanism, allowing the person to emotionally survive the experience by “disappearing” into someone completely separate. There was a case study a number of years ago, a woman with one hundred and twenty-six identified personalities—in one of those personalities she had the medical symptoms of advanced diabetes, and in all the other personalities, she had no physical symptoms. Thus the extraordinary power of the human psyche… seen through extreme example.
For the rest of us, while we may not completely disappear into our parts, there is still a definitive three-ring circus going on in our minds at any given moment. You know the experience: Part of you wants to go to a movie tonight, and part of you wants to stay home. Part of you has decided to speak up against your tyrannical boss at the next staff meeting, and another part wraps their hands around your throat and squeezes tight at the very idea. Someone in you is terrified that your pack-a-day habit is a death sentence, somebody else is disgusted by the way it makes you look and smell, and someone else raises up righteous and says, “Hey, it’s our only vice. Bugger off.” That’s a real phenomenon—different “selves” duking it out for control, each one with their own intention, motivation, perceived outcome, and job security issues.
Your parts work for you. They, too, are programmed in your childhood—trained by family, community, culture, and employed by your psyche to uphold your belief systems and make sure that the neuro-pathways that run them are in impeccable working order. They are like worker-bees on an assembly line, each with a particular task they’ve been assigned to do… and for the parts, that responsibility literally carries a life-and-death importance: They believe that if they don’t do their job 24/7, and do it perfectly, you will literally not survive. Which explains why so many of our patterns and reactions to life can feel so desperate, and so absolute.
The parts ultimately have a positive intent, but most, regrettably, are handicapped in their ability to accomplish it, having been trained by some emotional circumstance or familial pattern you experienced and survived early in life, but which now no longer serves you. I believe our parts are the tools and resources God equips us with before we incarnate in any given lifetime—unfortunately, in the same way that the fuselage of a rocket gets twisted when it re-enters earth’s denser atmosphere, the divine purpose of our parts becomes twisted by the confines of our all-too-human influences early on. I also believe that that is the whole point of personal growth… to find and restore our own divinity by exploring and honoring how we came to wander so far away from it in the first place.
The wilderness you can potentially inhabit your whole life by virtue of a handful of parts trapped in old, worn-out patterns, cannot remotely compare to the heaven-on-earth you are capable of with the help of an internal Dream Team focused solely on designing and manifesting your destiny. Luckily, your parts are much more emotionally attached to you than they are to the methods they were programmed to employ… which means they can be restored to divine status almost instantly, once they are recognized and honored for their unceasing service, and given the chance to see a truer way of being.
An extraordinary example of how our parts can keep us firmly in unwanted patterns, no matter our conscious resolve to change, and regardless of who or what we know, was illustrated recently by one of the most powerful and influential people in our modern world: Oprah Winfrey. In her typically candid fashion, Ms. Winfrey admitted to letting her highly publicized diet and exercise regime fall by the wayside over the last year, resulting in an obvious weight gain and more than substantial shame on her part. She wrote in the January 2009 O magazine, “I’m mad at myself. I’m embarrassed. I can’t believe that after all these years, all the things I know how to do, I’m still talking about my weight. I look at my thinner self and think, How did I let this happen again?” She went on to describe her anger at herself for “falling off the wagon” after four years of conscious, high profile effort, working with some of the best in the health and fitness industries, and believing she had finally conquered her old unhealthy habits… this time for good.
Looking at it through the framework of the human psyche, however, when Ms. Winfrey decided to change and truly get healthy four years ago, a part (or parts) of her, fiercely loyal and more steadfast than any human being she’ll ever know, remained in their cubicle in her brain, faithfully doing the job they were originally programmed to do, unaware that she wanted something different. As a result, they pulled her back into old, familiar ways, not because they were trying to sabotage her… they just didn’t get the memo. And, like most of us do in the wake of our failures, Ms. Winfrey probably spent a good bit of time beating herself up for her supposed weakness, which I guarantee merely motivated the parts to work even harder at their jobs. (Holy crap, the boss is pissed! I better put in some overtime!!)
The truth is, Ms. Winfrey’s greatest power resides in those very parts that, despite every bit of her formidable intelligence, passion, dedication, and skilled assistance, were still able to efficiently maneuver her back into behaviors she had so clearly resolved to give up. She didn’t fall off the wagon. One of her parts shoved her, simply by doing its job in the only way it has ever known.
Our parts just want the best for us, and they’ll fight to the death to succeed in creating it. Disenfranchised from their divine truth, judged and often despised by the very person they exist to serve, they remain hidden in our psyches, behavioral and emotional Energizer Bunnies, unshakably devoted to us and to whatever belief they were hired to uphold on our behalf. Given our human programming, their criteria for our “best” and the methods they use to achieve it almost always create the opposite of their intention, but it IS possible to teach an old part new tricks… and the best part is, they will be every bit as loyal, superhuman, and expert at the new task as they were at the old.
What makes the CSI Program unique?
CSI is a very precise, and at the same time, organic modality consisting of dialogue, visualization, emotional and symbolic exploration, and various NLP-based psychological interventions. CSI works to precisely identify the foundational belief systems that negatively drive your behaviors, reactions, and decisions; the neuro-pathways in the brain that support those unwanted outcomes are explored and dismantled, and new, empowering beliefs and pathways are created. The positive beliefs in your psyche are then amplified and brought to the fore, and their supporting neuro-pathways empowered to run even more efficiently, making your strengths and your personal power vastly more accessible.
I took the NLP training 15 years ago, because I had sought help through several traditional therapies (and a few not-so), but aside from gaining some valuable insight into the “whys” of my patterns and having my feelings and perceptions validated, I didn’t experience any true change in my habitual issues until I worked with an NLP practitioner. Two sessions in, and things were different. I was different. And I knew I had to become a practitioner.
The training was a profound experience in itself, and the methodology of NLP made complete instinctual sense to me. I was drawn to do something more with it, to take it even deeper; to push the process to the greatest measure it could reach—the structure of the spiritual mind. Years of exploring the symbolic language of the Tarot and the landscapes of the psychic realm gave powerful testimony to the universality of archetype and myth inherent in the human psyche. And hardwired into every one of us, conscious or not, is an ancient and elemental longing to search for, find, and merge with something beyond ourselves; something far greater than our own limitations; something that can make us feel, and be, at least for a moment, limitless. Something like God.
As a counselor, I witnessed over and over again the common struggle between our inevitable human impediments, and our hunger for expression of the divine. And I was compelled to create a method of change work that incorporates the universal truths of archetype, myth, hardwiring and desire—to build a foundation in both the physical and emotional realms of the brain that gives effortless access to the sacred story that lives inside everyone. Not the rote tales we all live, at one time or another, out of pattern and habit and history, but the true legend that resides at the instinctual center of our being… our birthright as a magical child of God, at once divine, and undeniably human.
The brain operates through words and images, and the psyche communicates through a vibrant and symbolic language that transcends every intellectual, cultural, and evolutionary boundary known to mankind. The CSI process is a fusion of progressive techniques that capitalize on that language, giving the psyche permission to speak its deepest truth, which in turn gives you unprecedented awareness, self-knowledge, and most important, access to true change.
Following are some of the elements that make the CSI program so unique:
Psychic Assessment:
The process of change work is typically like peeling an onion, layer by layer… you begin with a problem or challenge you’re experiencing, you work on that specific issue and clear that layer, which then reveals another; you then clear that layer, and so on, the goal being to eventually get to the center, or the foundation, of your pattern. CSI is a bit like sticking a firecracker in the center of the onion, and blowing the sucker wide open.
The CSI program begins with a Psychic Assessment—a specific evaluation process combining structured self-examination and detailed psychic information, that clearly determines the foundational issues at the center of your patterns, including the karmic and familial legacies attached to them. The information is fascinating, tracing your belief systems directly to the ancestors, historical events and past life experiences where the imprint originated. Just understanding the intricacies of your patterns, and having clarity about where they come from and how they began, sets the healing process immediately in motion. The focus of each CSI session is then directed back to those foundational issues, allowing larger chunks of your patterns to fall away at a time, and a deeper resolution to be reached.
Family Legacy:
With CSI, we don’t just heal your patterns—we heal the energetic root of the pattern through both the paternal and maternal sides of your lineage. Family legacies begin as a pivotal moment in the history of a family line; an experience of indelible crisis or trauma which is then carried forward as an energetic vibration of memory and belief in both the conscious and unconscious minds of those who experienced it, and handed down through emotional and behavioral patterns to subsequent generations. By exploring the story of your ancestry, understanding both the light and the shadow sides of a family legacy, and doing a specific series of interventions designed to reframe the legacy at its point of origin, we are able to affect profound change on the energetic memory not only for you, but also for everyone else up and down your family line. CSI clients often experience noticeable and even dramatic differences in the interactions, emotions, and energies of their family members after healing a family legacy within themselves.
Past Lives:
In the CSI process, we also work to heal karmic or past life patterns. Karma is not some intricate system of Universal checks and balances, whereby if you did something wrong or bad in a previous lifetime, you’re going to pay for it in this one. Rather, karma is an opportunity to recreate a life lesson, often with the same people involved, in as similar of circumstance as evolution will allow, for the purpose of making more conscious choices and expanding your soul’s base of wisdom. In the CSI process, we are able to uncover and explore current day patterns from a karmic perspective, and like the energetic memory of a family legacy, heal the pattern at the precise point where, and in effect, when, it originated.
Archetype and Mythology:
Archetype and mythology are crucial informational elements in CSI. With the imagination precisely engaged, the psyche is able to offer up profoundly clear messages through imagery that is specific to your personal mythology. Everything is a metaphor in the CSI process. Parts appear with deliberate energy, gender, age, even symbolic attire; environments rise in the mind’s eye with distinctive and purposeful landscapes. You might feel at times as though you are “just making things up” in the CSI process, because of the ease with which your psyche responds to the techniques. But as the resulting symbolism is explored and utilized, you’ll find yourself trusting your instincts in ways that were previously not possible, and the unmistakable synchronicity of the information revealed will inspire a solid confidence in your personal truth, which leads to an even greater sense of empowerment.
Polarity:
True balance lies in the magnetic alliance of opposites. Every one of us has both masculine and feminine energy within us, and the parts play definitive roles in creating that balance, or the lack thereof. In the CSI process we purposely explore the elemental yin/yang expression of your parts, and we work to right the polarity within your psyche, by aligning your feminine selves with the forces of creativity and passion, and the masculine heroes in you with their right to protect and provide. Balance created within means authentic balance established and maintained outside in your personal world, effortlessly.
Personalizing God:
By far the most powerful aspect of the CSI process is the alignment of your parts with their divine intention—the role that God originally intended them to play in your life. By fleshing out your parts, envisioning their personalities and their potential, and bringing them into your consciousness as though they were living, breathing entities, you in turn come alive, connected intimately to the individual players that comprise your divine story. Your psyche then has access to the truth of God—your truth—through which your own personal interpretation, emotional reference, and instinctual kinship with God can emerge and begin to reveal itself, in all its sacred and glorious detail.
Brought together in a purposely intuitive, divinely driven formula, these separate elements weave together to create a deep and intensely personal experience of true change. The CSI program is at once subtle and extreme, scary and exhilarating, and from the first moment you sign on to a track, your parts line up and the process of transformation begins. CSI does more than change your life… it changes you, so that your life can become whatever you decide, and everything you desire.
