Hello world!

Dear reader,

I'm starting this blog today to share thoughts, point out interesting things I came across or just mention whatever else new discoveries.

In 1997 I started writing stories. Now I'm writing this blog here.  ;-)

In 2009 I became interested in magic. I had a magic box as a kid, but nothing serious came out of that. In my studies at the university (studied inclusive education, that's helping disabled people), they talked time and again about the need to be aware of our own body language and have an "open" body language. But how exactly do you do that? Or how do I know if clients hold back information? What does it mean when they're sitting in a certain position across from me or have a specific look? We never talked about that. So I began teaching myself. Lately if you read on body language sooner or later you come across three letters: NLP. Neuro-linguistic programming.  I wanted to know how others use it and what can be done with it. I don't quite remember what I typed in, because if you just type in "nlp" at youtube, you don't get what I found and which eventually lead me to magic again. Which was a video with the "psychological illusionist" (his own words) Derren Brown. The video description read this: "The heist was an experiment hosted by Derren Brown to see if he could get people to rob a bank." What the heck? To get normal people to rob a bank? Can this really be done? I had to see that! So I watched his program on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdkivIk1NiY (part 1 of 5)

What can I say? The program was interesting and I started to like Derren Brown. I saw more videos with him, and bought his book "Tricks of The Mind". In it he gives basic introductions to many of the techniques he uses for his tricks: from magic with cards and coins to tricks to remember things (mnemonic) and hypnosis.

Hypnosis. People who read on NLP will also learn about hypnosis and hypnotherapy. After all one of the people the founders of NLP studied was the psychotherapist Milton Erickson, who not only was incredibly creative, but also used hypnosis as part of his therapy. In the spring of 2011 I did a google search for online courses on hypnosis and found Stephen Brooks. On his website among other things, he also offers a free one year course in the theories and principles of Ericksonian hypnotherapy and NLP. Free sounds good, right? Can you trust it? Yes! Stephen Brooks is one of the leading experts and well known around the world. He didn't meet Erickson in person, but studied Erickson and his methods through and through.

Spring 2012. I'm working for an organisation offering day care for people suffering from dementia. They are brought there in the morning and go home in the late afternoon every day. I needed this whole year to realise that the 2 therapy puppets we had are never used. It became obvious for me that if they shouldn't sit around in a corner looking bored, I had to do something about it myself. Take the puppet, stick a hand in the head to operate the mouth and at the same time move your own mouth to talk for the puppets? It works. It's easy. Too easy. Why talk for the puppet, if you can let them talk for themselves? With ventriloquism. How I learned and learn it and my thoughts on that will topic of my next blog...

Until next blog,

sarah