I recently had the opportunity to do a Skype interview with Connirae Andreas, about her new work, called the Wholeness Process. We have known each other since the early 80’s. I have always admired her intelligence and capability to teach NLP and develop innovative processes. She is specifically responsible for the Aligning Perceptual Position and Core Transformation processes as well as co-publishing many NLP books with her husband, Steve Andreas.
Connirae and I had a fascinating conversation in which she shared the answers to some direct and personal questions about the new Wholeness Work. I wanted to know more about her personal story – how she came to this work, which really is something new. She shared with me very honestly, and I’m passing on to you some of the highlights from our talk:
Rachel: Connirae, I’m interested to know more about what motivated you to develop the Wholeness Process? How did this come about?
Connirae: Well, what I’m calling the Wholeness Process is the result of about 10 years of development work. And it really came out of my personal struggle. I had been very active in teaching NLP and writing for several decades, and all that stopped rather suddenly because I was faced with a set of very serious health issues. My health seemed to be deteriorating in strange ways, and at the time I wasn’t sure I would come through it alive. So I was very motivated to find something.
In trying to find my way back to health, I explored solutions of all kinds – western medicine, alternative medicine, personal growth, therapy, and so on. From the beginning of this process, I started encountering people who said to me, “Connirae, has it occurred to you that what you’re experiencing might be a spiritual awakening?”
Well, no, I had always thought spiritual awakening would feel good, and what I was experiencing was very unsettling. But I did begin reading accounts of spiritual teachers and mystics from many traditions, to find out how they described the process they had gone through.
Rachel: What were some of the accounts you read? Who were these spiritual teachers?
Connirae: I read everything I could get my hands on that was a personal account, rather than conceptual or theoretical. I wanted to know what people experienced, not their ideas about it. One of the first was Autobiography of A Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda. I read the works of Emanual Swedenborg, a European mystic from some time ago. Irina Tweedie’s Daughter of Fire, Ramana Maharshi, Papaji’s “Nothing Ever Happened” (That one’s a 3-volume set, which my husband thinks is very funny. He said, “So it took him three volumes to explain how nothing happened!”) Those are just a few. There were many, many more.
Rachel: Was there something in particular that you were looking