A Pioneer in the Consciousness Frontier

Nita Little started her path as a dancer, and at an early age she developed an innovative movement method. Her bodywork connected closely to her soul work, so Little has become a researcher of the soul and the consciousness. Today she works with people in many ways. “Haim Aherim”’s writer has gone through a process, and discovered she can be a hawk.

Nita Little (51), an NLP (Neuro-Linguistic therapy) therapist, a dancer, a choreographer, a teacher, and perhaps most of all, a shaman, has features that reminds me of river canyons. They have power and depth in them, and sometimes only her face alone, can lead me in an unknown path. Her speech is very clear, as it is in the case of a person who leads people in the most winding ways of the soul. You can’t get lost when she’s around. In a way, this is how she sees herself. “I’m your cab driver” she says over and over again. “Where do you want to go?” Since I was given such a freedom, I allowed myself to phrase my dream. “I want to be rich and famous”, I wrote her. “I want to get everything easily”.

Nita lives in Bonny Doon; formally, it’s part of Santa Cruz, California. Realistically, it’s a forest, in which live  hundreds of families. The most common complaint heard here is of the deer and the rabbits that eat the gardens. “But we can’t complain”’ says Nita. “We’ve taken their territory”.

She grew up in Santa Barbara, in an old Californian family. Her great grandfather came there to look for gold and treasures. Her grandfather was a missionary who served in South America, among other places, and he called her Alanita. From her wooden house, with a porch just like those of the westerns, you can see one of the most beautiful valleys in the forest. I make myself comfortable in the sofa, and a big furry cat joins us.

Slowly we get into the details of my dream: I want to make money out of my work. I want things to reach me. I want to write freely about whatever I want, and to make a good living out of it. What disturbs me from achieving that? What is the obstacle that I want to overcome? The answer is known to me: fear of exposure.

She studied in a women’s college in Vermont, and soon after graduation co-developed a dance form called Contact Improvisation, and started touring all over the world with her partner, Steve Pexton, teaching and performing.  Nita: It’s an improvisational dance form. It’s a process dance. It’s a performing art but it’s not a dramatic art. Contact Improvisation is maybe a cross between a martial art and a ballet. Two people dance together, but nobody knows what will happen in the next instant”.

Like psychodrama in dance.

Nita: “Yes, but it’s not taking place on an emotional level; it’s physical. It’s a dance in which two people are in physical contact, and where the dance goes is determined by them. The principals share agreement with martial arts.  For example: what happens when you fall? What happens when you resist falling? What happens when you agree to go with the fall? When you resist falling, you end up getting hurt. When you agree to go with the fall, you can start to fly. So you start looking at the fact that falling is flying. In order to fly, you have to fall. So, for many years I worked with people on the principals of (maybe) a fly, from that perspective.”

With time, she moved from performing to teaching, and then, in her late thirties, she started working with people one-on-one.

Nita: “I frequently found myself working with people, in a context which I called teaching, but what I was working with was their mind, and state of mind. Because, when I look at bodies, I read mind. SO, I look at people and I see the body as expressed mind. Or body-mind. Every movement we make changes our mind somehow.  When I talk to you like this”, she says, sitting comfortably in an armchair, “you feel a completely different feeling in a state like this”, she bends her body in a sudden movement. So do I”.

“When I was working with people one on one, I’d be reading mind. One of the things I’ve noticed was that when people were in absolute belief, they felt it – it was real. As a dancer, I know, I flex my feelings as I move, as I dance. My feelings are flexible. That’s part of the joy of dancing. I could feel totally withdrawn, or tiny within myself, or I can feel sure, and powerful and elegant. I can feel awkward. Whenever I will be truly in my feeling, it will be read, and you, as an audience will be able to read it in an instant. I don’t have to try to be something. I have to be something. In fact, as I shift my being state, so the dance unfolds. Working with people, I was working on states of being, not just states of body. States of whole being, which embraces body and mind”.

She asks me to go inside myself, and asks directly: “What is the worst things that will happen, if you will be exposed, if you will be real”? I closed my eyes and saw myself naked, being stoned to death in the desert. The fear was on the surface. “Where is it?” she wants to know. “In the throat”, I answer, feeling a circle of pliers, that open and close as it likes, enabling or not, to speak.

And so she shows me the characters inside me, while getting closer and closer to me, until she is holding my hand, very closely; her face, like a carved totem is there, in front of me. Then came the small figure, who wants to protect me from exposure. When I try to talk to this one, anger comes up.

“Don’t be afraid”, I hear Nita, “Let’s invite that fear to talk. Who is he? What does he want to tell you?

There came a masculine tough character. He wants to succeed; he hates anything that holds him back. “I want to shake that unnecessary addition off myself”, he says, his hands crossed on his chest.

“I’m a great believer in the consciousness, and in the way we present ourselves in the world”, she says. Working in personal session made her want to explore human mind, so she studied Hypnotherapy in Palo Alto, California. She learned NLP many years ago, even if she didn’t become an NLP therapist. When she met Robert McDonald, a therapist who worked with her on an issue she had, she decided to learn the method and to make it part of her own work.

What is NLP?

Nita: “What interests me in NL is that there is no reality. The pre-disposition of NLP is that people are like mapmakers. We build our maps of pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells. The map is not the territory. The menu is not the meal. The picture smells, tastes, sounds and feelings inside of you, as you look at this picture. In order to understand the picture, you build an internal representation of that. If I ask you about Mimi, you have an internal representation of Mimi, that may include picture, sound, feelings and smells, if not tastes”, she laughs. “The same goes for anything else in the world. That’s not Mimi”.

Who is Mimi?

Nita: “That is the question. When I tell you will be surprised tomorrow morning, and you say: ‘Yes, I’ll be very surprised’, then I simply imbedded in you a future that you’ve agreed will happen.  Reality is very easily constructed with language, or with pictures. I can tell you, for instance, to picture my cat, with a bright wonderful frame around. Now, change that frame. Now, I’d like you to put a black frame around my cat. And make my cat black and white. What do you feel?”

It’s boring, depressing.

“Right. Now put it back into the beautiful frame and a beautiful color cat. Your representation will create emotional responses. You respond to your representation of reality, not to reality”.

“I would like to tell you a story”. It’s Nita again. “You can open your eyes. And she tells me about a Japanese soldier, who missed the ship that took the other soldiers back, after WW2. He didn’t know the war was over, and actually, he continued defending the country and the island from invaders. But the invaders were really people who came to live, or came for a trip in the island, and with time, they began to complain. The government checked who the soldier was, and found out who his officer was. They sent him to the island, with his uniform and medals.

The officer, now an old men, lit a fire on the beach and waited. I am wrapped now within a blanket, fully captivated in the story, waiting for the soldier with the officer. After few days the old soldier appeared, recognized his commander, and bowed deeply. The officer bowed back and then told him the war was over, thanked him for his loyal service all those years, and invited him to get back to the old country with him. When the soldier got back, he was welcomed with honor, and he was given a job in which he could use his skills.

It seems to me that now I’m more ready to understand that character of mine, and even the tough commander in me had softened a little. “She has a very important role, this one. She protected you for many years. Can you thank her?”

I thank her and then Nita asks me to turn her into an object. In front of my very eyes the character becomes a pink wool ball, going from the heart down my right arm, to the hand that became round to catch it; the commander, tall and stiff, turned into a wire, set in the left hand. I let the characters talk to each other, and eventually they turned into one symbol: a ball of light, made of thin lines, which move constantly. She asks me to keep it.

Nita:  “If you change the representation, you change the emotional response. When I work with you, I look to see how you represent your world. How do you understand it. When you understand it one way, it’s very different when you understand it another way. If you picture yourself as a mouse in a field, and the rest of the world as a hawk above you, you feel like food, and you are in a very bad position. If you transform yourself, so that you are a hawk, and the rest of the world is mice, you are in a completely different position. If you represent yourself as a hawk and the rest of the world is full of all kinds of wonderful extraordinary things for you to explore you are completely changed.  Everything changes your feelings. With NLP people can manipulate your feelings, by manipulating your representation”.

The original NLP developers were not interested in healing, but in the way people work, in the way the mind works. They realized that mind works through filters of the modules, like the sense, and other sub modules, like distance, size etc.  “The thing about NLP is that we’ve got the tools”, she clarifies. “The tools are heartless ones, unless they are married with deep human care and respect. Deep respect for other people and what they want”.

“I worked with you through conflict resolution process”, she explains the difference between NLP and regular psychotherapy, “and that was healing on a very deep level, and it went back in time, into your history, and resolved something from the historical level and brought it all the way forward. That could have taken you years to resolve, if not a lifetime”.

“I worked with you also through story telling. As I told you the story, your internal representation completely changed your understanding of yourself, because you took into a deep level, on a cellular level, you went and transformed yourself. So now you understand yourself differently. We could have worked in a much more external way that would still have profound effect. We could deal very directly on belief change. There are certain steps that NLP recognized in about what it takes to change a belief and what you are going to do about it. I would have walked you through all of these steps, and you would have changed your belief completely”.

I reopen my eyes, and Nita is in front of me again, asking how my throat is doing. Something opens in it, I sense, the pliers are more flexible now, they let me speak more. My voice has deepened, and I seem to be talking from my stomach, not from my throat. Now she is asking: “What do you see now? Is there an image, an animal, that embodies that feeling inside of you?”

In my mind’s eye, eyes open wide, a hawk is swirling, on the wind, high up in the blue sky of Bonny Doon. And maybe there was a real hawk there, because right afterwards she says: “You know, we have a few families of hawks here. We see them sometimes”.

“But hawk”, I protest, “is a bird of prey”. In Hebrew, I explain, it’s a synonym for foes, for people who have a fight, and also for my less favorable political party. Then I recall that the name of one of my favorite leaders is Starhawk. Nita tells me about the hawk, about its ability to see the whole picture from enormous heights and to discern the detail in which he is interested. Nature is built of ecological cycles, she says, and each animal has its own role. Without the hawk, we would have too many mice, she explains. I calm down, connect to the natural pace of the hawk, to that serenity. And then I realize that the hawk is the knowledge, deep down, that things come to me. This is the peace of mind I’m looking for, that assuredness that everything is right in its place. The puzzle becomes one whole picture, and suddenly I understand so many things. But our work hasn’t finished yet.

“What were you before?” Nita asks me. “A snail” I say without hesitating. She asks me to see the snail. I think about slugs, those armourless snails, I find so fascinating. It seems to me like a very brave thing, to be so exposed in the world, and dare even leave a mark. I think how vulnerable are the armored snails, and my heart fills with love to them. I understand what that small character in me told me, and how much she wanted so much to protect me. I understand why.

When I get back, I tell her that the hawk ate the snail, and that the snail lives inside the hawk. “In that case”, says Nita, “the hawk knows he was a snail; he’s willing to contain the snail, he knows the snail is a part of it”. The coin dropped. It seems to me that even while writing it now, months later, that insight, that I’m able to contain the wounds and the protection mechanisms and everything else I used to be, without living them, is coming to me again. We return to our starting point now.

 How is a woman like you, who is so aware of her body handling menopause?

Nita: “I think, right now, I find that I have to be constantly checking in with myself about my beliefs. Whatever society or culture says, we believe to be true. It doesn’t mean it is true. It just means we are all living with the myths, that that’s true, and our bodies will act in complete accordance with that. So, for instance, if you burn your hand, you will be convinced that healing has to go through certain stages… However, I know someone”, she becomes the story teller again, “who burned his hand on a hot stove. He was an emergency medical person, and he looked at his hand and knew it was a third degree burn. He didn’t have money at that time. He said to himself: ”I don’t have the money to have a burned hand right now, in my life. What am I going to do about it?” This is a person who can go into very deep trance states. And he went into a very deep inner trance: He put his hand up inside a block of ice, until all the heat was out of his hand. He took the hand out, and he saw that all the dead skin was removed. And then he painted new flesh on his hand. He did all this in a very deep trance state. When he came out of the trance, after about an hour, when he looked down at his and there was no burn. There was new flesh”.

You can cure AIDS or cancer this way. If a person is open enough, everything is possible.

Nita: “You have to be able to separate yourself from the cultural agreement. If you can free yourself from that, you can begin to change and decide what you want”.

“So, anyway, that is what I understood. At a very young age, I decided that what was important for me was evolution. I wanted to be on the cutting edge of what it means to be human. That is still my mission. I still want to know what is the forward leading edge in body, what is the forward leading edge in  mind, what is the forward leading edge in heart, in aspects of being. How full in heart can I be, how fluid and flexible in mind can I be. And the same in body.”

“It’s hard for me to know what is part of the cultural trance and what is real” she gets back to the original question. I don’t know what it means to be 51. I’m looking to participate in a new definition of that state, and I don’t have a clear answer right now”.

What sentence do you want to take with you, what will you know when you get up tomorrow morning? I remember my first aspiration and my fear of exposure. But the pliers are not there, neither is the woman who was stoned to death. There is only one figure, hovering above the treetops. I recognize her as my own self. “If I live my true self”, I start phrasing it with Nita’s help, “I will live a long and good life”. I went back inside, to the hawk, the hovering figure, and I charged them with that sentence, this time in Hebrew, and loud and clear.

Nita is also a choreographer, and recently she created a work called “Playing God”. “It’s about what happens if the artist no longer works in clay but in human flesh and DNA. So, for instance, taking and putting implants from other animals, like eyes of an owl to give you eye sight. There is a plastic surgeon in New Hampshire who wants to put wings on people.  I find it absolutely hysterical because in my mind evolution lies in another way, in the level of consciousness, not on the material level”.

And so, I return from my journey to the reality that surrounds me, tired but very pleased[1]. This session is over. In the coming days more and more things came up for me. I reached places inside of me I’ve never reached before. It was a direct result of that treatment. I returned back to Israel, and here I am, realizing another piece of my dream: to write freely, from my personal perspective. Things flow to me. This is what I learned from the hawk, through Nita Little, in one of the most important sessions of my life.