So I was thinking about how mirrors and photos may perhaps impact how we feel and it occurred to me that where they are positioned may also influence our feelings as well.

Sticking with the eye accessing cues theme that I started in the last blog, I reasoned that most of the photos that I have of my and my family’s past are on dressers, side tables and generally below eye level.

Perhaps the physical height of my photos has some influence on how I remember them…

As discussed previously, looking down and to the left is the typical accessing cue for most (but by no means all) right handed people for internal discussion and down to the right is where we (typically) access “feelings”.

So when looking at photos that are resting below eye level, are we accidentally influencing the way we access the memories associated with the photo?

I do have a handful of photos on walls at or above eye level (in fact I have one hanging over the computer as I type this) and I’ve always thought that they looked more sunny and happy than the ones that are on the side board and dresser.

Could it be coincidence that the photos that I have to look up at (entering the visual accessing area) always look more happy and sunny? Having realised this I’m not sure I can be objective enough to say, but I’d be very grateful if you wanted to have a think about where your photos are and how they make you feel or how they look and tell me what you think.

Its not just about eye accessing cues though: what about the concept and symbolism of something being higher or above us? or the reverse: lower than or below us? Might the symbolism of this have an impact on how we perceive or remember our history or present self?

We often find that people who find stuff daunting or scary often describe them as “big” and “close”. Using NLP techniques, we encourage the client to make them “smaller” and “further away”. Could this same ability of our minds to represent these things, actually play against us when we’re so carefully choosing the right photo to fit the space on the wall above the bed? What about the ones next to the plant by the tv?

This is where I started thinking about the mirrors again: what would the impact of seeing yourself slightly higher than you on a regular basis? I guess it would probably depend on how you see things that are higher than you. Would you see yourself taller and higher (better) than you are now, or would you see yourself looking down at yourself? What about all those cheap mirrors that we buy which ever-so-slightly distort our image: sometimes thinner, sometimes fatter, sometimes shorter, sometimes taller…

Back to the photos again, wondering whether having photos of your past “staring down at you” is going to have a positive or negative or indeed any kind of effect on you. Or do you see them as sentinels of excellence showing you how wonderful you are and how exciting you can be?

Feng Shui and mirrors

Distoriting Mirrors can distort your self image

As JP pointed out on my last post: Feng Shui practitioners have great faith in mirrors and they hold the kind of “cure all” power that diamond does for crystal healers. I found an interesting article on the use of mirrors in Feng Shui and I’ve extracted some of the suggestions for you here:

• Keep your mirrors clean (could a dusty mirror have any effect on how you see yourself?)
• Make sure that they don’t distort your image (I mentioned this one above and I agree whole heartedly)
• Use plain mirrors not crazy mirror tiles (Could they produce a distorted image of yourself?)

It could be a case of glass half full or half empty… Or I could be talking utter codswallop… Who knows, but whatever it does, I hope that next time you catch yourself idly looking at one of you photos or in a mirror, you consider what might happen if you changed its position or angle. Just to see what changes, and if you feel any different.

What got me started thinking about this was more of the eye accessing cues that I’ve mentioned before. I was finding that I was spending a lot of time internalising thoughts and deconstructing stuff which is all internal discussion (down to the left in my eye accessing cues diagram). Now I’m sure that most of us have, at one time or another, experienced times when we are far too internally focussed and over-think stuff.

I hit upon the idea of making a conscious effort to spend more time looking up and around. By doing this, it immediately reduced my ability to access the internal dialogue area and increased the time I spent accessing the visual and auditory areas.

I found a complete shift in the way I was thinking!

Suddenly I was externally focused and where I was looking up I found visual memories or fantasies (calm yourselves not those kind of fantasies) popping into my head. Of course initially, I found that my eyes kept wandering downwards as my thoughts turned inwards but as soon as I realised I was looking down (and thinking too much about stuff), I forced myself to look up. It didn’t take long to turn this into an automatic response to look up instead of down (incidentally this has all sorts of additional benefits and I thoroughly recommend that you start looking up more).

What has this to do with mirrors and pictures?

I’ll tell you.

There are two parts to this: Mirrors and pictures, and positioning. I will talk about mirrors and pictures in this post and positioning in the next.

Mirrors and Pictures

It is often said that people with lots of mirrors in their houses have a tendency to be slightly vain or self obsessed.

I’m not sure I agree here as there is a counter argument that people who like to see images of themselves are happy with the way they look and that they are therefore happy in themselves. Of course the images here are present “live” images displayed in a mirror whenever they happen to look in one. For those who like NLP, you could say that they are in rapport with themselves through use of mirroring…

What about people who have a lot of pictures of themselves? Well my thinking on this as an idea, is that this is very similar to having a lot of mirrors around the place: the person gets to walk around and see pictures of themselves. Invariably these pictures are of happy or exciting times that they have experienced in the past.

Can you see where I’m going with this yet?

If a person who lives with a lot of mirrors is happy with the way they are now then is a person with lots of photos of themselves happy with themselves in their past?

My thoughts were this: if a person is feeling depressed because they feel their life isn’t going anywhere and they can’t see themselves having fun/excitement in the future, perhaps if they started placing mirrors around the house, they might start to mirror themselves and find that actually they aren’t so bad after all…

Its just a thought that I had.

So what about positioning?

You’ll just have to wait for the next post!