For NLP Practitioners
I spent twenty-five years modelling one man. This is what came out.
An original piece of NLP modelling, and the reason I still think this work is the most interesting thing in the field.
Let me get the awkward part out of the way.
The man I modelled is an energy healer.
If something just tightened, good; that reflex is doing its job. It is the same reflex I had in 1998, sitting in a room in Montreal waiting to be unimpressed. Hold onto it. You are going to need it, because skepticism is the only useful instrument here, and I would rather you kept yours than borrowed my conclusions.
Modelling never required me to believe him.
It required the opposite. You watch the behaviour and you throw the story away. Denis described what he did in language that transferred to nobody (his words worked for him and for no one else). What he did with his attention, his breath, and his sequencing transferred fine, once it was separated from the account he gave of it.
That separation took me over twenty-five years. Not because it was difficult the way a technique is difficult, but because I kept trying to become him first, which was never going to work; I cannot feel energy. Most people cannot. That turned out to be the useful constraint. A model that only runs for people with an unusual perceptual gift is not a model. It is a description of a gift.
What is left is four components in a fixed order.
Itemization, so the affliction becomes an “it” rather than a “you”. Breath as the driving submodality. A shift out of first position into third. You will recognize every piece of that, which is rather the point.
Relief before belief. The sequence runs whether or not the person in front of you believes any of it, and that is the only test I trust. That sequence is The Hümmo Method™.
“The proposition that breathing acts as a central pattern generator is a fundamental insight into the nature of living systems and a significant contribution to NLP. This is only the second NLP book I have read that has successfully modelled a spiritual practice; the first is Connirae Andreas’s Wholeness Process.”
Richard M. Gray, Ph.D.
creator of the Brooklyn Program and NLP researcher
Our field certifies a great many people and produces very little new modelling.
I will put the ambitious version plainly, because hedging it would be its own kind of dishonesty. Most of what gets taught is forty years old and second-hand. If NLP is what it claims to be, a methodology for capturing the structure of excellence, then it ought to still be capturing things.
This is me trying to hold up my end of that. Whether I have succeeded is a fair question, and one I would rather you answered yourself.
The Book
The Hümmo Method™: Energy Healing for the Rest of Us
The full account of the modelling project. Where it started, the decade of failing at it, what finally came apart cleanly, and the complete sequence written out. Six parts. Out now in paperback and Kindle.
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The Training
The Self-Application Training
You would verify any model by running it. Ten modules, forty-two lessons, five to twenty minutes each, built for practitioners fitting this between client sessions. You run the model on yourself first; that is also the prerequisite for certifying in it later. Opens 26 September 2026 at an introductory price.
There is a longer version of this argument, written for practitioners who want the build detail component by component. The Hümmo Method™ for NLP Practitioners →
No unicorns required.
If it is a real model, you should be able to run it without the believing part. So run it.