INTRODUCTION

Finding the Way to the Wellspring

Within
The wind blows over the lake and stirs the surface of the water. The
visible effects of the invisible manifest themselves.
-Inner Truth, The I Ching
In this book you will be invited to identify the behaviors, feelings and
responses you like least in yourself, and use them to take yourself on a
remarkably healing and uplifting personal journey within, to the depths of
your beingness. This journey is called the Core Transformation Process.
Developing the Core Transformation Process came about naturally, as I
was doing what I love to do best, which is exploring how people experience
the world, right down to their words, gestures and facial expressions. Over
the 20 years that I have been working and learning in the area of personal
growth and change, I have used and developed many techniques and
exercises that effectively assist people in changing unwanted behaviors,
healing emotions and reaching goals. I've shared these techniques in a series
of books, some co-authored or edited with my husband, Steve Andreas. The
audience for these books was primarily professional-therapists, counselors,
educators, and others in helping professions. This book is different. It is
accessible to anyone who wants core transformation in their life.
The material presented in this book is a breakthrough for me both
personally and professionally, and I believe it is a breakthrough in the field
of personal growth, therapy, and psychology. As I explored and developed
the Core Transformation Process with clients and with myself, I began to
have a sense of awe and reverence for what I witnessed. Powerfully
transforming states of consciousness, which I call Core States, were
naturally emerging. These states seemed to be identical to the states of
consciousness many people strive for in spiritual traditions, described as
transcendent or spiritual experiences. Through doing the Core
Transformation Process these states became more than a temporary high-
they became the basis for living from a new “center.”
The way these experiences emerged was surprising and unexpected. I
had no intention of developing a process with spiritual overtones. I
basically considered that realm of experience beyond my ability to know
about and therefore I wasn't very interested. My goal was to develop a
process that went deep enough to the core of our experience to be effective
with every-thing from the seemingly trivial to our biggest life issues. I
wanted something that went deeper than what I had known before-both for
myself and for my clients.
In this search I gave myself the challenge of working with people who
had some major limitation they had been unsuccessfully trying to change.
These were people who had struggled for years to change, without results.
The issues they dealt with ranged from chronic pain and abuse to bulimia,
rage, sexual dysfunction, and co-dependency. Some weren't so easily put
into categories, like the man who felt he always held himself back from
living his full potential. He already did well by most standards, but had an
inner part that felt stupid and lacked the confidence to go forward in the
way he wanted.
I intuitively followed a direction you'll become intimately familiar with
as you read this book. The starting point was the person's limitation, and
then, by going deeper and deeper into the limitation with a process that is
both simple and indescribably kind, I noticed a level of experience
emerging naturally, on its own, that was beyond what I had ever known
before.
In seeking to find what would transform these major life issues I
stumbled upon a process that went far beyond my original goals. Most of
the people I took through it got the results they wanted in their lives-either
complete changes or significant movement in the direction they desired. But
beyond that, they wrote me cards and letters telling me things like, “It’s a
miracle,” or, “Everything has changed.” One person who didn’t get what he
asked for said, “I got something better; something wonderful is happening
that’s hard to put into words.”
Discovering these incredibly powerful Core States at the center of every
inner part in myself and others has certainly transformed my sense of the
spiritual nature within each of us. This spiritual nature is not a belief
system, it is an experience, and I want to acknowledge that you may prefer
to describe your experience in other terms. You do not need to have
spiritual beliefs to benefit from the Core Transformation Process. When we
do this process with individual clients, or in workshops, we often do not
talk about what kind of experience to expect. You will get equally strong
results whether you describe your experience as spiritual, or in other terms
that fit more for you.
As I was developing the Core Transformation Process I was lucky
enough to have my sister, Tamara Andreas, join me in learning the process
and teaching others how to do it. Her experiences both with herself, her
clients, and in the Core Transformation seminars she facilitates, have added
immensely to our knowledge and experience of the process, and to the con-
tent of this book.
I came to the field of personal growth work through Neuro-Linguistic
Programming (NLP), a brilliant and powerful model for communication,
personal growth and achievement of our potential as humans, developed in
the early 70s by linguistics professor John Grinder and computer
programmer Richard Bandler. Core Transformation has its roots in several
NLP approaches and techniques created by Bandler, Grinder and others
over the years. I am deeply grateful for my good fortune in being able to
build on the work of so many good teachers, and feel that the field of NLP
has greatly facilitated my ability to go deep enough to develop the Core
Transformation Process.
NLP has been criticized in the past for being overly “mental,” and
“manipulative,” which can be true if that is how people choose to use it.
The Core Transformation Process takes us past the mind, past any sense of
manipulation, into universally sought-after states of consciousness that
evoke a sense of oneness and peace.
There are many personal stories in this book from those who have used
this process, as well as interviews and actual transcripts of myself or
Tamara doing the process with a seminar participant or client, which we call
“demonstrations.” All the accounts of personal change are presented as told
to us. Although names are changed and some factual details are changed or
omitted to preserve confidentiality, we were always careful to preserve the
meaning. Many people were so excited about their changes that they gave