More elephant/rider related stuff – Maile McCarthy on her Breath by Breath blog (note: since I wrote this article, it looks like she’s deleted her blog as the link now goes to her illustrator site) suggests attention as a way of bringing the conscious rider and the unconscious elephant into greater harmony:
noticing when your conscious and unconscious thoughts are pulling in opposite directions
As Fritz Perls said, “attention is itself curative”.
Meanwhile, the Australian NLP trainer Chris Collingwood (in a separate conversation on the now defunct nlpconnections.com) tells me that he prefers the description of ‘conscious attention and unconscious processes’ rather than conscious and unconscious minds – following John Grinder in this I think.
Attending to the elephant