According to Watkins’ The 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People, Richard Bandler is the seventy-fourth most spiritually influential person as of 2014 (2014). Who is Richard Bandler? Richard Bandler was born on February 24, 1950 in New Jersey. He acquired a Bachelor’s degree through the University of California in psychology and philosophy in 1973. Then in 1975 he acquired his Master’s degree from Lone Mountain College in San Francisco, California (Find the Right Therapist). Bandler has struggled through many hardships throughout his life. He was considered an outcast throughout his teenage years, his work as a therapist using NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), and he was accused of murder and struggled with an addiction to drugs and…show more content… Richard Bandler used NLP as a way to help people overcome their “depression, cognitive impairments, anxieties, and phobias” (Find the Right Therapist). Bandler and Grinder are credited with helping a women overcome Acrophobia. They helped her by not asking why she was afraid or what caused the fear, they asked her how she felt. Once she told them, Bandler and Grinder told her to sing will approaching her fear. They then said that because she was focusing on something other than her fear, she was no longer afraid (Clancy and Yorkshire, 1989). According to the article Messing with your head: Does the man behind Neuro-Linguistic Programming want to change your life and/or control your mind?, Bandler himself has used NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) to improve his own life, after suffering from a “stroke”, in order to learn how to “walk again” (2009). In one of NLPLife’s YouTube videos, Richard Bandler once helped a man conquer his past during a seminar. He helped the man by asking him to “close his eyes and look at the big bad picture and blink it black and white” the “picture” being whatever “memory” that was haunting the man. Then he instructed the man to “close his eyes and look jump to the end then rewind it backwards to the beginning” there was music playing in the background which the man was to focus on. Afterwards the man claimed that he now felt…show more content… Christensen was the girlfriend of Bandler’s cocaine dealer and friend, James Marino. Bandler was arrested only hours after the murder of Christensen, who happened to also be a student of Bandler’s. The case against Bandler was not very strong. According to Clancy and Yorkshire, Marino and Bandler presented the police and district attorney with two conflicting stories of what happened the day of Christensen’s murder. Throughout the trail Bandler was surrounded by supporters, even though the trail produced evidence which showed a new side of Bandler. A side in which Bandler participated in the use of drugs and heavy drinking. According to the Wire Services article, the jury came to the conclusion that Bandler was innocent after almost six hours of “deliberation”. The article mentions an interview with a member of the jury who said “there was reasonable doubt of Bandler’s guilt”, which is why they determined he was innocent (1988). The juries’ conclusion of Bandler’s innocent could have been determined from the conflicting evidence or testimony of Marino or it could have been partly due to Bandler’s reputation which he built through helping people through the method of NLP (Neuro-Linguistic