THE RUSH HOUR GRIDLOCK SCENARIO
For the sake of this example, you are stuck in morning rush hour traffic:
How do you feel about it? Angry and frustrated probably. You are going to be late and you’re aware of all the things that now won’t go smoothly. Your head is now full of a maelstrom of negative thought.
Can anyone here control the thoughts that pop into their heads? No you can’t. The standard response is a counter-thought (such as “no that is not helpful for me to feel that”) but this doesn’t work because your blood is already up!
You cannot argue with a thought that has a tidal wave of emotion powering it!
So don’t argue with the thought you’re going to be late. Agree with it! Yes I’m going to be late. I’ve every right to feel annoyed!
Now ask this question that works anywhere: What is this an opportunity for?
You now bring in to play a simple skill you’re already using every day, but you tend to keep reserved for tasks and lectures, it is your attention. Your attention is absolutely crucial to emotional intelligence. What has your attention has your emotions, your thoughts and your behaviour. Your attention is not just for tasks and lectures, it should be under your conscious direction every waking minute. If you don’t, it will go looking for trouble because that’s what it’s evolved to do – (that’s how you survived on the African Savannah!)
So here you are in your car. What is it an opportunity for?
ACCEPTANCE
In any situation, action, thought and emotion need to sing from the same songsheet. And the conductor of the choir is your attention. Your attention however needs a positive incentive – what’s the payoff of giving this my attention, because if there’s a payoff, your emotions will fall in line. This works for any task, no matter how dull.
You’re now practising the discipline of acceptance, the ability to maximise the opportunities in every single situation. It will give you an edge over Fred Bloggs, because Fred Bloggs is wasting his energy resenting what isn’t there. In any unfavourable environment, practise the discipline of acceptance.
So going back to our example of being gridlocked:
This is not great and I have the right to be annoyed about it!
So what is this an opportunity for? Meditation? Phoning a friend? Notation?
What’s the payoff? Can I suggest getting to work in a much healthier state?
Give this opportunity your full attention, be aware of the payoff in doing it, and thought, feelings and behaviour will be transformed into powerful allies.
Showing posts with label peace of mind. Show all posts
Showing posts with label peace of mind. Show all posts
Monday, 13 December 2010
Monday, 6 December 2010
Banish The Doubt - Part 6
ALARMS FROM THE SUBCONSCIOUS
If you are wracked by doubt, by insecurity, by worry, it’s coming from the fact that stored away in your subconscious is a memory of bad experience that’s ringing a big bell that says I AM NOT COMFORTABLE! Now of course we all have to endure some discomfort, but there’s no escaping the fact that discomfort impairs judgement, and the greater the discomfort, the lower your judgement. Who in their right mind would make a major business decision when they are desperate for the toilet?
MONSTERS FROM THE ID
So, to summarise up to this point, the origin of all negative thinking is MONSTERS FROM THE ID, bad feelings that have come from bad experiences. If you want to banish the doubt, if you want to be rid of negative thinking, you must have some way of changing your feelings.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
You need to learn emotional intelligence, because emotional intelligence reaches the parts positive thinking cannot reach. No matter how stirring the team talk, no matter how wise the words, no leader or coach will ever get the best out of his players if he does not understand their individual emotions and how to manage them.
AERIALS AND TRANSMITTERS
Emotional Intelligence is the key to revolutionising your life and changing you from an aerial, simply being affected by others to a transmitter, who profoundly affects others.
DEFINITION
Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify, assess, manage and control the emotions of one's self, of others, and of groups. So you see, once you have mastered this ability, not only will you change yourself, you will change others too. It is an extremely powerful skill once mastered.
I would really have liked to have learned this a lot earlier, because I would have coped a lot better, made better decisions and be a lot further on. But, at least I now get it. Most of the “aerials” out there never become “transmitters”, so I will count my blessings!
ACCEPTANCE
Now there are many different models and methods of emotional intelligence, but as a business person I suspect you don’t want to be bombarded with a load of conflicting psychological theory to choose from, so instead I would like to give you one that works, that’s easy to follow.
The first model I want to teach you is called acceptance, a technique for dealing with an unfavourable environment.
If you are wracked by doubt, by insecurity, by worry, it’s coming from the fact that stored away in your subconscious is a memory of bad experience that’s ringing a big bell that says I AM NOT COMFORTABLE! Now of course we all have to endure some discomfort, but there’s no escaping the fact that discomfort impairs judgement, and the greater the discomfort, the lower your judgement. Who in their right mind would make a major business decision when they are desperate for the toilet?
MONSTERS FROM THE ID
So, to summarise up to this point, the origin of all negative thinking is MONSTERS FROM THE ID, bad feelings that have come from bad experiences. If you want to banish the doubt, if you want to be rid of negative thinking, you must have some way of changing your feelings.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
You need to learn emotional intelligence, because emotional intelligence reaches the parts positive thinking cannot reach. No matter how stirring the team talk, no matter how wise the words, no leader or coach will ever get the best out of his players if he does not understand their individual emotions and how to manage them.
AERIALS AND TRANSMITTERS
Emotional Intelligence is the key to revolutionising your life and changing you from an aerial, simply being affected by others to a transmitter, who profoundly affects others.
DEFINITION
Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify, assess, manage and control the emotions of one's self, of others, and of groups. So you see, once you have mastered this ability, not only will you change yourself, you will change others too. It is an extremely powerful skill once mastered.
I would really have liked to have learned this a lot earlier, because I would have coped a lot better, made better decisions and be a lot further on. But, at least I now get it. Most of the “aerials” out there never become “transmitters”, so I will count my blessings!
ACCEPTANCE
Now there are many different models and methods of emotional intelligence, but as a business person I suspect you don’t want to be bombarded with a load of conflicting psychological theory to choose from, so instead I would like to give you one that works, that’s easy to follow.
The first model I want to teach you is called acceptance, a technique for dealing with an unfavourable environment.
Thursday, 2 December 2010
Banish The Doubt - Part 5
SOURCES OF DISTRESS
So, what happens when what you’re experiencing feels uncomfortable? You feel distressed! You will feel sadness or anger or suffering. And the more uncomfortable you feel, the more distress you feel and if that distress gets strong enough it will override any other consideration.
There is another way you can get distressed, and that’s to have a source of comfort taken from you, and if that loss is big enough, the distress will again explode out of you. For example, most people agree that the most stressful thing that can happen to you, the greatest mental anguish of all is bereavement, the death of a loved one. Anyone who has been bereaved will tell you that they will be never be the person they were before being bereaved. Why is this important? Because it will affect your performance as a business person.
IMPRINTING
In your life, you will have several big experiences, and what makes them big is the degree of comfort or discomfort you experienced. A really crucial time is between 4 and 8 years old. In this period a phenomenon known as imprinting takes place. What you experienced then is having a direct impact on your business right now. A large part of your emotional responses to situations now was first moulded back then. You see, at that age, you have mastered language, so now you can give things labels like good and bad.
You have a bad experience at that age, and everything to do with that experience will be labelled bad. And similarly everything associated with really good experience will be labelled good. This is why ordinary objects and situations can evoke really powerful emotions, because you associate that situation or object with a traumatic or exciting event. And the bad news is that once that association has been imprinted, it is not easily shifted.
HOW REALITY IS BUILT
With experience comes ideas, mental maps of how things are in relation to each other, and ideas get built into beliefs, mental maps of how the universe behaves. All these beliefs are built into our concept of reality. So you may be able to see straight away that reality is not objective - we don’t all experience the same reality, we all experience an individual reality which even at best has only some things in common with others.
MISMATCH OF REALITIES
Now, if you’re a fairly observant person, you may also see that there’s a recipe for conflict brewing up here, because quite often there is a mismatch between how we’re told it is and what we personally have experienced, between what we’re told is important and what you think is important, between how we’re told it feels and how it feels to you, and that conflict is going to undermine your performance in a team.
MISMATCH OF COMMUNICATION
If you are familiar with computers, you will know that a picture file is not just stored as a picture. It comes with tags. These tags can tell you the format of the picture, the size, the number of individual pixels, who created it, when they created it and so on. In the same way, every word you hear now, every experience you have now, is evoking some kind of feeling. Exactly what is being evoked depends not only on how something is communicated, but on your beliefs, which depend entirely on your ideas, which depend entirely on your unique individual experiences, so no wonder that people misunderstand each other so often.
So, what happens when what you’re experiencing feels uncomfortable? You feel distressed! You will feel sadness or anger or suffering. And the more uncomfortable you feel, the more distress you feel and if that distress gets strong enough it will override any other consideration.
There is another way you can get distressed, and that’s to have a source of comfort taken from you, and if that loss is big enough, the distress will again explode out of you. For example, most people agree that the most stressful thing that can happen to you, the greatest mental anguish of all is bereavement, the death of a loved one. Anyone who has been bereaved will tell you that they will be never be the person they were before being bereaved. Why is this important? Because it will affect your performance as a business person.
IMPRINTING
In your life, you will have several big experiences, and what makes them big is the degree of comfort or discomfort you experienced. A really crucial time is between 4 and 8 years old. In this period a phenomenon known as imprinting takes place. What you experienced then is having a direct impact on your business right now. A large part of your emotional responses to situations now was first moulded back then. You see, at that age, you have mastered language, so now you can give things labels like good and bad.
You have a bad experience at that age, and everything to do with that experience will be labelled bad. And similarly everything associated with really good experience will be labelled good. This is why ordinary objects and situations can evoke really powerful emotions, because you associate that situation or object with a traumatic or exciting event. And the bad news is that once that association has been imprinted, it is not easily shifted.
HOW REALITY IS BUILT
With experience comes ideas, mental maps of how things are in relation to each other, and ideas get built into beliefs, mental maps of how the universe behaves. All these beliefs are built into our concept of reality. So you may be able to see straight away that reality is not objective - we don’t all experience the same reality, we all experience an individual reality which even at best has only some things in common with others.
MISMATCH OF REALITIES
Now, if you’re a fairly observant person, you may also see that there’s a recipe for conflict brewing up here, because quite often there is a mismatch between how we’re told it is and what we personally have experienced, between what we’re told is important and what you think is important, between how we’re told it feels and how it feels to you, and that conflict is going to undermine your performance in a team.
MISMATCH OF COMMUNICATION
If you are familiar with computers, you will know that a picture file is not just stored as a picture. It comes with tags. These tags can tell you the format of the picture, the size, the number of individual pixels, who created it, when they created it and so on. In the same way, every word you hear now, every experience you have now, is evoking some kind of feeling. Exactly what is being evoked depends not only on how something is communicated, but on your beliefs, which depend entirely on your ideas, which depend entirely on your unique individual experiences, so no wonder that people misunderstand each other so often.
Tuesday, 23 November 2010
BANISH THE DOUBT PART 4
UNDERSTANDING THE BRAIN AND MIND
To get a grip on your emotions, you need to have a basic understanding of what’s going on in your head. You will probably know that your awareness lives in the brain, an extremely powerful organic computer. More powerful and with more memory than the most powerful computer today, and with more nerve cells than there are stars in the sky, it is a truly impressive organ.
This organ is operated by a highly sophisticated suite of software known as THE MIND. The mind is not a physical thing, it is patterns of energy like any software. This software operates a bit like an iceberg, with most of it under the waterline, unseen by the user.
CONSCIOUS AND SUBCONSCIOUS
Most of your mind is beyond your conscious awareness. Called the subsconscious, it is a massive database of stored memories and behaviour.
Like Microsoft Windows it comes with a default.
This default doesn’t do logic! Why not?
THE AFRICAN SAVANNAH DEFAULT
Your default mode is geared to survival on the African Savannah, where we Homo Sapiens evolved from the last nearly extinct remnant of our predecessor Homo Erectus. Grab it when you can, hoard what you can, and when times are good, breed like mad! That’s what helped you survive in the primal past.
Clearly, the default mode is just not applicable to modern civilisation! This means that your mind needs configuring.
A RELUCTANCE TO RE-CONFIGURE
Oddly, the ability to re-configure your mind has been around for millennia, but the trouble has been who’s been keeping the knowledge. Back in the African Savannah, the guy who dealt with wellbeing was the Shaman, who became the priest, the cleric, the llama and so on, and as religion and spirituality has become increasingly divided, and the knowledge fragmented, here in the West everyone eventually got a bit fed up with this, and wellbeing was taken up by the scientists, but they limited themselves to stuff they could measure, and you can’t really measure feelings and emotions.
THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION
Fortunately, we live in the information revolution, and all this disparate knowledge is now getting pooled online! Now you don’t have to sign up for a faith, change faith, or abandon your own faith to get the information, and you can utilise the wisdom of the ancients without compromising your own conscience.
What I’m teaching suits any spirituality or none.
UNDERSTANDING THE EMOTIONS
Let us first get a basic understanding of our emotions. They are fundamental to who you are, even more fundamental than thinking. Feeling and emotion and desire were there in your life long before language. All emotions are hardwired to lead you to a fundamental desire, the desire of desires. There is a basic fundamental desire we all have - we had it at birth, we still have it and it will be there at death – it is to be comfortable. When I ask my hypnotherapy clients which feeling they want to feel above any other feeling, they invariably say PEACE, because when you’ve been troubled, that’s your idea of comfort.
THE BOTTOM LINE IS COMFORT
Any pleasure or desire you can think of, the bottom line is COMFORT. We all want to be peaceful and comfortable. You want what you want because you think that when you’ve got it, you will experience comfort. Even adrenalin junkies! But there is a problem. Your primal instincts don’t want to wait to be comfortable, they want you to be comfortable NOW!
To get a grip on your emotions, you need to have a basic understanding of what’s going on in your head. You will probably know that your awareness lives in the brain, an extremely powerful organic computer. More powerful and with more memory than the most powerful computer today, and with more nerve cells than there are stars in the sky, it is a truly impressive organ.
This organ is operated by a highly sophisticated suite of software known as THE MIND. The mind is not a physical thing, it is patterns of energy like any software. This software operates a bit like an iceberg, with most of it under the waterline, unseen by the user.
CONSCIOUS AND SUBCONSCIOUS
Most of your mind is beyond your conscious awareness. Called the subsconscious, it is a massive database of stored memories and behaviour.
Like Microsoft Windows it comes with a default.
This default doesn’t do logic! Why not?
THE AFRICAN SAVANNAH DEFAULT
Your default mode is geared to survival on the African Savannah, where we Homo Sapiens evolved from the last nearly extinct remnant of our predecessor Homo Erectus. Grab it when you can, hoard what you can, and when times are good, breed like mad! That’s what helped you survive in the primal past.
Clearly, the default mode is just not applicable to modern civilisation! This means that your mind needs configuring.
A RELUCTANCE TO RE-CONFIGURE
Oddly, the ability to re-configure your mind has been around for millennia, but the trouble has been who’s been keeping the knowledge. Back in the African Savannah, the guy who dealt with wellbeing was the Shaman, who became the priest, the cleric, the llama and so on, and as religion and spirituality has become increasingly divided, and the knowledge fragmented, here in the West everyone eventually got a bit fed up with this, and wellbeing was taken up by the scientists, but they limited themselves to stuff they could measure, and you can’t really measure feelings and emotions.
THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION
Fortunately, we live in the information revolution, and all this disparate knowledge is now getting pooled online! Now you don’t have to sign up for a faith, change faith, or abandon your own faith to get the information, and you can utilise the wisdom of the ancients without compromising your own conscience.
What I’m teaching suits any spirituality or none.
UNDERSTANDING THE EMOTIONS
Let us first get a basic understanding of our emotions. They are fundamental to who you are, even more fundamental than thinking. Feeling and emotion and desire were there in your life long before language. All emotions are hardwired to lead you to a fundamental desire, the desire of desires. There is a basic fundamental desire we all have - we had it at birth, we still have it and it will be there at death – it is to be comfortable. When I ask my hypnotherapy clients which feeling they want to feel above any other feeling, they invariably say PEACE, because when you’ve been troubled, that’s your idea of comfort.
THE BOTTOM LINE IS COMFORT
Any pleasure or desire you can think of, the bottom line is COMFORT. We all want to be peaceful and comfortable. You want what you want because you think that when you’ve got it, you will experience comfort. Even adrenalin junkies! But there is a problem. Your primal instincts don’t want to wait to be comfortable, they want you to be comfortable NOW!
Monday, 15 November 2010
Banish The Doubt - Part 3
THE PHANTOM MENACE
Why are so many of us if not all of us experiencing our success being sabotaged from within? Clearly it’s something subconscious because I have absolutely no conscious desire to fail. I want to win, and I want to win BIG! I know exactly where I want to be and where I want to go. So why in certain situations have I screwed up for absolutely no logical reason?
What causes experienced penalty takers to miss penalties? It would be pretty handy to find out wouldn’t it? I would give us something of an edge. Well good news, I’m going to tell you. It’s not something I discovered personally, it’s been known and documented for thousands of years. It was never lost, it’s never been a secret, it’s never been suppressed or covered up, it’s just been plain ignored, possibly because you can’t measure it. That is one great oversight, one great flaw in Western business thinking and intellectual thinking in general – if we can’t measure it, it’s not important. This is plain wrong! Who makes a business successful? It’s people isn’t it? Can you measure human nature? Bizarrely, one man argued you can.
PSYCHOMETRIC TESTING
He was named Francis Galton and he invented PSYCHOMETRIC TESTING in the 19th Century. He was the first to propose that if we ask the right questions, do the right tests and measure the responses, we will know exactly how someone will perform. Unfortunately it’s not that simple! It’s also pretty rich coming from someone who had a nervous breakdown as a young man!
Yes you can get a general idea of someone’s aptitude and attitude, but if you think psychometric testing will tell you what someone will do when it comes down to it, you will soon find out that it’s not a very accurate science. As Gerald Ratner has taught us, great performers make gaffs! I’m sure Gerald would have passed every psychometric test going, but no one saw the business “clanger of clangers” coming did they? Least of all Mr. Ratner himself!
ONLY A SNAPSHOT
My other objection to the use of psychometric testing is that as well as being an unreliable measure, it is an unreliable snapshot of how that person was on that day. It takes no account whatsoever of someone’s potential. People change, they learn and grow, they are being constantly remoulded by their experience.
You are all not the person you were five years ago, and in five years the person you are now will be dead, there will be a new person with your memories but a different perspective.
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
So then, if you can’t measure it, what is this X-Factor, this hidden phenomenon that is sabotaging us from within, undermining, overriding and negating every positive thinking strategy you’ve heard of? It has several names. In Buddhism and Taoism, it is called the Mind Monkey. Psychologist Sigmund Freud called it the ID – it can also be thought of as the elephant in the room, the “bull in the china shop”, the ghost in the machine, the gremlin in your morale. It is negative emotion.
Why are so many of us if not all of us experiencing our success being sabotaged from within? Clearly it’s something subconscious because I have absolutely no conscious desire to fail. I want to win, and I want to win BIG! I know exactly where I want to be and where I want to go. So why in certain situations have I screwed up for absolutely no logical reason?
What causes experienced penalty takers to miss penalties? It would be pretty handy to find out wouldn’t it? I would give us something of an edge. Well good news, I’m going to tell you. It’s not something I discovered personally, it’s been known and documented for thousands of years. It was never lost, it’s never been a secret, it’s never been suppressed or covered up, it’s just been plain ignored, possibly because you can’t measure it. That is one great oversight, one great flaw in Western business thinking and intellectual thinking in general – if we can’t measure it, it’s not important. This is plain wrong! Who makes a business successful? It’s people isn’t it? Can you measure human nature? Bizarrely, one man argued you can.
PSYCHOMETRIC TESTING
He was named Francis Galton and he invented PSYCHOMETRIC TESTING in the 19th Century. He was the first to propose that if we ask the right questions, do the right tests and measure the responses, we will know exactly how someone will perform. Unfortunately it’s not that simple! It’s also pretty rich coming from someone who had a nervous breakdown as a young man!
Yes you can get a general idea of someone’s aptitude and attitude, but if you think psychometric testing will tell you what someone will do when it comes down to it, you will soon find out that it’s not a very accurate science. As Gerald Ratner has taught us, great performers make gaffs! I’m sure Gerald would have passed every psychometric test going, but no one saw the business “clanger of clangers” coming did they? Least of all Mr. Ratner himself!
ONLY A SNAPSHOT
My other objection to the use of psychometric testing is that as well as being an unreliable measure, it is an unreliable snapshot of how that person was on that day. It takes no account whatsoever of someone’s potential. People change, they learn and grow, they are being constantly remoulded by their experience.
You are all not the person you were five years ago, and in five years the person you are now will be dead, there will be a new person with your memories but a different perspective.
THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM
So then, if you can’t measure it, what is this X-Factor, this hidden phenomenon that is sabotaging us from within, undermining, overriding and negating every positive thinking strategy you’ve heard of? It has several names. In Buddhism and Taoism, it is called the Mind Monkey. Psychologist Sigmund Freud called it the ID – it can also be thought of as the elephant in the room, the “bull in the china shop”, the ghost in the machine, the gremlin in your morale. It is negative emotion.
MONSTERS FROM THE ID
Negative emotion, (fear, hate and anger) is a very basic very primal force that drives us all and it can override our most sincere beliefs, our strictest taboos, and our firm intentions. Nothing within you can overcome the monsters from the ID, these beasts from the subconscious. In fact they thrive on resistance and suppression. The more you try and pack down your darkest emotions into some deep dungeon within your mind, the greater the pressure, and suppress them hard enough for long enough and one dark day you will find them explosively released all over your life.
The monsters from the ID do not do logic, explanation, argument or containment. The only weapon you have against your emotion is another emotion, and I will show you how to wield that weapon in in the next part.
Negative emotion, (fear, hate and anger) is a very basic very primal force that drives us all and it can override our most sincere beliefs, our strictest taboos, and our firm intentions. Nothing within you can overcome the monsters from the ID, these beasts from the subconscious. In fact they thrive on resistance and suppression. The more you try and pack down your darkest emotions into some deep dungeon within your mind, the greater the pressure, and suppress them hard enough for long enough and one dark day you will find them explosively released all over your life.
The monsters from the ID do not do logic, explanation, argument or containment. The only weapon you have against your emotion is another emotion, and I will show you how to wield that weapon in in the next part.
Sunday, 21 February 2010
Peace of Mind
I have spent large parts of my life wishing I was put to sleep and woken up only for a rare experience of ecstacy, then to be put back to sleep again - literally and honestly. It seems that near his end, Michael Jackson felt the same, but had the money to make it happen - and had the fate of many who seek an external chemical solution to their problems. For so long, life was just awful, or more accurately felt awful. Suffering, I have since discovered, is really just a decision that things are bad. This decision is made by creating an idea of how it should be, an idealised fantasy where everything does what you think it should, and then measuring how it actually is against that fantasy standard.
It has taken more than half a lifetime for me to deconstruct this perception and manage my thoughts in such a way that doesn't leave me permanently miserable. Even then, this awakening has taken place because I was forced into it by necessity. Others, particularly in my family, were going to be deeply affected by my attitude and behaviour. I didn't want to let my issues spoil their lives, as my parents issues had spoiled large parts of mine.
I am not immune to being blown off course by circumstances and the attitudes of others, but when alone, I am no longer torturing myself, and have that most precious of all life's qualities, peace of mind. Nothing else really matters. Peace of mind is the ultimate bliss that life can offer. I would trade in any other experience for it, as it is the only one that really satisfies. In fact, the Law of Attraction only works to full effect when you are at peace with yourself first.
The absence of peace of mind boils down to fear, and fear is an ongoing product of the mind itself. Yes, past trauma, injustice and bad circumstances play their part, but these things only go on hurting us when we are ruled by fear, and your fear also incidentally hurts not only you but everyone around you. Fear, in the absence of an imminent threat to life, really does ruin everything. The first step to free yourself from this tyranny of fear is to tame your own mind, because left to itself the mind has an infinite capacity for bringing up things to be afraid of.
The ultimate cause of fear boils down to a sense of separation from the reality you perceive around you. Many of my clients express this very feeling, that they are innocent little fish thrown into a nasty pond full of horrid things. I have to then deconstruct this perception of reality and show them it is something they created themselves, a popular but false adopted concept that life sucks. It only "sucks" if you start with the assumption that your life is all about whether your conscious mind is in control of everything.
When you start to examine what your conscious mind actually is, and what what you mean by "me" "myself" and "I", and what these things actualy are when you look at them closely, your clear ideas about being a distinct little fish in a big mucky pond start to break down and then get completely turned on their head. It turns out that you are the pond experiencing itself through the fish. The universe is experiencing itself through you!
This startling conclusion comes at the end of a prolonged journey of discovery. It is a journey embarked on only by a minority, who are so absolutely sick of suffering, and yearn so desperately to be free that they are determined enough to embark on it. My clients in their own ways are all similar. They have tried everything else and are so fed up with their issue or utterly bereft of a way out by themselves that they turn to me. Fortunately for them, so long as they trust me and do what I tell them, I can help them, as I've already "been there", be it addiction, despair or distress.
Most of my clients rarely need to undertake the full journey I have - if they have a single issue, they need only to learn how to draw on their own hidden inner resources. As they learn to trust in themselves, their self-belief starts to dispel their fear and life becomes rich and fulfilling, without any need to go into the nature of existence itself. As the healer and therapist however, it is essential to my own personal ongoing succes.
For most people, and the majority of my clients, it is sufficient to see oneself as simply just as worthy as anything else in the pond, with a valid and worthwhile contribution to make. The sense of separation becomes less acute, fear dissolves, at least to a manageable level, and peace of mind is experienced. But occasionally I get the odd client whose belief system is so negative, so utterly distorted and so self-defeating that nothing less than a complete paradigm shift in their fundamental assumptions about life is required, and I introduce them to the reality of who they truly are.
If you wish to experience ultimate Peace of Mind, which is life's ultimate bliss, you need to become aware that you are not a separate distinct thing from everything else, but rather a unique expression of everything else, in the same way every wave is a unique expression of the ocean, or a snowflake is a unique expression of snow. What some people call "enlightenment" is not transforming into an angelic being, but rather the letting go of what you have thought you are to become what in reality you have always been. To experience that reality, begin the journey by sitting down and asking the question "exactly who/what am I?"
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
