Week One

ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION

 ‘If you’re depressed you’re living in the past, if you’re anxious you’re living in the future, if you’re at peace you’re living in the present.’ Lao Tzu.

In week one my aim is to guide us to that place of peace, dissolving the mind chatter, and getting out of the way of being ourselves. 

We’ll accept the gift of stillness, and understand that there’s so much more to us than just the ‘meat suit’. We’ll meet who we really are…the loving observer of our human experience.

For me, meditation takes the pressure out of life. It helps me look in to the insanity of our human experience rather than thinking that this is all I am. It’s an awareness that everything around me is just play dough. It’s great that all the good stuff’s there but it’s not what really has the ability to make me happy. Experiencing the essence of who I am, which is pure love helps me understand what true happiness is.

Do I choose suffering or love?

Only I can decide whether to suffer or not with every choice I make about what I’m going to think. Do I choose suffering or love? Do I choose the fear of my stored past beliefs that keep me small and stop me from creating my life or do I embrace the lessons and in so doing, let them go? And when the sh*t hits the fan and I think that all this insanity is real, do I then give myself a break and understand that I’m just having my human experience or do I keep beating myself up and stay being a victim?

There’s always a choice.

Week Two

FORGIVENESS AND RELATIONSHIPS

“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” – Louis B. Smedes

Is there anyone or anything in your life that you don’t forgive?

It’s very rare that you’ll find a human being who hasn’t experienced some sort of abuse, illness, or trauma at some point in their lives.  Whether it lasted for years or was a single incident, we create belief systems that our human experience can hold on to not only in our lifetime, but for generations. The stress created from not forgiving can cause us to suffer horribly, eating us away inside, causing all sorts of diseases and mental anguish.

When we forgive it doesn’t excuse the behaviour of others and let them off the hook, we forgive purely to end our suffering. It’s nothing to do with them.

“When you forgive, you in no way change the past – but you sure do change the future”. – Bernard Meltzer

When we don’t forgive, the thought of that person or incident can consume us. Situations and people remind us of it constantly. We give it strength and power by continually talking about it (usually to our long suffering friends and family), and relive every moment to continue the agony. Or we suppress it, and do anything to forget by numbing ourselves, but if it’s not dealt with we only relive it another day…

Most of us need a period of time to relive the nightmare and keep the flame alive, to help process it. But there comes a time when the essence of who we are (pure love) has had enough, and wants to heal.

The only way to release the misery of these limiting beliefs, find peace, restore our health and our present relationships is to forgive. Not only to forgive the other person, but forgive ourselves for letting it consume us.

“A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.” – Robert Quillen

Forgiving and letting go can be one of the hardest things we ever do. Some people see it as a strength to hold on to the negativity. “I’ll never forgive her!” is worn like a proud badge of honour, but really it takes a strong person to really surrender and say ‘enough!’. Holding on and letting it eat us up will only make us weak, miserable and sick.“Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.” – Marlene Dietrich

We know we’ve let go when we just don’t think about it any more. It’s such a wonderful feeling to create some space in our minds for peace. The more we forgive, the happier we become and the lighter we feel. I remember recently doing a surrogate session with a client where she wanted to work on her husband. I knew that he had past issues that he hadn’t let go of but I was really shocked to feel the pain in his muscles! Like he was wearing a really heavy coat that felt almost suffocating! Un forgiveness sits in our bodies as a heavy negative energy and an anxiety that eats away at our organs.

Letting go is the most loving and empowering thing that we can ever do for ourselves.

Let me guide you through a Mind-less meditation to help you recognise and let go of past and present resentments to create a happier and healthier life.

Week Three

HEALTH & WELL-BEING

 I think we’re all very aware of the scientific evidence that our minds have the biggest role in creating disease as well as healing the body. In Bruce Lipton’s book ‘Biology of Belief’ , he has documented forty years of research about how what we think affects our bodies, and that our environment is responsible for diseases and not our parents biology. So if your mother had breast cancer it doesn’t mean you’ll get it from her purely from a biological stand point but if you believe you will, and you lead a very stressful life it does heighten your chances. From my experience as a therapist, we can also take on our ancestors beliefs and the trauma’s that happened to them, plus past lives. 

A Course in Miracles says that the body is ‘a tiny fence around a little part of a glorious and complete idea’. It’s saying that the body, or the meat suit as I call it, is a minuscule part of who we really are. Who we really are is a mass of vibrating energy that expands out in to the universe and connects everything and everyone.

The affects of stress.

Stage 1 –  adrenalin high.

We’re very good at living off the adrenalin ‘high’ of constant challenges. A state of semi-euphoria is induced by the high levels of cortisol.

Stage 2 – resistance. Body tries to restore balance.

The second stage, that of resistance, is the body’s attempt to restore homeostatic balance. It involves hormonal changes and shifts in metabolism and mineral balance. Commonly there’s sodium accompanied by water retention in the tissues.

Stage 3 – exhaustion. Organ failure, depression.

The third stage is exhaustion. The body’s defences have become too weak to counter the effects of the stress hormones. The immune system is then compromised, digestion is greatly diminished and our organs start malfunctioning, plus studies have proven that a feeling of helplessness has been related to a reduction in anti cancer killer cell activity and increased tumour growth. Depression lowers the immune response, and this helplessness has to do with how much control the person feels they have over stressful events. Those findings explain why depression and a sense of helplessness are associated with cancer. (Science 223: 188-190 and Sapolsky, 2010)

Doesn’t it make perfect sense that we should work on our minds to release destructive thought patterns, and keep our stress levels to a minimum, to allow our bodies to heal and return to homeostasis?

Also getting out of our heads helps us shift our awareness from ‘body identification’ to ‘spirit identification’. This heals the body as well as the mind. When we’re stressed we get caught up in the mind, our bodies, and our environment, and we’re right back in thinking our human experience and the meat suit are all there is. When we get out of our heads we come back to our connection of everything and everyone.

We’ll be exploring the mind/body connection every month and will rejuvenate our bodies’ with the mind-less healing meditation.

Week Four

CREATING YOUR LIFE

If we become still enough, we will be filled with silence. In that silence we can be an irresistible magnet towards anything and everything from everywhere and no where which can come at any time to illuminate, thrill and enchant every cell of our infinite beings.

Robert Rabbin

Creativity, intuition, and inspiration are needed to access the knowledge of the loving unity of all that is. Getting out of our heads gives us the ability to see things in a brand new way, and we then create new ideas that help us move towards our goals. We can plug in to all this whenever we want to. We just have to find the ‘will’ socket.  We have the most sophisticated computer and programmers helping us achieve our goals – it’s called the loving unity of all that is and can be accessed by getting out of our heads.

When we’re doing our soul’s purpose we’re in the flow. ‘How the hell am I going to do this?’ we might ask, but when it feels right and we ask for help, we get all the knowledge and the time to make it happen.

We feel inspired (in spirit) and we feel really excited with loads of energy. When our vibration is high ie; closer to love and miles away from fear, we trigger our super conscious mind and we create what we need.

Any thought, plan, goal or idea, held continually in the conscious mind, must be brought in to our lives, in to our experience and in to our reality by the superconscious mind, whether positive or negative. Which is why it’s so important to be extremely focused. Talk, think, feel, and visualise only that which we want to happen.

Being in touch with our inspiration – the loving unity of all that is, which we can access in mind-less meditation, can get us on the right track for what our life’s purpose is on this planet.

There’s an easy way to find out what your life purpose is by asking these five questions.

1. Who are you?
2. What are you highly qualified to do or teach?
3. Who do you do it for?
4. What do those people want or need?
5. What do those people get out of it? How do they change as a result of what you give them?

If you’re not highly qualified yet, getting a job in anything and trusting that the universe has your back, and that one day it will lead you to your dream job is a great place to start.

Adam Leipzig says there’s 151,928 books on Amazon about how to find your life’s purpose. He says the unexamined life isn’t worth living, but if all you’re doing is examining it’s still not worth living!

In week four we’ll look at how you want to create your life. What fears are stopping you and how to start implementing what it is you really want to do and deal with the negative self talk that comes up.

Adam went to Yale and 80% of the people he spoke to at his 25th re union weren’t happy with their lives. He realised that those people did what they ‘ought’ to do, but it wasn’t really their dream, and it didn’t serve others. He realised that the people who were ‘outward facing’, who served people in some way to help make them happy, knew that they would be taken care of and felt good about them selves.

Being outward facing, of service and helping others, whether you play music, design clothes, you’re an engineer, work in a cafe, work in a factory, what ever the profession, will ultimately be much more satisfying and inspiring than being in a job just for the money.

Sometimes it’s as easy as changing our attitude about what we do that can change our life. Our Human Experience (ego) always wants something bigger, better, and faster, especially as we’re always being told that unless we’re rich and successful then we’ve failed at life and probably won’t be happy. Being of service, loving ourselves just as we are, dealing with the fears that stop us, and loving the experiences we’re having in this moment is the best recipe for a successful happy life.

When we look at ourselves, we see what the underlying feelings are that prevent our success, competitiveness, self doubt, insecurity, inadequacy, and desire for approval.

When the clouds are removed, the sun shines forth. The freeing up of abilities, creative ideas, talents and resourcefulness occurs automatically as a result of a positive state of mind. Letting go of negative belief or self limitation frees up inspiration to create an endless flow of creative ideas.

Next… Why Meditate