it's like gym for your soul...

My clients must get sick of me telling them to start meditating. They frequently talk about how they just can't stop thinking. How they just keep overthinking. How they worry about their kids, their jobs, their partners.

Ah. The bullying mind!

Of course, we're human and very few of us who live an average human life are going to rid ourselves of all worry. But it honestly doesn't have to be this painful.

What most of us aren’t taught - and should be! - is that the mind is a tool.

We think that the mind is us, that the crazy rushing river of thoughts between our ears is what we actually are. Sub-consciously, many of us fear that if that never-ending stream of chatter ceases, so do we.

But. The mind is simply a tool that helps us to work out how to get stuff. Like a computer does. Or Anthony Robbins.

We let the mind run roughshod over us and when we do, it’s like those cartoons you see where someone unskilled starts a chainsaw and runs round the yard chopping shit up as they struggle to get control of it.

The very best thing you can do to tame your rampaging mind is learn meditation. Meditation is gym for both the mind and the soul. It strengthens both your ability to concentrate your thoughts and your ability to clear your mind when complete calm is needed.

There are a lot of different types of meditation and a lot of different ways to learn. I always recommend people start with YouTube. Just search guided meditations and listen to a few different ones till something floats your boat.

Five minutes a day is far more useful to you than a half hour on Saturday morning. It's about making that small daily silence a habit. One day, you will find it has become so habitual, it will happen automatically during a crisis and the other people involved will say to you, 'How can you be so calm?'

It's because you'll have trained your mind to react as needed in the meditation room in the same way a weightlifter trains their body to react in the gym.

Just make a start. Put the word out to The Universe that you are ready to start stopping your thoughts - just for a while, here and there - and the path to blissful quiet in your head will open before you.


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it's like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die...

Humans are complicated. We're like walking talking symbols of Oppositional Defiance Disorder. We routinely both love and hate our significant others - partners, parents, kids - at the same time.

I often see people who are looking for intuitive guidance from the cards on how to resolve, or at least, live with these destructive dilemmas. A reading can help with the specifics of an individual case, but in the mean time, there are certain truths that can help in every situation.

Whether it's someone you love who is in your life everyday, or a stranger passing through your life, you can stop drinking the poison and experience less of the corrosive emotion of hate.

1) Understand that we are all born guiltless and that life then happens to us. Life is hard and it often twists people. If the person has done something unforgivable, try not take it personally - by that I mean that, it's them, not you.

2) Understand that nobody, except a very sick individual, gets out of bed in the morning and thinks now whose life can I cock up today? Everybody thinks they are doing what they have to do to survive.

3) Understand that letting go of your hatred helps you, not them. To say, I'm not going to be angry about this anymore is not the same as saying What you did to me was okay. It is more like saying, I'm not going to let you keep doing it to me.

4) Symbolic visualisation of what you want your emotions to do helps enormously. The human brain thrives on visual plans and wants to do what you instruct it to do. It LOVES symbols - flags, dreams and music tell us this very clearly.

5) Meditation is the greatest tool you can use to calm destructive emotion and there are many places on the net where you can learn to do it for free.

You can imagine a balloon with the object of your hate inside and release that balloon to float away out of your sight. This symbolic imagination tells your brain that you don't want to think about that person anymore. It will work soon enough if you persist.

You can imagine that hatred as a yukky poison that fills your body which you then let drain away out of you through your fingers and toes. This tells your brain that your resentment is toxic and it shouldn't allow poisonous crap to hang around in your mind because that also affects your body.

If that person is still in your life and you are forced to unpleasant confrontations, you can imagine yourself as being surrounded by a shield which protects you from any 'bad vibes' that might come from them. This tells your brain to disregard input from that person.

You may be thinking How can these things help me? It's all imagination.

Well, great news - so are your emotions!

Yes, it's true - your emotions are all in your head. Which is not the same as saying they are not real, it just means that you are in charge of them. Yes, they are an unruly bunch and when they are running very high, it takes effort and clear thinking to keep them civilised, but still, they are yours to command.

If you have been very wronged, it can take time to heal and release your hatred - but while ever you are making the effort to let it go rather than to hold on to it, you are moving forward towards freedom and happiness.



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how to feel better in 10 minutes a day...

Over and over, I say to the people who come to me for help: The best thing you can do to make your life better is to meditate. 
Over and over, they say back to me: My mind won't stay still long enough to meditate. 
Over and over, I say to back to them: No, it won't, will it? Not till you've practiced meditation for a while! 

So many of us think a calm mind is the normal human state of being and a mind that chatters away at us every waking moment is abnormal. Somehow we think that most other people have it together and we are the only ones whose minds are giving us grief all day every day.

I'm afraid not. It's the nature of the mind to think. That's what it's there for. The mind exists to look for problems and when it finds them, real or imaginary, to turn  possible solutions over and over until it finds one it's happy with. Stupid Mind doesn't care if it's the middle of night. It doesn't care if its solutions are actually helpful. It doesn't care that it's actually only a tool for us to use in order to have a happy life.

The Mind thinks very highly of itself. It thinks it's in charge of our lives. The Mind thinks it's in charge of us. In fact, the Mind thinks it IS us.

It isn't.

It's certainly an important part of us - but many people consider our mind, our thoughts, to be our core Self.

It's not.

Think about a time where you felt peaceful - maybe it was lying on the beach in the middle of your best holiday ever and all you were aware of was the sun on your face and the smell of the sea in your nostrils. Maybe it was climbing a tree when you were a kid and your whole concentration was tied up in where to find your next foothold.  Maybe it was lying in your lover's arms after some mind-blowing sex and all you were aware of was the after-light of the fireworks behind your eyelids.

These experiences generally do not need the words or thoughts that Mind uses to communicate with us - and yet these are the times when we are most our true selves.

The mind is important. In no way am I saying it isn't. It's fun to play with. It's interesting to explore. It's crucial to navigate successfully through life's problems. But it isn't our most essential self. If humans were computers the mind would pretty much be the operating system. Like Windows, with all its problems and glitches. Just as Windows runs the computer, but is not actually the computer, so the mind runs the self, but isn't actually the Self.

I see my job as helping people find their way in a scary world - and the number 1 way to navigate this world is by putting the mind in its place. What we think of as our mind is often more just a constant stream of worrying and negativity. What will happen if I run out of money? What will happen if my lover leaves me? What will happen to me when I'm old?

What's the point of these out of control thoughts? There is none. They don't solve anything. They just make you unhappy. Meditation will teach you to quiet your mind so that you can enjoy the beautiful things in life. It will allow you to control when you let your mind off the leash to apply its logic to actual life problems in the here and now.

There are operations you leave Windows to run automatically on your computer and things that need your direction. Your life is like that. Practising meditation allows us to quiet those unnecessary thoughts and experience what lies beneath them.

What will we find beneath the constant chatter of an out of control mind?

Peace.

In my next entry, I'll give you some pointers on how to get started on the great adventure inward that we call meditation.

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making the most of your misery...

I think one of the places people of my generation have failed in bringing up our kids is that we so badly wanted them to be happy - have this! watch this! go here! distract yourself with this fun thing! - that many of us didn't teach them that unhappiness is a normal part of life. 

In fact, it's a crucial part of life. 

These are some of the things I'd say to our young now. These are some of the things I'd have made clearer to my own kids if I had it to do over. 

You will never escape times of unhappiness. We never taught you how to just sit with the feeling of being unhappy. We never taught you that being unhappy with your lot isn't the worst thing  that can happen to you.

We also didn't teach you really effective ways out of your angst. I'm not saying we should go back to the old days, the tough old days where men were men and women ate their young - modern psychology has identified a lot of issues that make humans unhappy and that's a good start. Now we need to start making sure that everyone gets some grounding in how to live with and find their way through, the part of the human condition called misery.

1) Write things down. If you're unhappy with your life as it is, organise it via the written word.

a) what's wrong with my life 

b) what can I do to make it better 

c) what do I need to take that action and most important of all 

d) TAKE THE ACTION.

2) Get out of your own head. Think of others. Do something for someone you love for no reason whatsoever. Do something useful for someone you don't even know for no reason. Do this more than once. Make a weekly habit of it. All of our unhappiness exists within the 2 square foot of space that our body occupies. Move out of that 2 square foot regularly and put yourself into someone else's - it makes you bigger. 

3) Get help to take care of the things in life that need to be taken care of. One of the greatest sources of anxiety is the feeling there are a million things you should be doing, that it will be utterly disasterous if they don't get done and you don't even know where to start. Accountants, lawyers, house cleaners - god bless them, every one, for doing for us the things that make us crazy. 

4) Learn to meditate. You will hear it over and over through life. Learn to meditate. It stills the grasshopper human mind and gives times of great peace and insight.

5) Dwell on the positive as much as you can. For most of us, there are a dozen positive things happen in our day for every negative one - but the human mind is rigged to look out for danger and so it latches on to every little negative occurrence and lets them crowd out the positive. I don't mean you should ignore the negative - but you should certainly strive consciously to give the positive equal weight in your life. Your family, the roof over your head, your health, books to read, gorgeous nature to moon over - there is so much to be happy for in even the very worst day.

6) Understand that whatever is happening for you now, it will pass. None of it is the end of the world. Understand really truly deeply that we are all miserable sometimes.

Life is good for a while and then it's crap and then it's really really good for a long while and then it's catastrophic suddenly and then later it's good again and ... so on and so forth to the end, where you look back and you really only remember the love and adventure  you shared with the people you met up with.

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