Monday 3 November 2014

Bigger on the Inside

I consider that the broader purpose of my sessions is to help clients to expand their energy and to ‘lighten’ in all meanings of that word. So much of what we do in life and how we respond, causes us to shrink, condense and contract our energy. We become weighed down and reactionary, smaller and more afraid (regardless of our apparent position in society). Instead of opening up to the flow of universal energy we create resistance and friction. Then the world seems a very difficult place to be and we wonder why nothing seems to work out for us, and why we can’t find fleeting satisfaction, never mind peaceful fulfilment.
  I’ve been a fan of the BBC TV series Dr. Who since I was a little girl and I recently grabbed hold of the idea of the TARDIS as a way of helping clients to understand this concept. The TARDIS is the Policeman’s phone box in which Dr. Who travels through time and space. Not much larger than a standard red phone box on the outside it is, as nearly every occupant comments, “much bigger on the inside.” In essence we are each a mini TARDIS– much, much more than our external finite physical shell and way more grand on the inside!
  The trick is to connect with that inner greatness and to anchor ourselves in its certainty.  If we listen only to our mind and sit with it as our lord and master then we believe only in the 5 senses, are convinced that we know only what we are taught and that we are powerless, if power hungry, individuals. However if we claim the throne of the soul then we can call on all the knowledge of our many lives, and the wisdom of our guides and guardian angels. We trust our intuition and learn to work with, rather than against, energy flow. We also act in the certainty that we are indeed authentically powerful beings with no need to chase external kudos as a measure of our relevance.
  So don’t judge yourself or others, pay no penance to the critical voice rabbiting on in your mind and let go of the word ‘impossible’. Beyond the fear and pain of the child and past the anger and frustration of the adult lies the truth of our being, where all is known and everything is possible. Centre yourself in your Heart not your head, anchor into the earth, then open up the ‘TARDIS’ energy of the Solar Plexus chakra and know that you are one with greatness.

Thursday 18 September 2014

What do you Feed your Mind Monster?

This month I want to talk about the ‘Mind Monster’ – that body of energy that is comprised of our most negative thoughts, and is all too often the nagging narrator of our life.
   All it takes is a simple slip up, a misspoken word or a response we don’t like from someone we may not even know, and suddenly the Mind Monster is out of the cage, puffing up and demanding to be fed. And feed it we do, spending days doggedly pursuing what makes us angry or fearful or stressed, but cancelling out a positive emotion or thought (especially about ourselves) within minutes of it forming. When the Mind Monster is in control, our energy and sense of self is splintered and we feel powerless to control our responses to the challenges of living. 
   Mirroring the individual Mind Monster, we have the global version incessantly twittering away. Through social media we have created a massive monster with a voracious appetite, which has convinced many of us that it is our best source of validation. Yet what it all too often encourages is the most vicious and critical of voices, whilst carelessly causing a teenager’s self-esteem to be based on how many ‘likes’ they get within the first 2 hours of uploading a new profile pic. Social media is in many ways anything but sociable. It may give us the illusion of being connected and part of something important, but most of the time it is feeding our individual Mind Monsters and, as such, keeping us small, whilst distracting us from the true source of connection, the Soul.
   Unlike the Mind Monster, the Soul has no need to feed pain to itself or others. It has no interest in defining itself through those external to us, because it knows itself intimately. It is compassion, it is wisdom, it is the source of love, it is our most perfect self.
  So make a pledge today to starve your mind monster. And make no mistake it is your mind monster.  It stands between you and your greatest self, between you and strength, clarity and happiness…….and you definitely don’t deserve that.

Things you can try
  • Instead of grumbling and rumbling on for days about how some loved one annoys you, whilst “liking” the innocuous activities of someone you barely know, take the time to like the person sitting across the dinner table from you. Ponder their strengths and the place they fill in your life. Contemplate the things they do that make you smile, for at least as long as you fixate on their less favourable habits. 
  • When you notice your Mind Monster starting to awaken, dragging you to a place of negativity, anchor your feet into the ground, breathe slowly and rhythmically into the lower part of your lungs, and with each out-breath visualize the Mind Monster deflating bit by bit, like a hot-air balloon after it has landed. Then crumple it up, chuck it in the bin, and grab a rainbow instead to pin on your lapel.
  • If we think of our interactions in terms of a city, then social media represents the busy market square, noisy, frenetic and draining. While it’s fun to visit occasionally and people watch, it's not where we'd choose to live. We need to balance its distractions with other opportunities to find the silence and space our souls crave. We find that solace when we do something creative, play a game, sit under a tree watching the clouds or work in the garden.
  • Several of my clients are enjoying this website which for a small fee emails 10 minute meditations to your inbox every morning. These come from all over the world in different styles and traditions and recipients report feeling much more uplifted and positive for the day.

Thursday 7 August 2014

Reclaim Your Happy Child

  I am always saddened when I have clients say that they can’t recall the last time they had a good belly laugh or can’t remember what it’s like to feel the joy of being alive. They are bogged down in all the demands of living relevant to their time of life – school, job seeking, chasing a career, raising children, caring for ageing parents etc etc. Also, if we don’t do the work, we tend to reinforce and more deeply embed our fears, anxieties, and negative belief systems until they become our default settings.  Then the joyful child we once were is progressively buried under pain and shame, anger and angst. As I have mentioned in other blogs when we operate from within this distorted conditioning we are caught in the swing between the hurt child and the out of control adult. However if we begin to heal and release the negative barriers then it is possible to hold the authentic adult self, and ultimately to connect once more to the joy of the child.
  That’s why I know a client is on the healing track when, in a session, I am given an image from their childhood where they are completely immersed in the joy of living. When I remind them of those moments clients can become quite emotional or look stunned at the realization that they have left that wee person so far behind.
  Rather than running from ourselves and chasing that illusive ‘happiness’ that we are certain must be just around the corner, we have to begin the journey back to joy by sitting in communion with self.  Then we have to forgive ourselves our mistakes, we have to say sorry to ourselves for some of the things we’ve put ourselves through and we have to applaud ourselves for making it through, struggling but learning, challenged but growing and, hey, still going. Then as a reward for all that work we permit ourselves joy, we allow the beauty of this earth to move us and we let wonder fill our souls. We rejoice in our ability to laugh, rekindle our mischievous ways, and honour our right to have fun 'just cos’.
  If you wish to reach across the years and give that joyful child a helping hand, you can get out some baby photos where you were obviously happy. Try remembering what it felt like the first time you built a sandcastle or rode on a roller-coaster. Climb a tree, have a swing, run down a hill with your arms outstretched, roll down a grassy bank (without being embarrassed), skip, have a pillow fight, have a water fight, go rock-pooling or make a snow angel depending on the time of year. If you’re still having trouble click onto this you tube video of a baby called Micah, laughing as his dad rips up a job rejection letter!
  Reclaim your joyful child today – he/she is not as far away as you think!

My sister Christine and me (L) and Susan the doll

Thursday 15 May 2014

Help! I'm a Rescuer!

Many of my clients come in carrying other people’s ‘stuff'. This shows up as clogged energy in the solar plexus chakra, or heaviness on the back, or even the other person’s pain lodged in the heart chakra. Many of us, particularly women, are programmed to be sympathetic and empathetic from an early age. We often are ‘fixers’ so want to help everyone and anyone - whether they want it or not!
  As I have discussed in an earlier blog we actually do a lot of our communicating on the auric level. As such we read each other’s auras and identify each other’s (often faulty) programming. Friends, workmates and relations will pick up on our energetic message of fixer, helper, rescuer, repository of other’s pain etc, and decide, “Oh great she/he will carry all this for me.” And so they dump and then go off feeling much better for it, and exclaiming the benefits of having us as an acquaintance. Meanwhile we are left feeling heavy, drained and tired. If even when out shopping total strangers feel it appropriate to tell you their life story – this is you.
  And certainly it used to be me. Once, as a university student, I was on a train leaving Newcastle-upon-Tyne when a bloke sat down and started to tell me his life story which looked pretty bleak. I say ‘looked’ because I was going purely on facial expressions. I couldn’t make out a word he said – anyone who has heard a strong Geordie accent will know how possible that is (think Ross Noble calling a horse race).Anyway I must have made the right noises at the appropriate times as when he got off the train I did manage to catch, “Thanks a lot pet, I’ve never talked to anyone like that in my life before.”
  So how do we change the pattern? Firstly we need to recognise that we can’t fix everyone, and it is totally inappropriate to believe that we can or indeed should. In fact we can be hindering a person’s growth and development if we are forever taking their load for them. We have to learn to sympathise, but not carry other people’s baggage, no matter how much we love them. That does not mean we become mean or hard-hearted, just that we give ourselves permission to allow others their burden. After all we are much more useful over the long term if we walk beside a person, rather than carry them on our backs. This also makes it easier to hold a place of non-judgment and compassion and reduces the likelihood of ‘giver’ fatigue or resentment.
  In my sessions I release the energy around conditioning or experiences which have fed the faulty belief that we have to be the wonder-woman/superman of everyone’s lives. I then reinforce that release, by discussing tools to break out of the pattern. One young client came up with a great way of dealing with this. She tended to get people in her life offloading onto her, and she was tired both of it and from it. So she now imagines a big bowl in front of her. The other person dumps their stuff into the bowl and she envisages helping them to sift through it until they take it back in its new shape or, if they’re stubbornly attached to their pain, reclaim it in the same, sorry old state as before. While my client is still being caring and concerned, she is detached from the energy of the issue and the person and doesn’t feel depleted or put upon.  
  I think this technique will also reveal in time that we are at our most insightful when we are neither distorted by the need to get 'our strokes’, nor drained by the effort involved. Gradually too we will discover our truth that we don’t have to rush in to rescue and carry, in order to be loving, lovable and loved!

Monday 21 April 2014

Gratitude

On the 16th of March I was involved in a beautiful Indigenous- inspired ceremony honouring the Goddess energy in Port Phillip Bay, around which the city of greater Melbourne spreads its suburbs. You can read more here.
   The most important aspect to the whole ritual was the notion of gratitude. Gratitude for all the many good things we have in life and especially gratitude for earth’s bounties.  I spent my childhood on a farm and yet I don’t always have at the forefront of my mind the fact that all our food has to come from the earth. It is no wonder then that those who grow up in our cities can often take for granted the food they get from the supermarket. Or have no real connection to the products they place on their tables. If there is any thought beyond the routine of food shopping it can be – “I went out and got it and paid my hard-earned cash for it – so I’m grateful to me for working so hard.”
   When way back we picked or hunted for our food we made the plants and animals central to our life –they were our survival. Then when we mastered husbandry and cultivation and grew our own food we had a direct relationship to it and also to the process involved. We watched for rain, we yearned for heat or vice versa. We followed the seasons and the waxing and waning of the moon. We knew the variables involved could mean lack or plenty for the coming year. And that in turn meant health or wealth for our loved ones. We therefore honoured the source with rituals of gratitude and thanks. Everything from pagan worship to harvest thanksgivings, were aimed at counting our blessings and hoping, through such gratitude, to ensure the next season’s success.
   Gradually though, as societies have become more complex, and people further and further removed from the source of their food (and the meaning of religious festivals) their relationship with Mother Earth is compromised. In losing our connection to food, beyond obsessing about a calorie count, we disconnect from a fundamental fact of life - everything we eat comes from the land, sea or sky of this wonderful blue planet of which we are custodians.
   We lucky people no longer have to be concerned with issues of basic survival, so shouldn’t we be leading the way in the gratitude stakes? Shouldn’t we be the ones saying the loudest thankyous? And shouldn’t it be even more obvious to us that we are blessed to reap the bounties of this planet and that we are actually ‘crazy’ if we don’t protect and honour it?
   In the aforementioned ritual, those of us who stood on the beach under a full moon, felt deeply connected to the energy of Mother Earth. We were informed that there was one word, one emotion required to feed and honour that connection – a word we should spread far and wide: “Gratitude”.

PS Thank you for reading my blog.
PPS Click here to hear Shawn Achor's very witty and insightful talk on happiness which suggests that making Gratitude part of our everyday lives increases our happiness levels.

Wednesday 26 February 2014

The Gift of Time

Time – we use it, make it, spend it, mark it, waste it, kill it, lose it and bemoan its passing. It’s a gift and yet we often see it as a burden.
   When we are small time seems to move so slowly because we have no concept that it’s a commodity that may run out. We can spend hours just doing Lego or playing make-believe, ‘waste’ a whole afternoon in the sandpit, or fall asleep half-way through a tidy-up.
   School starts the shift – it demands our time and attention. It insists we must concentrate, corral our thoughts, and organise our time. Then as the pressure increases in high school indoctrination begins into the myth that ‘Happiness is always a step, and therefore a piece of time, away’. When we get a good final score at school then we’ll be happy (never mind that we’re spending the most exploratory time of our lives in a state of stress); when we get our degree, happiness awaits (oops there go the early 20’s); don’t worry we’ll find it when we get a job or life partner– oh well maybe a better job (or better life partner!). Now we’re racing through the 30’s and into the 40’s and still can’t seem to catch our breath or grasp that elusive happiness in anything more than occasional snatches. Not only that but we start to notice the time that has passed in life against the balance of what may be left, and panic or despondency set in.  
   What we don’t realise is that there is only one accessible moment in time and that is NOW, this very moment and it is our choice whether or not we savour it. We cannot complain about time when we spend most of it living in our head considering a place in the future, or worse caught in the thrall of a moment long gone when we “shoulda, coulda, migtha!”
We turn conversations that lasted minutes into hours of repetition and editing, or devote swathes of time to planning a future when we will get everything right.
   Our experience of time, however, only exists outside of us if that is how we are determined to perceive it, time actually is ours to own. If we live consciously we can choose what our relationship with it is. If we choose to stop experiencing our lives as a series of tasks to be ticked off at the end of a day, we can begin to live in the moment fully committed to and mindful of the current activity. We can also begin to be the child again, engaging organically with whatever we are doing. We can draw time, and indeed people, to us by being totally present in every conversation (kids especially know if you are really present or just wanting them to hurry up so you can get the lawn mown, or emails answered or TV show watched!) If life seems rushed, expand it by shutting off the mind and its endless lists and demands, sitting in peace and stillness, if only for a few moments, and with the breath drawing in calm and releasing tension. 
  But I’m a working mum who has busy kids I hear you cry – well then when rushing child 1 from (a) to (b) be aware of their presence and of your  time together rather than worrying about how you then have to get child 2 from (c) to (d). And if child 2 decides they don’t feel like activity (x) then don’t fret frantically on how best to fill the sudden space, take a slow deep breath and head to a park and sit together connecting with the ground and each other until it is time to head back to retrieve child 1 at place b doing activity (y)!
   Surely the aim of this journey is not to look back and wistfully say, “Where did the time go?” or “If only I had my time again….” But rather to claim, “Life …I owned every moment of it!”