Practising Mindfulness Latest Posts

  • Easy Self-Discipline

    Sometimes it can seem like the hardest thing in the world

    There are days, or is it just moments, where we think: what exactly is the point? What is it, this feeling, of not wanting people to bother with us? We don’t want them to talk to us or try to communicate with us on any level. We want to sleep, but can’t.

    Is this just a down day? Of course it is, and yet, when there’s a part of us that felt so alive and enthusiastic for life yesterday, we can’t help wondering, what the hell has happened for all this to change?

    The energy within each trigger

    Beliefs are very much dependent on triggers. Events that occur throughout the course of the day influence the flow of electrochemical energy flowing through our brains. When we think of the interconnected nature of the neurons within our brains, it’s easy to understand, how this flow can influence our thinking.

    In terms of how long they’re being fueled, by this electrochemical energy, beliefs, can be relatively short lived. As each belief is triggered and then replaced by one that has a greater energetic trigger (emotion) we feel our moods shifting and changing.

    Our mood and mental health changes from day to day

    And so as we can see our mental health changes from moment to moment. It can take the slightest thing to change how we feel; for our beliefs to shift. This could be something a person has said, or not said, for that matter. It could be the company we keep. Is it the influence of others deciding our mental stability? Perhaps it’s simply the tiring effect.

    It doesn’t matter, how impervious to the influence of others, we feel we’ve trained ourselves to become. People can still affect our moods and mindset. The alternative to this is being alone. It can be time alone that’s altering our mood. We can become withdrawn and inwardly focused, feeling like we’ve lost our motivation. How strange the mind is that it can alter, or be altered, so simply and inexplicably.

    So here we come the issue of self-discipline

    How can we keep ourselves on track and motivated when it seems our mind has different plans? This has a lot to do with understanding how we’re allowing ourselves to be distracted. What is it we’re doing to alter mood and mindset? What are we doing to alter our mental health?

    When we look deeper, we will see, that to a greater extent than we realise, it is actually us that’s doing the changing. It is us that’s responsible for these seemingly inexplicable shifts.

    Put yourself in the place of someone you believe to have immense stability, self-discipline, and determination

    Take the racing driver Lewis Hamilton as example. What does this person have that enables him to be so consistently good? What does he have that makes him such an achiever? What is the secret to his consistency? It’s more than a good car that’s for sure. A winning car is only this way when driven by a passionate and winning driver. Not to mention his team; the people around him.

    Self-discipline involves the matter of consistency and stability coming from within

    In other words, we must keep ourselves aware of any inconsistencies within our patterns of thought, and behaviour. Take diet as a simple yet powerful example. We might think it okay to eat well and healthy one day, and the next, just pig-out on sugary and fatty junk foods. This might be a pattern of behaviour. It could well be a pattern that’s been allowed to build in strength for years and years; as such, it’s something we’re no longer fully conscious of.

    If this type of eating were a followed pattern, it would be a prime example, of how we change moods from the inside out. We might now think that this is a chicken and the egg situation: that it’s the mood prompting the day of junk food or whatever. It is more likely though, that it’s simply a pattern – established many years ago – being acted out, over and over again. It’s this that’s changing mind. We are what we eat.

    Take a moment now to think back to the consistency of our racing driver

    During the racing season you can be sure Lewis Hamilton will be following strict routines. His patterns of thought and behaviour will be stable and consistently beneficial to winning races. He will have an awareness of this. So when it comes to self-discipline, it’s far easier to have this when we’re aware of what we might be doing, to alter our mindset from within. On a daily basis we must ask ourselves:

    How am I making this harder for myself?

    What am I doing that is in direct conflict with being consistent and stable?

    Diet, thoughts and behaviour, have a lot more to do with conflict than we might first realise. If we’re to find stability and consistency, self-discipline, must extend to all aspects of our lives .

    Important ingredients to success

    Take a few more moments to imagine what kind of mindset our racing driver possess. Actually close your eyes and imagine. Imagine his exercise regime; his diet and the people around him. Consider his general lifestyle. With this, think about his moods, mindset and mental health. What place is he in psychologically? 

    Apply this to yourself

    Think of what changes and improvements to lifestyle, diet, thoughts and behaviour you must now make. The outcome will be a consistency and stability that begins from the inside out.

    Along with thinking skills, one very important aspect of routine and self-discipline, is the ability to stop thought and just act. In other words, it’s our self-talk; our internal chatter, that can sometimes be the problem. By ceasing internal chatter – and just doing things routinely – we increase good habits and patterns of behaviour.

    Often, all we need do, is simply stop thinking about it and act. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it: “Do the thing and you will have the power”. Discipline yourself and just do it.

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  • Reaching for Ideals

    All images courtesy of pixabay

    Ideal:

    noun

    1. a conception of something in its perfection.
    2. a standard of perfection or excellence.
    3. a person or thing conceived as embodying such a conception, or conforming to such a standard, and taken as a model for imitation.

    Should we seek the ideal? Is being an idealist different to being a perfectionist? The English dictionary defines the idealist as this:

    • Someone who believes that very good things can be achieved often when this does not seem likely to others.
    We’re told that perfectionism is a negative

    We’re told that wanting perfection, and only settling for this, is something to be avoided. If we believe there’s no such thing as perfect, yet at the same time seek it, we’re certainly going to be wasting a lot of energy.

    Alternatively, when we understand perfection – as simply an ideal to strive for – we’re able to achieve our best in any given moment of time. Our efforts may not have been perfect, yet we can be comfortable in the knowledge, we did our best. In this respect we must have a ‘benchmark’ to reach for. There must always be a gold standard.

    So whether we like it or not, perfection, is always going to be something striven for. The perfect body, the perfect house, life, car, job, child, marriage, we could go on. The downside of this, will be the negative feelings we’re left with, when we inevitably fall short. We’ll feel frustrated, dissatisfied and unfulfilled when we fail to reach perfection. Eventually we may give up altogether.

    With this in mind, only reaching for the ideal, is the objective

    Being the best we can be without achieving perfection is the plan. After all, to be perfect would leave us with nowhere else to go; a very dangerous situation indeed. And so in this respect, it’s very sensible for us to see perfection, as unachievable. Thankfully there will always be better to strive for. Seeing this for what it is, gives us room to work harder, even when we know we’ve done our very best.

    It’s the knowledge that there is always more that keeps humans striving to move forward. We can always do better. There is always more. A very reassuring fact. This brings me on to the key understanding we must strive for.

    At The Freedman College we believe it makes perfect sense for us to be striving for a better understanding of one key element in our lives.

    When we focus our attention on this one key element all other things are found

    If we come back to the examples given of what we seek perfection in for a moment (be it lives, bodies, marriages or houses), all of these things are easily achieved, when we have a clear understanding of this key element. Here it is: The Ideal of Love.

    Once we cease – in our misunderstandings and misinterpretations of love – we will stop striving for an unachievable ideal. Because we’re confused about love, we don’t actually know, what we are in fact striving for. For example, we’re told that love is many things. The nonsense of this definition is the very thing causing confusion. If we don’t even know what it is, how can we strive to find it?

    When young we often think we’re in love

    We confuse the feelings we may have for someone as love. We may feel that we need someone, or that we feel lost without them; that we pander for them, or pine for their attention. We mistake lust and infatuation for love. We must make ourselves aware: Emotions of craving have nothing to do with love. Further to this, we mistake many aspects of fear, for love. We think because we fear losing them that we must love them. Fear of loss is fear of pain. Love is completely devoid of this.

    We really only need ask ourselves one thing to know whether we’re in love or not. Here it is: Do I want to empower this person? The true emotion of love is something we’re awarded when we witness the freedom of our loved ones. Anything other than this will never be love and only a poor imitation and illusion of it. 

    To know if our version of love is reciprocal, all we need do, is turn the question around like this: Is this person empowering me?  

    At this stage be sure to have a clear understanding of the word empower. It is not empowerment to need a person and neither is it empowerment to give yourself up to another. Empowerment is when we’re able to lift a person to be a free individual standing on their own two feet who is the best version of themselves they can possibly be at that moment in time.

    At the same time – as your empowerment of them – this power sets you free. The more people who have a clear understanding of this the better.

    Here is the definition of an ideal love that we believe to be A Basic Human Right:

    “Love and the ability to teach it, is wanting and needing to empower your partner and children to evolve into whole human beings who are free of fear, because that process gives you pleasure, freedom from your own fear, and brings you closer to wholeness”

    – Create Beautiful Partnerships

    Wholeness is a calm acceptance of this version of love and that of yourself as a near perfect example of a human being.

    Strive for this ideal and all other things will come.

  • How to Defend the Empath

    A modern term banded about nowadays is that of being an Empath. It’s really just a way of describing those who have a particularly overblown sensitivity to the mental or emotional state of another

    One of the main reasons for this sensitivity, I believe, comes as a result of the empath being very in touch with themselves. Those of us who have a good understanding of what it is to ‘know oneself’ do tend to display above average empathic abilities.

    There is of course disadvantage, as much as there is advantage, to being an empath. The empath can find themselves easily affected by the behaviour of others. They can also tend to be highly suggestible, and effected by others moods, to such a degree, they’re often swept along by the moment.

    There are times when the majority of us, and not just highly empathic people, become all too aware of the unpalatable and unpleasant aspects of human nature. Under such circumstances, we must all know how to protect ourselves, from its effects.

    We must distract ourselves by focusing our minds on the more positive aspects of human nature. Becoming more involved with the world around us will also help. Move attention, away from the feelings centre, and more toward the other senses.

    I clearly remember telling a trainee therapist one time, how, if she ever felt emotional – at an inappropriate moment – she’d find it useful to look upward

    This is done in order to take the mind out of our feelings or kinaesthetic sense. You’ll often see this when people are unconsciously seeking to control tearfulness. Conscious awareness of this phenomenon (of moving eyes upward) awards us greater control.

    When it comes to greater control, one last thing for us to look at today, is that of how easily empathic people can be emotionally manipulated. This is simply due to their high degree of awareness: the moods of others become theirs. When others are sad so are they, when others are happy, so are they. With this in mind, the clever, abusive manipulator, has the empath in the palm of their hand.

    An uncomfortable paradox for the empath is they’ve often experienced neglect, and other kinds of abuse, during childhood

    And to add insult to injury, as adults, they can also easily find themselves in the hands of abusers. Paradoxically, this is due to survival skills established during childhood, creating vulnerability (if not understood) in adulthood.

    Be aware: if you are empathic there are times when your mind, is quite literally, not your own. Taking back control involves detaching yourself from certain senses. Move your mind onto other things. Allowing yourself to be distracted from the moods of others, may be necessary, to take back control of your mind. As odd as it sounds, you may need to start caring, slightly less.

  • Hypnosis

    hypnosis

    The word hypnosis originates from the Greek word for sleep (hupnos). Even though this is how, and from where the word originates, hypnosis does differ, in some respects, to sleep. In fact, it could be said the use of hypnosis – in a modern therapeutic setting – actually wakes us to a new awareness; an awareness of why we often seem to behave in limiting, and uncontrolled ways. 

    There has been, and still is to some extent, much confusion around the subject of hypnosis. Let’s clear it up.

    Think of a time when you’ve drifted of into an imaginary would all of your own; think of how that has distorted time. Think of a time when you’ve been so lost in your own world, that you’ve not heard what someone said, or even seen them leave the room.

    Think of a repetitive activity – a car journey, coach, or train trip for example – and think of how you’ve not noticed time slipping away. Think of how good it felt, that time, when you were so very focused, to the exclusion of all other things; in the zone, as they say. All hypnotic states.

    It could be said we’re all constantly in a state of hypnosis, that simply varies from light, to slight, and back again during the course of our day.

    Sleep is something we do at night to rest our bodies. Our minds are potentially more active during sleep than during medium to deep hypnosis. Notice the use of the words medium to deep there.

    Medium to deep hypnosis is used by the Clinical Hypnotherapist as a means of accessing the unconscious, non-critical, part of the mind. Once hypnosis has been induced, positive suggestions for change are indirectly (through judicious use of metaphor) or directly emplaced – “You find change attractive and exciting” – for example.

    It’s often the unconscious part of our minds that keep us on a self-destructive path. Reprogramming – that which has become an unconscious activity – is the name of the game here.

    Here’s a gentle example – of something that has potentially become unconscious: could a good hypnotist suggest you no longer remember where your keys are? Could he suggest you’ve forgotten where you put them? The simple answer is yes, however, the professional Hypnotherapist, is only interested in emplacing suggestions that are beneficial.

    Hypnosis

    Analytical Hypnotherapy is used to help resolve the more stubborn confusion and conflict (neurosis) the mind may harbour. Often, we must understand the purpose and origin of a behaviour or way of thinking, before we can convince the mind to give it up.

    So there we are, relax, it is all in the mind.