Archive for month: August, 2017

In a world where at least 60% of people suffer anxiety, 45% report being stressed and 45 million working days are lost each year to stress and anxiety, we just might consider doing something about it. Beyond taking medication we can all learn to moderate our anxiety and stress in healthy ways.

Live In The Present.
It has to start here because in the now, in the moment, there is no depression, no anxiety and nothing to worry about. Let go of what was and do not worry about what will be. All the suggestions below will enhance your ability to be in the moment not in a depressive past or an anxious future. They are all also ways of increasing the happy endorphins in your brain which also has the effect of keeping you younger for longer.

Use the time that you do have in non-stressful ways.
How long does it take you to get to work? On that journey are you living in the present being relaxed and easy with yourself or are you winding up for a difficult day? How about you use that time to listen to music, and audio book or if you are on public transport, actually read a book.

Mindful meditation.
Just 10 minutes a day of focused mindful quiet time can change your life. It is the practice application of living in the present. The ten minutes begins to seep into the rest of your day calming and relaxing your life.

Relaxing pastimes and hobbies
Painting a picture, cooking a meal, knitting a jumper, the list becomes endless. When you focus on a project, whatever it is, your ability to worry becomes diminished as you focus into the moment.

Doing good things for others
Doing things that make other people happy has the magic effect of making you feel better and increasing the happy endorphins in your brain. It might just be making someone a cup of coffee or helping an older person carry their shopping, a good turn to others is a good turn for yourself.

Leave work at work
In occupational health we talk a lot about work life balance. The evening review, in the mindfulness toolkit, stops the negative issues of work spilling over into home life. End you work day positively and leave the stress of work at work.

Get physical
If you raise your heart rate for as little as twenty minutes, your brain will respond by releasing a wave of happy hormones. It doesn’t need to be in a gym, a short run or a brisk walk will do the trick. It will also keep your musculoskeletal and cardiovascular systems in order.

Animal love
Not for everyone but having a pet, usually a cat or a dog is a fabulous way to reduce anxiety and stress. Having another being to look after can create a meaningful sense of purpose. The act of stroking or petting can reduce blood pressure and calm your system and the added need to walk your dog can help with your physical exercise.

Nobody wants anything and nobody needs anything
Taking time out just for you. Sometime that is all about you. What you need and what you want to do. It could be a hobby, it could be a Zumba class or a bath with candles and music. When did you last do something just for you?

Stress is in the eye of the beholder
The psychological concept is that “thoughts become things”, “the things that you think about you bring about” means that what you focus on will get ever bigger in your conscious awareness, “what you feed grows and what you starve dies”. In neuropsychology we know that for most of us the ability to be happy or depressed, stressed or relaxed, anxious or calm, is a choice. We choose what we focus on every moment of everyday. If we feed good thoughts we have good experiences and if we feed bad thoughts we have negative experiences. It is our choice.

Make your choices today, ones of calm relaxed happiness.

Take care

Sean x

We think of time as a set structural thing and yet our experience of time is really emotional. When you are in a meeting or a presentation and the speaker is uninspiring flat and boring time just seems to drag. Every time that you look at your watch it seems that little or no time has passed.

When I began meditation I started doing three minute sessions. Making the jumps to five and ten minute sessions was like climbing a mountain. Yet now I happily sit for an hour and sometimes it feels like I am only just getting into it and the time is up. I have also noticed that when I am going somewhere it always feels longer than when I am going home, strange!

Time is attached to personality or chakra types.

Mulladhara or physical type personalities live with the physical processes of their body. These happen very quickly as nerves fire off and endorphins are pumped into the system. The rods and cones in your eyes, the light sensors, are firing in milliseconds. People that live in this physical world tend to be quick, have problems staying still and want to be continually on the go. They never sit down for long and office jobs or watching the telly can bore them rigid. These people tend to get impatient, want it now and often have a short fuse.

Svadisthana or social, sensual types enjoy the time of anticipation. Were as the physical type can be too impatient to enjoy foreplay or the anticipation of an appetiser, they want the main course right now, the social type enjoys it. The preparation may be more enjoyable than the main course. These social types can be a little ambitious and want the future in the present. We call this credit and for many social types credit is there best friend. In Britain we call this keeping up- with the Jones’s.

Manipura or intellectual types can be curious. They make really good researchers and scientists, writers and reporters. They can have the dogged determination to stick on the trail like a dog with a bone. In this sense time can begin to spread out waiting for the answer or the result. Sometimes these types can suffer early onset boredom and then they will seek stimulation elsewhere. As long as they remain intellectually engaged they will stay on the case.

Anhatta or emotional types have the patience to get what they want. For them time can be very long often in terms of holding on to hurt, they do not forgive easily. They may smile at you but they do not forget. If you have crossed an anhatta they will never forget and will enjoy their revenge at a time of their choosing in the future. It does work the other way as well. If you have looked after an anhatta they will never forget that and they will look after you in return. The negative side is vendetta and mafioso.

Vishuddhi is the passed. The world of tradition and custom is there’s and that goes back as far as can be remembered or was recorded. ‘We have always done it this way’ is their phrase. Change and uncertainty scare them. They need to now where they stand and how long it will take. Because they have long memories they will hold you to your word, your promise and your commitment. Very long memory.

Ajna is the future, the vision the dream. In this world on intuition and universal connectedness time is eternal, there is no beginning, there is no end. The experience of time can be see as so great that may be counted in epics, eras, life times and incarnation. For many Ajnas the issues that we face today may have there roots in several lifetimes ago. Yet always the ajna looks to the future as either a vision or a dream, the world of will be, of what we could do, how we could make it better.

Sahasara is pure imagination. Sahasara are the image makers the creative geniuses and the artists. The images shared by Sahasara can be so vivid and so inspirational that thousands of years after their deaths people still read their words and follow their teachings and revere them as deities. Sahasara time is measured in the memory that is passed from one generation to the next.

For us all, we live in our own time world that is peculiar to us. One thing that we do know is that when we are bored time goes so slowly and when we are enjoying ourselves time flies by.

Perhaps our choice is to have the experience of a long and boring life or a quick and happy one. I’m in for the happy ride.

Take care and observe your experience of time.

Sean x

I love it when people talk about communication, they usually mean communications. Communications refers to media, broadcasting and the transfer of information. Many of us believe that when we have transmitted our message that we have communicated. Say, a boss goes into an office and barks demands, instructions and leaves believing that they have just communicated. How do they know what their staff actually heard, what they meant? This is the point. We believe that because we have said something that the person that we said it to has understood what we mean. This is how miss communication occurs.

I once ran a self development centre called ‘The Centre For Human Communication’. Despite the fact that we ran courses on yoga, meditation and self development people often thought that we were something to do with the telephone service. The difference between communication and communications. The role of coms in business is well known as the person running the publicity and media systems.

The coms operator does not have a clear way of understanding whether or not what they meant to convey in their coms was received by the recipients.

A word is like a train carriage and the people that the word travels to are like stations on the railway line. As the train carriage moves from one station to another people get in and people get out. Sometimes there will be a bicycle or a dog or two in the carriage and, on rare occasions the carriage will be completely empty while other times bursting at the seams. The carriage may look the same on the outside but the contents changes all the time.

Words are just like that. They are mental and emotional railway carriages. As a word moves from you to another person it’s meaning will change. Just like the carriage the word looks the same, it may be written the same but the content, the meaning, is changed. The meaning that is put on the word, it contents, is provided not so much by you the sender but by the person that receives it, that hears it.

The meaning of a word or phrase, it’s contents, maybe cultural, coloquiall, familial, or experiential. Either way it will be peculiar to us. If I say ‘I love you’ what do you hear? What do I mean by love? It might mean anything from I want to marry you, be your friend, take you as a lover, or whatever it means when you say it or you hear it. You might get the idea that communication in the real sense is actually quite difficult.

The meaning of communication

The literal meaning of the word communication is common union or to be at one with, or in the same place. When I say something and you hear what I mean then we have communicated. If I say something and you interpret it into your meaning we have miscommunicated. The art of advertising is this very thing. The coms person has to impart the message in such a way that the customer receives the message.

This takes us to the hub of communication. The majority of what we communicate is not in the word. With different research the percentages vary but it goes something like this. About 52% of the meaning is in our body language, facial expression and stance, about 36% is in the tone of our voice. Around 3% is in the volume and 2% in pheromones. It is only around 7% that is in the literal meaning of the words. This makes texts and the written word the worst forms of communication that we use.

Imagine when you read a book. In your mind, in your imagination you are creating the characters and what they look like. Then someone makes a film of the book and in your mind they completely got it wrong because the meaning that they put on the word in the book is different to yours. As we say, ‘a picture tells a thousand word’.

What do you hear if I say ‘he went nose to nose with me’? Well where I come from that would mean we went face to face or he squared up to me in an act of aggression. Well, in Arabic cultures, when males meet, they do a side on hand shake, pull into each other and tap their noses together twice. To say ‘we went nose to nose’ is either an act of love or an act of aggression depending on where you come from.

The only way that you will ever know what someone means is to ask them, ‘when you said that I heard….., is that what you meant?’ Or ‘when I said …. What did you hear?’

Communication is a tricky business. Miscommunication is probably the root of most problems at an individual and a global scale. Likewise, communication is probably the resolution of most of our problems. The magic is that when we truly communicate, when we are in the same place we begin to see the other person as ourself as though we are one.

When I say, ‘if we all look after each other we will all be okay’, I guess that in part I am saying that if we communicated we would all be ok.

Hey ho, keep talking but do it mindfully and try to communicate.

Take care

Sean x

Wow!, it’s the summer. We generally are hoping that it is hot, but not too hot!

In the colder climates of Northern Europe people are heading south to the sun. Topping up their vitamin D and replenishing their energy before the darkness and the cold of the winter to come. In the hotter humid climates of the Middle East people are heading north to cool down a bit. Turning their back on the sun and the humidity. I only realised recently that people from the Middle East suffer similar vitamin D deficiency to those people in Europe. In Europe there is either not enough sun or people are smothering themselves in suntan lotion to avoid getting burned or developing skin cancer. In the Middle East it can be so hot and humid that people stay indoors enjoying the coolness of the air conditioning and avoid going out in the open. The result in vitamin D loss is the same.

The adaptability of human beings is truly amazing. We have been able to make a life in the frozen wastes of the north and the sun scorched deserts of the equator. Yet, wherever we live we crave the difference of being somewhere else, to get away to take a holiday. Holidays come in two main types. There are those that need to simply get away from something, taking a break or chilling. Then there are those who need to be doing something and take the activity holiday.

Whether your holiday is a stop and chill or a start and do event, what is it that makes a holiday happy for you?

For some couples, the pressure of being together for a long period can prove to be too much and arguments ensue and in extreme cases they can split. The same thing happens just after Christmas in the New Year. But, I digress.

What is your ideal holiday?

For me it is the Italian art of doing nothing and, the place that I prefer to do nothing in is, of course, Italy, “La Dolce Far Niente”. My life is intense and sometimes extreme when I travel for work the reality of being on the plane for a few hours is a welcome oasis of stillness in the everyday madness of life it is my dolce far niente. When I go on holiday that sense of nobody needs anything and nobody wants anything is magical. If I am honest I do not need to leave my house to do that. A chill day in the house can, for me, be a holiday.

But such stopping is not easy for everyone.

There are many people who do not know where their off button is so that everyday becomes a list of things to be achieved. Even the act of exercising becomes another task on the list to be ticked off. The art of being able to simple sit and be, “La Dolce Far Niente”, perhaps with a meal, as a couple, as a family, as a group of friends and to genuinely do nothing and genuinely feel that you allowed to do nothing is becoming a lost art. I see so many people in various organisations who have forgotten how to stop. Perhaps we should change the concept of ‘work hard play hard’ to…

Work hard, but know when to stop

We say that one person’s meat is another person’s poison. We could say that one person’s holiday is another person’s nightmare.

The one thing we do know is that when we take a break that is good for us and feeds our individual needs it has a positive effect on our system right down to the cellular level, reducing stress hormones, blood pressure, anxiety and so on. It is important that you take a break that will work well for you. But the most important thing is that you take a break and give yourself the value of being important enough to look after.

Wherever you go and whatever you do this summer, be happy and enjoy it.

Take care

Sean x