Archive for year: 2015

Love is an energy that pulls things together just as hate is an energy that pushes things apart. For me love, like gravity, is the glue that holds the universe together. This attractive gravitational pull works at all levels big and small. It holds the moon around the earth and the earth around the sun. It holds the particles to the nucleus in an atom. At a social level it holds families and communities together and in intimacy it keeps couples together.

Whether we call it the law of attraction, the power of gravity or, the profundity of love, it is the infinite power that binds the whole of creation together. So, I think of love as elastic. Once we make a love bond we connect our emotional elastic to anther person. Once connected, we are pulled towards that person. If they move away we follow as the emotional elastic becomes stretched and we are pulled.

Living apart
The elastic is not dependent on distance. We may live very close to someone, in the same house and the same bed, and have little tension or pull in the elastic. We may live apart, either side of the earth and feel the exquisite feeling of the tension of love pulling us back together. The elastic of love knows no distance, but it does know vitality, health and strength.

The issues with couples is not usually the length of the elastic it is the colour or shape of the elastic, different needs create different elastic:

Physical elastic
Physical love may need a lot of physical, even sexual, contact for it to remain healthy. When people are dominated by physical need long distance relationship seldom work, unless the couple are able to anticipate the repeated honeymoon experience of coming back together after a prolonged absence as in sailors or off shore rig workers.

Sensual/Social elastic
May also require physical or sensual contact. However social media can support and maintain the social need in relationships and the idea of long distance sexual relationships, or cyber sex is no longer that uncommon. However, the sensuality of touch, from the held hand to the caressed buttock may be essential to maintain sensual elastic.

Intellectual elastic
At this point distance becomes less of an issue. Intellectual sharing of experiences, playing with ideas and concepts, the writing or reading of poetry and letters, enables the person at the other end of the elastic to become your inspiration and your muse.
I have come across many people who have maintained a loving relationship with a person they have never met and, perhaps never will meet. The extension of the pen pal, the person who writes to someone who is in prison who may never be released.

Emotional/Passionate elastic
Passion may involve physical, or emotional, contact, but the idea of ‘saying it with flowers’ or sending that expensive or seductively personalised gift can maintain and even strengthen the elastic.

Dutiful elastic
The love of rightness or to be righteous, the commitment to duty and fidelity, to being moral and correct is powerful in maintaining a strong elastic bond. This may be as true for the child sent to boarding school, the army officer, the priest, or the dutiful partner.

Intuitive/sensitive elastic
The deep intuitive emotions are about as near as we can get to unconditional love. At its best it is the clearest, purest elastic that requires nothing in return. It is the pure love of love. Its extent is limitless it power total.

Love at a distance
I guess what I am trying to say is that the ability to maintain a distant loving relationship is dependent on feeding the needs of your partner. If the elastic is well and appropriately fed it remains strong. The stronger it is the less likely it is to break.

Perhaps the question we should ask our long distance partner is, what do they need and how will they know that we love them? Once having sorted that out you should ask yourself the same questions and then see how they fit with our partners. The closer the match the better the chance of the relationship surviving.

Have a look at your love elastic and decide how it works for you.

Take care and be happy

Sean x

Why Remember Anything?

What is memory for?
Memory happens in all sentient beings. It’s primary function is that of safety. Memory tells us what is safe and what is a threat. When we are able to remember we are able to survive in safety.

Over time we lose memory
Psychologically we remember things because we are emotionally connected to events. This means that the connection is relevant or important. When things or people cease to be relevant we forget who or what they are. This may seem difficult for the person who we forget, it may seem that they are now not important to us. Often the reason that we forget is overload and we have so much to remember that we forget who people are.

However, sometimes when we lose memory we have structural decay. The white matter in the brain is the tissue that connects the grey matter, which is the hardware of the brain. Issues of dementia are when the structure of the brain is breaking down.

How far back can we remember?
Our earliest cognitive memories go back to age 2 to 3 years old. Most of us can remember these early years. Prior to that age our memory is emotional. We may not be able to remember what happened in a logical or visual sense but we can remember what we felt at that time. Often this creates the foundation of later emotional feeling. Perhaps we feel generally anxious, or angry, sad or happy and we say that is just the way that we are. Well it is not. It is simply what we learned when we were little.

The structural memory of the cognitive mind is like an attic, that is full of boxes of memories. It is a repository of information. When the boxes get turned over there is confusion as the contents of the boxes become mixed up. People will actually say “a leopard can’t change it’s stripes”, this is confusion.

Hypnotherapy is the therapy that intervenes in memory. Aversive hypnotherapy is described as suggestive. What that means is the therapy is putting something into a memory box. If someone smokes cigarettes then perhaps we can include the memory of sweaty socks or burning tyres into the memory, so that every time someone put a cigarette in their mouth they experience that horrible taste in their mouth, they are averted from smoking.

Analytical therapy is about taking stuff out of the box. If people have inappropriate associations. perhaps rice pudding has been included in their sex box. This means that there needs to be rice pudding involved for them to become eroticised, then the therapy is about taking this out of the memory.

Advertising and propaganda are about aversive and suggestive memory. They seek to change the memories of the population.

Unwanted memories as intrusive thoughts or flashbacks can become problematical. Such emotional memories happen after trauma or post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. In this case memory is visual and emotional. Therapy involves desensitisation or rewinding of the problematic memory.

The last point is that we are each able to create our future memories, Thoughts become things. When we wake everyday we decide how the day will be. We are creating it in advance. This is forward memory. If we decide that the day will be bad then we are right and it will be. Equally If we decide that the day will be wonderful we are also right. In creating forward memory “thoughts become things”. We have a choice.

Take care, be happy and think positively about the day ahead…Thoughts become things!

Sean x

The Importance of Failure

We live in a world of opposites that are totally dependent on each other, one cannot exist without the other. Hot and cold, high and low, rough and smooth, light and dark, happy and sad, positive and negative, rich and poor, good and evil, the list is endless. Yet each of these symbiotic twins are relative to each other.

For example something will only seem cold if it is at a lower temperature of what we have labelled hot. Just as something will only seem hot if it is a higher temperature then what we have labelled cold. The difference between these twins is never an ‘actual’ measurement it is a ‘relative’ measurement.

Compared to the ceiling the floor is low. Compared to the sky the ceiling is low. Compared to the moon the sky is low. Compared to the Sun the moon is low. Compared to Alpha Centauri the Sun is low. It is all just the way that we look at it. Which takes me to the symbiotic twin that I want to look at, it is ‘success and Failure’. This has such a profound effect on our self esteem and our ability to function happily in our life.

Like all of these twins this is a matter of opposites. We could not have a concept of success without a concept of failure. Yet, because it is a relative relationship our experience and beliefs will vary.

My concept of success might be your concept of failure.

Let’s say your success is to have one million and for me five hundred would be my success, if you were experiencing my success you would be feeling your failure. I have often said that I see competition as a senseless waste of time. My example is that if nine people embark on the 100 metre dash only one person will experience success while eight people will experience failure.

Ed, and other competitive types tell me this is the wrong way to look at it because the eight that didn’t win the race may have succeeded in other ways. Perhaps the person who continually comes fourth managed to come third so this is a success. Or one runner improved their time and felt success. I guess that even to have competed at a high level meeting at all and to come last might be experienced as success.

Failure could be the mother of invention

I am reminded of Eddison and his quest to invent the light bulb. His problem was finding the right element that would glow without burning out that would create light. He tried over 2000 different elements before he found tungsten that worked. That is over 200 experiences of failure, or was it. I have often thought about his tenacity. At what point would I have conceded failure and given up. Was it that each element that failed spurred him on to try the next in his determination to succeed?

I suspect that it is this concept of failure that is vitally important to our achieving our success. Just as there is no up without down, and there is no success without failure. The point from which we start anything is the down point and the goal that we are aiming for is the up point. When we look up to where we want to be we are setting our goal. Achieving our goal is our success and this is often tied up with our self esteem just as not achieving our goal is our failure and leads to a loss of self esteem.

Learning from our failures

My experience, both personally and working with others, is that that the pain of failure is the spur that creates the energy that drives us towards success. A business person can learn from a bankruptcy so that it never happens again, we come out of a failed relationship with the knowledge that allows us to succeed next time, the injuries that we experience in training enable us to adapt to succeed in the race.

When failures become learning points we learn and grow

I want to challenge the concept of failure and the idea of success. In this world of twinned opposites we need to continually learn from one to achieve the other. So, I prefer to think of “failure” as an opportunity. We don’t have failures we have learning points, that, if used consciously and creatively enable us to move towards our success. In that sense there never are problems only opportunities.

Planning our success

Ok, so if we have a starting point and we have a goal we need to make the journey from one to the other. Most people set the goal too high and then don’t reach it. This is then labelled failure. To make the journey it needs to be broken down into achievable steps that create the path to success.

Forward Base you success

Forward basing is an exercise that I use with individuals, couples and teams who need to achieve a goal. You can do this right now in your kitchen, If it is a team I use a gym hall. On one wall I stick a big sheet of flip chart paper. On this I write where we are up to in the NOW. On the opposite wall I put another sheet of paper. On this I write where we want to get to, this is the GOAL.

The next job is to put sheets of paper on the floor that become the stepping stone from now to the goal. This is the plan. Each step is set at an achievable distance so that with each step there is the feeling of success. Once the steps have been set out we create a timeline along the wall, so that we have steps to take set in a time frame.

None of this is set in stone. The time frame can vary and the steps can move. If one step is not completed we go back to the previous step and either try again or adapt or change it. The point of forward basing is to create a flow on continued success that build self esteem and drives us on to our goal. When we forward base we are able to use success rather than failure as the drive towards our goal.

1. What do you consider to be your failures?
2. How can you turn these into useful learning points?
3. If you were to forward base what would you right on the NOW sheet and what would be on the goal sheet.
4. From this you can create your steps and your timeline.

Failure, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder only you can define your failures and acknowledge your successes. In my own life I have had many learning points. The only failure that I would Identify is when I didn’t attend to the learning points and needed to repeat the lesson. I also acknowledge that I have had many, many successes which makes me a happy person who feels successful.

Take care, be happy

Sean x