TSHP194: Is goal setting bad for us?

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Do we really need goals? Most self help and development blogs will say ‘yes’. We probably have agreed at some point, but today Sean and Ed are exploring the idea that goal settings can be harmful.

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Enough is Enough

Human beings tend to be acquisitive. They gather and collect. Part of this has to be based in our evolutionary past. Most animals survive by the gathering and hoarding of necessary staple supplies. I guess there is little difference between a squirrel burying nuts, a spider trapping a live wasp in its nest and the human being pushing a shopping trolley from the supermarket to increase the stores in their larder.

We do the same with money. While we only need to spend on our needs of the moment yet we store and hoard money in the belief that it will keep us safe at some future date. We say things like…

…save you money for a rainy day!

Probably better to save your money for a sunny day and enjoy it, but I get the idea. It is true that we never know what will happen in the future or around the corner and so we attempt to overcome the worst that can beset us with insurance and pensions, mortgages and credit.

A while ago I viewed a news broadcast about a couple living in the US who at the age of 74 were pulling pumps in a gas station because the company providing their pension had just gone bankrupt. I read reports about the traders jumping out of windows to their deaths having just heard they had lost all their money in the Wall Street Crash. Or the story of the man in Germany just before the Second World War, when inflation had become so great that when he was taken a wheel barrow full of money to the bank he was mugged. The mugger tipped the money out and stole the wheel barrow because it was worth so much more than the money. It would appear that however much money you have, even if you think you have enough it can become worthless just like that.

So people said…

…”put your money in bricks and mortar”

That is great advice as long as property prices either stay the same or, as we all expect, increase. At the end of the 1980’s property prices crashed. Many properties halved in value and people ended up with negative equity. This is when you suddenly owe more money than the property is worth. I lived on the Isle of Wight at the time. A person I knew sold a £200,000 house for £95,000 and another who held a £90,000 mortgage on a property now valued at £45,000.

I could go on in this vein but it seems that when we invest our time and energy into collecting physical things or money we are vulnerable to the fluctuations in social changes, politics and economics and in that case perhaps enough is never enough. For many the more insecure they feel the more they need. That could be money, houses, people, position, status and so on. When is enough enough? When are we able to be thankful and grateful for what we have right now?

I have known many monks whose possessions amounted to a change of clothes a food bowl and a bed roll perhaps a few books and bits and pieces. These people with the least possessions were amongst the happiest I have ever known.

I have had three big houses that were all seen as grand. They all taught me the same lesson. You can only use one bedroom at a time, one lounge at a time, one bathroom at a time and the big grounds or gardens just created more upkeep. In the end I worked to earn money to maintain these houses. I was working for them they were not working for me.

Trying to make up for our emotional deficits

In most cases, most of the time, people seek to accumulate stuff or people to make up for their own deficits. The need to have thousands of ‘friends’ on Facebook, even people that you will never know, suggests a need to be recognised, to be special or seen in a special way. The sound behind the music, the motivation behind this action, would suggest someone who feels very small and needs external feedback to make them feel good. I see people investing so much time and effort into creating or getting more or whatever to make up for their own fears, anxieties and deficits. The worst one is power!

In many organisations I see managers who are actually not very good at their jobs who use their position to gain power. They believe that the more power they can get, can provide the status that they need, because they actually feel that they are not really worth it or up to the job. A loud, draconian or bullying voice often makes up for a bad or even useless manager. The same happens in politics. The best examples on the current stage are Trump and Blair who are good at making a lot of noise but lack the substance. It is like the shop with the amazing shop window that looks so enticing until you enter the shop to find that the stockroom is empty. A lot of show but no back up.

Living the simple uncluttered life

When we live with confidence and inner security we do not need shows of power, material shows of wealth, we do not need more and more money. Simple life’s are stressless. There is nothing to keep up, nothing to maintain. No weight to loose, no boobs to be enhanced, no lips to be filled, no faces to be lifted.

Enough is enough when we are happy with who we are and what we have

When we look at the other side of this as perhaps ‘when is not enough, not enough?’, and consider all those who do not have enough of anything. Those that are starving, living through disasters and wars. Those that are facing famine and drought, disease and poverty. I suspect that is often the case in a global environment that the only reason that we can have more than enough is because other people in the world are living with not enough.

The crazy thing is that there is enough for all if we would only just learn to share.

If we all look after each other then we will all be ok

I keep saying this but it is the simply truth.

One reality that we need to be mindful of is that the poorest people in our society that are on benefits are still in the top ten percent of the richest people on the planet.

The bottom line for me is that as long as we do not share our land, money, energy, love and compassion there will be many others who will suffer as a result or our insecure need to have and hold and not share.

Enough is to be warm, secure and to go to bed with a full belly.

I am reminded of Rehman who came on the show a few episodes ago telling us about his experience of Islam. One of the principles that he explained to us was ‘to go to bed with a full belly while knowing that the people next door were starving is wrong’. I get that entirely. Until we learn to care and share the world will be full of haves and have nots.

I am warm, sheltered, I have enough food and enough love, I have enough. In fact I have more than enough and that allows for charitable giving.

Be happy and enjoy what you have – enough is enough.

Take care

Sean x

TSHP193: Finding your sense of purpose

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Drifting through life is oh so easy. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it but when our time is up we can often be left with certain regrets about we did or, more importantly, what we didn’t do. A sense of purpose is not always easy to find, but once you do, you’ll be mighty glad you did…

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How a sense of purpose can keep you healthy

In the work that I do in both private and public organisations the issues of purpose and direction are strongly associated with stress. Those that feel that they do have a clear direction are more energised and even dynamic. Those that feel that they have a direction suffer less from stress related conditions.

Having a direction is having a purpose.

Question: What is the purpose of your life?

That is a big question and is the one that can create a lot of stress along with…

Why are we here? What’s is life all about? What happens when we die?

The deal is that we all need to fill in space in between birth and death. We can either find a meaningful way to do that or we can blunder, try to cope and survive this thing called ‘life’.

I have travelled the world attempting to discover the purpose of life, to understand why I am alive and what I am supposed to be doing with my life. Biologists tell me that my role is to reproduce. Some scientist tell me that this is all a chance mistake and that I should just put up with it. The religious lobby tells me generally that life is hard and life is earnest and that we are here to learn and grow in a spiritual way and, that if I am a good chap, I will get my reward in heaven. One priest told that we all have “our own cross to bear” and that we should see suffering as a good thing. Hey ho.

In the early 1980s I was at a cross roads in life that was about making the decision about what I should do with life. I spoke with the great and the good and decided, perhaps in my arrogance, that they were all wrong. I came to the conclusion that life was supposed to be happy, that each of us was entitled to our own fulfilment and that suffering was for those who believed that we all had to suffer. Suffering is a bad deal, I don’t like and don’t want it, you can keep it.

So, my thinking went this way. If I am going to live a happy life then I would need to devote the time that I had left to me in doing things that made me happy. The question was what is it that makes me happy? I guess this is another question point.

Question: What is it that would make you happy?

It took me a long time, as in many months, to gradually be honest enough with myself to truly answer the question. I went through the wealth and materialism, the power, recognition, status and position and let it all go in favour of two simple things that I knew made me happy. I began to realise that whenever I did either of these things I had a smile on my face and a skip in my step. That I got easily out of bed with a positive expectation of the day ahead. Then I realised that whenever I did either of these things I came home with a smile on my face feeling good about my life and about who I was and what I was doing. Those two things were…

Playing music and working with people

The playing music has taken me all over the place. I have played and recorded music in my own right, I have backed some amazing people. I have created backing recordings for my own meditation, relaxation recording and apps and even wrote and recorded the music that Rie walked down the isle to when we got married. I play music everyday and keep a small travel guitar in my consulting rooms so that I can distress at anytime during the day when I get the opportunity.

Working with people is my life, it is the only thing that makes any sense to me out of this mad thing called life…

If we all look after each other we will all be ok

However, the point is that I work with other people because it makes me feel good, it makes me smile and it gives my life purpose. If I got more joy from collecting stamps, being in the army or being a mortician I would be doing those things instead.

The extensions of joy
The weird thing is that when you do connect with your purpose it really is just a beginning. Now that you are on your path it leads you to other places, ideas and things? My music world has taken me to so many places and been such a joy and an inspiration and it continues to do so. Working with other people has taken me through various areas of academia to writing books and appearing at conferences, working all around the world and doing the podcast and this blog.

But even now I play with the idea of what will I do when I grow up. Hopefully I never will grow up and will carry on enjoying this thing called life.

Whatever you decide to do with your life, let it be joyful.

Take care and be happy.

Sean x

TSHP192: How music can boost your mood

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Hands up who doesn’t like music of any kind? Right, EVERYONE likes music, hey? So what does (or what can) it do for us, emotionally? Thanks to the listener tip off for this one…

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How to use music to boost your mood

Music is something that effects us all probably everyday. Often we see music as a creation of man. Actually, music is as normal and natural as colour and all other energy systems. But let us start at the beginning..

“In the beginning was the word…”

The Gospel according to John starts with the words above. When we trace back the meaning of the word ‘word’ through the Aramaic and Greek languages back to the father of all languages, Sanskrit, we find that the root meaning is ‘the given vibration’. In classical Sanskrit the given vibration is the Om Sum or Nard symbolised by this letter. When people use Om or Aum, which you might also hear as Amen in Christianity or Amin in Islam, as a mantra in meditation they are sounding the given vibration described by John.

The letter Om is a pictogram.
NARD
The two features at the top are the sun and the moon, these depict consciousness and unconsciousness or Purusha and Prakritti. In other systems this might be described as Yin and Yang, Sun and Moon, positive and negative and so on. It is said that when consciousness or spirit and unconsciousness or matter brush together they create the phenomenal world of experience, of cause and effect. The three prongs on the left of the Om show the basic triad that is common to all energy systems.

Colour – Primary colours Red, Yellow, Blue
Music – Major chord Tonic, Third, Fifth
Electricity – Ohms, Volts, Watts
Ayurveda – Vatta, Pitta, Kalph
Samkhya – Satvia, Rajsia, Tamsia
Christianity- Father, Son, Holy Ghost
Psychology – Thinking, Feeling, Doing
Or – Cognition, Affection, Behaviour…

… and so on, you will find these triads in all systems.

If we start with the idea that all of creation began with the vibration of sound we have the basis of music as we understand it. The entire universe is a vibrating symphony of life that starts with the Big Bang and ends only when the universe ceases to exist.

The harmonic series

“A harmonic series is the sequence of sounds where base frequency of each sound is an integral multiple of the lowest base frequency. Pitched musical instruments are often based on an approximate harmonic oscillator such as a string or a column of air, which oscillates at numerous frequencies simultaneously.” (Wikipedia)

What that actually means is that if you have a string stretched between two nodal points, say on a guitar or a cello, and you pluck it, then it will, all at the same time vibrate its whole length, half its length, a third, a quarter and so on right down to the smallest microtones. When you unpick these different micro notes and lay them out in a sequence that forms the scale that we know as…

Do Re Me Fa So La Ti Do

When we split sound in this way we create this seven fold structure. In the same way that we can also see this seven fold structure in light. When we pass white light through a prism it splits into the colour spectrum red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. The harmonic series can be seen in all systems from electricity to structural engineering.

Music in your body

In the body this seven fold system is seen in the endocrine system of gonads, adrenals, pancreas, thymus, thyroid, pituitary and pineal glands. In the Eastern system each of these organs is related to a nervous plexus which as a part of the energy system described as Chi, Ki or Prana known as the chakra system.

Chakra – Colour – Endocrine – Location – Music
Muladhara – Red – Gonads – Perineum – Do
Svadisthana – Orange – Adrenal – Sacrum – Re
Manipura – Yellow – Pancreas – Solar plexus – Me
Anhatta – Green – Thymus – Sternum – Fa
Vishuddi – Blue – Thyroid – Throat – So
Ajna – Indigo – Pituitary – Forehead – La
Saharam – Violet – Pineal – Crown – Ti

The nerves control and connect the chakras to the body system. In the energy system connecting the chakras the connection system is called meridians in the Chinese system and Nardis in the Ayurvedic system.

Ok, so if all this is making some sense then you will begin to see that that because the systems are the same music can have a direct effect on the body through resonating. You have probably seen clips where an opera singer can sing a note that will make a make the crystals in a chandelier ring in sympathy. This is what happens when we play or listen to music it has a direct effect on our body system, our brain and our emotions.

Music can energise your body system and make you want to move or dance. It can raise your blood pressure and increase your heart rate. However it can also reduce your blood pressure and decrease your heart rate. Music therapy can effect your body in healing ways, it can aid concentration and help with the recovery from disease, it can really ease anger, regales anxiety and overcome depression.

Music is so fundamental to the whole of creation that it actually is creation. In his book “The Symphony of Life” Donald Hatch Andrew explains the connections of differing energy systems and how they effect us all.

Next time you listen to music tune into your body and get to know which part of your body mind system that it is affecting.

Take care and be happy

Sean x

TSHP191: Can mindfulness help overcome cancer?

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Cancer is in the spotlight this week as the world focusses it’s attention on the disease through World Cancer Day. Sean and Ed have sat down for a wide ranging chat about cancer – how it can be avoided and dealt with.

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Mindfulness and Cancer

It is that time of year when we look at what, for many is a scary issue, it is Cancer awareness day on the 4th Feb. Its main objective is to get as many people as possible to talk about cancer.

I find these podcast and blogs some of the most difficult to do. It can seem easy to be talking about what is often a life threatening condition to other people when you do not have it yourself. It is important not to sound like a clever dick.

According to Ed’s research eight million people across the world will die of cancer this years. Four million of these will be described as premature which I think means they are under the age of sixty nine. It reminds me of running the support services for the ‘Younger People’s Brain Injury Unit’, in this case younger meant anyone under the age of sixty five.

In Britain there have been recent news reports of how our health services are failing cancer patients when compared to other countries in Europe. For me this is all signs of our failing NHS. So cancer currently has a high profile in the news. However, if you follow any of the scientific or medical press you will also be aware of the breakthroughs and potential breakthroughs that are happening right now. Such advances are good news for us all.

In any case the predictions are that around fifty percent of use will, at some time in our lives, develop a cancer. However, the bit that people tend to not hear is that most of us will survive it and, I guess, the issues will be about learning to live with cancer rather than dying from cancer.

In this blog I want to look at the psychological issues around cancer and can Mindfulness help in some way. Before I do that I feel it is important to say that we should all get checked. We should be aware of our bodies so that we can notice any differences developing in our body. I once ran a B&B. In each of the showers were instructions for breast and testicular self examination, something that we should all do. If you know your breasts or your testicles and do a weekly examination you will know if there are any changes and be able to get medical advice early. I could also at this point talk about causes of cancer in what we eat, drink or smoke, but, let’s move to psychology.

Can our minds effects our bodies?
I would say ‘yes’, but there are limitations to that. If you were falling off a roof it would not matter how positive your thinking might be you will still hit the ground. With cancer this can be true if we have a genetic profile that gives us a high probability of developing a cancer, or any other disease. In some cases we may be able to make life style choices that hold it back, though in genetic cases it may be ‘when’ rather than ‘if’.

Life style will have a direct effect on your body. The evidence of the cancer producing effects of drinking, smoking, drug use and some food is now legion. Recently it has been suggested that if your roast potatoes are too crispy or your toast too brown then you are eating carcinogenic foods. In the sanity of life perhaps a little of what you fancy does do you good. Which takes us to psychology.

Personality and cancer
For a long time we have realised that many people will develop a post-traumatic response (PTSD) following a diagnosis of cancer. This suggests the importance of Psychological medicine being an active part of the medical model when dealing with a diagnosis. This may not just be for the patient but also for their family.

For many years, as I have worked with various psychotherapists we have collectively noted that there are certain types of personality that develop cancer. This does not detract from the two other types I mentioned, genetic and environment or lifestyle cancers. When we develop the traits of the Cancer – prone personality we are likely to exacerbate any existing disease. The Cancer – resistant personality is more likely to either avoid cancer or have a better time of it in dealing with and over coming existing disease.

Cancer-Prone Personality Types
[Often has a negative outlook on life and may generally feels unhappy with their lot]

• Represses both positive and negative emotions.
• Shows anger, resentment, or hostility towards others.
• Takes on extra duties and responsibilities, even when they cause stress.
• Reacts adversely to and does not cope well with life changes.
• Is negative or pessimistic.
• Becomes easily depressed or has feelings of hopelessness.
• Worries often and excessively about others.
• Feels the need for approval and to please others.

Cancer-Resistant Personality Type
[Maintains a positive outlook on life and generally feels happy with their lot]

• Expresses emotions in a positive and constructive way.
• Controls anger and resolves anger issues positively.
• Knows when to say no.
• Copes well with stress and feels in control of situations.
• Is optimistic and hopeful.
• Does not become easily depressed.
• Seeks out and maintains social support networks.
• Does not worry excessively.
• Likes to please, but does not seek approval as an emotional crutch.

Can Mindfulness Meditation aid recovery?

I have put some links here that may take you to further reading rather than just giving you my point of view, which is that yes it can. If you read people such as Louise Hay they would suggest that Mindful thinking and practise can even heal and overcome terminal illness. In this only you can decide that reality.

http://www.louisehay.com

According to Mary Jane Ott,

Mindfulness meditation has clinically relevant implications to alleviate psychological and physical suffering of persons living with cancer. Use of this behavioural intervention for oncology patients is an area of burgeoning interest to clinicians and researchers.

According to Andy Puddicombe of Headspace
Mind over cancer: can meditation aid recovery?
Trials have shown that mindfulness can increase calm and wellbeing, lead to better sleep and less physical pain.

I think that we know more about how the mind effects the body than we ever did. However I suspect that there is still a long way to go and that we are really just at the beginning of understanding what we are able to accomplish.

My post script is that we are going to die and we will all die of something. When I die they will not simply write on my death certificate that Sean came naturally to the end of his life, they will provide the reason why my body stopped working. Perhaps my heart stopped, or a vein in my brain burst, or I got cancer, Alzheimer’s, dementia, pneumonia or I simply had a accident. For us all, life will come to an end and while I support that for each of us life should be good honest and true we should not anticipate or worry about the ending where ever we are in life or whatever our state of health. Live in the moment, live in the day. As Buddha put it…

“Let us rise and be thankful
For today we learned a lot
And if we didn’t learn a lot
Then at least we learned a little
And if we didn’t learn a little
Well at least we didn’t get sick
And if we did get sick
well at least we didn’t die
So let us rise up and be thankful”

And when we do die with mindfulness we will be happy for the life that we have had for the company of those people that shared it with us.

Live in your moment and be happy
Sean x