TSHP216: Is generosity the key to happiness?

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What’s Coming This Episode?

Self help is what we do, but does that mean that we should focus on ourselves all of the time? Surely not! Generous people are well thought of and well remembered. This week Sean and Ed dive into the topic of generosity and why it might just be the key to a happy life…

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Is generosity the key to happiness?

When I talk to people about generosity the first thing that comes into their mind tends to be money. There are many levels of generosity that I will come to later but let’s begin with the idea of money and stuff. Most selfishness, xenophobia and meanness is about our inability to share money, possessions and things.

Now, many psychologists tell me that selfish hoarding is a natural selection trait that developed in the evolution of our social psychology to ensure individual survival and the survival of our genes in the gene pool, ‘the selfish gene’ and all that. I can see that, and I see how we as groups developed socially to create alpha males and alpha females right through to the entire inequality of social structure that now dominates all human interactions today. The only thing is, that I really don’t buy it, I don’t believe it, I don’t believe that this is simply the way that it is.

Equality in action. When I look at the remaining hunter gatherers on the planet, who are the nearest that we can get to our ancestors, I see an equality that does exist in the agricultural, urban and industrial societies of today. For hunter gatherers everything is shared. It is a case of WE own this not I own this. When a hunter from the group catches an animal to eat, it does not belong to the hunter alone it is shared equally with the group. The sense of my and mine is superseded by the collective of we and ours.

Can you imagine a world where we shared our food so that no one went hungry? We shared our resources and technology so that everyone had a place to live, were warm and safe?

Generosity requires that we examine our current concepts of ownership and perhaps make some adjustments for the good of us all. My fear is that if we do not we will begin to see the decline of humanity.

So what about other areas of generosity?

Physical generosity
To hold a door open, help someone on or off a bus, to help someone across the road, cut their grass, to go out of your way to help them ‘doing’ something is an act of physical generosity.

Social generosity
To check that another person is okay, that they have a dinner at Christmas, that they are not alone or lonely, to run them to the hospital, look after their kids, pick them up when they fall down are acts of social generosity.

Experiential generosity
To run scout clubs, take the poorly to Lourdes, to raise money for charity e.g. comic relief, children in need, cook meals for the homeless and help in the homeless shelter on Christmas Day, to run a Newspaper that only tells good news are all forms of experiential generosity.

Financial generosity
To give 10% of your net income to the poor and needy, to support children in foreign countries, to give money national and international appeals are all forms of financial generosity.

Responsible generosity
To sit on committees, to be a school governor, to be an advocate, to help out in the local CAB, to volunteer to help adults to learn to read and write, to set up protest groups against planning applications, to fight for the rights or those killed at Hillsborough are all forms of responsible generosity.

Spiritual generosity
It may not feel like it but when you open the door to someone who wants to save your soul by promoting their faith, is their act of spiritual generosity. To act Dharmically, to always do the right thing, and to do your best in every situation, to consciously not hurt or damage other people and if you do then doing your best to repair any damage, to try and get the best for all, are acts of spiritual generosity.

To have an open heart, sharing love and care, doing what you can to help and assist others in whatever way is necessary and appropriate is generosity.

One last thing. To be able to accept the generosity of others requires that you have a generosity towards yourself. Charity begins at home we cannot accept the help and generosity from another if we do not value ourself, feel worthy and worth it. First love yourself, then love others.

Take care and be happy
Sean x

TSHP215: The Importance of Allowing

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What’s Coming This Episode?

You can’t change the world, you can only change yourself, so the saying goes. No matter how much work you put into yourself at some point you need to interact with reality and that means OTHER PEOPLE. Trouble is, not all folks are as enlightened as us, so how do we deal with their ‘eccentricities’? Enter the law of allowing…

Enjoy the show and take care, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

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Let the Idiots Be Idiots

This week Ed and I were looking at how to cope with the behaviour of someone close to you that you do not agree with, even to the point where a close family member is doing bad things. We got an email from a listener who wanted to know how they could cope with a cousin who’s behaviour was potentially harmful to members of the family. This is interesting because in most cases that examine the law of allowing do so from a macro perspective like issues of war or terrorism. Yet, the law of allowing is operating every minute of every day sometimes in small and often insignificant things that happen all the time.

The issue raised here is how does tolerating bad behaviour fit with the Law of Allowing. Well it doesn’t. Let me explain.

The Law of Allowing is not passive
It is often a common belief that the law of allowing implies a passive acceptance of other people’s behaviour, it is not. We should always confront injustice and never allow it to dominate.

“The only thing you should be intolerant of is intolerance”
Plato

Your emotional litmus paper
You may remember from your chemistry classes at school that litmus paper is used to dip into a liquid to test it’s Ph, to decide if it is acid or alkaline. Our emotions are just like litmus paper and show us a similar response to any situation. Straight away, our emotions indicate to us if this is good or bad, right or wrong. Some people will call this our gut reaction. Our emotions are telling us whether or not we should proceed. In the same way we would say ‘if it feels good do it, if it feels bad don’t do it’.

What is it when we react?
When we have an emotional reaction it is usually present in our body as an intake of breath, increased heart rate and perhaps, the activation of the fight, flight, freeze reaction. But, why are we reacting?

A reaction is telling us that we have a problem. It is the difference between a response and a reaction. When we respond we mindfully observe the situation and make an ordered decision as to what we are going to do about it. When we react our cognition tends to go for a walk and our emotions take over.

How powerful is your reaction?
We all have problems. Sometimes those problems are hidden and we may not even know that they are there. It would be good if there was something there that would let us know when we have a problem that needs to be dealt with. Well there is, it is our emotions.

When we experience something we may register that it is wrong and decide to do something about it. This is a response. When we experience something that makes us angry, we have high levels of energy that might make us shout or lash out, this is a reaction.

When we react we are describing unresolved emotional issues that are within us. Let’s say that we were abused as a child, when we watch news casts of child abuse on the news our reaction may upset us or make us angry or irrationality volatile. We are reacting because we have unresolved emotional energy within us and we are re-activating these unresolved issues.

If we were abused but are able to respond to the news and not become irrationally angry, we are describing that we have dealt and processed those emotions within us. This is the difference between a reaction and a response.

The degree of the energy of our reaction within us describes how much of an unresolved problem that we have.

What is the point of all this?
When you react negatively to an event you should look within and decide how much of the problem that you are experiencing is your unresolved emotional issues and how much is related to the current situation. When you have continuing high levels of reaction I suggest that you seek psychotherapy and talk it through.

Do not be passive
I am not suggesting that if you feel anger or high emotion you should not do anything. It may be that you are right about the person or the situation that you are experiencing.

The law of allowing is not passive. When we react we are not allowing. When we respond we are allowing.

We must remember that within the law of allowing we need to look after ourselves and allow our self to be fulfilled and happy and respond mindfully and be prepared to change things when they are not.

Take care

Sean x

TSHP214: The importance of smiling

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What’s Coming This Episode?

When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you. Right? Seems obvious really, but keeping up a chirpy outlook and a near permanent smile is harder than it sounds. Let’s find out why and how we should smile as much as we can…

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TSHP213: Do films and games make us violent?

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What’s Coming This Episode?

Films and television have been around a while. Games, not so much. Do either have an impact on how we act in real life? Sean and Ed take a look at the evidence in this weeks episode…

Enjoy the show and take care, it’s The Self Help Podcast!

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Do films and games make us violent?

There is, and I suspect always will be, a debate about what effects the individual and what is responsible for their behaviour. The world seems to fall into two schools that we usually describe as nature and nurture. The issue is, are we effected by events?, or are we effected by our response to those events?

That brings us neatly to the subject of this weeks podcast which was about whether or not we are effected by watching violence on screen, does it change our behaviour and does it make us more violent?

My simple response would be that in some cases observing violence can make us more violent either through the need for revenge or through desensitisation towards violent acts. There can also be a general desensitisation to the morals or ‘right and wrong’ that goes with the habitual experience of negative behaviours. When we desensitise acts that we would have previously seen as wrong they become common place and normal. There has been enough research on the concentration camps in world war two for us to see what happened to the guards and how they normalised their behaviour so that running a death camp became normal.

We can also see in families how abuse, both violent and sexual, is carried from one generation to the next through the normalisation of observation and habitual experience.

In neuropsychology we know that the Brain changes and develops in response to new learning and that learning is mainly visual. We also know that the brain cannot tell the difference between whether we are actually doing something, observing it or imagining it. They all have the same effect on the brain. People watch horror movies because they experience the thrill of the fear. However, they have the luxury to get up at the end of the movie and get on with their lives.

This relationship between what we observe, how it effects our brain and how we subsequently act begins to explain how visual media, video/internet games and internet porn, directly effect out attitudes and our behaviour.

One of the motivations for this episode was the fact that I had been talking to a sexual support worker who told me that in a large class of adolescent girls who were asked do they expect sex to be painful there was a 100% ‘yes’. This was either from experience or from what they had observed viewing internet porn. The issue and attitudes are from the fact that the girls had learned that sex was something that would be, or is, being done ‘to’ them and not something done ‘with’ them. An act of submission and not an act of equal expression.

When we examine our own attitudes in any aspect of life and consider where they came from we begin to realise that we are the habits that we have learned from birth. People keep saying to me “this is just the way I am” and I am forever saying ‘no, this is the way that you have learned to be’.

It is easy to see and understand where the desensitisation to sexual sensitivity or generalised violence comes from. The bit that is not explained is where is the moral compass, the teaching and the direction that takes us to more equality of loving and nurture. The bottom line is that previous moral steering that came from religions of various shades across the world has fallen into disrepute. Less and less people are attending places of worship. Where now is the ‘love your neighbour’?

Politically we see Trump, Putin, May, North Korea, and so on shouting a creed of violence and vengeance. We have the ‘us’ and ‘them’ syndrome that desensitises us. When the concentration camp guides made the Jews into ‘them’ and decided that they were not human beings only animals it made their behaviours acceptable to them.

When see any group of people as less than ourselves then we have rights and powers over them and we can use this as our justification to treat them as we will.

We learn by what we observe. If we involve our self in real or virtual images and experiences of physical violence and sexual violence everyday it becomes the normal. If we see women being used as sexual utensils for long enough we desensitise and normalise. If we take Jews off to the gas chamber everyday we desensitise and normalise.

All these things are true until something else happens to wake us up to our behaviour. It may be a teacher telling us to love our neighbour as our self, to nurture and care for our family, to forgive, let go and live in peace.

In a world where the things that we think about we bring about we need to be mindful of what we are feeding our minds and emotions. Good images equal happy mind.

Be happy be mindful, be sensitive and be loving

Take care

Sean x