TSHP399: Live in the Present Chapter 2 – Self Forgiveness

What’s Coming This Episode?

Thank you for committing to taking our digital course! We’ll take you through things step by step. Let’s move on to Step 2, which is all about self forgiveness. It’s time.

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

Show Notes and Links

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TSHP398: Live in the Present Chapter 1 – Forgiveness

What’s Coming This Episode?

Thank you for committing to taking our digital course! We’ll take you through things step by step. Let’s start at Step 1, which is all about preparation and forgiveness of others.

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

Show Notes and Links

Stay in Touch

We’re all over the web, so feel free to stay in touch:

Leave us an Honest Review on iTunes

We’d be amazingly grateful if you could leave us a review on iTunes. It will really help us to build our audience. So, if your like what you hear (and would like to hear more great free content) then visit our iTunes page and leave us an honest review (all feedback gratefully received!).

TSHP397: Living In The Present – Introduction

What’s Coming This Episode?

Welcome to the Live one the present Ten Steps. This course carries a warning because it can change your life forever. Though it will only happen if you follow the program and complete the given exercises after each session. Your life will change, no matter what your goal is, by understanding and working with the natural laws that determine your experience and your ability to succeed in life.

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

Show Notes and Links

Stay in Touch

We’re all over the web, so feel free to stay in touch:

Leave us an Honest Review on iTunes

We’d be amazingly grateful if you could leave us a review on iTunes. It will really help us to build our audience. So, if your like what you hear (and would like to hear more great free content) then visit our iTunes page and leave us an honest review (all feedback gratefully received!).

Living In The Present: Introduction

How to achieve what you really want from your life

Welcome to the Live one the present Ten Steps. This course carries a warning because it can change your life forever. Though it will only happen if you follow the program and complete the given exercises after each session. Your life will change, no matter what your goal is, by understanding and working with the natural laws that determine your experience and your ability to succeed in life, including the laws of:

Attraction – Forgiveness – Allowing – Intentional creation

Often, people ask, ‘How long will it take to achieve my goal?’ Well, I can’t answer that, but I can tell you some things that will help. These are things that I have found for myself not only through my own experience of life but also from working with thousands and thousands of clients and students:

The sooner you let go of any negative connections from the past 

that are holding you back the sooner you will get where you need to be going

The more you allow positive energy, thoughts and feelings to flow through your life in the present, the clearer that you focus on your goals the sooner you will achieve them.

Several times in my life, I have had to reset my own course as I experienced things to have gone badly wrong for me. I once saw myself as a victim of life and thought of the things that happened to me as chance or fate negative karma. It never occurred to me that I might actually have something to do with or even be responsible for the things that I experienced. I found it much easier to blame other people for my hurt and unhappiness and my failures, starting with my parents and moving on to siblings, partners, friends, employers and colleagues, and so on. It was only when my teacher said to me, 

What you hold in your bindi (third eye) will come to pass 

that I began to think, perhaps it was the images that I was holding in my mind that were having such a negative effect on my life and me experience. Could my negative feelings and thoughts of the past be having a negative effect on what I was experiencing now? The answer is yes they could and they do. The first step of our ten will be addressing this.

Since then, I have heard the same idea expressed in a variety of ways: ‘thoughts become things’, ‘what you think about, you bring about’, attention goes where energy flows’ and so on. We talk about optimism and pessimism and how full our cup is. Psychotherapists and counsellors talk about people writing their life script and then living out their own expectations. We are all the authors of our own experience of our own lives. We create and reinforce our life scripts through repeated behaviours and actions, ruminated thoughts and feelings and by what we say.

As a psychotherapist myself, I spend my life correcting people’s speech so that they do not use negative words to reinforce negative ideas. These words include, ought, should, must and can’t. What you say you hear and what you hear reinforces how you feel.  Just as these words are banned from the consulting room, if you want to change they are also now banned from your mouth and your thoughts from now on. From here onwards, you are only interested in the positive. So that from now on, you are only talking about what you can do, what you will do and what you are actually doing. You are only concerned with the positive and not the negative.

The transition from negative to positive thinking, feeling and talking may take you a little while to get your head around. It can be easy to slip back into old habits and you will need to be vigilant to stay positive. The daily practice, exercises and recordings are designed to help you to make this change and to make it permanent. But that means that you will benefit most if you practise everyday and this may mean that your day needs to be re- arranged so that you can create a new positive regime.

You might need support from your family and friends; you may need help with child care; or if you are a carer for an adult or elderly person, you may need some respite. Task number one is to clear enough space to complete the course tasks, practise them and then your life will change.

In a practical sense, the course requires that you reset the things that you do and the way that you do them. You will have heard that Einstein’s definition of insanity is 

doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results

Well, if you want things to be different there are things that you will need to change. Basically these are the way that you think, the way that you feel and the way that you act. 

This program runs over ten weeks/sessions. In reality it takes most people about two years to make a full transition to becoming what they really want to be. For some it is quicker though many of you will need to address deeply embedded attitudes and behaviours and that can take a little time. This is life work…

change is for life, not just a New Years resolution 

Change come about through persistent and consistent action moving towards what you want. Stagnation comes about through persistent and consistent repetition of the same old negative attitudes and behaviours.

After each session there will be a chapter from the book ‘Live In The Present’ as a free resource plus recordings and links to useful resources. I always suggest keeping a reflective journal. This enables you to track your progress and remind yourself of how far you have come and what you have achieved as well as revealing the patterns you have developed in you life to date.

If at any point you need to talk to me you can message or email sean@seanorford.com. With the wonders of modern science I am able to one to one sessions any where in the world on screen.

Take care, live in your present and be happy

Sean x

TSHP396: Fear of the unknown

What’s Coming This Episode?

Often people fear of change and the unknown. What on Earth will happen next? A year ago none of us would have realised that we would be here now with C-19 and Brexit. As I write this Scotland has gone into a total lockdown until the end of January. How do we deal with all of these unknowns?

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

Show Notes and Links

Resource of the Week

  • Sean linked to this article
  • Ed linked to another game… this week it’s Animal Crossing for Nintendo Switch

Stay in Touch

We’re all over the web, so feel free to stay in touch:

Leave us an Honest Review on iTunes

We’d be amazingly grateful if you could leave us a review on iTunes. It will really help us to build our audience. So, if your like what you hear (and would like to hear more great free content) then visit our iTunes page and leave us an honest review (all feedback gratefully received!).

Fear of the unknown

Often people fear of change and the unknown. What on Earth will happen next? A year ago none of us would have realised that we would be here now with C-19 and Brexit. As I write this Scotland has gone into a total lockdown until the end of January. Wales is pretty much there and the rumour is that the whole of England will be following suit. On top of this we have Brexit.

Whether you were an ‘innie’ or and ‘outie’ we are now out. We are no longer European. A year ago most of the people around me were talking about our relationship with Europe from the point of view of the fear of illegal immigration. The reality is that we are all, in some way, illegal immigrants. Though with Covid 19 all the countries in the EU or, for that matter, across the world, fear people coming from any other country. It would seem that xenophobia is alive and well in the world as we leave the EU. 

Dislike and prejudice against, people from other countries is what I often hear in the news. Whether it is the Chinese blamed for the virus, Russia blamed for hacking elections or the Americans for wanting to extradite Julian Assange. These things may all be senseless and wrong or meaningful and important but why do we need to fight each other and then revel in conflict? In my opinion, the most destructive emotion that humanity can have is fear, fear of each other.  Many of us seem to be obsessed with keeping our borders shut to outsiders as though we own the countries that we live in. Yet, in reality, we are all outsiders.

  

The original peoples of Britain, as far as I can understand it, were the Celts, Gaels and the Picts. The Gaels and Picts were collectively known as the Gaels, or Gauls. These people inhabited Gaeland, which later became Scotts and Scotland. These other Gaelic people that lived across the British Isles were collectively known as Celts. If we assume that these Gaelic speaking people were the original inhabitants of the British Isles what happened to them? Why are they now only in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany?

Well, from just before the first century, successive arrivals or invasions from other countries gradually pushed these Celtic people from their homeland of Britain into Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. The Romans invaded Britain in 55 BC and remained here until 410 AD. Following their departure Germanic invasions in the form of Jutes, Angles and Saxons began and the nation of Angle-land or Eng-land began with a developing identity and language of Angle-ish or  English. 

Around 790 the Viking started invading and controlled vast areas of the country known as the Dane Geld. The Normans appeared in 1066 with Willian the Conquerer who defeated Harold the Anglo-Saxon King, at the battle of Hasting. Following the Norman invasion of 1066 another Danish invasion took place in 1069. These great influxes of new people to these Islands were violent and involved war and occupation. However each of these were followed by further influxes of people from all over the world that were often encouraged and enjoyed.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there were waves of Jewish immigration escaping the Pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. In 1951 there was the first phase of the encouraged immigration was from the West Indies. Followed by waves of Asian immigration as people were expelled from Kenya and Uganda in 1972. 

It becomes clear that Britain, like all countries in Europe, is a melting pot, of nationalities. No one here can truly call themselves a native Britain. My own ancestral line includes Chinese, African, Irish/Celt, Jewish and Viking, yet I see myself as British as do all those around me of differing colours and ethnicities. I get it that the resources of any country are limited and that the rate of immigration needs to be regulated by the majority but that is how all the countries of Europe developed. We are all really brothers and sisters. As someone once said “strangers are family that have yet to get to know”. It doesn’t matter what colour, gender or ethnicity you are we are all one, we are all human beings and…

…If we all, look after each other we will all be okay.

It seems to me that the human family in all its shapes, colours and sizes with all its religions, philosophies and theories, it’s arguments and disagreements is, in the end, the same family. We are all brothers and sisters and strangers are only family that we have yet to meet. The wellbeing of humanity is served best by people coming together not separating.

Staying in Europe may have been difficult and would have been a challenge, it may have required communication, negotiation and frustration but that is the human story. If Europe breaks down completely and again returns to the self interested countries that existed before the First World War we are simply recreating the very conditions that led to war in the first place and look where that got us, first the depression followed by the Second World War.

My nightmare scenario would be that as the UK leaves Europe Scotland leaves the UK followed by Wales, Ireland and maybe even Cornwall that has also been given special status by the EU. That would leave England alone, a small part of a small island just off the coast of Europe. We assume that we have a special relationship with the USA. Well, we learned from Trump that all relationships are conditional and if we are outside of Europe I suspect that the relationship with the USA will be a little less special than it was when we were in. 

Whether in or out of Europe the need is for human beings all over the world to learn to look after each other and to work towards a common unity. If we can do this it will be the only thing that will save humanity from destruction and extinction. War and the illusion that self interest is a good idea has to be the most outmoded thought process on the planet. Yet, many of us hang on to it learning nothing at all from history. If you really want to happy look after those people around you. It has a ripple effect.

Whether or not you voted to stay in or out of Europe we are where we are. If we look after each other now and share our love with those around us we might just be able to create heaven on Earth. It might be fun. 

Take care and be happy in 2021

Sean X