Archive for category: Blog

Have you ever wanted to give you a body a good clean, but from the inside? It is rebooting your entire system. A bit like when you turn your laptop off and on again and then defrag the hard drive.

Twice a year, autumn in October and spring in March I will do a 13 day mini detox. This an exclusion detox, that you can see on the site www.livesthepresent.co.uk . In the thirteen days you progressively go from a full solid diet to three days of fluid and then back up to a full diet again.

Every few years I go on a 90 day clean out. This means no alcohol, no chocolate, no caffeine, no dairy, no meat. With the no dairy goes all the cakes and pastries. Does that sound hard? for many people this is normal. 

When you have been eating a full western diet this may seem a difficult idea. Yet many people live their entire lives this way and, guess what, they are very healthy. When Fauja Singh ran the london marathon aged 102 he did it on a Punjabi farmers diet of mainly rice and lentils.

I will reduce my diet over a seven day period and have a day, or a few, on just Water with honey and lemon, often this will be warm. The lemon cleans, and the honey provides energy. Some people will have some withdrawal to begin with. So if your system is addicted to something like caffeine you may get headaches if you stop too quickly so it important to reduce things gradually.

People often fear that they will lack energy. Not true. You use between 35 and 50% of your energy just digesting the food that you would normally eat. On diets like this most people feel an increase in their energy level and even sleep better. 

Flushing your system may sound odd, this is why I do it. The tube that runs from your mouth to your bottom, the alimentary canal, gut, processes all the food that you eat. It has done so from the moment of your birth and if you have never fasted or detoxed, without a break. Just like the skin on the outside of your body the lining of you gut will be sloughing cells, so that a proportion of what comes out of your bottom will actually be your dead cells from your gut lining. 

However, because your poor old gut has been working, usually flat out 24/7, year after year not all the cells come away and you get a build up of old rubbish on the lining that reduces the efficiency of the gut wall to absorb the nutrients that your your body needs. Many people suggest that this buildup and the subsequent problems this creates lead to many diseases. By doing a few days on fluid, and that means quite a lot of fluid, so that you pee a lot, your gut gets the opportunity to flush and clean all this rubbish that would otherwise remain stuck to your gut wall. Having given the gut a clean you then have a chance to create a new diet that will serve you well.

Think about our origins as hunter gatherers. We would never have had the constant supply of food that we have now provided for us in the supermarkets. There would be days of plenty and day when the calories would have been reduced and some days when we only drank water. In these circumstances the gut had the opportunity to cleanse itself on a regular basis.

So what will I eat? Well pulses, beans, grains and nuts, plenty of protein their. Rice, potatoes and wholemeal pasta, plenty of carbs there. As much fruit and vegetable as I want, plenty of minerals and vitamins there. I make my own bread that can be moistened with good olive oil or nut butter. For breakfast a plain unsweetened muesli type mix with nut or soya milk.

Really it means flushing the system and rebooting onto unprocessed foods that are healthy and nutritious. My rule is no meat, no dairy, no alcohol, coffee, sugar and anything processed with a drastic reduction in sugar. I have to say that if you are going to try it you might need to talk with your doctor first especially if you are diabetic.

The resource for this podcast/blog is my thirteen day detox programme. This can be a good place to start, as I say twice a year. If that goes well and you enjoy it you may get to trying a thirty day and then gradually extend it to 90 days over a few years.

Game for a laugh? Have a go.

Take care 

Sean x

 

 

Last week Auntie Vera passed at the age of 96. As the last person in that age group in the family her loss has been very profound the grief intense. There is joy and happiness for the memories of what a lovely person she was set against the hurt and pain of her going. Thankfully her passing was a good one.

Dealing with the grief that follows a death is something that can never be understood unless it has been experienced directly. I see so many people who feel a sense of guilt because they are still grieving only three months after a loss when, in reality, grieving takes a long time, and sometimes may even last a lifetime.

A dictionary definition of grief is….

Intense sorrow, especially caused by someone’s death

Grief comes from a French word ‘Grever’ meaning ‘to burden’. We might, therefore, consider grief to be a burden that we carry. We have finished our grieving when we are ale to put the burden down.

I am forever surprised at how ill prepared we are to face death, both our own and of those people, family and friends around us. It is the most certain thing that faces all of us, we will all die.

The attachment of emotional elastic

In my book “what colour is your knicker elastic” I explain that the emotional connections that we make between ourselves and others is like a piece of emotional elastic. At a point of loss, when that relationship comes to an end, the emotional elastic is severed and we are hit in the face by the emotional energy that is remaining in it, unless we are prepared for it. 

The loss of a parent

We had an email from a listener this week who has been facing the death of a parent and is trying to come to terms with the hurt and the loss. I am not sure if this true for us all of us but for me the loss of those that we truly love is possibly the worst pain that there can be. The only loss greater than that of a parent is that of a partner or child. It may seem like an easy thing to say but the reality is that, at some time, most of us will face the loss of those people that we care about. The pain of this loss we call grief.

Relationships are all different and the nature of the emotional elastic will vary. It may be thick and strong or thin and week. Because of this the level of emotional rebound and grief that we experience when the elastic snaps will be very different. I have seen situations such as when someone’s mother had died. The person in this case showed little or no emotion and took the morning off to deal with it and arrange the funeral before returning to their work. Two weeks later they took a few hours off to attend the funeral and returned to their work. Their colleagues observed this and saw it as insensitive, negative and nasty. What they did not realise was that the relationship that this person had with their mother was not a good and happy one. For them childhood had been a difficult time and the lack of support they experienced from their mother had resulted in thin emotional elastic, so thin that when it snapped it had virtually no emotional effect upon them at all. In fact they described the death as a relief not a burden.

Alongside that I have also experienced the people who have been completely devastated and debilitated by the loss of their mother. They have taken weeks, and in some cases months, off work as they have attempted to recover. For them the emotional elastic was thick and strong and at the point of snapping the were hit hard by the emotion.

Learning to live with loss

When I consider the real affects of a death and the cutting of the emotional elastic phrases like…

 

…‘don’t worry you’ll get over it’ or ‘times a good healer’… 

…show a total lack of empathy and insight. 

These phrases are often used by those people who have never experienced the grief of a death, or of a significant death. The idea of getting over the loss of someone close could not be further from the truth. It would be more accurate to say that grieving is learning to cope with the new situation that you now find yourself in. Life without a parent, husband, wife, mentor, friend or child can be so completely different to all that went before. Death, loss and subsequent grief is literally life changing. 

Life will never be the same again.

Acceptance, a journey

Grief and bereavement are not a thing to get over. They are a process that must be gone through until the reality of the loss has been accepted. This is a journey that you may not want to travel and yet you will, in the end you have no choice. For some of us the journey is short, this is when the elastic is thin. Also it may be shorter if we have had time to prepare. This is what I call pre-bereavement. Perhaps there has been a long illness and a gradual ending that has prepared us for the real end. 

For some the journey may take a long time to negotiate with many obstacle to overcome and issues to face. In these cases the elastic is thick and strong. Sometimes the emotions may be so powerful that they will never be resolved and the grief may simply be something that we have to accept and live with. It is as though this loss, and perhaps others that we experience in life, have been woven into the tapestry that is our life. It has now become a part of the picture.

The unbreakable elastic

Some elastic will never break and continues to pull from the other side of the grave. I lost a child, many years ago now. Every time that day comes around it is as though it was live action all over again. I have accepted this as part of the tapestry of my life and no longer need it to be any different. It is a part of my year, it is a part of who I am.

The process of grief

In psycho talk we alway say that grief will take a minimum of two years to process. The pain of being without that special person can be hard to bear. From the death day we have to live through the first year and all the significant times, birthdays, Mother’s/Father’s Day, anniversaries, and all days of importance. 

The first of each annual event is generally the most difficult. So too are the new events, those events that the lost person will never to see such as a wedding, a new grandchild or a naming ceremony. The feelings and emotions associated with these days has to be borne and gone through. 

Avoidance is not always a good idea

A family may decide that they cannot possibly have their normal Christmas, as they have done each year, because it would just too awful with the lost person not present. The family decide to go to Honolulu or do something completely different. This seldom works because next year they simply have to face what they avoided last year. In the end all that they have done is delay our process by a year. Grief is when we need to understand that grief is a process not an amount of time.

So in psychology when we say that the minimum period of grieving is normally about two years we mean each events needs to be faced and processed. This is because from the death day we go around the year facing every special day and anniversary. After one year we come back to the death day, take a deep breath and do it all again. In most cases by the time we have completed two year cycles we are starting to normalise and accept the change and our loss. However we have to accept that some, or perhaps most, losses will never truly leave us. 

Becoming an adult

We are all, or were all, children. All of us were born of a mother and had a father. Throughout our life we are our parents child, until, that is, the moment when they pass on. In reality none of us become truly become adults until both our parents have died because up to that point we are someone’s child.  We only become adults when we are orphans. Just as this is true for us and our own parents it is equally true for our children. While we live they will always be children, we need to die to allow them to become adults. If you are in your seventies and your parents are in their nineties you may not come to adulthood until late in life.

How long should we grieve 

While grieving may take an indeterminate amount of time that may have no limit it still remains a process. Often people will feel guilty for still being upset three months after a loss. In reality the process may take several years. On average we think of two to begin to come to terms with a loss.

The three stages

Grief is often identified as having three distinct phases. These may follow the classic sequence or the phases may come and go over time.

1: Disbelief

The first stage is disbelief. “I can’t come to terms with what had actually happened” I assume that the person will come back and walk through the door, that they will ring or write.

2: Emotional letting go

As emotion is released it may come out as tears frustration sadness or depression. Even when people try to hold it in there usually comes a time when it is released.

3: Anger

Anger is a strange though powerful emotion. At some point the anger comes. We may feel anger with the doctors, the disease, God or the person who has died. When we feel guilty with the person who has died we then often feel guilty for being angry with them and we may spend sometime going round and round until it is processed. Often it is the anger that give us the energy to move on.

The wonder of birth and the wonder of death

Why do we celebrate birth and not death. In many ways we have lost touch with both birth and death. These great events, that used to take place in the home now happen in hospitals and hospices. Only a generation ago most people would have been born at home and died at home.

With the rise of the medical professional we have de-personalised the process. As we have done this we have also given away our own responsibility and participation in these processes.

Celebrating a life or mourning a death?

My vote is that we use the last funeral rites as a celebration of life, that we change our sadness into happiness and celebrate what that person’s life has achieved.

I shall stop here before this turns into a book.

Wherever you are in the cycle of life, enjoy it and plan your ending with joy.

Take care

Sean x

Following Covid I have spoken with so many people who, even now, are having problems getting going again. For some their is a frustration with their life for others it is that feeling of they simply can’t be bothered. For many trying to get their work life balance back is proving difficult. Working from home can be a challenge when it is easier to stay in bed, sit in the garden or engage in your favourite hobby rather than doing the work that you are being paid for. While I get all this I want to make a positive stand for doing nothing as being a good thing.

There is never a point in life when we are doing nothing. It may feel like it but consciousness is always at work even if we are unaware of it. The part that is working that we don’t realise is termed the subconscious, it is below our awareness but it is still there.

Even when we are doing nothing we are doing something.

To the person who always needs to be busy someone who meditates or simply stops long enough to enjoy the view may be seen as a procrastinator. Yet, perhaps it the person who is being still and apparently doping nothing who is seeing the real world and making the breakthroughs in life, science, art or literature. The person who always needs to be busy is often avoiding dealing with difficult issues. Their business blanks out difficult emotions of decision rather like an anaesthetic. The busy person who avoids dealing with issues by continually doing other things is often less productive than people that we might describe as procrastinators.

If you break down the word Pro = forward, future… Crastinus = tomorrow

Manyana, in Spanish, simple means tomorrow. As a slang term it is used to mean…

“we don’t need to do that now it can wait until tomorrow”.

For many people procrastination simply means to delay. That does not make the person lazy they may simply be the type who considers before they act. However, that does not mean that there aren’t people who are really lazy and do as little as possible. But these may be the people who appear to be busy but are avoiding doing what needs to be done.

Sometime the feeling of procrastination is an emotional barometer that tells you whether what you are doing is what you should be doing. Lack of drive and enthusiasm maybe be because your are bored or simply in the wrong place doing the wrong thing. Giving your self time to think a about it and reflect may help you discover what is it that you really want from your life. Then you just might feel like enthusiastically getting on with it.

Imagine that when you wake you are about to go and do something that makes you feel good. Do you have problems getting out of bed?, well no. Now, imagine that you are waking to a day full of things that you don’t want to do. Do you have problems getting out of be?, well yes. It is then that we can our see procrastination might just be that our system trying to tell us something.

The sooner I fall behind, the more time I have to catch up.
Author Unknown

In the west we tend to be driven by what is termed ‘the Protestant work ethic’. Most people work long hours to the exclusion of family, friends and their own life and fulfilment. Yet very few people actually like their work life. I work with thousands of people who wake on a Monday with the dread of another week in their workplace. They would rather be doing anything else. Procrastination does not always mean to do nothing, doing something else instead is often termed displacement.

Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.
Robert Benchley

Displacement activity is something that you do to avoid doing what you don’t want to do, or a way of not dealing with a difficult situation, like being busy. For example a rabbit that is cornered and is about to be eaten by a fox and knowing there is now escape will displace this energy of fear into the activity of washing itself.

In psychology, procrastination refers to the act of replacing more urgent actions with tasks less urgent, or doing something from which one derives enjoyment, and thus putting off impending tasks to a later time.’
Wikipedia

The clue in this definition is ‘enjoyment’. The protestant work ethic goes alongside with ideas like ‘life is hard’, ‘life is earnest’ and ‘everyone has their cross to bear’. Well I don’t buy any of that I am in the school of life should be fun and life should be fulfilling. It seems that we have no problem finding the energy to do things that we do want to do, things that make us feel good. While, those things that we don’t want to do sap our energy and take away our motivation.

My approach to life is that when I feel the need to procrastinate or displace, I look at, and enjoy the process, and at the same time I look at what I need to do with my life so that I feel engaged and connected and restore the balance between what I need to do and what I want to do. This is often described as ‘work life balance’.

In the end if you are living the life that you really want the issues of procrastination and displacement do not exist because you are enjoying and fulfilling yourself in the present moment so that getting out off bed on any day, even Monday is never a problem.

The best way to get something done is to begin.
Author Unknown

That comes back to what do you really, really, really want to do with your life. Until you answer this question you will be forever procrastinating and displacing. Becoming aware of when and why you procrastinate will will help you answer the question of what do you really want. So there may be times when procrastination is really something we should celebrate.

I’d like to procrastinate but I can’t be bothered

Take care and live in the present and when you are doing nothing enjoy it.

Sean x

In this episode we are revisiting an old topic – MONEY. With the current economic crisis and the ongoing effects of Russias war in the Ukraine things ate tight. Interest rates are on the rise and available income is diminishing. The people in the know say that it will get worse before it gets better. Lots of fun.

So, does money make you happy? The answer is ‘no’, unless you are an addict and crave the money in your account, in your pocket or the assets that you have accumulated. Even then it will only be temporary and the joy is short lived as we crave the next hit. 

In this blog we are back to our old friend Dopamine, the love drug. Dopamine is produced in the brain and leads to feelings a joy and excitement. Dopamine is produced in response to a stimulus such as drugs or alcohol or to a feeling such as when we are in love, attachment or expectation, or to an action such as driving fast, jumping out of plane or bungee jumping etc.  In fact Dopamine is reproduced in response to getting or experiencing anything that we label as fun and exciting.  While we can all enjoy the ‘wow!’, feeling of Dopamine and may enjoy it or look forward to it, the stimulus response cycle may not dominate our life. When the craving, or drive towards a Dopamine hit begins to dominate our existence and our behaviour we have an addiction. For some people money is an addiction.

Understanding Money Addiction 

Addiction is probably the most misunderstood aspect of human experience. We tend to see addiction as a bad thing that happens to bad people, or to people who have been led astray by others. If you enjoy the feeling of exercise and look forward to the next class you are describing your addiction or need for stimulus and response that is driven by your need for Dopamine. We are all addicts.

Try changing the word addiction to habit and it might be easier to understand. If each day you pray, meditate, attend church, go for a walk, talk to a particular person, eat a certain thing for breakfast, whatever it is your habit. But if you feel odd or out of salts when you are unable to or do not complete your habit you have an addiction.

When you wake up in the morning if the first thing that you do is to check your phone rather than acknowledge your partner, you have a phone addiction. If you do acknowledge your partner prior to using your phone then you may have a partner addiction that we might label love. If your first action in waking is to go and get a coffee then you have a caffeine addiction. Even if you drink decaf you still have a coffee addiction. Once we can see our habits, repeated activities, often enacted below our awareness, as addictions we can begin to understand the addictive quality of the human psyche.

Addiction disorder

In a previous blog where we were talking about anxiety. The point was that we all have anxiety and that it was and sometime still is a good thing. Anxiety has kept human beings alive throughout evolution. Anxiety disorder is when we have continual production of stress hormones when there is nothing to feel stressed or anxious about. There is also the realisation that we can create the same anxious effect in our system by simply imagining an anxious situation so that our body mind and brain react as though the event is actually taking place in real time right now.

Our entire system works in this way. We may become aroused by imagining a sexual situation it does not actually need to be happening for the aroused response to take place. The same may be true of drugs, going to church, or taking exercise. The anticipation is so powerful that the dopamine begins. However the needs of Dopamine need to be fulfilled. If there is no fulfilment of the anticipated outcome the response will either be a withdrawal response that may include depression or there may be an increased drive towards the anticipated addiction. In drug and alcohol work a common phrase is “the addiction always comes first’, this need to fulfil the Dopamine cycle can be to the detriment of relationships, jobs and emotional stability and even life itself.

Addiction disorder happens when this simple, normal and common effect of mind and imagination for an anticipated fulfilment drives towards ever greater levels of Dopamine. This is very important because in all addiction it is not the stimulus that we are addicted to it is the Dopamine and Dopamine is an unforgiving master who demands higher and higher levels of stimulus to create the desired emotional effect. This is why addictive behaviours always increase. This is the difference between a regular habit and an addiction disorder. An addicted perpetrator of domestic violence will escalate their behaviours over time so that a loud voice becomes a shout, becomes a slap, becomes a punch, becomes a kick, becomes a beating.  

So back to money

If the ownership of money, or the ability to spend money, is an active part of your stimulus and response mechanism then you will experience that money does, in fact, make you happy because it feeds that ‘wow!’, feeling of Dopamine. Once we find a route to Dopamine production we will continue to enact the stimulus and response mechanism so that we continue to feel good.

What is money?

All money is potential energy. A unit of currency is like a seed full of potential energy that when released can create something. An acorn can create an Oak tree. Money is simply a form of energy. When we release that energy we can turn it into something else. In physics the law is that energy is never lost all it does is change its form. The energy or power in money is the same. When we use it we change its form into goods, services, actions and so on. If the things that we use money for create a Dopamine response within us then we will develop an addiction to the need for money to maintain those levels of Dopamine. We were told as kids that “money is the route of all evil”. This is a misquote the original was “the love of money is the route to all evil”. In the terms we are talking about in the blog it is the addiction to money that creates our problems.

Mindful responses to Dopamine addictions

Whatever your addiction disorder there are solutions and they lie in Mindfulness. Behaviours, habits and addiction are embedded in the mind, emotions and actions, often below awareness. Using Mindful techniques and developing your observer self that sits above the cognitive mind and emotions you are able to see your habit cycles and, most importantly make decision to feed those habits that serve you well and to starve those habits that do not serve you well.

What you feed grows and what you starve dies

If you do have an addiction to money, or the things that it can get you, remember this…

Love people and use money

Not the other way around.

Be happy and enjoy the money that you do have

Sean x