Archive for category: Blog

So, a client says to me, just as an aside, “why is it that we go on holiday to get away from where we live and the people who live where we holiday are going somewhere else for theirs?”

The idea of needing to get away would suggest that where we are is never really good enough. I get it that the act of taking a break, of doing something different, is stimulating and often relaxing but the question got me thinking about do we appreciate where we are and what we have? Are we able to enjoy the space that we live in?

I am reminded of the amount of time when Rie and I have been driving around Europe and have been spellbound by views and vistas. Yet there are many times when we have noted that we have views like this where we live. There is a beach on an island in the Florida Quays that people go to every evening to watch and marvel at the sunset. It’s a lovely sunset. But, when I watch the sun going down over Hilbre Island and the Welsh coast I am stunned on a daily basis.

I live on a peninsula named Wirral. It is known as the insular peninsula mainly because people, once they arrive, never leave. I know many people born in Wirral that have never travelled anywhere else, not even for a holiday. I note that those that do manage to leave often return after a few years as though they have been drawn back by some invisible elastic umbilicus that will not let them truly leave.

Wirral sticks out into the sea with estuaries either side. There is the river Mersey between Wirral and Liverpool and the River Dee between Wirral and Wales. Both estuaries empty into the sea so at the top end of Wirral there are beaches, and all the fun of the holiday trade. There seems to be a balance here of industry, residential and holiday occupation and accommodation.

Where do you live?
How well do you know your own area? What do you know about its history? The month on May is local community and history month, maybe a good time to get to know where you live?

I have lived all over the world and only came to Wirral with work and stayed because of Rie, and now I can’t think of a better place to live. Like most of the British I feel that the weather could be warmer and that the sun could shine some more but all in all, I live in heaven. Within minutes I can stroll down to the beach. In twenty minutes I can be through the tunnel and in the centre of Liverpool. In twenty-five minutes I can be in Chester and in forty minutes into the mountains of Wales. The motorway system that runs through the middle of Wirral connects us to the rest of the UK and through to Europe.

Once I became interested in the Wirral and began to look around it I found places that are gems. There are areas of richness and poverty, areas of beauty and the not so beautiful. I discovered that Paul Hollywood’s dad had a bakers in Wirral, that Lillie Savage was brought up here and Wirral has been home to Ian Astbury, Ian Botham, Chris Boardman, Fiona Bruce, Elvis Costello, Dixie Dean, Daniel Craig, Chris Farrell, Austin Healey, Paul Hollywood, Simon Rimmer, Eric Idle, Paul O’Grady, John Peel, Patricia Routledge, Harold Wilson, Glenda Jackson, the list goes on forever. And there was a Viking parliament in a place called Thingwall apparently a corruption on Ing meaning assembly and Voll meaning field- Amazing.

Anyway, I digress. My advice to you is to get to know where you are. Don’t become blind to what is around you and certainly enjoy your holidays in foreign parts but maybe begin to understand why people from other parts of the world might like to come to where you live for their annual holiday.

Take care and be happy

Sean x

Blaming your friends for your lack of drive could be real. So could blaming them for your energy and enthusiasm and for your prejudice, bias and bigotry.

This story caught my attention and made me think a lot about why we are the way that we are. Where do our attitudes and beliefs come from? Well we know that our system, our mindbrain is blank at the moment of birth and that we accumulate information from what we observe, what we hear and do. These become our habits that are the building blocks of our paradigm of how we are or how we believe ourselves to be.

A new study shows that people tend to unconsciously imitate the lazy [and energetic] attitudes of those around them. So, you could blame your friends for your lack of drive, I suppose?

Perhaps we need to see this as a possible effect, it is not inevitable. Mindless responses lead to simple imitation. MIndful responses lead to choice.

Researchers Jean Daunizeau and Marie Devaine, from INSERM in Paris, combined mathematical modelling and cognitive psychology to explore the laws that govern this “attitude alignment”. They asked 56 participants to make a series of decisions involving effort, both before and after having observed the decisions of fictitious participants (in fact: artificial intelligence algorithms) whose lazy attitudes were sensibly calibrated.

The study results show that participants are bound to a “false-consensus” bias. That is, they believe without evidence that the attitudes of others resemble their own. It also shows that people exhibit a “social influence” bias. Their attitude tends to become more similar to those of people around them.

This natural bias to imitate the behaviour of the group, team or unit is common to us all. The researchers noted that participants seem to be mostly completely unaware of these biases.

It all happens below our awareness unless we are mindful of our thoughts, feelings and actions.

The mathematical simulations demonstrate that both biases, and the surprising interaction between social influence and false consensus, are hallmarks of a unique mechanism that is ideally suited to learning both about and from others’ covert attitudes.

This suggests that unless we are awake to ourself we are deluded by our need to experience feelings of social conformity, to feel that we belong. Attitude alignment is necessary for stable membership of any group. It is the basic requirement to make you one of ‘us’ for you to belong.

The researchers are currently applying this work to assess whether this form of attitude alignment may differ in people suffering from neuropsychiatric conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder.

The most important part of this research is the realisation that we all simply conform unless we are able to question. To act or react without insight is mindlessness. To act or respond in mindfulness. Reactions happens without awareness. Responses happen with awareness.

In mindful awareness we can never blame others for our beliefs, attitudes or actions. We are always responsible for how we respond to any situation. Being responsible or respondable is to be Mindful

Take care and be mindful

Sean x

Hey, we have got to number 200, that’s over 100 hours of podcasts and a lot of blogs. I have to begin with a big thank you to all of you who have read the blogs and listen to Ed and I over the last four years. You have a lot of sticking power. We have both been really pleased by the positive response that has come our way in both texts and emails.

So, this week we popped a bottle of bubbly and settle in, by a log fire (can someone wake up spring!), to talk about celebration and as usual we wandered around the subject. Our celebration was about having come this far with the podcast, share some ideas with each other about where we might go next.

I would also like to thank Ed for his steady contribution and continued commitment to the podcast. I remember the first ones that we attempted and than had to bin before we finally got to something that we thought would be good enough to put out on the air. Amazingly they were liked and we shot into the top ten ‘new and notable’ on iTunes where we stayed for some months and even hit the number one spot, fabulous.

The one person who should have been on this 200th celebration with us was Rie, who does so much behind the scenes. Sadly Rie suffers from some form of modesty, not shared by Ed and I, where she avoids cameras and microphones as much as she possibly can. Saying that, we did get her on one podcast when she was talking about the amazing work that she does at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre. Half way through the episode she accidently knocked a glass of water into the keyboard of her mac and we had to pause the podcast and sort it all out. The laptop was repaired, but I doubt we will ever convince her to get behind a mic again, though we will carry on trying.

So, I want to thank Rie for all the work that she does for the Live in the present site, the podcast, books and courses.

And, to you reading this, and listeners of the podcast, I want to once again thank you. Without each and everyone of you the podcast would not have happened or continue to happen. Thank you all for listening, for your feedback and ideas and your ongoing support, cheers.

Last of all I want to thank all the guests who have given their time to come on the podcast and share their work and their lives with us all. You know there really are some amazing people out there doing some amazing things. Maybe you would like to come on the podcast and share the mindful things that you are up to in your life.

To the awake mind all of life is a celebration. Every morning when we wake into a new world we can celebrate the dawning of a new day. With every breath that we take we can celebrate the wonder of our life. life is a journey from our first in breath to our last out Breath.

Now I am off to finish this bottle of bubbly with Ed and celebrate just how good life is.

With love and gratitude

Sean x

This is an interesting blog. We were contacted by a listener who wanted us to talk about abandonment in terms of being excluded from a group. In her case this was religious group. Having grown up in a Jehovah Witness family she decided that it did not work for her and she decided to leave the church. The result for her, as often happens is that once you leave the faith you are also then abandoned and often ostracised by the entire group or faith.

Years ago I had my own brush with the Moonies, or Unification Church. Their claim was that their leader, the reverend Sung Young Moon, was the second Messiah. They had written their own book of the word that was inspired by God that they saw as the New, New Testament called The Divine Principle. The punch line was that Mr Moon was the second coming predicted in the old New Testament. Having met Mr Moon in the flesh I felt that anyone less like a Messiah I had yet to meet. Saying that I have never met a messiah so who am I to judge.

Anyway, I decided that it was time to go, not such an easy thing to do. I was told by those that I had arrived with that it was the Devil in my soul that stopped me seeing the divinity of Mr Moon. They stayed and I left. In leaving I was no longer one of ‘Us’ and was now one of ‘Them’, the heathen non believers. Like our listener I was then abandoned.

Why have we been abandoned?
It is all down to core beliefs. People gather together in groups that are similar. The groups may be sport, racial, sexual, religious, political, socio-economic, academic, ethnic, the list goes on. When we create a culture of ‘us and them’ we loose the magic variety that is creation. We limit our experience and our knowledge, we become confined and inward looking. Most negatively we create prejudice in our unfounded beliefs in what ‘they’ are like because they are different to ‘us’.

When all is one there is nothing to abandon
What attracted me to Ayurvedic and Sankhya philosophy is that there is no ‘us and them’ because all of creation is one thing. It is as though the entire universe of creation is a gigantic jigsaw and that every idea or philosophy that there ever is, is simply just another piece in the jigsaw, another part of the picture.

If you are truly my family and if I see strangers as family that we have yet to get to know then we are approaching the one-ness that is creation. The divisions of ‘us and them and need to build walls, actual or metaphorical to keep them out leads to never ending conflict, pain and suffering. If the whole picture is of the oneness of creation do we also include all sentient beings as ‘us’.”

Peter Singer, author of ‘Animal Liberation’ said, If I could make everyone in the world see one film,
I’d make them see EARTHLINGS.”

EARTHLINGS is a 2005 American documentary film about humankind’s total dependence on animals for economic purposes. Presented in five chapters (pets, food, clothing, entertainment and scientific research) the film is narrated by Joaquin Phoenix, featuring music by Moby, and was written, produced and directed by Shaun Monson.
http://www.nationearth.com/earthlings-1/

If you can bear to watch Earthlings it might expand your ideas about abandonment.

Be happy and look after each other

Sean x

According to Kevin Loria in the Business Insider Thursday 16 February 2017 Depression may be our brain’s way of telling us to stop and solve a problem

There is a theory that suggests that rather than being a problem depression might be a specific behavioural strategy that we have evolved as a biological adaptation that serves a purpose. As Matthew Hutson explains in a Nautilus feature on the potential evolutionary roots of depression and suicidal behaviour , that the purpose of depressions might be to make us…

…stop, understand, and deal with an important problem.

Figures for the USA, which are probably reflected in Europe, suggest that at any given time, about 5% of people report symptoms of moderate or severe depression. Major depressive disorder is now so common that at some point in life, one in six people will suffer from it.

So why does such a debilitating condition strike so many people?

The traditional understanding is that depression is just a breakdown in the normally working of the brain. This is seen as a chemical imbalance that is treated by chemical medication designed to balance chemistry, change mood and create shifts in behaviours.

Could depression have developed to help us?

Evolutionary psychologist Paul Andrews and psychiatrist J. Anderson Thomson first elaborated on this idea, called the “analytical rumination hypothesis,” in an article published in Psychological Review in 2009.

Their idea is that what we think of as a disorder is actually a way for our brains to analyse and dwell on a problem in the hopes of coming up with a way to deal with it. The researchers suggest it’s possible that a difficult or complex problem triggers a “depressive” reaction in some people that sends them into a sort of analytical mode.

This intrigues me greatly because in the Ayurevedic model, my original training, depression was seen as a gift, as a way of our system telling us that something was wrong and giving us the chance to sort it out. This would explain the increased rumination that arises in depressive episodes. Along side this is an increase in dream sleep. The two phases of sleep are deep sleep (NREM) and dream sleep (REM). It is assumed that deep sleep is the resting phase concerned with repair of the body and dream sleep is an active phase concerned with processing experience and emotion. In depression the dream sleep eats into the deep sleep so that despite sleeping for long periods of time the person does not experience rest and may become progressively more tired.

The concept that depression might be an evolutionary adaptation rather than a mental disorder is not the main consensus of the mental health community. In reality it cannot be true for all depression. It would be true for those who suffered with reactive depression in response to a trauma or traumatic stimulus. Even so this could still account for around 80% of depressive episodes.

The problem is that in most cases depression is not the cause it is the symptomatic response to the cause. In western medicine we tend to treat the symptom and pay little or no attention to the cause.

It could be that if we accepted depression as a gift and took the opportunity to undertake a self-audit to enable us to get our lives back on track. Instead we treat depression negatively as a problem and medicate the symptoms and fail to deal with the cause. It would make sense that if alongside medication we engaged in mindful therapy so we could speed up treatment and help to dissolve depressive episodes.

MBCT
Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy is designed to deal with and overcome issues of reactive or repetitive depression. MBCT, is recommended by the United Kingdom’s National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) for the prevention of recurrent and reactive depression and has also been shown to be effective in treating the symptoms of anxiety.

Take care and be happy

Sean x