Archive for category: Blog

Definition:..
…a person who habitually expresses negative or pessimistic views
despite a general feeling that things were going well..

You must know them, you might even be one, Naysayers are everywhere. If the sun is shinning it is too hot, if not it is too cold, too wet, too dry, whatever it is, it is never right and it never will be. The role of the Naysayer is to tell you how bad it all is and to reinforce this negative message at every opportunity.

Who is doing it?
Try this one, go to three different places, maybe cafes, waiting rooms, bus stops, or wherever, and listen to the conversation being carried on by those around you, what do you hear? Are the people around you sharing positive or negative things? Are they counting their blessing or bemoaning their woes? Are they sharing how good their life’s are or reciting the badness in their everyday?

Are you positively or negatively dominated?
Current research suggests that for most people the average negative dominance of their thoughts and conversation is about 70%. That means that for most of us we spend about 70% of our time thinking, feeling and talking about negative things.

What are we doing this for?
If we could track back in evolutionary time we could probably find a point where it became good for our development to be negative. Perhaps it was an obsession with danger that kept us safe. Or maybe the fear of starvation made us critical of others that wasted precious resources. However it began and however it developed it is with us today and maybe is developing. It is certainly true that every person who develops and maintains the habit of negative dominance becomes a drop in the ocean of negative consciousness that affects us all.

Does it have to be this way?
We know that we are each the sum total of all that we have learned since our birth, this is our paradigm or all of the habits that we have developed throughout our life. As we learn our habits from observation we can assume that the habit of negative dominance has been passed down the generations to the point where the habit is now accepted as normal behaviour. Remember; a habit is something that requires no effort and no will power to enact, we simply just do it. It becomes who we are, how we see ourselves, it becomes normal behaviour.

Be informed not inundated
Having listened to others talking try the news broadcasts, list the positive stories and the negative stories. What is the dominance, negative or positive? Just think about it. If this is the diet of information that we are receiving every day then it is little wonder that we have negative thoughts and feelings. We need to be aware of the news, we need to be informed but we do not need to be inundated by a sea of negativity. We begin to realise that with all this negative recitation and rumination how can we ever have a positive dominance in our thoughts and feelings.

Time to change
To change you need to do two main things, 1: Stop listening to the sources of negativity and 2: start listening to the sources of positivity. This means stop listening to ever repeated news broadcasts and move away from people that you know who keep reciting negative messages.

Do you really know yourself?
Ok, last task, spend the rest of today listening to yourself. Listen to what comes out of your mouth but also to your inner thoughts and feelings. As you become aware of what is happening inside you begin to observe how your system responds to negative messages. These may be news items or come from what other people are saying.

What do you do with them? Do you grab them and play with them, reject them, get angry, sad? Just observe what you are doing and how you are handling it. Be aware of how your body responds. You might react to negative news/information with an in take of breath, with a flutter in your tummy, with a surge of anger or sadness. Whatever it is become aware of it.

As you observe, watch what you do. Do you let negativity go? Do you challenge it? How does it make you feel?

The point is that like all things positivity and negativity is a choice. Only you can decide how you respond and react to all the things that happen around you.

So back to the question at the beginning, the reason that we listen to Naysayers is because that is the habit that we have developed. In listening to negative messages we feed the Naysayer and encourage their bad behaviour. It is another case of what we feed grows and what we starve dies. If we stop giving it attention, it eventually goes away.

Take care be happy and practise being a Yaysayer rather that a Naysayer.

Sean x

Thanks to Rachel, one of our long term listeners, this week we found ourselves talking about author Marie Kondo and her book ‘The Life Changing Magic of Tidying’. It seems that the tidiness movement is huge and Marie has a massive following. So why should we tidy? Why should we want to?

If you think about it we only need to tidy up because we have stuff that needs tidying, we have belongings and the more you have then the more you need to tidy. I guess when the first person discovered or invented the first tool, perhaps a flint knife to cut meat, they started the trend of creating and collecting stuff and we have been building on it ever since. Over time, with more tools, we created more stuff until we developed the industrial revolution and the technological revolution so that now we are sinking under piles of stuff. And stuff needs to be made tidy.

Tidiness and tidying has become big business.The quote is that ‘tidying increases good fortune… and dramatically transforms our lives’. Perhaps it was the stuff that really transformed our lives.

A tidy desk equals a tidy mind
It has always been true that the way we manifest ourselves in the physical world describes what is happening in our internal emotional and mental world. When we look at how we organise our office, bedroom, kitchen and so on we are also looking at the insider of our mind,

Beware of being judgemental.
However, it does not follow that your ideas of tidiness and organisation are ‘the’ right way. When we talk about tidiness and organisation it is not that one size fits all. Different people approach organisation in different ways. The teenager that has adopted the ‘floordrobe’ as an alternative to the more common wardrobe may know precisely where everything is. Yet, from the outside the parents are driven crazy. It might just be that you see my level of organisation as chaos but it might work pretty well for me.

What is tidiness
Tidiness is when the world that I live in works well for me. If we were to make our own rules of tidiness and tidying, they might look something like this:

1: Does the current state of my environment disturb me?
2: Am I able to feel relaxed in my environment?
3: Can I find what I need when I need to?
4: Does my storage method keep my belongings safe?
(The should probably be something here about cleanliness as well)
And secondary
5: Does my environment disturb other people?

We each have to decide the way that we choose to live.

The Harmony of Wa
Seeing as we are talking about the Japanese art of tidying I think that we need to consider ‘Wa’. Wa was the first character in the Japanese alphabet and seen as the first principle.

(Wikipedia)
Wa (和?) is a Japanese cultural concept usually translated into English as “harmony”. It implies a peaceful unity and conformity within a social group, in which members prefer the continuation of a harmonious community over their personal interests.[1][2] The kanji character wa (和?) is also a name for “Japan; Japanese”,

When the Japanese lived in paper houses, so that the goings on of those next door became all to obvious or they did not keep the noise down, it was an offence to disturbed the Wa of the people next door. As a community people were expected to live in harmony with one another.

The concept and principal of living in harmony effects our community and society at large and also businesses, the family, couples, relationships and individuals. Also, on a global scale, the whole of humanity. The idea that Planet Earth has a spirit, often described as ‘Gaia’, suggests that when we live with Wa we are living in harmony with nature and not wrecking the planet. Wa is a pretty big concept and one that I have lived with for many years. I am aware of my own Wa, my own inner harmony and, should my Wa become disturbed, so that I do not feel right, then I do something about it. Sometimes that does include tidying, sorting out, clearing out and taking stuff to the tip or de-cluttering. Though when I do go to the tip I am appalled by the amount of stuff that we create and then waste by burying it in the ground. I am not sure that this dumping of stuff is good for the Wa of Gaia.

Therapy, growth and self development
When we live in balanced Wa life is not stressful. When we can live at peace with balanced Wa we can be the best and most productive version or ourself that we can possibly be. To live without Wa is to live with disturbance, disorder, disease, and disharmony. What the art of tidying is really showing us is one way that we might use to regain our Wa, for ourselves. The magic thing about the concept of Wa is that when we are each individually in harmony then as a society and as humanity we are in harmony.

Mindfulness, Wa and the tidy mind
For me, being mindful, is to live in awareness, and that means to have a tidy mind that allows for balanced Wa. Avoiding attachment and negative environments, to avoid cravings and longings, is creating the tidiness of mind that is mindfulness.

Tidying as a meditation
The Japanese stone garden is a meditation in Wa, a meditation of tidiness and order. This is where the art of tidiness and meditation meet in mindfulness and Wa. If we can tidy and create order with the same consciousness as the person in the picture, we can transcend the experience of time and space and enter the wonderful void of meditation.

There are two other things that we should also be aware of, the first of other people, the second is obsession.

Other people
The world, your house, company, community and so on is populated with other people whose ideas and Wa will be different to yours. Now, I accept that some people are mindless slobs who wouldn’t know Wa if it bit their bottoms but in general half decent people have their own version of Wa that works for them. The classic is the child’s bedroom that drives the parents round the bend. There often comes a point when we need to close the door and allow the child to develop their own concept of Wa. If you cast your mind back to your own teenage bedroom the likelihood is that your current state of Wa is different to what it was then.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
It is probably unfair to suggest that without stuff we wouldn’t have OCD because most obsessive symptoms are most commonly involved with repetitive thoughts and rumination not about gathering or ordering things. However, some people are obsessed with the world out their, and their need for cleanliness and order. Our collective production and collection of stuff over many generations opens up a whole new world for us to worry about. In the cave with a few tools, a couple of pots and a few animal skins it did not take long to get things in order. Once we have lots of stuff we need security and locks, banks, safes, and deposit boxes, insurance, vigilance, worry, anxiety and stress. Often from stuff also comes crime, theft, robbery, jealousy, envy, and so on.

Time to de-clutter
Now, once I have finished this I will be back up in the attic where I have created a studio. I am sorting out the bags and boxes that are under the eaves and sending stuff to the charity shops and the tip. And you know what? I find it really very satisfying. When I look back at the space I have created I do, genuinely, feel a sense of peace and harmony from the clarity of the space.

In my case I think Wa is ‘tidy attic equals tidy mind’.

Be happy, be tidy but don’t become obsessed, allow others their Wa as well.

Take care

Sean x

In this weeks episode we had the pleasure of interviewing Alex. She and I worked together a couple of years ago as she made the magic changes of getting rid of the habits she had developed that did nor serve her well and replacing with new one’s that did. Like all of us, her habits were not really current, they were the ones that she been developing since the moment of her birth. We are all the habits that we create from what we learn. In the first instance these are from observation of what is going on around our emerging self and then after that they come from our experiences and more importantly from our responses to those experiences. In Psycho-speak we describe this collection of what we know and believe as our paradigm.

‘A paradigm is a standard, perspective, or set of ideas, a way of looking at something. It is a new way of looking or thinking about something. This word comes up a lot in the academic, scientific, and business worlds.

A new paradigm in business could mean a new way of reaching customers and making money. In education, relying on lectures is a paradigm: if you suddenly shifted to all group work, that would be a new paradigm. When you change paradigms, you’re changing how you think about something.’

Perhaps we should revisit the last sentence and perhaps embellish it a little.

When you change your paradigm, you are changing the way that you think, feel and behave about you and your wellbeing.

What Alex managed to do was take the journey that changed her paradigm. In so doing she changed her life, her relationships and her level of happiness and self-fulfillment.

You embark on ‘the journey’ when you make the decision to change your paradigm. When you do this you move from the unconscious programming of your childhood, where your unconscious paradigm controlled who you are and what you do, to a new you. This new you is in control of, and actively creating, and living what you desire. This is a new you who is living and getting what you really want from your life.

Different disciplines will describe this journey in many different ways, for me this is ‘waking up’ and is what our work at ‘Live In The Present’ is all about. The course and the book are designed to take you through the steps required to re-wire your paradigm. This is not prescriptive, we do not have an ideal paradigm that you should create or a set of dogmatic beliefs about how you should be. Your journey is you deciding what is the best version of you, that you would like to be, and then enabling you to take the steps to get there.

Strangely, when embarking on the journey, most people have no real idea of their destination. Many of those that do, at the outset, will often change their course mid-journey as their awareness of their real needs and desires emerges. It is a bit like me asking someone “what is it that you really want” and they say “I just want to be happy”. Well that sounds good but it doesn’t work. To complete your journey to your happiness you need to know what happiness looks like, what it feels like, what shape, colour, size it is and so on. To find happiness you need to have some idea of your journeys end. This is the work of the steps and this is what Alex under took with me on a one to one basis.

There is one thing that did come up when she came on the podcast that I needed to reflect to her, it was that she described herself as “I’m only a hairdresser”. Apart from the fact that hairdressers are probably equal to a therapist in the happiness and wellbeing that they provide for their clients they also are often real therapists as well, because people, in the secure safety of a trusted touch relationship will often unburden themselves to the practitioner. This is true in massage, reflexology, reiki, acupuncture, chiropody, podiatry, the list is endless. There are many professions that are ‘lay-therapists’ it is the nature of being a human in a human society. It fulfills my philosophy,

“If we all look after each other then, we will all be okay”

But, back to the ‘I am only a hairdresser’. One thing that you begin to realise when you are on the journey is that this is not a quick fix. Changing your paradigm, that you might have been reinforcing for many, many years, does not change quickly and can be tough. As Harv Ekker, author of the Millionaire Mind put it “change is difficult, it doesn’t happen fast, it happens at the speed of crap and crap moves real slow”. What we find is that we need to revisit our evolving paradigm not just once and not just through the period of the ten steps but every day in every way for the rest of life.

This is life long learning. It is the journey of the evolving self and I would say the only meaningful purpose of life. Human beings are learning machines. We are a centre of consciousness that is connected to the experiential world through a set of senses that teach us about our environment and our experience. When we wake up we realise that we are in control of our experiences.

I suggest that you have a listen to the podcast and hear Alex’s fascinating journey.

Take care, be happy and embrace life lone learning.

Sean x

A listener messaged in asking us to revisit the subject of disappointment. We had looked at the subject in episode 159 and tended to focus around the hot topic of the EU and the potential, whatever the outcome, for half the population to be disappointed.

The request here was to look at the effects of more personal disappointments. For example what happens when the job interview doesn’t go so well or we feel let down in other areas of life? This raises the issue of competition and the idea of winners and losers, often seen as the survival of the fittest. The reality is that in a competitive world disappointment is just a fact of life. You can’t have one without the other.

But there are alternatives – You can’t be disappointed without your permission.
To be disappointed you first have to buy into the concept of wining and losing, of gain and loss. These concepts involve the separation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ or ‘you’ and ‘me’. For ‘me’ to win or succeed ‘you’ have to lose or fail’. If ‘we’ win ‘they’ lose. These tribal separations are the seed of all conflict and war be it religious, sexual, ideological, sectarian, ethnic or whatever. It all involves ‘you’ and ‘me’, ‘us’ and ‘them’ concepts that lead to ‘have’ and ‘have not’, ‘success’ and ‘failure’.

In the personal sense for ‘me’ to succeed at the interview and get the job ‘you’ will be disappointed. On the other hand if ‘you’ get the job then ‘I’ will be disappointed. Unless we begin to see this process of winning and losing in a different way. Perhaps these things that I identify as disappointments are actually good things.

My own assumption is that the universe is not out to get me and that the things that I am presented with are for my own growth and development. I am not a fatalist I believe in free will but I do get the law of attraction and see that the things that happen to me do so because they are meaningful to me and my level of development. I see the same things as true for you also. In this way nothing is ever bad. It is my response to what happens that labels it good or bad.

What if I didn’t get the job because, in the greater scheme of things, it would have been damaging to me or the wrong direction for me, held me back and not allowed me to develop to even greater things? If this were the case the fact that I didn’t get the job should be a focus of celebration and thanks not of disappointment and loss.

To be disappointed assumes…

1: Expectation. This is craving, my demand for the outcome that my ego seeks. When we project forward in expectation of outcomes, be they good or bad, we are firing up our anxiety circuits. Learning to see the things that happen in life not as problems but as learning opportunities means anxiety dissolves. If you consider that the human race has survived because we each have this amazing problem solving ability that, should we need it, will come to our aid and solve whatever the issue is that we are faced with.

We don’t have problems we have learning opportunities.

2: Loss. This is attachment, my inability to let go of my feelings of possession for things, people, events or the belief of what I see as ‘mine’. It could be that I saw the job as ‘mine’ before I went to the interview. This attachment to the past creates depression. When we feel the loss or bereavement for what was, or for what might have been we often ruminate. When this happens the rumination keeps it alive, so that many years after an event it can still feel like it is live action as though it has just happened.

When we learn to let go we overcome depression and stop projecting into the future we can live in the present. In the present, in the now there can never be any disappointment because there is no attachment to the past and there is no carving for the future. The trick to living in the present is gratitude. The following is attributed to Buddha.

Let us rise up and be thankful,
for if we didn’t learn a lot today,
at least we learned a little,
and if we didn’t learn a little,
at least we didn’t get sick,
and if we got sick,
at least we didn’t die;
so, let us be thankful.

At the end of each line of the above the option is to be disappointed or grateful. It is not what happens it is the way that we see it. We are not effected by events but by our response to those events.

In a very real sense being disappointed is a choice. What do you choose?

Take care

Sean X

Uncertainty is a form of anxiety. Anxiety is living an imagined future right now. To be anxious is to not live in the present.

Anxiety and uncertainty are bed fellows. Even the most focused and determined of people can never be 100% sure of the outcome of life or their endeavours. Yet, we are not all anxious why is this?

I recall reading a study about men being kept on death row somewhere in the states. The research showed that while under the threat of execution the inmates would produce high levels of stress hormones and feel high levels of anxiety. Once they had been given a death date, even if it was a while in advance, their production of stress hormone would drop. The conclusion of the study was that uncertainty creates stress and anxiety but knowledge, knowing what will be happening, takes away the stress. It would seem that certainty, even if we are certain of difficult outcomes is less stressful that simply not knowing.

Whatever will be, will be
There is another way of approaching the future and that is in accepting that what ever will be, will be. There are things that we can change and things that we can’t. It is helpful to know the difference.

Serenity
Is the state of calmness where there is peace and untroubled thoughts or feeling.

According to Wikipedia the Serenity Prayer was authored by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr 1892–1971 The best-known form is:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

In the 1930s and 1940s the above prayer was adopted and popularised by Alcoholics Anonymous and other twelve-step programs. The original prayer looked more like this…

God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.

The Law of Allowing
In our, live in the present, work we use the law of allowing to avoid engaging in thankless tasks that will only wear us down or wear us out. Allowing the mad people to be mad without joining them or needing change them leads to serenity. When we can accept the world, and others, as they are the uncertainty, stress and anxiety fall away.

This is not fatalistic
To be fatalistic assumes a lack of control. In the law of allowing being the observer of events does not make use powerless or inactive. It is more that when we choose to engage we do so mindfully with clarity of vision and purpose. We do not engage in headless chicken syndrome running around in panic and worrying about things that we cannot effect, or that we cannot effect ‘yet’.

Become a positive script writer
We know that we are each writing our experience before it happens, we are choosing how we respond to life.

We are not effected by events
We are effected by our response to events

We have choices and anxiety, to be anxious, is a choice. It may not feel like that at the outset and in extreme cases we may need medication to help us reset our system. Anxiety is never the way that we are, it is the way that we have learned to be and we can learn to be different, to not be anxious.

We don’t have problems we have opportunities
When we realise and embrace the amazing creativity of human consciousness and our ability to solve problems, whatever they are, anxiety and uncertainty does not exist. When I know that whatever happens I will be able to deal with it there is no fear. It is only when we loose that perspective that uncertainty and entirety take hold.

Catastrophisation
Often the things that we do become anxious about are neither here nor there. It is simply that by focusing on them they have got bigger.

What you feed grows and what you starve dies

OCD is the result of focusing exclusively on something and allowing it to grow so large that it takes over the now so that we cease to be present in the moment but live in the fear of uncertainty and anxiety.

My friends, uncertainty and anxiety
Uncertainty and anxiety, not anxiety disorder, have been with us through out evolution. They have kept us safe in our quest to survive by not being eaten by predators or falling from trees. The awareness that comes with normal anxiety is good, not scaring and does not create uncertainty. When appropriate anxiety gives us the awareness that we need to stay safe.

Be serene and be happy

Sean X