Birthdays

Today’s date is so very neat. 17 02 2017. It’s a beautifully sunny day and it’s also my birthday.

I’ve had a mixed relationship with my birthday over the years. As a child it was far and away the most important day of the year to me, the only day I felt important, that I mattered. I expected the sun to shine, the bus to be on time, everyone to be super nice to me and to adorn me with gifts and throw wonderful parties for me. If anything didn’t meet my extremely high expectations for the day, I felt that I would have to wait another year for the next opportunity. What a weight.

After having children, I transferred the weight of birthday expectations to them and deemed it my personal responsibility to ensure that the sun would shine, their bus would be on time, and that they were the prince or princess for the day. More weight.

And then something changed. I began to find that my special day would inevitably not live up to my impossibly high expectations, in fact, it would usually get ruined and I’d find myself sulking in bed by 9pm with all the exciting plans and preparations in tatters.

The pendulum had uncomfortably swung the other way before eventually settling in another place entirely.

Today, I celebrate the birth of my physical form by loving my humaness. The date feels sacred to me, and very internal. I have no need or desire to shout it from the rooftops, and spending the day only with myself or close loved ones has become my norm.

I still love the 17th February, but I feel that the celebration is between me and the date and no one needs to pander to my whims or wants. I love to sit in the field of the anniversary of my birth and offer thanks to Life for affording me the opportunity to be here in these unusual times. I have realised that every day can be lovely, regardless of the date and I love that neither my birthday, nor anyone else’s carries any ballast for me.

I don’t even notice the getting older part anymore, except when the decade changes. It feels like a personal new year, between me and Life. I do still like it when it’s sunny though. That hasn’t changed.

How do you relate to your birthday? Has your relationship with it changed over the years?

I think, therefore I am not sure

Don't believe everything you think!Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be in charge of our thoughts? Imagine a life where every thought you had was supportive, constructive, kind, useful and in service to your greater good. How do our thoughts work, and how can we get them on our side?

About twenty years ago, I joined a group of people who organised workshops about emotional intelligence. This particular system had been going for at least 10 years when I came aboard, and here I was at my very first meeting, the newbie in a room of seasoned veterans. On this particular day, the group were very excited because the founder of the system was to be there. There was a lot of awe and reverence surrounding this man.

The only available seat in the room was right next to him, so being the newbie, and lacking awe or reverence, I plonked myself down next to The Big Man.

The session began and the group fired their questions at him. It transpired that the top man had a condition that was causing his thinking to be foggy and so he was slow to bring forth the answers to the questions.

However, because I was sitting next to him, as the answers were trying to find their way to him through his fog, I was picking them up. So as he ummed, aahed and struggled to find the answers, I jumped in with suggested answers. It was so unexpected. The irreverent newbie was speaking the thoughts of The Big Man.

This was my introduction to how thoughts work. The questions elicited answers. Any one of us had access to these answers. They literally moved around the room, knocking on doors until they were picked up.

The answers didn’t belong to a person, they belonged to the questions.

I picked them up because I didn’t know that I was supposed to leave the big questions to The Big Man.

And so began a curiosity with how thoughts work.

I noticed that there is a societal tendency to teach us what to think, rather than how to think. We each grew up within a context, circles within circles. When they are in accordance with each other the action of questioning rarely arises. So if we grew up with a family, a school and a society that held the same beliefs, we would have no reason to question whether our thoughts and beliefs were actually true. We wouldn’t even know that they were beliefs, we would just think that’s how the world was.

Thoughts have substance. They remind me of fish in the way that they swim around, going about their business until such a time that we catch one.

And like fish (and pretty much everything else) they tend to hang out with others of their own kind. The type of thoughts we ‘catch’ depends on the type of ‘bait’ we are using. It’s like the thoughts just hang out in the ethers until we call them to us using our vibration as bait.

When our vibration is higher, we have access to higher thought forms, when it’s lower, we’ll be trawling through shoals of less desirable thought forms. The art is in discerning which thoughts are useful and which can be thrown back into the water.

The trouble with the way thoughts interface with us, is that they tend to do it in a recognisable voice, usually our own. Because they tend to speak in a voice that we recognise, it’s like they have our password and get through our filter systems. If a person on the street told you that you were unworthy and undeserving of happiness, chances are that you wouldn’t believe them. But when the same thoughts seem to emanate from within, we don’t question them.

It’s actually very easy to change our relationship with thought. The first step is to simply notice that you think. The best way I know of to do this comes from Eckhart Tolles’ ‘The Power of Now’.

To do this exercise, simply close your eyes and sit for 1 minute like a cat waiting to pounce upon the mouse of thought. Every time a thought comes, notice it and then let it go and wait for the next one. The very act of bringing your attention to thought already interrupts its flow and causes there to be space between the thoughts.

As you get used to doing this, you’ll find that you begin to notice that you are experiencing thoughts even when you’re not doing the exercise. When I began doing this exercise, I quickly noticed that there were underlying thought patterns that I had literally based my life around that turned out not to be completely false. My underlying thought pattern was that I didn’t have space and I didn’t have time. I thought that my house was too small, and that I didn’t have enough time to focus on myself in any meaningful way.

Turns out that the truth was that my house was the size that it was, and that I had the same 24 hours in each day as absolutely everyone else. Who knew?!

There is undoubtedly violence in the world we live in, and I see no reason to add to it through self harming thoughts. I strongly urge you to question your thoughts, and to not believe everything you think!

Why inside out is so much more comfortable

Wear your spirit on the outside

When you were little and enthusiastically and freely offered yourself to the world the chances are that you frequently encountered rejection. “Mummy come and play with me” is often met with the many reasons why that’s not gonna happen. If you weren’t the cool, popular kid who always got picked first, it would be understandable if you had learnt that your presence is often not wanted.

You learnt to hide the parts of yourself that didn’t fit in. Trouble is, that part was often your spirit, the very essence of you. You learned to keep yourself in, to not risk rejection. Maybe you’d wait for others to take the lead, to stand on the edges until someone else began dancing and invited you in.

I get it. It’s totally understandable. The thing is though, it’s not your spirit that’s fragile. Your spirit is the strongest aspect of you, the one part of you that’s not temporary, that will be with you for at least your whole life. It’s the thing that’s been there since you were born, a constant, indestructible presence. It’s your ego, your little human-self, that gets hurt. Your spirit is just fine and dandy.

So why not make friends with it? Make best friends with it? Fall in love with it even? And allow others to enjoy it too. The way to begin to do this is so simple.

Wear your spirit on the outside.

Sit in it like it’s a comfy armchair. Let your body be within You, your spirit, rather than keeping You and your spirit within your little, fragile body. Fill the space with your spirit, let it run free. There’s plenty of room for you and everyone else to fill the space.

Try this.

Close your eyes and let yourself become aware of the part of you that has always been there. The same you as when you were a child, the same you as a decade ago. Breathe it out, let it fill the space around you, at least to an arm’s length. Then luxuriate in it and watch as your life gets better. It doesn’t take very long to do, and you can do it anywhere; on the train on your way to work, in bed before you get up, at your desk, in the park. Anywhere. Try doing it a couple of times a day for 2 minutes. It could be useful to set a reminder on your phone to help you  remember.

Living with your spirit on the outside will ensure that you are what it says on the packet. Those that resonate with you will be drawn to you, and those that don’t, won’t. It will bring a greater sense of your life being in alignment with you and that in turn will bring a greater sense of belonging. Putting your little human self in charge of your precious life is like expecting the secretary to do the boss’ job.

Just because you weren’t the fastest runner at school and your mum was busy with the laundry, doesn’t mean that there’s really no place for you on the planet.

I’ve got a brainwave

Actually we all have brainwaves. All the time. And in the interests of spiritual meets science, I’ve just been and gone and had mine measured.

I’ve often wondered what was happening inside my head while I’m working with you, and now I know. Turns out that large portions of my brain are asleep. And not just any old sleep, but deep, deep, dreamless, dead to the world, sleep. Even when I’m just living my life there is a strong predominance of delta brainwaves in play, but when I’m working they go into overdrive, along with an increase in the theta waves as well.

When Christina, the practitioner who was doing the measuring, saw how asleep my brain was, naturally she was concerned. In a walking, talking sense it means that my mind is unfocussed, I forget things, I’m not great at admin and A.D.D. style, just tend to do what’s in front of me, rather than doing what I’d planned to do.

I left her office feeling like there was something wrong that needed attention. As soon as I got home and began exploring the role of our brainwaves in our lives, things began to fall into place. With such a huge amount of delta waves in play, it would be expected that I’d be completely unfocussed, and yet when I’m working with you, I feel hyper focused. It’s like I’m between worlds and have access to that which cannot normally be accessed.

I’ve long been aware that it’s easier for me to ‘look’ into your world when I close down as much stimuli as possible. I prefer to work remotely on the phone or if on skype, without the imagery. The less stimulation the clearer my perception. A high proportion of delta brainwaves is associated with psychics, yogis, meditators and babies. The literature says that as we age, we often don’t even often get into the delta waveband in our deepest levels of sleep.

It seems to me that when I am awake, and yet with large parts of my brain asleep I am able to tap into life beyond the physical world. Thoughts, beliefs and emotions feel like something tangible, as if they have weight. I can feel what you feel like on the inside, what your partner feels like to you and can help you to clear the energetic blocks that might lie in between who you really are and how you express yourself in the world.

I’ve been doing this for years anyway, measurement or no measurement, and whilst there is of course value in improving my brain’s patterns so that I stop leaving my swimsuit in the shower at the gym for example, it’s beyond exciting for me to know that when we’re working, I go into a delta state from which I can access information that is not accessible within the usual confines of the mind.

What a bloody great use of science.

If you are interested in getting your brainwaves measured, or would like to increase the elasticity of your brain, check out Christina’s work here. And if you have any understanding about the role our brainwaves have in our lives, please do leave your comments below. I’d be delighted to explore this fascinating subject further.

 

 

Welcome

All of you is welcome here.

It’s not a grammatical error and by ‘here’ I don’t only mean that you are welcome to my brand new website, although that too is of course true. I mean that I invite you to pause for a moment and allow all of you, your whole self to be welcome, right here, right now wherever you may be.

There are the gloriously shiny bits of you, your natural talents and the abilities you’ve learned. There’s the child in you, maybe the sibling and the parent, the friend and the advisor, the expert and the helper. The kind parts and the loving parts, the bit that scrubs up well when you make the effort. These parts arrive easily. They’re used to being welcomed.

But how about the other parts? The bit that sometimes drinks too much, or was mean to someone they cared about, the part that didn’t feel like going to work today, or the part that doesn’t like to admit it has a bit of a penchant for porn, or for staying up too late and eating food that isn’t good for you. Welcome to all these parts.

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