Monthly Archives: May 2019

When do you ‘hang in there’ and when do you quit?

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“We fail when we get distracted by tasks we don’t have the guts to quit.”
(Seth Godin, The Dip, 2011)

One of the problems with the intellect is that it is very good at giving you reasons to do a lot of things. You can make a case for doing many things and making them all sound important. So what do you choose?

We are in a unique period of history where we have more choices than ever before and more marketing coming at us to convince us to do more. A lot of these choices are in our face literally, with our smart phone.

And not only do we have more marketing thrust at us, but we now have (with social media) more opinions to wade through about what we should be doing. So not only do we have information overload, we also have opinion overload.

This gives rise to decision fatigue. The danger with this is that overly operating from the intellect, we lose the ability to filter what is important and what isn’t.

Enter body mindfulness.

Stopping and focusing on your body is the best antidote to the racing overload of choices, opinions and information that the intellect has to try to sort out. When you take time to stop and go within, a multitude of options drop away and you edge closer to dealing with only the essential, only what’s required, only what’s truly most important. Your intellect cannot do this alone. Your body and your feelings have to be involved. The sifting happens much faster and deeper when you do it through your body.

This doesn’t mean that you will magically get answers every time you stop and focus inward. Sometimes a lot of old clutter has to be addressed, faced and accepted before it drops away, revealing the true core path or option. With that inner certainty, it is then much easier (as Seth Godin says) to quit something that was just leading to a dead end for you. And it is also much easier to hang in through the dip you will experience, the hard slog, the depth necessary to do something really well.

Feel Positive, Live Longer

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Last post covered the health of your Heart. In this one, we focus on longevity.

“Just as attitude affects the heart,…Yale scientists even concluded that attitude was more influential than blood pressure, cholesterol levels, lack of smoking, a healthy body weight and exercise levels in how long a person lived.”

(Hamilton, David R, Ph.D, How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body, 2nd Ed updated, 2018)

How important is research like this that keeps coming out? Strongly and continually pointing to how positive emotions improve your health and help you live many years longer than negative based people. The overall research indicates clearly that attitude impacts your health in a very significant way.

So anything you can do to be more positive and feel more positive emotions throughout your day will improve your physical health directly and have you live longer.

In my experience, this is why people who keep a gratitude journal where you write in it what you were grateful for during the day tend to feel a big positive difference. So making this activity a habit can really help. Even if you just do it in your head, but do it everyday.

If feeling more regular positive feelings equals a healthy and longer life, it makes sense that you should jump on board and do it everyday. A lot of people can’t do this for very long because it is not always easy. For to genuinely feel positive emotions (and this is key) you must allow the negative ones to release. Otherwise you are just faking it and not really feeling anything of substance.

Going within, in a body mindfulness practice, helps you to face and release the negative emotions that cover up your natural positive ones. Once the negative ones (usually pain, anger and fear) are acknowledged in your body and allowed to move naturally, the positive health benefits can begin to surface and spread throughout your body.

This is the natural authentic way to positive emotions, with no push, pretending or force of willpower.

Anger and its link to the risk of Heart Disease (Attack)

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I focused on Cancer in the last post. This week we look at Heart Disease (Heart Attack).

“The connection between attitude and the heart is so reliable that a 30 year study published in 2003 in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that ‘…hostility is one of the most reliable indicators of coronary heart disease risk’.”

(Hamilton, David R, Ph.D, How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body, 2nd Ed updated, 2018)

According to the World Health Organisation (in May 2018) the leading cause of death in the world in 2016 was Heart Disease (Heart Attack), followed by Stroke, accounting for 27% (15.2 million) of all deaths world wide.

Then we have studies like the above quote that strongly link heart attacks to hostility, or as I would word it, the emotion of excess and prolonged anger in your mind and body.

If you would like to self heal yourself through body mindfulness meditation, it is imperative that you also focus on the emotion that sits with the sensations you feel in your body during a practice. Taking the time to feel the emotion, will go a long way to improving your health and immune defense against disease.

By spending quite, deep and prolonged time in a body mindfulness practice you can uncover your hidden frustrations, blame, hates, people you cannot ever forgive, angry judgments and hostilities towards others. Deeper down there will probably be suppressed rage and fury at injustices.

Your intellect can rationalise these old traumas and subdue them, but going deeper (into your body) you can uncover what is still actively firing in you emotionally. If it is anger related, then we have a red flag for a future heart attack.

Express that anger, acknowledge it, get it out, throughout your body, release it and make peace with what you have hated for however long, This will literally bring peace and lightness to your physical heart and lower the risk of ever getting a heart attack.

But it must be felt IN YOUR BODY not just intellectually in your head, hence why doing a regular body mindfulness practice is so vital to your health.

Expressing Emotions to Heal Disease

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“In our body, cancer cells never arise in the heart or small intestine, because the heart and small intestine are warm, with high blood circulation and high oxygen content…Cancer is the end result of alexithymia – or not expressing feelings or emotions.”

(Kelly A. Turner, Ph.D, Radical Remission – Surviving Cancer Against All Odds, 2014)

Body Mindfulness work is excellent for getting you still and inward enough to heal a lot of issues and diseases. Cancer’s link to emotional suppression is very strong now with many studies and research all pointing to the truth of the above quote.

In your practice when you go within and stay there long enough, the diseased or suppressed parts of your cellular structure begin to reveal themselves to your awareness and consciousness. You begin to bring these cut off parts into the light of the present moment where they can heal. Most times when they reveal themselves, the releases can be somatic, physical, emotional and feeling and even involve small or big movements, depending on what was unfinished in the traumatic event, that shut that part of you off, in the first place.

So as you advance with this work, you have the opportunity to go very deep and heal things that the majority of doctors in western medicine cannot make sense of. It’s a whole other paradigm, a whole other world where you have much more control of your health and wellbeing then you were ever taught was possible.

You are that amazing on the inside and can do (by today’s standards) remarkable things. (I’ve certainly witnessed this with clients often, in my private practice.)

I look forward to the day when this is the new norm.

We are well on our way 🙂