Monthly Archives: July 2019

The importance of Space and Stillness each Day

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“When you are full of problems, there is no room for anything new to enter, no room for a solution. So whenever you can, make some room, create some space, so that you find the life underneath your life situation.”
(Eckhart Tolle, The Power Of Now, 2004)

Fifteen years on and this book is still a timeless classic, as readable today as it was when it was first published. It still remains the number one book on my bedside table.

Body mindfulness meditation helps to create that space to make room for new solutions, new connections in your brain which otherwise could not be created. Downtime is critical to growing and repairing your brain functions.

Some space and stillness time is very important to have at some point in your day. It is critical to your growth and a healthy mind and body. It also doesn’t feel good to be on the go all day long without pause. Constant stress on your body leads to inflammation internally, which leads to some of the leading causes of disease, ageing and death around the world.

It is that important, to create space.

So why don’t we do it naturally? Because the old habits of western society say that doing more is better. Your intellect wants to do do do and go go go. Accomplish more, fill all idle time, no blank spaces. Somehow this has become ingrained in our culture, become the norm.

Our thinking minds constantly overrule the needs of our body, our heart and our spirit. What these parts of us need and want sadly don’t get much of a look in, until it is serious or they break down.

Often when a mediation practice takes a back seat it is being overruled by a very convincing mind program that says ‘doing more is more important then being right now’. And so your being doesn’t get a chance to properly correct your doing. Left too long, is when people begin to report drops in productivity, feeling lost, or unfulfilled or stuck in a rat race. Left further unchecked, leads to disease and breaks in body function.

Left to its own devices, the intellect sees no value in space and stillness. Because it means the intellect gets turned down even switched off for a period. The intellect wants to always remain in power, in total control, so switching off is not an option.

So it takes some doing initially, to take the time each day to switch it off, stop the rampant thinking and just be and be still, for a little while, coming more back into your body. Even if your eyes remain open. This stillness time will help re organise your thinking processes and allow much more efficient use of your time and energy, reducing stress and improving health.

Releasing the Past, by Coming into the Present

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“If we know how to touch the present deeply, we can touch the past, and even transform it.”
(Thich Nhat Hanh, How To Fight, 2017)

The present moment is all that is ever real. What you are reading now is all that is real in this moment. What just happened or is about to happen in your life, isn’t real. The plans of the future and the memories of the past are just thought form imprints in your brain. They are not real. Your body responds as if they are real if you recall them. And if you recall them too often you can create anxiety that isn’t real either.

A daily body mindfulness practice helps you to stay more in the present moment. To not live as if past memories, and future made up memories, are real.

Learn to spend more time in the present rather than your memories. All of life is happening in this present moment. It can’t happen anywhere else.

And as you stay with the present moment awareness of your body, the past unfinished material will reveal itself. What you haven’t let go of will surface and it will feel as if it is happening now, and it is. Everything is either happening now or not at all. It may have started in the past, but you feel it now in the present moment.

So just staying with something difficult from the past, and staying in the present moment as you feel it, helps it to release and diminish in intensity. The trapped emotional charge (trauma) has a chance to let go and flow out.

This way, past old stresses and traumas can heal, complete and release in the light of the present moment. And your thinking mind doesn’t need to do anything. It doesn’t have to work it all out. All it needs to do is stay present deeply, in your body, right now.

Does it make sense that being more present releases the past? If you are habitually living from your past/future memories, it doesn’t make sense at all. Your thinking mind thinks the past actually still exists, that it is real. It isn’t. It is long gone, its just history now. A memory.
Only this moment exists. Ever.
And it is always this moment. Forever.
Well, how can it always be this moment you may ask?
And I’d like to ask you the best question of all.

IS IT NOW?

And the answer is…..Yes.
Ask this question at different times in the day, in the middle of the night, ask it whenever you want, the answer will always be the same, YES.
Ask it a trillion times over the next fifty years and the answer will still be the same, forever constant. YES.
So it follows that it is now forever.
It is this moment, forever.
And it is this moment that you ever need to be in….. Forever.

Expanding your Brain in Real-Time

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“The concept that mind creates matter is not a metaphysical proposition. It’s a biological one….your brain creates matter in the form of neurons and synapses in response to your consciousness.”
(Dawson Church, Mind to Matter, 2018)

Lots of research is coming out now (thanks to imaging machines and brain electromagnetic field readers) that the pathways in our brain are changing in real-time.

What you think and focus on affects the neuron structures in your brain directly, then and there. (Not just when you are asleep at night.) The rewiring is happening live as you focus intently on a task. The longer and deeper that you can focus, the deeper the neuron connections that can form in your brain.

Meditating in a Body Mindfulness Meditation class for one whole hour, and in the presence of other meditators, boosts this effect as everyone’s energy field resonates with each other, strengthening the effect.

This is why I also ask all clients at the end of a therapy session to not talk as they go home, and to lay down if possible when they get home. Most often people feel like doing this anyway. It’s a natural result of going deep. The energy your brain is expending in making neuron changes then and there is tiring. A good tiring.

You cannot feel the actual neutrons forming, there are no feeling receptors in your brain to let you actually feel this, but you feel the after effect in your body. You are tired, don’t want to talk and just want to lay down and often take a nap.

So after every deep body meditation and deep body personal therapy session, your brain has literally changed and the neuron connections in your brain have multiplied.

This is nice to know.

Your Practice, Your Spirit and your Better Health

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“Recent research studies show that, on average, religious people suffer less from anxiety and depression than non-religious people; they are less prone to suicide, less likely to smoke, and less likely to abuse alcohol or other drugs.”
(Rupert Sheldrake, Science and Spiritual Practices, 2017)

Biologist and Biochemist Rupert Sheldrake has written some very interesting books over the years and this one is no exception.

Religious people seem to enjoy much better health and wellbeing because of their spiritual practices. Some of these practices involve meditation, gratitude, forgiveness and improving relationships.

It’s the meditation aspect that interests me here. Praying is a form of meditation, when a person slows down their thinking, closes their eyes and focuses on something other than their conscious thinking mind. Anything that takes you out of the conscious intellect for a little while and allows you to focus on your body, your surrounding space and other people, turns out, is very good for your health.

You don’t have to be religious to enjoy the benefits of body mindfulness meditation even though you can have experiences in the process that feel spiritual. The more you practice, as you become comfortable in just being in your body and your body heals further, you can begin (if you want) to expand out further outside your body and experience much more.

There is growing evidence that our minds can extend beyond our physical body. Through years of personal practice, this is certainly my experience. Sheldrake through his research coined the term morphic resonance to explain this link, and what a link it is!

More on this later.

Neuro-Immunologists – a western medicine group, that are finally getting it.

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“It wasn’t considered professionally respectable to investigate connections between the brain – the province of neuroscience – and the immune system – the province of immunology.”
(Edward Bullmore, PhD, The Inflamed Mind – A radical new Approach to Depression, 2018)

I’m fascinated how the immune system and the nervous system interact. How inflammation in the body when the immune system is low can affect and even create mental symptoms like depression. And also going the other way, how negative depressive thinking can weaken the immune system and cause inflammation in the body. The research is finally beginning to show this link.

My personal and client experiences over the years informed me directly that the mind and body affect each other quite strongly. Of course western scientific medicine has denied this for hundreds of years thanks to 17th century Descartes dualist ideas that the mind and body were totally separate.

So it was nice to read from a psychiatrist (Edward Bullmore) that ‘a lot of what I was taught in medical school is wrong’.

Edward is part of a small group of psychiatrists that call themselves neuro-immunologists. He is pioneering a new field of research that links the brain, the body and the immune system. So we can look forward to much better treatments that deal with the mental and physical health issues together, rather than apart as they are currently done within western medicine.

I realised decades ago in my practice that western medicine was way behind in this mind body connection and so I let them go and continued independently, continually researching and applying new techniques that made this mind body link stronger and stronger within me and within my clients.

Making this link stronger is what body mindfulness meditation is all about too. Just by strengthening and feeling into this link in your body, your body automatically begins to heal, and you don’t need to know how it is doing it. It just happens – when you get out of the way.

My personal research and development continues to this day and there are more exciting breakthroughs to come again soon. And again, like thirty years ago, it is going to look completely alternative and ‘bonkers’ to western mainstream medicine, until they catch up again – eventually 🙂