This is a powerful speech at Danny Frawley’s Funeral today in Melbourne Australia by Wayne Schwass. See previous blog entry for more details of who Danny was.
Men need to have the courage to speak up and ask for help when something deep inside is not okay. Rather than being strong and covering up, be courageous and open up. Get help.
“Manning up in the past was to suffer in silence, manning up now is to put your hand up.”
(Danny Frawley, AFL Football Great/Coach, 2019)
Danny Frawley died in a car crash hitting a tree last Monday afternoon. He was only 56. The whole Australian AFL football world was in shock that this great man had died.
He was the second longest serving captain ever of the St.Kilda football club – the club that I follow – so I remember his playing days well. He also did some good things in his coaching days and then was a great host and commentator in the media, radio and TV. He was a great leader and inspired many. He was much loved by all.
Danny had major depression issues over the last ten years. He was one of the first men in football to go public with his mental health issues. Having them splashed across the newspapers would not have been easy. This was such a brave thing to do for a celebrity and for a man so much in the public eye of the australian football world.
I am hoping his legacy will have a wide reaching effect on all men, to stop playing tough and pretending ‘she’ll be right mate’ and be brave and courageous enough to speak up and ask for help without feeling it is a sign of weakness. In fact it is a sign of great courage.
It takes great courage to face your demons. It takes men even greater courage to do that, because of cultural conditioning growing up. I believe it is the beginning of a death sentence when a man decided to completely suppress his real feelings in order to be or look strong. This is just not healthy whatsoever. Blocking off feelings reduces your life span.
It takes great courage to face what you have going on within you. I see this regularly with new clients, coming in shaking and scared at what will be revealed. I was the same. Having been through it myself, most are able to calm down fairly quickly and begin the deep inner process.
Looking back at all the sessions I had over the years, I would often be sitting in the waiting area terrified at what I was likely to show to the therapist which had never been safe to show ever before in my life, even to myself. This type of courage leads to freedom and greater health in your life. It’s not easy, but it is worth it.
Doing a regular Body Mindfulness meditation practice means you will have to go within and eventually face some of your old traumas and demons that you could not face in the past. Don’t give up when uncomfortable feelings arise. Just take a smaller piece, whatever is manageable and face that. Do that regularly and you will progress further than ever before. You will thrive.
“what the left hemisphere can offer must be used in service of what the right hemisphere knows and sees, not the other way round. This is as important in the case of science as in that of imagination, in the case of reason as in that of intuition. The left hemisphere is a wonderful servant, but a very poor master.”
(Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary, 2nd Ed, 2019)
A lot has been accepted about the differences between our right brain and left brain and what each specialises in. Iain (whose above book has sold over 100,000 copies) has researched the differences of each hemisphere in a long (10 years+) detailed study and has concluded both hemispheres do about the same work. What we thought only happened in one hemisphere actually also happens in the other.
For example both hemispheres will work a math problem, not just the left brain alone as previously thought. The difference is in how they work the problem. The input of both is the ideal and best way to reach a quality best outcome.
However in the Western world and recent history the two brains have clashed with the left brain winning for the most part. Only that this winning isn’t a win at all. It has been the loss of the importance of the right brain function and what it provides to a situation and our daily life.
The left brain needs to scale back and allow more of the input and processing wisdom of the right brain.
The left brain must serve the right brain more, not dominate it as it has done for centuries.
A lot of our intellect dominance sits in the left brain. With mindfulness meditation and more focus on the body, the right brain can be allowed to input more, influence and provide intelligence which the left brain can incorporate in it’s thinking and reasoning. This is vital for a healthy and vibrant culture and society.
“The remnants of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted and then let go of, join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body.”
(Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, 2005)
Last week I quoted from Eckhart’s book that preceded The Power of Now. This week the quote is from the book that followed The Power of Now.
Everyone will have events in their lives where there are strong negative emotions that are hard to deal with. People find ways to cope with such events.
But coping is not healing and at some point those negative emotions need to be dealt with and released. If not, as Tolle says, they accumulate and join together to form tensions, pressures, pains, muscular restrictions, energy drains, limitations, stiffness, and then later, affect our thinking creating anxiety, depression and if still not dealt with, much worse, disease and even serious injury.
The good news is that you can do something about it for yourself by mindfully connecting to your body on a regular basis. Taking time to connect within allows you to contact the cells that are carrying that built up negative emotion.
By switching off distracting thoughts you open an inner door way within your body that allows you access to the community of cells that make up the different parts of your body. This crucial connection allows for a lot of self healing that scientists and doctors are still coming to grips with.
Learning to connect within, gives you unprecedented access to your physical vehicle as well as your past unprocessed emotions and traumas. Facing this past material is not always easy but it is worth the resulting freedom, reduced drama and enhanced health that is waiting on the other side of that old hidden pain.
This can be difficult to believe if you have been brought up thinking you have to always take something when you are unwell.
But if you learn how to face something now,
you most likely won’t have to take something later.
“..how total are you in what you do?
Is your doing surrendered or non-surrendered?
This is what determines your success in life, not how much effort you make.”
(Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks, 2003)
Another timeless classic from Eckhart. This book came out a year before the world wide best seller, The Power of Now.
This is one of my all-time favourite quotes.
People think that you need a lot of effort to accomplish things well. But there is a big difference between lots of doing doing doing action and quality embodied action. You can put in a lot of effort and strain and sweat and produce little of value. Or you can put in quality measured, embodied effort and achieve high quality great results.
It’s not the amount that counts, but the quality of that doing. And you cannot produce quality without first being present in your body in the here and now. Without body mindfulness meditation it can be hard to be consistently present enough in your body to produce that quality result.
Another way of putting it, the quality comes from being in the ‘zone’. That alpha deeper state in your body, where your brain is not obscured by a multitude of thoughts that are irrelevant to the task at hand. Unnecessary thoughts that make you push through, strain, strive and sweat to produce a quality result.
The habitual interference of thoughts that have nothing to do with the present moment you are working in, is a world-wide phenomenon. Each of those thoughts will link back to something unfinished on your mind, or something habitual that you thought was normal to think right now.
How do you let them go? How do you drop them? By surrendering to this moment. By practicing focusing on your body and the here and now and not giving up or beating yourself up when the thoughts take over.
You can do it. It is inherit in your primary nature to be able to do it. You had it as a child before you were taught to over think through everything.
“…focusing on everything means focusing on nothing. It’s almost impossible to accomplish anything significant when you’re racing through an endless litany of tasks and emergencies. And yet this is how many of us spend our days, weeks, months, years – sometimes, our entire lives.”
(Michael Hyatt, Free to Focus, 2019)
I’ve talked about this information overload many times over the years. It’s a sign of the times. It is so important to be able to narrow down what you want to accomplish and then spend time just working on those specific tasks related to what you really want.
To do that, you have to constantly say NO to a lot of things that bombard you along the way. Your smart phone tends to be the biggest distraction. If your head is too much in control of your day, saying no will be very hard. But if you have a regular mindfulness practice, it makes it much easier to train yourself to switch off the distracting thoughts and the corresponding external information overload.
Having a deep connection to your internal world and internal space is very precious. The more body mindfulness work you do to inhabit/embody yourself, the more you will guard it, the more you will say No to things. The more focused you become on tasks and information that really matter to your goals.
Looking back, I found that the more connected I became to my body and inner self, the better choices I made.
I noticed I began to choose and do what worked rather than what was popular.
This is a very important point to make here. Your mindfulness meditation practice helps you access the real you. It helps you clear the way to accessing your true home, which is throughout your physical body. Then your guidance system becomes your own heart and not the ‘convincing’ information your head is brain-washed to need.
You are unique, a magnificent human being. Very precious. And the more you can embody this, the more unique choices you make, more often. Following the herd mentality, is not fulfilling, so that begins to lessen. You live a life that is much more rich and alive. One that actually contributes something special to the world that makes a real difference.
You have that in you.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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!