Author Archives: George Gintilas

Changing your Deep Subconscious Auto-Pilot Habits

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“Our brain captures the strategies that work to keep us safe, connected and respected as possible in our early life environment, and then puts those behaviors on autopilot.”
(Amanda Blake, Your Body is Your Brain, 2018)

The behaviours you have that are on autopilot are hard to change because they have been buried deep down very efficiently. They are on autopilot so that they can run automatically when needed without thought.

When you need to be safe and connected, you don’t want to have to think it all through. Stopping to think for too long can be the difference between life and death, or connection and no connection with others.

So how do you change something that’s deep and not part of your conscious thinking intellect? You need to turn inward and put the intellect into the back seat for a while. Body Mindfulness work helps you to do this. You scale back the rate of thinking by focusing on your inner body, mostly from the neck down, away from the seat of the intellect. That brings you closer to the automatic patterns that you deemed early on as the best way to live.

I like Amanda Blake’s explanation of the there brains. The lower Cerebellum Brain is geared for safety. The middle Limbic Brain is geared for emotional connection with people and the Cerebrum (top brain intellect) is geared for Respect. This gearing or wiring are strategies that are on autopilot were created long ago, mostly in childhood.

Things change as you grow up and into adulthood. But very often these deeper autopilot patterns do not update. What burned them in place was so strong (probably traumatic) that you decided there is no way you are going to let that affect you in that way again. So that patterns is locked in deep to protect you. To keep you safe. To keep you connected and to keep you respected by people.

Body Mindfulness – Healing Everything in the Here and Now

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After a long pause, this blog is back again. I haven’t gone away, the educational process has continued but the information has been published in other ways, mainly through my email newsletter subscriptions and now a bit more through Facebook. But now it is back here again here to offer more ongoing support and material to help you in your goals and life.

I have written a lot about mindfulness over the years and this is because of my weekly Mindfulness class which I run here in Melbourne at the Shambhala Centre, now it its seventh year running. Much of the blog information on mindfulness here on this page came from my Mindfulness newsletter. And resuming again today this will be no exception.

I love what learning body mindfulness and practicing regularly can do for people. Note that there is a big difference between just doing Mindfulness and, doing BODY Mindfulness. My expertise is in the body psychotherapies and that is all body mindfulness.

The more you practice body mindfulness the more the following paragraphs will begin to make sense.

The beauty of working with body mindfulness is it’s continual focus on your present moment sensations and feelings in your body now. If you want to work on any issue from past, present or future, if you think of it for a moment…it is always happening in your body NOW in this moment. Eckhart Tolle puts it well “Only the present can free you of the past”.

Anything you want resolved within you, focusing on your present moment body sensations that are here right NOW, is the big key.Why? Because it is always happening in your body right now. Anything unresolved that you haven’t let go of in the past, your body is still being affected by it now, in this moment, right now. In reality there is no past or future, It is all present now.

So as often as possible, come back to the here and now in your body.

“Attention is essential, but not to the past as past” (Tolle)
Your present moment experience in your body will reveal what ‘past’ stress is in your body right now. So face the here and now in your body and you heal the past (and future) simultaneously. The more you live in your mind/intellect, the more the above paragraphs will not make sense. Because you will be convinced that the past and future are real.  But they actually are not. They are just thought forms in your head. Memories.

Confused a little? Your intellect might be 🙂 because it is the creator of past and future thought forms and memories. But they are not now and never will be.

That Ego Voice in your Head

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When it comes to Self Healing the bottom line – is facing the pain you have stored away in the cells of your body.

Your ego is doing a great job at keeping that pain at bay and building an identity and behaviour pattern around it all to keep you safe. Initially that’s good and you needed it under the circumstances when it first formed. But at some point if you are to progress in your life in a healthy way, that needs to be addressed.

“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, Page 142)

Body Mindfulness based self-healing and therapy work is very powerful in helping you heal all this old stored up pain. It’s not always easy to face, your ego will kick and scream all the way or put you to sleep. That’s the last place it wants to go. But as you face it, bit by bit and release, the ego’s strength lessens and it eventually gets easier and easier to let go.

You grow in strength and the ego diminishes. You get healthier and more alive and back in real contact and communication with your body. So as the communication with your body increases, you gain more control and know what’s going on. All this leads to a healthier more relaxed and peaceful mind and the all the great benefits that go with this.

As you learn to face what’s stored, compressed and banked up in your body, the ego voice in your head begins to diminish, it starts to take a back seat. In sessions, you will still hear it doing it’s thing, but it will more and more become a fainter voice in the background as you face the past within you and your body.

There is nothing wrong with having that ego voice assisting in your daily activities, but it becomes a problem if that’s the only voice running your life. There is another one, the one that comes from the cells in your body and, of course yours – the aware spirit you, (some people call it your heart).

Listening to the voice from your cells is what heals your physical body. Listening to your heart/spirit is what directs and heals your life.

Remember to Remind Yourself

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For inner peace, happiness and fulfillment, in work, rest and play – I always recommend meditating a little every day. Especially in the morning.
The sooner you can remind yourself of who you really are, the less chance you have during the day of the habitual thinking mind, taking you over and running you.

For you to stay in control in the best way possible, you have to remind your thinking mind who really is boss here. We’ve been brought up to put thinking and science high on a pedestal – way too high. So high that we can sometimes forget where our real intelligence sits – who we really are – and it’s not the thinking.

Thinking is a tool to use, it isn’t you. Because we have over identified with thinking as ‘us’, we let it be the overriding ruler. So we create beliefs and programs and strategies and rules and truths and understandings and let them all run ‘us’.

A little reminder:

You don’t have to make decisions based on intellect thinking all the time.
You DO have a choice in the matter. In fact you ALWAYS have a choice.
Every moment…Right now ….forever.

And who is you?
That alive inner stillness. The being you. Throughout your body.
The you that is always here, no matter what happens.

This reminder is very important in the morning before work, especially if you work in a company surrounded by people who are over thinking and not very conscious.
It is very easy to get caught up in their over thinking and lose yourself again. Losing yourself to over thinking breaks the contact that you have with your intuition. You lose that very important intelligence and guidance which is the real you.

As a child, what did you sacrifice within you, to keep the peace?

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A question I’d like to ask you…

Q. What tension did you bottle up as a child?
As a child living in the environment of your parents and siblings, what did you sacrifice within you, to keep the peace?

Whatever that is, if you haven’t done the inner work to clear it, chances are it is still there, inside you, in your body, in your cells having a hidden influence. Holding you back (making you hesitate too often) or pushing you to overdo (over react in certain situations).

With body mindfulness deep meditative work, you can access more of this backlog tension. It often feels like an area within your body that has pressure or weight. It can also feel less flexible and doesn’t move easily. Or it could be a part within you that is shaky and vulnerable if there is trauma there too.

What we humans are so good at, is suppressing this unexpressed part because it was too painful to feel at the time and/or there was no one around to help us feel it and release it safely. On top of that, we are also very good at forgetting that we are even doing this! Yet, your behaviours show it out. They hint at what you have buried and sealed deep down. Over time your work colleagues or friends will treat it as your normal behaviour. “That’s just John’s personality”. But it’s not.

I highly recommend, to give yourself space each day, to honour the bottled up parts that need a good clean out. And often all it takes is a prolonged focused attention without pushing, for those parts to begin to release. Even the ones you have completely forgotten about.

It’s a great sign when you can feel a part in you that lets go. It feels lighter, freer and when you breathe into it, it moves, where before it didn’t. There’s often a relief feeling that goes with it. That inner stress gone. That often happens after a deep release. I witness this everyday in my practice but you can also do this work at home and progress a lot faster.

Nothing is more frustrating than battling with a bad behaviour that you can’t seem to shake off, for years, decades even. With body based mindfulness work, you can move through stuck parts often very quickly. And it doesn’t require talking. In fact the less you talk the quicker it can go and the unhealthy behaviour along with it. .

Relaxation Music – What’s the best?

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Working as I do everyday helping people release anxieties, past traumas and bad habits that are holding them back from living a more productive, successful and authentic life, I often get asked what books do I read? What relaxation music do I listen to?

In a past blog I have written about what my best ever personal development book is. Here, I’d like to answer what relaxation music I like the best. Having listened to thousands of tracks over the years, there actually is one track that has left the biggest impression and which I turn to when I really do need to settle and calm, if I have been overly stressed. It works for me every time. It’s the best I have ever heard.

It’s a four minute track called ‘Dream Journey Part 2’ by Michael Wild.

I bought it a looong time ago, on cassette tape. That’s how long.

He now has it on CD of course and MP3 digital downloads are available. The track is on the CD album Star Dreams.
Check it out here on his personal website www.michaelwild.com.au. For the MP3 download go to www.quietearth.org.

Are you living your life your way?

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“If you keep your attention in the body as much as possible, you will be anchored in the Now. You wont lose yourself in the external world and you won’t lose yourself in your mind. Thoughts and emotions, fears and desires, may still be there to some extent, but they wont take you over.” ( Eckhart Tolle – Page 117 The Power of NOW)

There are many benefits to Mindfulness body-based work. This is another major benefit. It gives you some separation from the demands of other people and organisations.

You begin to lose yourself if you take on too much of what other people tell you you should be doing, to succeed or to live. This also happens when you forget what feels right for you and you decide to follow the trend or herd. ‘They’ must know better because so many are living that way.

With mindfulness work, you come into your body field more. You begin to realise that you are a separate valid and important person and you can think for yourself. And only you really know what’s best for you. Even if it goes against the current norm. I loved it when my neighbour some years ago thought that I was ”weird” in how I ran my life. I loved hearing that because it confirmed I wasn’t living like the herd majority do. I was living my unique way.

An original. Free and alive.

Are you living your life your way? Or have you bought someone else’s plan entirely? Someone else’s plan is someone else’s plan! If it doesn’t include yours, then it’s not yours. That’s obvious to say, but unless you go within and contact yourself more, and therefore your body more, you will be all too easily swayed to following someone else’s plan, losing part of yourself to the external world. We are social creatures and need each other to survive well. But without deep contact within yourself first, you cannot be a clear and productive individual within your social and work groups.

I encourage you to live your way. That’s the best way 🙂

The busy persons guide to staying healthy and happy

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How does the busy person in today’s world keep centered, happy, clear and healthy?

If you are like many people, you are very busy, have a lot to do, have many demands placed upon you and you run from one thing to the next with few breaks. A lot of people hardly take holidays.

This is no way to live and it’s not healthy long term.

What’s more you can watch yourself doing it, know it’s not healthy and yet keep doing it out of ingrained habit. And don’t kid yourself that it’s only for a short period, or only for this project or only for this deadline coming up. No, I bet it reoccurs over and over again.

I’ve often heard over the years from clients, that getting a flu or getting sick or having a breakdown or an exhausted crash was the best thing that ever happened to them. And they had never relaxed so much before. Why? Because it forced the ingrained habit (spinning wheel) of over thinking, to stop.

Getting sick of course is not a good way to stop that old habit.

So what do you do?

Planning a fixed time each day (no matter what) to do a short mindful meditation, say 5 minutes, can really help. What’s 5 minutes, right? But that old habit can still be so convincing even with ‘losing’ 5 minutes in your day!

If 5 minutes is hard, start with 2 minutes. Surely 2 minutes won’t ruin your day’s productivity, right? If that’s hard too, then you know you have a runaway train in your head. And that should be setting off alarm bells – ”Big Crash highly likely coming” soon.

What it also says is that you, deep down are not content and that you are wasting your energy and resourcefulness – using too much energy to accomplish a task.

Stopping for 2 minutes (for a mindfulness meditation) breaks the mind dominant cycle of thinking in your head, gives you back more control over what you are thinking or working on which allows you to think more efficiently again, as well as reduce the excess stress in your body.

Don’t leave doing this for too long. It’s too easy to get used to the stress and think that being relaxed is feeling slightly less stressed, where even your relaxed state is no where near a healthy level for you, long term.

Enter The Quiet that is already there

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In my research travels I came across a quote recently that is worth noting here.

“Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet. It is a way of entering into the quiet that is already there – buried under 50,000 thoughts the average person thinks every day”.
Deepak Chopra

This is very true in my experience. Underneath you are already whole, complete and perfect as a being. It’s all there, buried under years of built up traumas, negative experiences, well meaning parents, misdirection, unconscious friends and relatives etc.

Mindfulness meditation work redirects you to develop better habits with what’s most important – the real you. The free, alive, healthy, embodied you. And it is all there within you. The gold is sitting there inside. But you have to go in to free it.

The Self Healing Mindfulness Meditation classes I regularly run aim for just that, to build the time you spend where it really counts – within your inner body. Accessing more of who you really are, clearing out more of the old outdated unfinished patterns and emotions and giving more freedom to your cells to do the work they know how to do, but can’t because your thinking mind gets in the way.
That quote by Deepak is a nice reminder of who you really are. The more reminders we have each day, the easier it is to change old outdated habits we have been brought up with.

Talking about reminders, Eckhart Tolle is coming to Melbourne Australia November 18th this year. For a one evening talk. I highly recommend attending! Tickets through Ticketmaster.

Healing the effects of Bullying at School

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A strong traumatic event from the past that clients often share is being bullied and teased at school. This can have such a strong effect on people’s lives later on. Many clients will say just how much bullying affected them in their lives. There has been more focus on this issue in the recent past but I thought it was worth mentioning it here again.

I enjoy working with kids with this issue. Parents will sometimes bring a child in for help with the anxiety and stress of such bullying.

Body based and movement work is excellent for this. Helping a child fight and hit back at the bullies in a session (kicking and punching into a big cushion) helps to release much pent up fight/flight stress in the child’s body. They feel great after, their confidence goes up and often the bullying stops.

So it is good to get it early in a child’s life. Sessions help provide a safe place for a child to gently get their physical power back. They may hit into a cushion tentatively at first, but eventually they can be pounding with a strong force that gives enormous confidence after. With strong overpowering bullying a child will retract and hide their power away for safety. If this happens for too long, a child will forget that they have this power available within them. Sessions help to coax this important fight reflex back out again.