Author Archives: George Gintilas

What do you give Space for?

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What do you give Space for?
You know what you give money for and what you give your time for but, what do you give space for?
What is in your life that you stop, relax and open up to just being with?

This question will point you towards how mindfully and embodied you live your life.

How much time in a day or week do you spend where you can feel space around you and within you? This is different from down moments where you are exhausted, sleeping, smoking, eating or busy ‘relaxing’ watching TV. Although with watching TV, clients will often say that they just zone out and don’t really watch. If you do this, what you are actually doing is meditating with the noisy TV in the background. Why not just switch it off and meditate properly and give your mind and body a real proper deeper rest?

If there is no space in your life, it will feel like your life is rocketing by, without feeling like you are accomplishing much of what you really want. You can even begin to feel like a slave to others.

The more space that you allow – the more fuller, wiser, healthier, less-stressed, freer and fulfilling you will feel and be. Time then begins to slow down to what it really is….

…just this present moment.

Focusing on Long-Term quality and growth

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It’s nice to be reminded (often) that you are more than just the thoughts in your head and that coming into your body, is one of the most beneficial skills to have in life for health, wellness and success. I cannot stress this enough.

When you begin to allow thoughts to run your life, you are more prone to the world running you. You are more easily influenced, swayed away from what truly matters to you.

Don’t let the world run you.
You run yourself.
Always choose quality over what’s popular.
That’s what’s real in the long run.

The more you focus on quality – quality time, quality work, quality connection with yourself and quality connection with others, the more you will accomplish longer term. This is easier to do when you have a good embodied contact with yourself. When you take the time to mindfully connect within yourself.

It’s a tricky thing because it is very easy to get caught up in doing things that give off a short term benefit or which produce a temporary feel-good feeling. If your life is full of short-term gain activities you are likely to rob yourself of the time required for the long-term quality activities that produce long-term deeper, more stable and more meaningful rewards.

Its like saving money. The short term reward is not much because you are not spending the money on something that will feel good now and the saved balance is small. But continue to put away a little regularly and the long-term rewards are deeper and very fulfilling as the money starts to grow and earn you more and more with less effort.

In order to do more of the longer-term activities, what helps is taking time to embody yourself. Take time each day to stop, slow down, and deepen further within, with body mindfulness. This way you connect with more of what really matters to you and you alone. Then the to-do activities that will produce the long-term more satisfying rewards begin to surface within you. It becomes easier to do the things that are effort now with no immediate reward. It becomes easier to do the things that need to be done when no-one is watching.

Destressing for sustainable long-term success

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Reading today in a local paper:
“The problem with technology especially email – is that it allows you to feel productive without really achieving anything. Of the tens of thousands of emails I’ve read and sent, there are less than a hundred that were real game-changes.” Scott Page – Barefoot Investor, Herald Sun Newspaper.

Learning to connect/disconnect from the constant information overload is important if you want to stay sane, healthy successful and satisfied with your life and work. The smart phone can take over your ability to be happily embodied within yourself.

When you begin to feel run by your phone, computer or employer, a good question to ask yourself is,

‘Am I comfortable in my body right now?’

In other words, are you centered, relaxed, calm, happy and settled in your body right now? Remember it’s from this place that you will produce your best work long term each day and every day. It is quite alarming when I regularly hear from clients how pushed they are from their employers to do more and work harder beyond a comfortable sustainable level.

If you don’t feel comfortable in your body, address it now. Don’t put it on hold. If you decide to deal with this internal stress at some point in the future, the damage could be far too great.

Remember you run your life, not your employer or smart phone. If you are working for an employer that wants maximum profits at any cost. Get out of there! They don’t care about you. They are entitled to run their business in this way but you don’t have to work that way. A true intelligent caring employer will aim for a fair profit and fair balance work load. A load that is sustainable long term. It is wise long term vision that produces the best most fulfilling success.

Success comes from having a successfully fulfilling present moment action. All your life is made up of this building block. So if you do not feel comfortable in your body right now, address it. Address it by adjusting the external factors contributing to creating this pressure and address it by adjusting the internal factors contributing to creating the pressure.

If you have had this pressure for more than a year, the alarm bells should be ringing. It’s time to take back more control. Don’t get comfortable with such high levels of stress. It’s not ‘this is just how it is’. No, this is not just how it is. It’s not like this everywhere. And it doesn’t need to be like this within you either.

There is a better way.

If you never truly rest, you can never truly go hard

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In my regular daily research I was recently reading some research and studies done with high performance athletes in Spain and Austria and what worked in terms of producing better results in their times and performance.

What came out was very interesting. And it is good to note this quote below and remember it.

“If you never truly rest, you can never truly go hard.”
(Neal Henderson – former researcher at the Boulder Centre for Sports Science Medicine.)

What they found was that improvements in performance came when the athletes allowed themselves to work their body at an easy aerobic level – most of the time.

So to better physically improve your fitness the recommendation is: that your weekly exercise comprise of 75% easy routines, 15% hard and 10% moderate.

The same applies for your mind and health. If you push yourself and your body all day long, improvements in your state of mind and health will be slower than if you went slow and rested more. This has been my experience. And this is the value of mindfulness meditation for self healing.

When you stop and go slow, you give your body time to repair and reorganise itself into more efficient ways. Things get cleaned up, put in their places again, get better oganised and clearer. The same with your mind. By giving them the time to do so, your neurons and cells get a chance to reorganise themselves in better ways.

Things get done and cleaned up when you mindfully meditate that do not get done when you sleep. So doing it regularly builds clarity, better cellular organisation, more inner resilience – which then allows you to be intense with efficiency when you really need to be.

One of the purposes of my mindfulness self healing class is to help you do just that – setting aside time to rebuild and reorganise yourself from the inside.

In my private practice with clients each day I am also doing the same – setting aside 60 to 90 minutes focused on one person – in detailed, slow, focused depth to help rearrange, clean up and heal the things that cannot be repaired by constantly going fast.

Then once the slow inner depth work is done, you are ready to execute the bursts much more efficiently and effectively when you need them in your life and work.

Forget the Deadline – just for a short period

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At the end of last year I was very busy relocating my practice after 16 years in the one spot. It’s been a big change but a better one. It was interesting watching how I handled deadlines with renovations of the new place and the tight closing down deadlines of the old place. Without mindfulness attention it would have been more stressful than it was in the end. 

A big aspect of coping with the deadlines was the time-out periods in the day, where I would stop to re center myself, think about nothing, do something mindless or meditate and connect with my spirit in my body. Then after a period, launch into the business and action again to get the things needed done before the next approaching deadline.

It is so important to not let deadlines take you over, where you lose yourself to the ‘doing’. Even under the most stressful deadlines, always allow time to stop, pause, center, and forget the deadline – just for a short period. What I found by doing that, I was much smarter in my decision making as well as less stressed day-to-day. I wasn’t ‘running mad’ in one direction. 

By taking those regular breaks, my mind stayed sharper, I thought more intelligently, my body and muscles had time to consolidate themselves, rest and strengthen. This made me more productive when I got into action again.

This all sounds fairly basic and common sense, yet how often have you pushed and pushed and over worked at high intensity without taking that crucial mind/body break in between? Yes you can push your body and mind more, but is that the most efficient way of working? Working until you drop or your body gives way? That’s not the most highly productive way to function, especially if you want to remain healthy and sharp for a long time. Pushing your body to extremes wears your body and mind out. Short term gain for long term pain.

So the next time your boss says ‘come on let’s push this to reach the deadline!’ Make sure you plan in breaks. Every 90 minutes is the ideal, following the natural cycles of your body and mind. And if your boss thinks you are goofing off, give them my number!

5 Minutes

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How many times have you, in the past week – stopped and closed your eyes to re center yourself – even for five minutes?

Even five minutes is beneficial.

Occasionally when I am busy and I haven’t allowed enough time to centre myself during the day, I will close my eyes just for five minutes. Even though it is not nearly enough, some interesting things begin to happen. I’ve also noticed this with others in the past. When you actually stop and not think, let everything settle for a few minutes, your deeper real intelligence emerges. So you make better decisions.

So what will often happen as I sit still for 5 minutes, I will often realise something that is very important that I want to do, something I may have forgotten. That action then rises very quickly to the top of my to-do list in my head and when I open my eyes, it usually gets done very quickly.

So your actions become much more focused and effective.

Closing your eyes for that brief period is often enough to reset the over thinking in your head. Once the noise stops, the real to-do’s that are of a higher priority surface to your awareness. So you take more control of your day, your work and your life and become much more effective.

“George, how do you remain so calm and balanced all the time?”

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An executive client (while I was on location at a corporate client site) recently asked me ‘George, how do you remain so calm and balanced all the time?’ He had observed me over a six month period while I was working there with a variety of issues and employee behaviors and stresses that I had to deal with and help with.

That was a very good question that I’d like to answer a little bit here and give some insight into with four major points.

How was it that the whole time I was working with that client I never stressed out, complained, got impatient, got reactive to another employees behaviour, but was always calm, balanced and fully available?

On one level it’s a great testimony to this therapeutic work, meditation, mindfulness and body psychotherapy.
You can walk into a place and pretend to keep your cool and try hard to not react and stay balanced, that’s an interim step to the real thing. But what you really want is to be so present in the moment that normal stresses just flow through you, creating a little bit of a wave maybe, but pass through you and the present moment. Or if you do react, the reaction completes very quickly and flows out of your system so you are back in balance very quickly, within seconds sometimes, with very little lingering on.

So here is part of what keeps me in that balanced state the majority of my day:

1.
Do your personal work. Preferably Body based Psychotherapy (my bias).
Having had a lot of personal sessions over the years has been the biggest foundation to being able to be more present than ever before. When I first started having sessions for some issues, I didn’t realize just how much I had buried within me. So as it came out, more arose that I became aware of. So I began a number of years of flushing out the past build up. Without that flushing out, (if you have a lot buried within you) it is very hard to stay present and calm in the face of reactive people that trigger your past unfinished business. So this foundation step is not a quick fix. It took some time which has paid off for itself handsomely over the past 20+ years.

2.
Meditate every day.
Preferably every morning. Each time I arrived at that client’s site, I would stay in my car for 10 minutes, close my eyes, engine switched off, doors locked and I would meditate, centre myself, arrive, get more present. Let any stress from the drive there release.

3.
Be mindful of the present moment – often.
During the day, stay in mindful touch with your body sensations where ever you are at. This helps to keep you out of your head and more embodied in the present moment. You can’t be responding to the present moment appropriately if you are off thinking other things in your head other than being with what is in front of you in the moment.

4.
Be in the Zone.
People who do their job well, professionally, usually have mastered doing the work ‘in the zone’. That’s another way of saying – only be in the present moment now. So my client who wondered how I always stayed that relaxed was seeing me working ‘in the zone’ doing my job, focused, present, attentive, there to accomplish a goal. That’s different from the more casual state that you can be in outside of work hours, where you let your hair down. That professional ‘zone’ produces quality output.

So there you have four major points for how I stay calm and present when I’m busy and/or in a challenging environment.

Learning to Let Things Happen

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Learning to let go the over-use of the intellect isn’t easy in this day and age. But it is a must if you want life to flow more effortlessly and to be able to make better decisions in all areas of your life. Changing on the inside also doesn’t have to be a big effort or struggle. Whenever it is, you know your intellect is trying to do it for you. And that’s the hard way.

“As far as inner transformation is concerned, there is nothing you can do about it. You cannot transform yourself and you certainly cannot transform your partner or anybody else. All you can do is create a space for transformation to happen, for grace and love to enter.”
Eckhart tolle (The Power of Now p158)

Eckhart describes the effort required very nicely in the quote above. In mindfulness classes you relearn how to just be again, to let things happen naturally. You create time and space to reaquaint with your deeper self, without effort. And as it turns out, this is the best and most natural state that also helps people around you to heal, change and grow.

When you find it hard to ‘just be’ around an issue, when you find it hard to give the problem or issue space to heal, that’s when it’s good to seek out professional help. Someone who can help you ‘be’ again, to safely and gently help you face and free a deep stuck place

The Bizarre Twitches and Jerks

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“What are these twitches and jerks George! They are bizarre!”

Such were the comments of a client recently after their session.

Welcome to my world! Where every little subtle sensation and feeling is treated as much more important than the thoughts in your head.

To the average person, when they do this work, (getting into the body) the body responds and comes to life. This life shows up as twitches, jerks, tingles, buzzing, heat, tensions, pressure, waves, feelings and emotions, to name just a few.

Under normal circumstances these body messages are ignored by most people. But, come and have a session of body based psychotherapy, enter your body mindfully, and all these previously hidden sensations that the intellect always considered totally irrelevant, come to the forefront.

You would not walk down the street and let your body twitch and jerk visibly. You would get strange looks and people will want to lock you up. ‘Who is this weird person?’

But in the total privacy of the therapy room, all these sensations become very important and normal. They are a very important part of your body releasing the causes of your blocks, pains and stresses in your life. Not just as a coping mechanism, but as an organic completion of old unfinished business that’s been buried deep in your body.

So if you want to progress more rapidly and heal more fully, spend time listening to your body’s messages in deep, deep detail. Hang out more with all those cells that make up your whole body. They have a lot to say about your current issues, problems, pains and health. Give them some attention and they will show you what needs to happen next for you to move forward and heal in ways that drugs, talking, pushing and analysis could never do.

You do not need Thoughts to Think, you need Silence

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“Do you have the patience to wait
until your mud settles & the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
until the right action arises by itself?”
Lao Tzu

This is a great quote for describing aspects of Mindfulness Meditation – especially for self healing.

The inner you (subconscious) needs time, space and usually a slowing down of the mind to connect and do its job properly, for you to heal and move closer to your goals.

This stillness time is crucial to have each day, if you want to work more effectively and have more control over your self healing. Then once things are still and clear and settled, you then need patience to allow the next movement to happen spontaneously in your body and in your mind.

I do this everyday to some extent with each and every client that I work with. There is always some time for stillness, quiet, silence.

This quote also applies very well to solving problems and making decisions when you are stuck.

Just stop, relax, calm down, settle, allow some time, then wait in stillness, silence, until the answer (the next right action) spontaneously, automatically ‘pops’ into your head.

Why does this work so well? Because when you do this, you are accessing MORE of your whole being to solving the problem. You are not limiting the answer to the narrow range of your intellect.

This taps into the common saying that “we only use 5-10% of our mind’s full potential”. In this stillness, this silence, you will find more of the other 90%.

This also ties in with my standard quote at the foot of all my Mindfulness Meditation emails…

” You do not need Thoughts to Think, you need Silence”