Category Archives: Mind Body Connection

No Exaggerated Benefits

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There are many benefits to Mindfulness Meditation and many more with Body Mindfulness. These benefits are described in many mindfulness books. There are critics that think that Mindfulness is treated as a cure-all and that it is given way too many accolades. They think that this is done because Mindfulness is the new fad and the current in-thing and that this will fade eventually revealing the truth that Mindfulness is not all that it is claimed to be.

I find it myself, when I sit down to right these blogs that I can’t help but describe the many benefits over the years that I and my clients have received with Body Mindfulness based work. There is no exaggeration.

Mindfulness helps in so many areas because it is a fundamental shift in the way of living. It changes the fundamental belief that it is the outside world that is the cause of your problems to, it is the inside programs you created for yourself and are consciously and unconsciously choosing to run, that is the cause of your problems.

This is a massive fundamental shift in the way we have been brought up and what we have been taught in school. Through Mindfulness work, you have amazing access to your insides and all your past and present programs. Never before in recorded history has this been taught at the scale that is happening now on the planet.

You are not a victim to your body’s issues, diseases and your minds habits and problems. Almost all health issues can be traced back to an issue in your mind and body that you have access to, and are able to heal.

Of course saying that this is possible and actually doing it requires a lot of practice. But it is worth it. Your health and stress levels will show the difference over time.

The Art of Achieving a Goal

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One of the ways you can use your Mindfulness practice is to focus on a positive goal that you are wanting to accomplish. How you do this is very important. Visualising an outcome helps reprogram your brain and nervous system to make this happen much easier.

But visualising alone is not enough. You need to be out of your thinking mind and in touch with your body to energise the goal. It takes all parts of your body to be aligned and active to achieve a goal. Especially if it is a new one that you haven’t done before.

If it is new and just out of reach (which is what you want) it can be difficult to visualise it clearly enough and that’s normal. So it requires repetition over and over, correcting and adding more detail each time. That detail should be positive, seeing the end result. It should also feel like you have it now in this present moment. To have that real feeling you need to be in that mindful deep state, in your body.

If you are not in that mindfulness alpha/theta state, then the goal is just a fantasy, a pie in the sky dream that has no legs to stand on. If you don’t take the time to repeatedly feel it throughout your body, nothing is likely to happen.

Pockets of Peace

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Finding pockets of peace throughout your day is a very healthy sign and a release valve for the stresses that come at you all day long. A lot of our diseases and issues stem from such stress.

What is stress? The pressure you feel in your mind and body and the pressure your body feels within itself beyond your awareness, that stretches normal calm functioning beyond the normal limits. Mindfulness meditation helps you to create a release valve for this stress, to briefly step out of the environment that is creating the stress and allow your body time to balance and reset.

The more you work under stressed people or the more stressed people you have in your environment, the more you need to find these pockets of peace throughout the day.

Learning to switch off at will, is a powerful tool to combating the stress that is around you. Prolonged periods of stress are not beneficial to your mind or body. Occasional bursts to achieve a deadline is fine but ongoing, long-term it is lethal.

Learning this important skill to switch off at will throughout the day, even for two minutes, gives you back control of your mind and body. Other types of switching off/release valves can be good too, but switching off the thoughts and feeling into your body are key.

Disconnection from your Body can cause so much Misery

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It never ceases to amaze me when a client has a problem (health/habit/phobia/limitation//trauma/psychological etc), that it can be changed rapidly just by bringing the focus into the body while the head is still trying to work it all out (the old way.)

Some words of wisdom that can save you a lot of time, drama, pain, money and effort….

In my experience, if something isn’t working in your life, chances are you have disconnected from your body and have left your poor head/intellect all on its own to try to work it all out for you.

When this intellect process tries harder – thinking more to try to solve the problem – you begin to create the racing mind phenomenon where your poor brain is overworking (thrashing) for very little result.

The more thoughts you need to solve an issue, the more stressed your system is and badly in need of a tune up. At some point, (when you are finally over it) it becomes time to clean up all the unfinished programs in your head that are still running, clogging up your ability to think in a straight line and doing so within a clear space in your head.

Thankfully body mindfulness offers a big key to be able to do this. And you can do this at home in a body mindfulness meditation practice. My body mindfulness class is designed to help you do this for yourself each day and then more intensely when you need something more focused.

I also recommend giving yourself this mind/body tune up with a therapist each year too, with a number of one-on-one private sessions. This helps to speed things up much more. Of course I practice what I preach and I do this myself every year. It makes a huge difference, as you prune all the old unfinished thoughts and issues still whizzing around in your head taking up unnecessary space and energy.

So why don’t people do this more often? One of the biggest reasons is that they think there isn’t a problem until they go inside and find just what is still running in there, subconsciously. That can be a bit of a shock to realise how much of your effort internally is inefficient and clogged with unfinished traumas which you thought you had resolved.

So I have learned over the years to never wait for a problem to surface. I do the work regularly and clear it out before it becomes a problem. You will always find things lurking in your subconscious that are building and are problems in waiting. So do this practice for yourself regularly, ideally daily, and have a series of sessions regularly each year for the deeper stuff. Do it no matter what and you will notice a big difference.

Your life will run smoother, you will feel more in the flow and present. Drama drops off. Your health improves. You age slower and you think with more peace in your head as the thrashing of your thinking clears.

Your Mobile Computer Phone and your Racing Mind

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Body mindfulness is a great antidote to the racing mind and the constant presence of the smart phone. We first called them mobile phones (cell phones), then smart phones, but what they really are now is mobile computers that can take phone calls. A lot of our contact is not done by voice calls as much anymore. So you are carrying around a computer in your pocket which is always-on and always with you, probably 24/7. The intellect loves interacting with this device, and it represents the outward manifestation of the racing over used mind.

When we use this device we go into our head and our body goes on hold. There is little movement in your body and you are probably breathing very little (unless you are dealing with something very emotional or exercising at the time). You cut off your conscious awareness of your body to use this device. If this is overdone, it can create health problems, relationship problems as well as feeling lost in your head.

When your body is divorced from the decisions you make in your head you lose a lot of intelligence, creativity, you add stress to your thinking process, (so it takes longer to see things clearly) and so you lower your ability to make smart decisions.

Staying in constant contact with your body is crucial to better health and better decision making.

The mobile computer works fast, requiring you to think fast to keep up with it. Connecting with your body is slow, forcing you to slow down and take more care of the present moment. But what may seem slow is actually very fast and efficient in the long term and you get there with much less drama, less waste of energy/resources (less dead ends, less of the long way around to get there) and arrive healthier and happier along the right path for you.

Lost Connections leads to Depression

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The last class for 2018 is running tomorrow night. The Mindfulness classes will resume again on Tuesday Jan 15th 2019. So a shorter break than other years. 2019 will make it 9 consecutive years running of this class and as is tradition, the first class will be free for whoever books in until full.

I’m reading (technically listening to) a great book titled Lost Connections by Johann Hari. Where he covers the real causes of depression in most people. And the research all points to lost connections. For example, we have lost connections with:
* People – today we have fewer friends we can confide in,
* Work – more people doing less meaningful work,
* Childhood Trauma – people are not taking the time to go within and complete their past trauma to reconnect with themselves,
* Natural World – we are losing the natural organic rhythms of nature that we use to have centuries ago.

I recommend this book highly. It’s a damning indictment on trying to solve depression with prescription drugs.

A Body Mindfulness meditative practice helps you to reconnect with your real self. I’ve found that when you reconnect to yourself within – your body – you then naturally want to reconnect to other (better) people, spend more time in nature, do more meaningful work, eat better etc.

Coming home and reconnecting to you is the first biggest crucial step to eradicating depression. And this time of year is when it usually hits the hardest. I will be on leave for 2.5 weeks from Dec 21st (returning Jan 7th 2019) but I will still be able to see some people for individual sessions (in person or from anywhere in the world over Skype/Zoom) should you really need help with that inner connection over the Xmas/New Year break.

If the body is not at peace the mind is not at peace

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If the body is not at peace the mind is not at peace.

Your body has a very big influence on your mind. More than what most people realise. A lot of it is subconscious, below the level of your awareness. With body mindfulness work you can access more of this deeper awareness, bring it into light and help it release.

When you go deeper what often arises is repressed buried emotions, feelings that are unresolved, unfinished. These unfinished feelings are there because you couldn’t deal with them at the time. So your mind labels them out of bounds, they become a no-go zone in your body. This no-go zone creates a stress in your body in its attempt to keep them locked away. Over time if they are not released they turn into physical pain, and longer term, become chronic pain.

So much of our chronic pain in our bodies are actually repressed emotions.

Release the emotion and the physical pain disappears. The majority of the medical community will still not acknowledge this proven fact and it doesn’t matter, as long as you believe it and do the work to access and release.

I’ve seen this happen time and time again in my private practice. And of course I’ve experienced it in myself too, over and over again.

I highly recommend reading Dr John E Sarno’s books. A good one is Healing Back Pain – The Mind Body Connection.

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.

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.