Category Archives: Mind Body Connection

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 🙂

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.

I haven’t been in this body for a long time

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“I haven’t been in this body for a long time.”

Such was the comment from a client recently in her first session when she came in for some work after a long layoff.

This is such a great realisation, to realise that you haven’t been in your body ‘for a long time’. Just realising this means that she has become aware of her still presence that inhabits her body, separate from the busy trillions of cells working away making the body function as one whole unit. She now has some space and access to the workings of the cells in her body and so access to the dysfunctions there, most which have been neglected for ‘a long time.’

Mindfulness body based therapy work helps to bring focus back onto what really matters in your body. By stopping, slowing down, listening and ‘being with’ your body, you allow powerful healing to occur, many times without having to do anything specifically.

Question:
If it is so beneficial to be in your body, why would you not spend more time in it?
Answer:
People don’t I have found, because of two major reasons:
1. You’ve never grown up making this a habit. You’ve never been taught the importance of doing this, because others around you never knew how either.
2. You’ve had some strong traumatic or painful experience in the past.
And the only and best way you knew how to cope was to escape and not be in your body.

Living in your body is the best way to live, it is also the most effective, the most beneficial, the most healthy and the most fulfilling way to be and function. I can say this from experience and the feedback from thousands of clients over the years. Why would you want to be any other way, all in your poor over worked head?

When you get a sniff of what’s possible with this work, you’re on your way to a whole new more productive way of working and living. But even with such benefits, doing this work still takes some time to break the old habits.
The old habits of:
1/ trying to work it all out with thinking just in your head and,
2/ vacating your body and living outside of it.

These habits can be hard to break. Especially when the majority of the population around you are doing just that.

My advice? Ignore the majority. Follow your instinct and heart and watch what a huge difference it makes. Watch how much more calmer you become, how much smarter, more emotionally intelligent, much more real, human and healthier all around.

You don’t have to wait for more studies to prove all this. Even though they are coming through now more and more.

Successful Present Moments

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For those who have known me for a while, you will know that I am a big fan of Eckhart Tolle. I’d like to expand on one of the many quotes from his book ‘A New Earth’ that I like:

“What the world doesn’t tell you because it doesn’t know – is that you cannot become successful. You can only be successful. Don’t let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.”

One of the purposes of my CDs, classes, workshops and therapy sessions, is to give you more being time, or present moment time. More moments where you can reacquaint yourself again with who you really are. Moments of stillness, peace and freedom. Along the way to this real authentic you, what of course happens (if you access yourself mindfully) is that all the holdings, stresses, pains, traumas and unfinished business from the past begin to surface. Allowing this material to move and release is a big part of the work.

As it moves and shifts and lets go, you begin to be more. You begin to live more in the present moment. This then naturally leads to more successful present moments. And the accumulation of successful present moments show up over time as ‘success’ in your life for whatever goal you are pursuing.

So if you can be successful in this moment now, and repeat this continually, you achieve the goal you want. So what you are thinking and feeling in your body right now this moment as you read this, is the most crucial component and determinant for what your success will look like in future. Ignore what your body is asking of you and requiring of you now, and you effect your success and health in future.

So this moment now as you read this, is very powerful indeed. To your ego/intellect it seems so mundane, boring and insignificant. This moment now? (it might be saying), this doesn’t seem important at all. It’s just a boring simple moment.

Bring your consciousness into it, make what you do in this moment count, make it a quality purposeful moment. Listen to what your body needs right now and do it. Repeat this seemingly boring process continually and you are guaranteed of success in future.

20 trillion life forms

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You, (the spirit you) live in a walking breathing community of 20+ trillion cells, that are all working together to create your body. They are co-operating at a phenomenal rate passing messages to each other. Each cell is a living, breathing, feeding life form, being. It moves, it hurts, it plays, it does the job it was built for, it feels. The entire makeup of your body literally, is made up of 20 trillion alive beings, all working together (for the most part) to give you a body, a vehicle to move around in, on planet earth.

We take all this for granted day to day. So much so, that when something goes wrong with our body, we forget how to access it directly in order  to heal the problem.

This is where mindfulness meditation for self healing and the body process-based therapies comes in. This work is designed to reignite the connection to your subconscious body’s 20 trillion cells and assist and guide them to heal. Now it is very difficult to home in on one cell. What normally happens is that we home in on a group of cells, maybe 200,000 of them that make up a muscle fibre in some part of your body. That you can feel. 200,000 expressing a sensation/pain can be felt.

If you take the time to listen to these groups of cells each day, you will find (as you get good at it) that your cells are communicating to you all the time.  Especially the ones that need urgent attention. Giving them this attention is what I help people do each day in my private practice and then watch as amazing things unfold and old problems, issues and pains begin to drop and melt away.