Category Archives: Mindfulness Meditation

Releasing the Past, by Coming into the Present

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“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.

Expanding your Brain in Real-Time

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“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.

Your Body, Trauma and Confidence

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“Research is also now starting to make clear the long term impact of early childhood trauma on people’s relationship to their own bodies (Price, 2007; Van der Kolk, 2014). Body awareness, body attitude and body satisfaction may all be negatively affected.”
(Benjamin R, Haliburn J, King S, (Ed), Humanising Mental Health Care in Australia, 2019, p253)

How is your relationship with your body? Body Mindfulness work requires you to feel into your body and accept what is there. Some areas are easier to accept than others. Others remain blind spots, numb areas that you have great difficulty accepting and allowing. As you access and delve into your body further, you will begin to learn the landscape that you have created within you. This is very significant because your body is dictating a lot of your health issues, psychological problems and limitations in life.

Those numb dissociated parts of your body are almost certainly due to a past trauma that you couldn’t assimilate at the time. You had to block off the pain and emotion to survive. That immediately cuts off part of your real self. And if the trauma was really severe and/or prolonged, you begin to live a shadow of your real self, have poorer health and limited abilities.

Past trauma, even if you don’t recall it whatsoever, will be affecting you through your body. If the trauma is deep, you will highly likely be feeling deep shame, disgust or even hatred towards your body, (very true with sexual trauma) which greatly lowers your self esteem. In the past you would have needed lots of motivation to override this lack of confidence and self esteem.

Your poor intellect revving you up to override the deep body based trauma. This as you can probably imagine, is short lived. It can help in moments where you require a boost but is difficult to work with long term if it is not eventually addressed at the body level and released and cleared permanently.

Thus a regular body mindfulness practice is essential as part of your long term mental health, physical health and personal development.

Your Second Brain

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“Your gut has capabilities that surpass all your other organs and even rival your brain. It has its own nervous system, known in scientific literature as the enteric nervous system, or ENS, and often referred to in the media as the ‘second brain’. This second brain is made up of 50-100 million nerve cells, as many as are contained in your spinal cord.”
(Emeran Mayer, MD, The Mind-Gut Connection, 2016)

Doctors have long kept the brain (the nervous system) and the gut (digestive system) completely separate from the maintenance of our overall health. Let alone even consider any connection the two systems might also have.

Medical doctors still mostly see the human body as mechanistic, largely unaffected by our thinking, our emotions, other systems and organs of the body and by us directly (our awareness). This separation of us, our brain and the body is helping to cause far more health problems than is necessary.

Your gut is like a second brain and it is strongly connected to the brain. The brain also remembers every gut feeling you have and uses this information when making decisions, not just about food but about people, work, play and life.

So it makes sense to spend some body mindfulness time regularly connecting to that gut and listening to what it has to say. It will respond in sensations, but rest assured there are also emotions there. (Your gut stores 95% of the serotonin in your body which is used to regulate your mood, anxiety, sleep, appetite, temperature, eating behaviour, sexual behaviour, movements and gastrointestinal motility). Your whole belly area is a powerful and very important brain.

Take time to connect with it in your mindfulness practice. After your brain, (which we spend a lot of awareness on,) the belly brain should always be your next port of call.

Healthy Work – Finding your Sustainable Level

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“According to the World Health Organization, stress is considered a worldwide health epidemic. The American Institute of Stress links stress to the six leading causes of death (heart disease, accidents, cancer, liver disease, lung ailments, and suicide).”
(Joe Burton, Creating Mindful Leaders, 2018)

Working in a high performance, high stress major company, the stress will eventually takes its toll. After 20 years and in their mid 40s managers and staff start to burn out and if unchecked, in the worse case scenario, leads to one of those leading causes of death.

If you survive and don’t die then there are other issues that arise, frequent sickness, anxiety, depression, loss of direction, moodiness, lack of fulfillment, relationship breakdowns, unemployment, financial issues, addictions, family issues, ageing faster, and general poor health. Luckily many companies are now turning to mindfulness meditation to improve mental, physical and emotional wellbeing.

It sounds crazy that this is the state that our work culture is in. What leaders would design a company like that? Rather than push a person for the maximum output, hence into a zone of high prolonged stress levels, why not find the sustainable level of work?

How do you know when you are working at the optimum sustainable level? My gauge for this is to ask the following question…

At the end of the day when I arrive home – am I calm and relaxed?
If the answer is NO, you are overworking, and over time it will take its toll.

If you are self employed or have a decent boss, you are able to adjust your work week to work at a sustainable level. And by sustainable I mean that you can keep doing those hours and activities indefinitely, for years to come and not tire. That’s the beauty of sustainability, it’s repeatable over and over and over again without much wear and tear.

This is a big work secret to long term health, success and happiness. Find the level for you that is repeatable, over and over again. The added length of time, gives you the benefit of accomplishment – higher income, more experience, and fulfillment in being able to do the things that need time, without burring yourself out in the process.

I adjusted my number of work client hours years ago when I was seeing too many people in a week and almost burned out and collapsed a number of times. Once I asked the sustainability question my whole practice changed. I now see the exact number that I know I can keep seeing indefinitely for years and decades to come. It has worked beautifully now for about a decade.

Initially you seem to earn less, but the quality of your work goes up because you are not stressed out. So over your work lifetime you actually earn much more and also feel happier in mind and body.

You also get the benefit of having a great buffer that you can draw on when unexpected stressors and traumas hit you. Your body has room to absorb the impact and see it through with less reaction. I had some major ones (totally unjust) hit me like a ton of bricks over the last six years, major assaults, that would have adversely affected many people. But my body had room to absorb the impact and release it over time.

I’ll be talking more about this process in future articles.

When do you ‘hang in there’ and when do you quit?

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“We fail when we get distracted by tasks we don’t have the guts to quit.”
(Seth Godin, The Dip, 2011)

One of the problems with the intellect is that it is very good at giving you reasons to do a lot of things. You can make a case for doing many things and making them all sound important. So what do you choose?

We are in a unique period of history where we have more choices than ever before and more marketing coming at us to convince us to do more. A lot of these choices are in our face literally, with our smart phone.

And not only do we have more marketing thrust at us, but we now have (with social media) more opinions to wade through about what we should be doing. So not only do we have information overload, we also have opinion overload.

This gives rise to decision fatigue. The danger with this is that overly operating from the intellect, we lose the ability to filter what is important and what isn’t.

Enter body mindfulness.

Stopping and focusing on your body is the best antidote to the racing overload of choices, opinions and information that the intellect has to try to sort out. When you take time to stop and go within, a multitude of options drop away and you edge closer to dealing with only the essential, only what’s required, only what’s truly most important. Your intellect cannot do this alone. Your body and your feelings have to be involved. The sifting happens much faster and deeper when you do it through your body.

This doesn’t mean that you will magically get answers every time you stop and focus inward. Sometimes a lot of old clutter has to be addressed, faced and accepted before it drops away, revealing the true core path or option. With that inner certainty, it is then much easier (as Seth Godin says) to quit something that was just leading to a dead end for you. And it is also much easier to hang in through the dip you will experience, the hard slog, the depth necessary to do something really well.

Feel Positive, Live Longer

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Last post covered the health of your Heart. In this one, we focus on longevity.

“Just as attitude affects the heart,…Yale scientists even concluded that attitude was more influential than blood pressure, cholesterol levels, lack of smoking, a healthy body weight and exercise levels in how long a person lived.”

(Hamilton, David R, Ph.D, How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body, 2nd Ed updated, 2018)

How important is research like this that keeps coming out? Strongly and continually pointing to how positive emotions improve your health and help you live many years longer than negative based people. The overall research indicates clearly that attitude impacts your health in a very significant way.

So anything you can do to be more positive and feel more positive emotions throughout your day will improve your physical health directly and have you live longer.

In my experience, this is why people who keep a gratitude journal where you write in it what you were grateful for during the day tend to feel a big positive difference. So making this activity a habit can really help. Even if you just do it in your head, but do it everyday.

If feeling more regular positive feelings equals a healthy and longer life, it makes sense that you should jump on board and do it everyday. A lot of people can’t do this for very long because it is not always easy. For to genuinely feel positive emotions (and this is key) you must allow the negative ones to release. Otherwise you are just faking it and not really feeling anything of substance.

Going within, in a body mindfulness practice, helps you to face and release the negative emotions that cover up your natural positive ones. Once the negative ones (usually pain, anger and fear) are acknowledged in your body and allowed to move naturally, the positive health benefits can begin to surface and spread throughout your body.

This is the natural authentic way to positive emotions, with no push, pretending or force of willpower.

Expressing Emotions to Heal Disease

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“In our body, cancer cells never arise in the heart or small intestine, because the heart and small intestine are warm, with high blood circulation and high oxygen content…Cancer is the end result of alexithymia – or not expressing feelings or emotions.”

(Kelly A. Turner, Ph.D, Radical Remission – Surviving Cancer Against All Odds, 2014)

Body Mindfulness work is excellent for getting you still and inward enough to heal a lot of issues and diseases. Cancer’s link to emotional suppression is very strong now with many studies and research all pointing to the truth of the above quote.

In your practice when you go within and stay there long enough, the diseased or suppressed parts of your cellular structure begin to reveal themselves to your awareness and consciousness. You begin to bring these cut off parts into the light of the present moment where they can heal. Most times when they reveal themselves, the releases can be somatic, physical, emotional and feeling and even involve small or big movements, depending on what was unfinished in the traumatic event, that shut that part of you off, in the first place.

So as you advance with this work, you have the opportunity to go very deep and heal things that the majority of doctors in western medicine cannot make sense of. It’s a whole other paradigm, a whole other world where you have much more control of your health and wellbeing then you were ever taught was possible.

You are that amazing on the inside and can do (by today’s standards) remarkable things. (I’ve certainly witnessed this with clients often, in my private practice.)

I look forward to the day when this is the new norm.

We are well on our way 🙂

Connecting Deeper and Lowering Suicide Rates

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I was alarmed by the figures of youth suicide reported in the paper in Melbourne today. 3,128 (aged 15-44) died by suicide in a single year. This is almost three times the amount of deaths from car accidents each year. Every day, there are about 8 suicides and 180 attempts. So that means that there are 68,620 suicide attempts each year. That is a lot of pain and angst that people have within them which they do not know how to resolve and heal in a healthy way.

Such pain points to a massive disconnect within themselves and with those around them. This leads to a lot of trapped emotion in the body. If this build up isn’t released in a healthy way, the pain can reach levels where the only way out logically seems to be to kill oneself.

What’s also concerning is that many times, families and work colleagues do not see it coming. So what can you do?
Internally – a mindfulness practice is critical to connect you within yourself to create an outlet for this trapped emotional pain.
Externally – making more meaningful connections with your loved ones is critical. Don’t always assume they are okay just because they are not saying anything. One way to facilitate this is to ask people you care about meaningful questions and ask them often.

I’ll give some examples here but what is important to note is the state you are in when you ask them. You slow down, become mindful, connect within yourself first, and then ask the questions slowly, with a lot of care and then wait, giving the person a lot of time and space to answer. The person must feel safe to go a little deeper than normal. Going deeper requires more time otherwise you’ll just get a shallow response.

Questions:
What’s been on your mind that you think would be difficult to talk about?
What makes you sad about yourself? Sad about the world?
What do you wish you were able to do better, if it were possible?
What makes you angry about yourself? About the world?
When was the last time you got scared or a big fright?
What scares you about yourself? About the world?

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.