Category Archives: Mindfulness Meditation

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. .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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”