Category Archives: Stress

Learn to say NO to a lot of things

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“…focusing on everything means focusing on nothing. It’s almost impossible to accomplish anything significant when you’re racing through an endless litany of tasks and emergencies. And yet this is how many of us spend our days, weeks, months, years – sometimes, our entire lives.”
(Michael Hyatt, Free to Focus, 2019)

I’ve talked about this information overload many times over the years. It’s a sign of the times. It is so important to be able to narrow down what you want to accomplish and then spend time just working on those specific tasks related to what you really want.

To do that, you have to constantly say NO to a lot of things that bombard you along the way. Your smart phone tends to be the biggest distraction. If your head is too much in control of your day, saying no will be very hard. But if you have a regular mindfulness practice, it makes it much easier to train yourself to switch off the distracting thoughts and the corresponding external information overload.

Having a deep connection to your internal world and internal space is very precious. The more body mindfulness work you do to inhabit/embody yourself, the more you will guard it, the more you will say No to things. The more focused you become on tasks and information that really matter to your goals.

Looking back, I found that the more connected I became to my body and inner self, the better choices I made.

I noticed I began to choose and do what worked rather than what was popular.

This is a very important point to make here. Your mindfulness meditation practice helps you access the real you. It helps you clear the way to accessing your true home, which is throughout your physical body. Then your guidance system becomes your own heart and not the ‘convincing’ information your head is brain-washed to need.

You are unique, a magnificent human being. Very precious. And the more you can embody this, the more unique choices you make, more often. Following the herd mentality, is not fulfilling, so that begins to lessen. You live a life that is much more rich and alive. One that actually contributes something special to the world that makes a real difference.

You have that in you.

The importance of Space and Stillness each Day

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“When you are full of problems, there is no room for anything new to enter, no room for a solution. So whenever you can, make some room, create some space, so that you find the life underneath your life situation.”
(Eckhart Tolle, The Power Of Now, 2004)

Fifteen years on and this book is still a timeless classic, as readable today as it was when it was first published. It still remains the number one book on my bedside table.

Body mindfulness meditation helps to create that space to make room for new solutions, new connections in your brain which otherwise could not be created. Downtime is critical to growing and repairing your brain functions.

Some space and stillness time is very important to have at some point in your day. It is critical to your growth and a healthy mind and body. It also doesn’t feel good to be on the go all day long without pause. Constant stress on your body leads to inflammation internally, which leads to some of the leading causes of disease, ageing and death around the world.

It is that important, to create space.

So why don’t we do it naturally? Because the old habits of western society say that doing more is better. Your intellect wants to do do do and go go go. Accomplish more, fill all idle time, no blank spaces. Somehow this has become ingrained in our culture, become the norm.

Our thinking minds constantly overrule the needs of our body, our heart and our spirit. What these parts of us need and want sadly don’t get much of a look in, until it is serious or they break down.

Often when a mediation practice takes a back seat it is being overruled by a very convincing mind program that says ‘doing more is more important then being right now’. And so your being doesn’t get a chance to properly correct your doing. Left too long, is when people begin to report drops in productivity, feeling lost, or unfulfilled or stuck in a rat race. Left further unchecked, leads to disease and breaks in body function.

Left to its own devices, the intellect sees no value in space and stillness. Because it means the intellect gets turned down even switched off for a period. The intellect wants to always remain in power, in total control, so switching off is not an option.

So it takes some doing initially, to take the time each day to switch it off, stop the rampant thinking and just be and be still, for a little while, coming more back into your body. Even if your eyes remain open. This stillness time will help re organise your thinking processes and allow much more efficient use of your time and energy, reducing stress and improving health.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Take time to put ‘on’ your body

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We take time to put on our clothes each morning. We should also take time to put on our body.

Try not to leave home in the morning without getting into your body first. Body Mindfulness work helps you to do this. Taking a few minutes minimum everyday to actually feel into your body can make a big difference to the quality of your day and mind.

You need to settle into your body like you are putting on your clothes. As you get in, you will feel what parts are comfortable to feel into and what parts are not. What parts need more attention, what parts are numb, what parts are stiff or flexible etc.

You are basically linking your awareness/spirit to your thinking mind and body.

When you don’t do this, you are more likely to have unfinished programs from the day before still running, clouding your mind and stressing your body. Especially the ones that run on automatic pilot because you haven’t paid them enough attention to realise they need switching off.

This is an over stressed way to live each day and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Relaxation Music – What’s the best?

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Working as I do everyday helping people release anxieties, past traumas and bad habits that are holding them back from living a more productive, successful and authentic life, I often get asked what books do I read? What relaxation music do I listen to?

In a past blog I have written about what my best ever personal development book is. Here, I’d like to answer what relaxation music I like the best. Having listened to thousands of tracks over the years, there actually is one track that has left the biggest impression and which I turn to when I really do need to settle and calm, if I have been overly stressed. It works for me every time. It’s the best I have ever heard.

It’s a four minute track called ‘Dream Journey Part 2’ by Michael Wild.

I bought it a looong time ago, on cassette tape. That’s how long.

He now has it on CD of course and MP3 digital downloads are available. The track is on the CD album Star Dreams.
Check it out here on his personal website www.michaelwild.com.au. For the MP3 download go to www.quietearth.org.

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.