Category Archives: Work

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. .

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.

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.

Destressing for sustainable long-term success

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Reading today in a local paper:
“The problem with technology especially email – is that it allows you to feel productive without really achieving anything. Of the tens of thousands of emails I’ve read and sent, there are less than a hundred that were real game-changes.” Scott Page – Barefoot Investor, Herald Sun Newspaper.

Learning to connect/disconnect from the constant information overload is important if you want to stay sane, healthy successful and satisfied with your life and work. The smart phone can take over your ability to be happily embodied within yourself.

When you begin to feel run by your phone, computer or employer, a good question to ask yourself is,

‘Am I comfortable in my body right now?’

In other words, are you centered, relaxed, calm, happy and settled in your body right now? Remember it’s from this place that you will produce your best work long term each day and every day. It is quite alarming when I regularly hear from clients how pushed they are from their employers to do more and work harder beyond a comfortable sustainable level.

If you don’t feel comfortable in your body, address it now. Don’t put it on hold. If you decide to deal with this internal stress at some point in the future, the damage could be far too great.

Remember you run your life, not your employer or smart phone. If you are working for an employer that wants maximum profits at any cost. Get out of there! They don’t care about you. They are entitled to run their business in this way but you don’t have to work that way. A true intelligent caring employer will aim for a fair profit and fair balance work load. A load that is sustainable long term. It is wise long term vision that produces the best most fulfilling success.

Success comes from having a successfully fulfilling present moment action. All your life is made up of this building block. So if you do not feel comfortable in your body right now, address it. Address it by adjusting the external factors contributing to creating this pressure and address it by adjusting the internal factors contributing to creating the pressure.

If you have had this pressure for more than a year, the alarm bells should be ringing. It’s time to take back more control. Don’t get comfortable with such high levels of stress. It’s not ‘this is just how it is’. No, this is not just how it is. It’s not like this everywhere. And it doesn’t need to be like this within you either.

There is a better 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.

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”

The big value of that ‘after lunch’ meditation

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I mentioned to the group in a Mindfulness Meditation class recently how I do many 10-20 minute meditations throughout the week. Then on a class one night last month when I had almost an hour, my body really let go further and I almost fell asleep while sitting in the chair monitoring the group.

What it told me was, that I really needed that longer deeper mindful rest. The cells of my body lapped it up and I blanked out for a short period. Needless to say after that hour I felt fantastic, with lots more energy which continued all week.

So there is a lot to be said for one good long mindful meditation (while staying awake) every now and then.

The feeling of rest that I felt during that class was similar to the feeling – if you have ever meditated after a big lunch in the afternoon – to the quality of that after-lunch meditation. This is often very different to the morning ones.

After lunch when you feel a bit tired, sleepy, it’s probably because your body needs to digest all the food. If you do a meditation, even 10 minutes after lunch, it will do wonders for your afternoon energy levels. Try it and experience what happens.

At some point in the ‘after lunch’ meditation you will blank out deeply for a few minutes, that’s normal. That’s your body taking the time it needs to digest. Make sure you stay awake throughout, even if you have blanked out. You’ll love the feeling afterwards.

The only problem with this exercise, especially if you are at work after lunch – where do you do it? It can be in the toilet, some hide a away spot where no one will find you, in the car if it is parked near by, in a near by park.

Not easy.

Until it becomes a common accepted practice at work, it will be tricky to do.
Once employers realise the value of such a practice, after lunch, I think they will want to implement it and allow it. The enhanced energy levels and alertness is very valuable indeed.