Category Archives: Your Mind

Neuro-Immunologists – a western medicine group, that are finally getting it.

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“It wasn’t considered professionally respectable to investigate connections between the brain – the province of neuroscience – and the immune system – the province of immunology.”
(Edward Bullmore, PhD, The Inflamed Mind – A radical new Approach to Depression, 2018)

I’m fascinated how the immune system and the nervous system interact. How inflammation in the body when the immune system is low can affect and even create mental symptoms like depression. And also going the other way, how negative depressive thinking can weaken the immune system and cause inflammation in the body. The research is finally beginning to show this link.

My personal and client experiences over the years informed me directly that the mind and body affect each other quite strongly. Of course western scientific medicine has denied this for hundreds of years thanks to 17th century Descartes dualist ideas that the mind and body were totally separate.

So it was nice to read from a psychiatrist (Edward Bullmore) that ‘a lot of what I was taught in medical school is wrong’.

Edward is part of a small group of psychiatrists that call themselves neuro-immunologists. He is pioneering a new field of research that links the brain, the body and the immune system. So we can look forward to much better treatments that deal with the mental and physical health issues together, rather than apart as they are currently done within western medicine.

I realised decades ago in my practice that western medicine was way behind in this mind body connection and so I let them go and continued independently, continually researching and applying new techniques that made this mind body link stronger and stronger within me and within my clients.

Making this link stronger is what body mindfulness meditation is all about too. Just by strengthening and feeling into this link in your body, your body automatically begins to heal, and you don’t need to know how it is doing it. It just happens – when you get out of the way.

My personal research and development continues to this day and there are more exciting breakthroughs to come again soon. And again, like thirty years ago, it is going to look completely alternative and ‘bonkers’ to western mainstream medicine, until they catch up again – eventually 🙂

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.

The Myths of Science

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We all need help to increase our self healing abilities. This is still a vast untapped resource within us. The potential within you is vast. Most of us are hardly tapping much of it.

Why?

One of the biggest road blocks to expanding your effectiveness in self healing body mindfulness I believe, is how we (myself included) from the day we were born, have been indoctrinated by science. This has become subconscious for most of us and is a huge hidden cultural belief system in western countries.

“Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads.”
(Rupert Sheldrake, The Science Delusion, 2012)

I talk a lot about the hold of the intellect and it’s hindrance in self healing in this blog. This intellect has been indoctrinated by the old beliefs of science which most scientists have never seriously questioned.

If you want more help, to break this block further I highly recommend Rupert Sheldrake book above. This is a brilliant scientist. He break the ten myths that science still believes are true. When in lived experience we know today, that they are not.

Rupert gave a TED talk on this topic some years ago and guess what? The talk was banned from the TED website! This is how threatened current old-school scientist were. TED talks are always on the edge and push the boundaries of what we have known. “Ideas worth spreading” their catch cry. So when I heard about this ban, I immediately thought we must have a real pioneer here. So I checked him out and I was right.

Check out his ex TED talk on YouTube here, (1.5m views) it’s freely available. This is brilliant pioneering scientific myth breaking and it will help your intellect and mind free up even more.

Anger and its link to the risk of Heart Disease (Attack)

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I focused on Cancer in the last post. This week we look at Heart Disease (Heart Attack).

“The connection between attitude and the heart is so reliable that a 30 year study published in 2003 in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that ‘…hostility is one of the most reliable indicators of coronary heart disease risk’.”

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

According to the World Health Organisation (in May 2018) the leading cause of death in the world in 2016 was Heart Disease (Heart Attack), followed by Stroke, accounting for 27% (15.2 million) of all deaths world wide.

Then we have studies like the above quote that strongly link heart attacks to hostility, or as I would word it, the emotion of excess and prolonged anger in your mind and body.

If you would like to self heal yourself through body mindfulness meditation, it is imperative that you also focus on the emotion that sits with the sensations you feel in your body during a practice. Taking the time to feel the emotion, will go a long way to improving your health and immune defense against disease.

By spending quite, deep and prolonged time in a body mindfulness practice you can uncover your hidden frustrations, blame, hates, people you cannot ever forgive, angry judgments and hostilities towards others. Deeper down there will probably be suppressed rage and fury at injustices.

Your intellect can rationalise these old traumas and subdue them, but going deeper (into your body) you can uncover what is still actively firing in you emotionally. If it is anger related, then we have a red flag for a future heart attack.

Express that anger, acknowledge it, get it out, throughout your body, release it and make peace with what you have hated for however long, This will literally bring peace and lightness to your physical heart and lower the risk of ever getting a heart attack.

But it must be felt IN YOUR BODY not just intellectually in your head, hence why doing a regular body mindfulness practice is so vital to your health.

The Five Checks to do Every Morning

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Starting your day with a body mindfulness connection makes a huge difference to how well your day flows and how productive you are. The core questions to ask, and areas to check each morning are (in order of importance):

How grounded am I?
That is how well are you earthed to the ground. How solid do your feet feel below you when you get out of bed and start your day?

How centered am I?
Do you feel your center of gravity in, or just under, your belly button? Or is the centre of gravity in your head, where a lot of people have it? Which leads to the next question…

How embodied am I?
That is, how fully in your body do you feel? Are you residing in all of it, or just in parts? Are there parts that feel numb or hollow? Are there parts you don’t feel or can’t feel into? Do you feel a disconnect from the neck down? that is, does your head feel separate from your body?

How connected am I to the present moment?
How much of your awareness is operating in reality right now? How much are you aware of your present moment surroundings, without past and future thought forms and memories interfering?

They are probably the top four questions to ask automatically when you wake up each morning, the top four checks. Once they are handled, you can ask the next question…

How connected am I to the Universe?
Once you are in your body, then check how connected your awareness is to the outside world around you. Your sense of connection to the spirit of all people and living things. This plugs your intuition into the flow of the world.

Do all of the above each morning and you are in for a very productive and fulfilling day!

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?

Lost Connections leads to Depression

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The last class for 2018 is running tomorrow night. The Mindfulness classes will resume again on Tuesday Jan 15th 2019. So a shorter break than other years. 2019 will make it 9 consecutive years running of this class and as is tradition, the first class will be free for whoever books in until full.

I’m reading (technically listening to) a great book titled Lost Connections by Johann Hari. Where he covers the real causes of depression in most people. And the research all points to lost connections. For example, we have lost connections with:
* People – today we have fewer friends we can confide in,
* Work – more people doing less meaningful work,
* Childhood Trauma – people are not taking the time to go within and complete their past trauma to reconnect with themselves,
* Natural World – we are losing the natural organic rhythms of nature that we use to have centuries ago.

I recommend this book highly. It’s a damning indictment on trying to solve depression with prescription drugs.

A Body Mindfulness meditative practice helps you to reconnect with your real self. I’ve found that when you reconnect to yourself within – your body – you then naturally want to reconnect to other (better) people, spend more time in nature, do more meaningful work, eat better etc.

Coming home and reconnecting to you is the first biggest crucial step to eradicating depression. And this time of year is when it usually hits the hardest. I will be on leave for 2.5 weeks from Dec 21st (returning Jan 7th 2019) but I will still be able to see some people for individual sessions (in person or from anywhere in the world over Skype/Zoom) should you really need help with that inner connection over the Xmas/New Year break.

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.

Remember to Remind Yourself

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For inner peace, happiness and fulfillment, in work, rest and play – I always recommend meditating a little every day. Especially in the morning.
The sooner you can remind yourself of who you really are, the less chance you have during the day of the habitual thinking mind, taking you over and running you.

For you to stay in control in the best way possible, you have to remind your thinking mind who really is boss here. We’ve been brought up to put thinking and science high on a pedestal – way too high. So high that we can sometimes forget where our real intelligence sits – who we really are – and it’s not the thinking.

Thinking is a tool to use, it isn’t you. Because we have over identified with thinking as ‘us’, we let it be the overriding ruler. So we create beliefs and programs and strategies and rules and truths and understandings and let them all run ‘us’.

A little reminder:

You don’t have to make decisions based on intellect thinking all the time.
You DO have a choice in the matter. In fact you ALWAYS have a choice.
Every moment…Right now ….forever.

And who is you?
That alive inner stillness. The being you. Throughout your body.
The you that is always here, no matter what happens.

This reminder is very important in the morning before work, especially if you work in a company surrounded by people who are over thinking and not very conscious.
It is very easy to get caught up in their over thinking and lose yourself again. Losing yourself to over thinking breaks the contact that you have with your intuition. You lose that very important intelligence and guidance which is the real you.