Category Archives: Your Mind

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.

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!

Facing Resistance

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My classes, workshops, courses and individual sessions that people attend, aim to create a safe place where a person can spend some quality time contacting what’s ticking away inside them subconsciously which affects their daily life, behaviours and health in very big ways.

I recently read a book recommended by a colleague, titled ‘Turning Pro’. It’s a simple easy to read book. In it the author talks about the difference between an amateur and a professional in life.

A quote from the book:
“Resistance hates two qualities above all others: concentration and depth. Why? Because when we work with focus and we work deep, we succeed. Resistance wants to keep us shallow and unfocused. So it makes the superficial and the vain intoxicating.”

Mindfulness Meditation and Body Based inner work gives you time to concentrate and go deep. Without depth and focus it is difficult to accomplish anything of substance that you feel satisfied with. True satisfaction comes from your inner spirit, your soul. Contacting this inner spirit part of you from your intellect alone cannot normally produce the depth required. It can only simulate.

A lot of people go through life simulating and never really facing their resistance.
You need to face your resistance in order to go deeper and become more healthier and authentic.

Facing resistance can arise when you are avoiding going somewhere you know is good for you, events of substance. Feel your resistance, the part that’s giving you all the reasons not to go. This is a good sign – for you are now going deeper and accessing old out dated programs that are not assisting you to live effectively today.

Feel them and be with them. Don’t try to change them, don’t judge them and don’t hate them. Accept that they are there right now and take the risk to allow them to release in the way that they didn’t get the chance to, when they were first formed. If this is too difficult to do alone, then seek out a therapist that can keep you safe, deep and focused long enough for this release to occur.

SPACE

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I highly recommend doing some mindfulness meditation everyday.

Because I have been doing this process for so long I sometimes forget just how beneficial it is. Earlier this year I went for a short period, without any daily mindfulness meditation. It that period I was very busy and was getting lots done but I began to notice something every interesting – my mind wasn’t thinking as clearly as before, I was more stressed, less intelligent in my decision making. When something went wrong, it took a lot more thoughts, effort and time to sort it out. I was also slightly more reactive to outside circumstances and my mind was beginning to race a little. It wasn’t pleasant.

I was very functional, and from the outside I looked fine to everyone and everything, but from the inside I wasn’t at my best, I wasn’t working from my highest quality of being.

I quickly realised that what I had lost in my mind was SPACE.

Still Space.

Quiet Space.

For in that still quiet space is where your real and best intelligent thinking, healing and decision making gets done.

I quickly returned to daily mindfulness meditation, let go some old thinking (that said I didn’t need it,) and I was back centred again. Back to having that SPACE within me and between my thoughts.

This SPACE should be with you throughout your day. It is a buffer between you, your thoughts and the external environment. Without it, it is very hard to function at your intelligent and satisfying best. It is also harder to heal yourself.

It is a very smart company that would teach this to their employees and allow everyone to practice this everyday at work. The benefits of creating this space to intelligent decision making in business are enormous. Huge.

And it still baffles me why every child isn’t taught this in school.

Are you a Meditator?: What it says about you…

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The Self Healing Meditation Classes are chugging along nicely at my centre here in Melbourne twice a month. Averaging about 16 people a class.

If you are a person who Meditates, what it says about you is this:
that you know deep down that you are not your thoughts, that you are something greater and deeper than that. That you are a being that thinks, rather than just a thinking robotic machine.

This ‘being’ in you, that resides throughout your entire body holds the key to your fulfillment in life. It is your spirit. The real you. Taking time out to contact this directly is the road to complete freedom. Along that road you will bump up against the road blocks of your past. The blocks you put up to survive but which you then forgot to take down afterwards.

This class gives you the time and space to firstly remember who you truly are, get in contact with the real you again, and then take time to release the old road blocks that are not helping you move forward today.

I look forward to helping you further along your journey.