Becoming a Person

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Surrender to Your Experience

Surrender to Your Experience

“Each of us actually believes that things should be the way we want them, instead of being the natural result of all the forces of creation.” ~ Michael A. Singer, author of: The Surrender Experiment: My Journey into Life’s Perfection and The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself Have you ever had a small worry about something that balloons into a huge worry and makes you anxious about…

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Saying Yes To Life

Saying Yes To Life

“What you resist persists and what you look at disappear” This quoute came to me when I had just started my spiritual journey, when I had started to see that perhaps I was not the voice inside my head, now it is apparent to be that nothing could be more true. Life has a flow to it and we stop ourselves from jumping on board for the ride by resisting.

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Step Away From the Busyness!

Busyness

Life is so fast paced theses days; we have instant access to information and hyper-connectivity with each other, there is so much stuff floating around and whizzing past us that in can be difficult to keep up. This can often make it difficult for us to find escape from everything and for us to work out where our priorities lie. I am going to discuss why I think busyness can be detrimental to our…

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Mindful Meditation: Not Just For Monks!

From Becoming a Person - http://bit.ly/1kMwXNT

Eleven years ago today, only three days before my 18th birthday and just before I was about to go to university, I was hit by a car on a night out and suffered a badly broken leg. I went to university but because of my temporary physical handicap I started feeling sorry for myself. I self-medicated every night by getting smashed on booze and smoking loads of weed. Next stop: depression.

After being depressed for about four years and lacking any motivation to do anything, I read a book someone had recommended to me; ‘The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying’. This introduced me to the idea of meditation, for a year or so I started experimenting occasionally but I didn’t get much out of it.

Fast forward four years and I am now a regular meditator, generally practicing twice a day.

Why do I continue to meditate? Initially I started meditating because I was depressed and anxious; I thought that mindfulness meditation as a concept could potentially quieten the constant negative thoughts I was having. After perseverance, this started to happen. Not judging or clinging to my negative thoughts was a great step for me.

Now with lots of practice I am able to sit for long periods of time, sometimes for up to an hour, in an attempt to be more present and detached from my usual incessant thoughts, although they tend to be a lot less negative these days. Meditation helps me become less attached to my thoughts, which as you may well experience yourself is difficult to do. Meditating has helped me to end attachment to every thought that enters my head, and to just accept it, watch it float by like a cloud.

In short; it helps me to focus my everyday attention on things that are worth focusing on!

Busting some meditation myths and answering questions that many have before starting to meditate:

Isn’t meditation a Buddhist or Hindu concept? Do I have to be religious to do it? Yes it is. But no you don’t! Meditation as we know it comes from Eastern traditions, to quiet the mind and to increase presence in the now. Despite this, I would bet people in the Western World have been meditating for centuries without even knowing it. Even if you don’t think you have meditated I guarantee there have been a number of times where you have sat quietly without getting attached to your thoughts.

Meditation does not involve praying to a god, so you do not have to be religious to meditate and in fact you can have a religion that doesn’t contain meditation as a practice and still do it.

Ok, so it works for you, but is meditation really beneficial? Yes, science has even proved it! Science has proven that mindfulness has a lot of benefits that can help anyone. Mindfulness is even used by psychologists to help their patients with a number of problems. Mindfulness can help with issues such as depression and anxiety. It is also used to help people with problems such as addictions and obsessive compulsive disorders. Add to that, it is proven to help with physical problems such as stress, poor sleep and even high blood pressure. You can really start to see the wisdom that people in the East have had for thousands of years!

But I’m a busy person, how can I fit meditation in to my life? You can meditate for as little or as much time as you like. This really is a personal thing; there is research to say that as little as 10 minutes a day can really help. If I am particularly busy I will try to sit for 5-10 minutes twice a day. Some days I find I can only do it for a short time, other days I have sat meditating for an hour or so.

How do I meditate? Find what works for you. There are lots of resources you can use, some of which I list at the bottom. I found that I had to do some experimenting to find what felt comfortable, but after a while I found a way to get the most out of it. I can’t sit cross legged on the floor for five minutes without seizing up, so found I could meditate whilst sitting in a chair. As with anything, experiment until you find what is best for you.

Ok, so I’m sitting still. Now how do I clear my mind? You don’t have to! This is a common misconception; meditation isn’t necessarily about stopping thought, although that can happen from time to time. Meditation is about focusing your attention on things such as the breath, bodily sensations and the sounds around you. All the resources I have used have said that you will probably start to think but the aim is to not judge the thoughts or become attached to them, instead gently guide your attention back to meditating.

“The act of meditation is being spacious.” ~ Sogyal Rinpoche

Science links to back me up! http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/07-08/ce-corner.aspx – benefits of meditation from the American Psychologocial Association http://meditation-research.org.uk/ http://blog.ted.com/2013/01/11/4-scientific-studies-on-how-meditation-can-affect-your-heart-brain-and-creativity/

How to meditate resources: https://www.headspace.com/ http://www.freemindfulness.org/download http://www.mindful.org/mindful-magazine?gclid=CNXnpLjEiMACFVIPtAodtmIA3g

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Appreciate What You Have With Negative Visualisation

It is easy to fall into a pattern of taking the things we value for granted, getting past this and regularly realising how lucky we are helps us to be happier. Today I’m going to look at how practicing negative visualisation has helped me to become more grateful and appreciative of things in my life.

“Misfortune weighs most heavily on those who expect nothing but good fortune.” Seneca

At the end of last year my mum was in hospital with pneumonia and was very ill. I am ashamed to say that this it what it took for me to realise how much I had taken her for granted throughout my life. Luckily she got out just before Christmas and is recovering well.

It is so easy for us to become acclimatised to things in our life and take them for granted. So many things we have are so special: family, friends, eyesight and being alive are all things to marvel at, but if you’re like me then you’ll take many of them for granted.

We may be pissed off because we don’t have the spouse we want, the career we want or whatever—negative visualisation allows us to see that whatever we lack is made up for ten fold by what we currently have. For those of us lucky enough to see the beauty of life before us, can you imagine not being able to see a sunset or the face of a loved one again? Try going half an hour without your eyes and see how much of a gift sight is There are so many invaluable gifts that can brighten up our lives and we end up taking them for granted. This doesn’t make us bad people, it’s just what happens when we don’t dedicate our attention to what is around us and are off chasing the next thing.

Negative visualisation is a simple Stoic technique that involves visualising your life deprived of something that is valuable; this could be your husband, wife, kids, job, home, you name it. I have always found this uncomfortable, but, we will have to deal with the impermanent nature of so many things during life, if this technique can help us to appreciate things more, then in my eyes it’s a good thing.

Building a negative visualisation practice in to our day helps us to stop and appreciate parts of our lives we may not see as so special. It can also help us to figure out what is important. When we really know where our priorities lie we can be true to ourselves.

It’s important to note that we shouldn’t fill most of our thoughts with gloomy or morbid ideas but a few minutes a day can help us to have more gratitude towards the wonderful things we have in life.

Try negative visualisation and see how it works for you. Write down 7 things that are important to you; over the next week pick one thing a day and spend five minutes thinking about how different your life would be without it.

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Appreciate What You Have With Negative Visualisation

Negative Visualisation (Yes, I Said Negative)

It is easy to fall into a pattern of taking the things we value for granted, getting past this and regularly realising how lucky we are helps us to be happier. Today I’m going to look at how practicing negative visualisation has helped me to become more grateful and appreciative of things in my life.

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“It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens…

“It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up.” – Eckhart Tolle

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Test

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Stress is What You Make of It

Stress is What You Make of It

We can all get stressed at different times and by different things and this can in the worst case drastically affect our health and life expectancy or in the best of cases make our day to day lives more difficult and unpleasant for the duration of the stress.

A lot of my friends always tell me about how stressed they are and how difficult it can be to cope with such heightened worry and difficult…

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Show Your Gratitude!

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” – Cicero

Gratitude helps us to see how much we have to be thankful for in our lives. It takes us away from looking at our lives as lacking and helps us to see that there is an abundance of things that we can be happy to have in our lives. (more…)

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The Examined Life

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

A famous quote by Socrates—one of the founders of Western philosophy. The philosophers of old thought life was worth examining in order to gain an understanding of it. What a wonderful time we live in, we have thousands of years of knowledge and examining to build our understanding of the world. (more…)

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If Not Now, When?

“Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.” – Eckhart Tolle

We have a linear understanding of time—the past, the present and the future. Dealing with three separate points in time leaves our brains dazed and confused. It’s no wonder we get confused and hung up on past experiences and become anxious about what is yet to come when we have…

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Do you find it hard to relax and just be? Do you get attached to every thought that runs through your mind? 

Maybe it might be time for you to give meditation a go! 

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11 Beautiful Lessons I Learned From Depression

11 Beautiful Lessons From Depression

There’s no getting around it, depression absolutely sucks. Feeling helpless and hopeless all the time is a downward spiral and leads to self loathing. Let’s be honest, nobody wants that.

For me the worst thing was my change in activity, my lack of desire to do things. Before I would do all sorts of stuff and always try new things. It lead me to a cycle of having the most boring routine and lack…

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CONTROL IS NOT AN ILLUSION IT IS A CHOICE!

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What can and what can’t you control?

There will always be things in the world that you have absolutely no control over. Just before I went to university I was hit by a car and broke my leg, this is a good example of something I had no control over.

What I did have control over was how I let this affect the way I think, it took me a long time to realise this, a long time which led me down some very dark roads. I have travelled the length of these roads over the last 11 years and now know that we have control over how we let things in our lives impact our emotional wellbeing.

  Whatever the outside world throws at you, whether you feel you can or can’t control it, there is always one thing you can control which is your reaction to it.

When we lack control over events it can cause worry and insecurity which can lead to a downward spiral of nervousness and anxiety. Before things happen we can control our thoughts and choose not to cause ourselves worry. In circumstances where we have control all we can ever do is our best to achieve the desired outcome. This is a proactive choice, we can also choose to be passive and let things happen to us.

Equally, when something has happened we have a choice as to how it affects our psyche moving forward.

In both of these areas of control there is a choice, a choice between being a victim of, or the creator of our own reality.

We will all at some stage in our lives experience regret, frustration and sorrow, that much is certain. While we can do our best to avoid them, negative happenings and emotions are bound to arise. What can be crucial to our future happiness is how we choose to react and let so called negative events shape our future thoughts and feelings.

You’ll often hear stories of people with horrible, often terminal illnesses, who shine a ray of light on to the world and those around them, despite being in what we would consider to be a bad situation. They choose not to be a victim of their reality but to embrace it. It may seem unfathomable to most of us for such people to be happy with their circumstances, but they exercise one of the biggest powers we as humans possess - control over how we perceive our own reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36m1o-tM05g&noredirect=1 - an inspiring talk by a young man with a genetic defect which shortened his life and how he was still able to live a happy life despite his circumstances.

The first step to not being affected long term by negative circumstances is acceptance. If you can’t control something, resisting it is only going to increase your resistance and this can slowly eat away at you.

I know this first hand from getting hit by that car, which lead me in to a long downward spiral of negative thoughts and eventually depression.

Acceptance is a choice to surrender to what is and allows us to go beyond feeling like a victim

Realising that control is a choice can allow us to take responsibility for what is happening in our lives, once we take responsibility for our thoughts, we can start to change them, so that we do not feel like a victim of events that have happened to us. This change of attention to the world can lead to a radically different outlook.

“The nature of the attention we bring to bear of the world changes what it is we find there” ~ Iain McGilchrist. Psychiatrist and author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

The language of our thoughts is another area over which we have control. Much like our thought patterns the script we read to ourselves is impacted by our past but it is something we can choose to change and over which we have control.

I developed very negative thought patterns and self talk, by having this negativity running around my brain non-stop. These conscious thoughts can be so harmful to you and your subconscious that a never ending cycle of negativity can take over.

What kind of language do you think in when, for example presented with a challenging activity? Do you say to yourself “I won’t be able to do that” or do you say “I'll give it my best shot”?

This is not to say that positivity will always lead to positive results, unfortunately it doesn’t always work like that, however, if you have control over your thoughts and a positive attitude toward something the outcome will be, at least in terms of thought different. It is the difference between; “I knew I’d fail, I’m no good at anything” and “Well, at least I did my best and can learn from this experience". As you can see these are two massively different ways to think. The former comes from a position of low self esteem and self compassion and the latter from a much higher position of self worth.

If we recognise the fact that we may not have complete control over our circumstances but we have control over how we perceive and think about them, it can help us in so many ways. We can go from being downbeat and playing the victim card to being pro-active creators of our existence. Which one do you think is more beneficial?

It took me a very long time to realise that despite what happens on the outside, how I think about and to what degree I allow outside events to affect me on the inside is entirely up to me.

I reckon this is one of the most important realisations I have had so far and one that has helped me to go beyond being a victim and something that has allowed me to become much happier in day to day life.

Next week I'll focus on some of the useful techniques I have discovered along the way :)