What’s in that lovely glass of wine that we really need to look at?

20 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

Tonight on BBC TV there is a program on Britain’s Hidden Alcoholics which sounds very topical in view of the increased awareness of the drink problem in the UK. It nicely targets the major problem of home drinking and people’s struggles to manage it.

Britain has a had a long and troubled relationship with drink, as seen in the gin drinking of the 18th portrayed in Hogarth’s engravings such as Gin Lane, or the campaigns to stop it such as the 19th Century Temperance Movement. Today a lot of drinking has been fuelled by its relative low cost and ready availability in supermarkets. As at present every so often there is discussion on limiting its availability. Yet while a supply-side approach has its advantages, it is also worth looking at demand and about personal responsibility and accountability and the struggles people have to manage their inclination to addiction of one kind or another.

Arguably the really insiduous and dangerous side to alcohol consumption is the slow, steady excess that can build up at home in the regular evening drink with a meal and confortably slumped in front of the TV and other seemingly harmless evening leisure pursuits. As a number of recent reports have been showing, the danger of long-term drinking is the gradual threat to our internal organs and the increased susceptibility to deadly diseases related to the colon, bladder and liver among others. Now there is suggestion to abstain for three days a week, to allow the liver to recover. For the regular consumer, that can be a challenge.

For those interested in self development and also the regular glass of wine, for  example, it is worth exploring your awareness around what might be called an attachment to the glass of wine and the issues raised by not having it. You could for example write down what comes up for you on each of these aspects.

What is involved in the pleasure? Is it your stimulated taste buds, or is it that lift you get followed by lets say a pleasant woozy feeling? Are you tired at the end of the day or exhausted or fed up and the thought of the wine or whatever is a nice way of taking you way from all that? Is it the social thing, of sharing it with another, who also likes doing it? Of course you might be a wine connoiseur and having a “good glass” does it for you – and your pocket.

On the other side, what comes up if you try not to have it. Do you get disgruntled, bored, not knowing what to do, for example? Has a hole just been knocked into how you spend your evening? Do you miss that diversion from whatever has been going on during the day. Have you just lost part of what defined your lifestyle? One can picture it, getting home, mixing that salad, the drizzle of balsamic vinegar, the chicken in wine sauce and some boiled new potatoes, all seemingly very healthy, and accompanied by a nice large glass of chilled white Burgundy and a good conversation (Oh, and you then just have to top up that glass, and then why leave that little bit at the bottom of the bottle?)

From a self development perspective, it’s worth looking at every part of that picture, and see what factors contribute to the regular drinking pattern.

Alcohol, like other addictions, is a powerful way that we disconnect from what’s really going on, and diverts us from dealing with them – at our own expense, literally and metaphorically.

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Feeling separate from the one we seek

15 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

“Will I ever get there?” How many of us at different times wonder whether we’ll achieve what we set out to do in terms  of our core goals? They’re commonly used words, wanting, success, goals, achievement, accomplishment. It can seem like we’re forever seeking but never getting “there”. Perhaps if you get there, that can become another “here” and there’s another “there” to strive towards.

Without wishing to get too far into the realm of human accomplishment in practical terms, because surely there’s lot’s who have achieved a lot. I’m thinking more of the inner driver, the inner wish, that which senses also a lack of accomplishment and that something is missing.

Yogis and others would say this is because we get ensnared by desire, wanting, in the egoic sense, and we get attached to it and it eats away inside. Others might say it is inappropriate goals. Or that we have a limiting belief that we won’t make it. All of these and more could be explored.

However, I’m interested here in the very fact of seeking. In terms of non-dual philosophy, by seeking we’re setting ourselves up to be another subject in search of an object, that which we seek, and therefore immediately make ourselves separate from it. And this can be the knub of the problem, the sense of being separate.

A classic way the sense of separation is experienced is feeling very separate from one you are in relationship with. The anxiety of separation eats into the relationship and drives the other one away, especially if it is accompanied by intense neediness, seeking love from another.

More generally people can feel separate in all sorts of ways, such as in social situations, feeling lonely, feeling apart from others, or engagement with life and living in its broadest sense.

Feeling separate from that which we seek could be said to be a core human dilemma. From a non-dualist perspective we are all One. Yet our human ego experience is that we are separate, and hence get to feel unloved, alone, abandoned, isolated, or at least those of us that connect at this level. So we might say that the early experience of the infant at fearing being separated from her/his mother taps into this core human dilemma. Existential aloneness and problems with infant bondedness get mixed up with each other, one fuelling the other.

From a spiritual perspective, this is all an illusion and hence part of the work is to let go of such feelings and to focus awareness on the sense of connectedness within us, as in meditation but also in our engagement with others. For example one can work to increase the feeling of connection and to hold to that in contact with others.

This is the sort of learnings we provide in The Point of Awareness.

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What’s keeping us from the love we seek?

14 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

In case you’re feeling out of the love bonanza (in theory) on St Valentine’s Day, it can be worth remembering that as well as love between one person and another, there’s other ways that love is experienced. There’s platonic love, say between friends, there’s love for animals, nature, one’s children, one’s parents, love for our fellow humans, or in what we do. We can encounter love in many forms and situations. It is a matter of being open to it.

You might, for example, be in a cafe musing on the world in general or deep in something you are reading, when you hear a song that sparks a memory. Or you are sitting outside and you are watching some children playing, and you remember a scene from your own childhood. You see some people pass and watch them talking, and somehow you feel very at one with them in the dynamic – and you feel love inside you. You are at a meeting, and someone discloses something very human and touching about themselves, and yours and everybody’s hearts open, and you feel love.

Love can be around, anytime, anywhere, for when we experience it, yes even when we choose to. There’s something about opening ourselves to what’s inside us. It seems like it’s something outside of us, like there’s a trigger or a reminder or a connection. Yet the experience is inside us.

Meditators would say it’s there all the time. For them it might be a matter of taking their awareness within, letting go of whatever is going on, and steadily settling and focusing the mind, and then allowing the state of love to emerge. In fact you could stay there and let it grow and grow.

Yet, the ego part of the mind can kick back in and we go off somewhere. Or the mind doesn’t seemingly allow us to go there in the first place, or lets say our ego part.

This is where self-awareness work is so important. It’s that ego, all those patterns, in yogic terms samskaras from past lives, memory, habit, limited thinking, limiting decisions, who we think we are, repeat thoughts, fears, anxiety and worry, past resentments, stuff stored up in our system, that so many of us are in denial of, desensitising ourselves from our awareness or deflecting our awareness from what hurts, all this inside that keeps us from our love.

So the external manifestation of missing love, that today might be a reminder of, is but also a mirror of an inner pain.

Dealing with all this will open you to the real love that dwells within, the parting of the 60,000 veils of illusion.

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What’s missing that we don’t feel totally comfortable about love?

13 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

Probably it can seem as if a blog post on the theme of love is pretty hard to take on a damp and murky Monday morning in early February, and the mention of St Valentine’s Day (Pisst! It’s tomorrow, guys! I’ll see you in Sainsbury’s!….a card?!) can produce an order of groans, so long as your loved one isn’t in hearing or anyone who knows her/him.

And that reaction, if it’s at all true for you, is one reason why it’s important to write about love. If there’s a part of us that feels rather remote from love at some level at the moment, then we ought to be sitting up and asking ourselves why.

Here’s a few reasons: we might for example feel that producing a St Valentine’s Day card is a routine gesture for your partner (and they might too!), something to keep them sweet, or to “make up” for all the tiffs and arguments that perhaps typify the relationship. So what’s missing in the relationship that it’s like this? If there’s a reluctance to mark the day as an expression of how we truly feel about another, then perhaps we ought to be asking ourselves why. Otherwise we’re not being honest.

Watch the soaps (well, if you do…). Their plot lines are usually built around some form of deception to a loved one, a failure or reluctance to be open and honest. And we all watch hooked, because it is a mirror of some aspect of us, at some level, or has been and we’re not free of it yet.

Then we can take this theme more broadly too. If there’s a part of us that groans about St Valentine’s Day, or feel sceptical or cynical, for the self-awareness explorers that is if not the rest of us, it’s worth exploring what happens for us that we distance ourselves in some way in relation to love.

For example I’m often struck how people find it a bit difficult to just say the word. Many people don’t say it cleanly. It often sounds overlain with embarrassment. Like we’re not comfortable with some aspect of it. We might, for example, be feeling vulnerable around love, or that we’re some of us embarrassed or ashamed about its associations with sex, let’s say. Perhaps we’ve had trouble with love in the past, or are currently. Maybe we feel deep down inside a big hole about love. After all, so many of us feel or have felt unloved, or are constantly seeking love from another. We might therefore feel the pain, or seek to deflect our awareness away from it because we can’t bear the pain, or we’ve learned to desensitise our awareness so as to not feel it at all.

This can be much more the truth for so many of us, the pain we feel about love, in relation not just to a partner or ex-partner, but to our parents, perhaps to an early abandonment experience that we’d rather not remember. It could be that we were loved, deeply, by our parents but our very early experience was of being left with another in ways that caused us to feel abandoned and unloved. It’s a not uncommon experience.

And we split from love at some level when the subject comes up. That tells a story.

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Use awareness to catch yourself doing your number

11 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

A lot of the time we tend to live in an unaware state. This is not surprising since we generally need to focus on activities relevant to our day-to-day needs. The practicalities of life and interactions with others will tend to demand this. In so far as we might be self-aware, it might be according to how we are accustomed to doing things, for example to adjust our behaviour to suit our interactions with others, or perhaps because we’re being self-critical, or perhaps in order to look after ourselves and lets say take care of how we’re feeling. Such self-monitoring will be egoic in the sense of maintaining our belief about our identity as who we think we are.

Very often we get “caught up”, absorbed in a pattern that we’re not comfortable with but are unsure of how to fix. It can also seem as if we’re a prisoner of our own personality, even helpless in the face of what is “thrown at us” by life. However, it is possible to change this.

Self-awareness can be used differently, as a tool for change, as a means of becoming aware of how we are are in the moment thinking, feeling and behaving.

A key way that self awareness can be used as a tool for change is to learn to observe yourself in action and particularly to notice when you thinking, feeling or behaving in ways that don’t serve you.

This approach is described in the video below:

What is important is to be able to use self-awareness to reach the underlying beliefs, limiting decisions, or our sense of self that sustain such patterns and then use awareness to unhook and free ourselves up from these areas of our lives that don’t serve us, and wake up to who we really are.

Our program The Point of Awareness is designed to help people do this and deal with the underlying patterns that keep them stuck.

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Applying the utility test to your choices

8 February 2012 By

People often ask me whether something they are doing or thinking of doing in life is “right”. I often reply with another question, “Does it serve you?”, or “Is it useful to you?” Reference is made numerous times in this blog to the phrase “what serves you” in assessing whether something is suitable as a strategy in life. I call it the utility test, whether it is useful or not. It brings thinking round to the outcome desired and whether the action, thought, feeling or behaviour will produce the desired result. And is that result serving you, being of use? Is there actually a higher purpose behind all this, like what your heart or your soul really wants, or your higher Self. Will what I’m thinking of, for example, help me, be of use, in my life path? Will in all this will I finally get to feel whole, complete, At One, who I really am, what I fundamentally believe in, what I’m truly about, my integrity, my real values, etc., etc?

So thinking about what serves you invites you to reflect on your underlying purpose in making your choices, rather than the more superficial criteria we might apply. “Right” by contrast involves a value judgement according to some belief system often received from others or the social consensus. People use the word “right” as if there’s an absolute, when too often it’s a relative, based frequently on received perception. One example often given is how one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. Syria would be a good case in point at present. The West considers the “protesters” to be advocates of democracy, whereas others support the Assad regime as they fear “armed gangs” or oppose “regime change”. Who is “right”?

Another question that is often raised takes the form of “Should I (think, feel, say, do) this or that?” “Should” is a use of an internal or external belief system presented as a moral choice. It is similar in effect to the use of “right”. So too with “good”, “bad”, and so on.

In personal development it can be “useful” to mull on the choices and the thinking behind the choices. We might ask ourselves what’s really going on here? What’s this about? What’s the belief behind it?

Clarifying choices is an essential ingredient of much effective personal development, in seminars and in coaching.

We help people raise their awareness of their choices in The Point of Awareness.

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Facing resistance offers potential for breakthrough

23 January 2012 By

Not infrequently we might encourage others to resolve a problem by changing in some way, only to find that they resist the idea and the problem continues, if not gets worse. This is the phenomenon of resistance*, where someone refuses or avoids change, either in or outside of awareness. Thus we have the expression, “What you resist, persists.”

I referred in the last post to how we can very quickly forget an insight or awareness that might contribute to our growth. Other ways this might show up is where people just don’t seem to get it, although others point it out to them. Or they might vigorously defend something, and counter all your arguments till you give up. According to Jung, we resist parts of our Shadow, disowned parts of ourselves, and thus get more of it in our lives, perhaps in other people or situations we encounter. It is suggested that if instead we “look at” what we disown, we start to loosen its hold over us.

Resistance that occurs in groups can be overt but also very subtle. As well as the more overt resistances, it can occur through the person becoming suddenly very sleepy or tired, or have difficulty grasping what’s being said. It’s as though there’s a part of themselves that is fighting this like crazy.

From the perspective of a point of awareness, this can be very powerful. The resistance points out an area for growth that a person might not be aware of. It is almost as if the soul at some level is saying, “Yes, you’re on target. That’s it!” So the very area that we seem to be struggling over is our area for growth. There’s a conflict going on, between our ego part of us, which wants to hang on to the status quo, even if unfulfilling, and our growth potential part.

The thing is, the growth potential part of us is pulling like crazy on our awareness, and it won’t go away easily, or at least only at the cost of lingering dissatisfaction with our lives as currently lived.

The Point of Awareness program is distinctly designed to help people have breakthroughs in their areas of resistance,

*For a Wikipedia article on resistance, click here

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Being present and aware in whatever you are doing

20 January 2012 By

In all the busy-ness of your day, I wonder if there’s a part of you that doesn’t want to be doing what you are doing? Or a part that thinks you’ve got too much to do? Or doesn’t want to be where you are?

Apart from considerations of making changes in those situations in the future, it can be worth reflecting on the totality of your awareness in that situation. We can get so heavily invested in our dislike of our current circumstances that we don’t allow ourselves to drop it, let go, surrender and “be” in that moment. Like simply dropping the inner dialogue that is resisting the situation. While we are so resisting, we’re consuming energy in a negative direction. In a way, it is a “denial of life,” as Eckhart Tolle says (in Stillness Speaks).

The skill is to pick up, become aware, that there’s even a tiny bit inside that doesn’t want to be doing it, and to let it go.

“Being in the moment” practice can be done by becoming aware of the moment, noticing the inner dialogue, taking a deep breath, and on the out-breath say to yourself, “Let go” of whatever is going on, and then be aware of of your breathing for a few moments. This helps you become present. Then just allow yourself to focus on the Now, and on what’s going on. If your mind goes off somewhere, notice that, breathe, and come back to the present. Keep practicing that.

This is one reason why meditation is so useful, to give you training in letting go and being present. Mindfulness training does that same thing. So does going for a walk and being very present and aware as you do that.

Of course it helps even more if you can raise your awareness of your mind’s tendency to “go off on one” about whatever is going on in your mind, and how to manage that.

All this is included in our program, The Point of Awareness.

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In praise of enthusiasm

19 January 2012 By

It’s well-known by marketeers, sales people, educators, communicators and presenters that if you want to communicate something and get people interested, be enthusiastic. People who aren’t enthusiastic about what they are talking about are liable to switch people off. Start to feel bored by something in your talk and you can see the boredom in people’s eyes. It’s like a collective sleep takes hold. The enthusiasm needs to be genuine, since people aren’t so easily fooled and pick up on the underlying energy of the communication, where you are coming from.

What can also be challenging for communicators is that they can lose enthusiasm for what they talk about. How many of us have had bored, uninterested lessons with bored, uninterested teachers? What we might not have known is that those teachers had lost touch with that part of themselves that was enthused by their subject, or in the communicating of it over time, the communicating part had lost its shine.

So, where you are coming from needs some thought. Here’s one take. The word “enthusiasm” comes from the Greek enthusiasmos, and the syllable en means “in” or “within”, or “possessed” and theos means “God”. So the word “enthusiasm” means “carrying God within” or “possessed of the Inner Lord”. Thus when you are connected with your Self within, and can speak from that space, you can have mighty communication! Thus we often speak of “being connected to your candle flame” when you speak. When you can, for example, feel that energy within, and hold it in your awareness as you speak, people really feel it.

Why do they feel it? Because your connectedness, your inner contact, then touches theirs. Thus do people resonate. If of course they allow themselves to so do. It can be almost automatic. Examples of this include laughter, which it has been shown triggers chemical responses in other people’s brains, such that they smile. Authentic laughter is also the language of the Self. Another is when people feel a “frog in their throat” such that their voice chokes slightly, others may also cough. Also, it’s well-known now that around 55% of communication is non-verbal and 38% is tone of voice. So enthusiasm will show, in the tone of voice and body language for example. The subtlety of communication.

People will feel it too because it touches something in them. This is another example of where people are mirrors for us, reflecting back to us something about ourselves. Something in us is being remembered through our observation of another. So people say things like, “I feel your pain.” It’s not necessarily the same, since we don’t really know what others experience, as it goes through perceptual filters, but it triggers something for us.

So when you communicate with enthusiasm, you are touching others, lighting them up too, helping them connect with something inside them. When you speak authentically, from your Self within, imagine what power you have, positive power, to touch others, for their higher good as well as yours.

This is where awareness training can be so useful, to connect with that Self within, so that you may speak from that space, Who you really Are.

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Our sad times can have something to teach us

16 January 2012 By

Today is sometimes referred to as “Blue Monday“, on account of it being apparently the saddest day of the year, or so it has been dubbed. It is said that the gloss of Christmas and the New Year has faded, people have debts to pay off and pay day is still a while off, it’s a long time till the next public holiday, the nights are dark and seemingly go on forever, we some of us don’t get much sunlight on our skin and thus not enough vitamin D, and other aspects of winter. Not surprisingly there are those out there seeking to counter this, such as this website I found.

Statistics and the media apart, it’s well known for people to feel down after Christmas as we go through midwinter in the north here. It’s worth noticing how much we ourselves are affected by these times, since it can rub off on others. For some Chistmas is a great time for meeting up and family, for others it’s less like that. However, once it’s all past, we get back to the realities of our daily lives. Here, we don’t have distractions, and whatever goes on for us can crowd in. Thus it’s worth noticing how much we use external stimuli to divert us from what’s really going on. Not that there isn’t merit in that, and it does help people shift their mood, as the second website above shows. The point here is, from a self-awareness point of view, to be aware of the undercurrents that we might not be attending to at our cost. They can have a way of reasserting themselves, unless dealt with. Moreover, it is also important to have self-management strategies, ways that you can manage your mind and regain a positive focus. It is one thing to notice what’s going on, and another to then manage it and let it go.

For people on a self-development path, such data is very important, to be aware of what get’s in the way, what is preventing us being who we really are, and keeping us from experiencing the love, peace and joy that is our birthright.

Some will feel sceptical and cynical in reading those words. “As if life is like that,” might be a thought. Yes, life is like that. Living in ego mode, in survival mode, we’ve learned strategies to keep us from getting too down and we cope. Such do we avoid our inner pain. We fear too much to face it. Yet facing it is our way out. I remember a saying we once put on the wall of a course we were helping with: “Let the cracks appear. They are your way out”.

Down times like these can be very powerfully instructive, much though we might resist it. These “dark nights of the soul” have great healing potential. Thus it is important not to resist them but instead get very curious about what we have to learn from them. Challenging but ultimately highly beneficial, as St John of the Cross, from whom the term “Dark Night” originates, learned for himself whilst imprisoned in appalling circumstances.

So, if you’re feeling down, start getting curious about what it is really about for you. You may not like it, but it’s there for a reason.

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