How we can talk ourselves out of our capabilities

22 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

One way that older people particularly feel the sense that they don’t have so much time left is seeing others doing what they once did, that others are taking over their role, that there isn’t a role for them in the workplace, and that those now doing it are much younger than them and often quite different. You could even say that people start to sense a potential redundancy quite young, even after let’s say 40.

I’m focusing here on the feeling, not so much on the actual situation, as it is often perception-dependent. For example it is perfectly possible to begin new careers, to position yourself and operate differently in the market place and, given the likelihood that many will now work for much longer than they used to, the contribution of the older person at work will over time change and be seen differently and more positively. For example, there is the contribution of knowledge, expertise and wisdom and many smarter ones are already selling this contribution. Such people evaluate the market and re-position their offering.

However, in self-awareness terms, it is worth looking at how the older person perceives their situation, and not just in work-related terms. It can be very easy to get locked into a self-perception that you are “over the hill”. This is all about self-confidence and self-belief. People who find themselves no longer in the first flush of youth can start to doubt themselves, at any stage. It can be very easy to talk ourselves out of our capabilities, and then what we believe manifests itself. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

To change the perception will vary from person to person, but it can include counting our blessings and identifying our assets, rather than limiting our sense of our potential by a comparison with others. So often in groups I’ve listened to people describe a very self-deprecating and self-limiting view of themselves, only to hear other much more positive perceptions of them by others. Such is the power of the mind. Where the mind goes, the energy flows. Talk ourselves down, and down things go.

So, for the older person, and I mean “older” simply as a comparison with “younger” and this could be at any age in fact, this is about looking at what we make ourselves and the world mean, and re-framing those that are not serving us. So a useful activity could be to write down all the self-deprecating words you use about yourself and the age-related comparisons you’re making with others, as a list on one side of a sheet of paper. Then on the other side, come up with positive re-descriptions of what you offer. It may take some work, and you may need to ask others, and re-visit the list. However, this is about finding ways to view ourselves differently. Then the point is the get into valuing yourself, rather than not, and then present yourself to the world from this new space.

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Suddenly waking up to the fact that you’re getting older

21 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

People come to significant change points at different times in their lives. For some it is when they past 30, others it’s 40 and that can feel like a major milestone. However you hear less perhaps of those passing 50 or 60, or later. Issues can arise around these age-related milestones that for one reason or another tilt one to re-evaluating one’s life and perhaps to tackling what is getting in the way for them.

What can often drive concern over what one is doing and what one is achieving is a hidden sense that time is running out. It’s the realisation, for true or false, that “there’s not so much time left” to do whatever it is that one is driven by. With age milestones, we are often brought closer to our own mortality. It’s not a subject most of us like to think about and given the fear of dying and death, it’s not surprising we avoid it. So, something that gets us to think about an aspect of it can be chilling.

This can also come up with the loss of a loved one, as well as the grief around their loss. Or the death of others not so close to us. We might ask ourselves what’s it all about, or what does life mean for us. And if the answer’s a bit negative, we’re likely to go looking for things that provide a stronger sense of purpose. Or we might look anew at our careers, or whatever else is important for us.

Accomplishment and success is a major driver for many people, the sense that you’ve achieved what you set out to do, but also for many it’s what you are doing is in line with your goals in life. Are you, in other words, “on purpose”?

As people get older, along with the sense of “time running out” is the concern over their capabilities and the willingness of society to accept their contribution. In an ageist environment like the UK, where there’s still age discrimination despite legislation, there’s obviously concern over employment. But behind that can also lie a question linked with self-belief. “How much longer can I do this?” The likelihood is that it’s a lot longer, but it’s the limiting belief that needs looking at. Then there’s the recession, which is hitting those over 50 and those under 25, with a sense of reduced opportunity. So, one may feel constrained or limited.

From a self awareness perspective, the point is to look at what is driving the sense of crisis or challenge that people so often experience with age-related milestones, one that can set in some time after the birthday champagne has been drunk.

These are classic reasons which bring people into self development and I often hear them voiced in my seminars.

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Where desire, need and wanting can cost us unless we let go

17 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

If you watch a small child who hasn’t got what he or she wanted, it’s very likely their face will pucker up, there will be a pause, a deep gasp for air and then out will come a traumatised scream. It’s not the scream of one physically hurt. It’s more likely the rage of disappointed expectations. We got to experience and express it early on, and were well-practised at it, until we learned more subtle and skillful ways to get our own way.

Disappointed expectations can often be expressed as rage. The pain that underlies it, the depth of the upset, comes out as anger, and it takes more work to elicit the underlying hurt. These feelings get locked in the body, especially if not expressed. For many of us, we learned to suppress how we felt in a society not so tolerant of self-expression: “Behave yourself…button it…be quiet…”, etc. The anger may rumble on underneath, perhaps surfacing every now and again in some event that triggers the underlying hurt. We may feel the anger, and its related upset, in a body tension, and later on in life in illnesses such as those related to the heart.

So it is useful to pay attention to the sense that we have not got from life what we expected. This is as relevant to people feeling very driven in say their work and their careers as it is in relation to a relationship. Another example might be the drive to be successful, and continually feeling we’ve not got it, or not got it “enough”. There’s a lack of satisfaction in some way that we seek from life and don’t get it, feel frustrated, and keep coming back to the same issues. In Gestalt terms it is an incomplete Gestalt, unfinished business, in relation to past events being expressed in present-day circumstances.

Thus it is so valuable to find ways to let go of expectation, desire, wanting, needing, where it is driving us unhealthily, and do something to safely release the pent-up emotion in the body, and not at your own or others’ expense. If it has affected our health of course, it is wise to do that under some form of professional support from people who have experience and knowledge in this area. And lots of exercise too, since the stored-up emotion will very likely manifest in a body state that needs exercise in part to restore its healthy functioning. So, with great care.

Good seeking, that which takes us to the discovery of who we really are, to a place of inner acceptance and a love of oneself and of one another unconditionally, has a healing all of its own. When we let go and connect with our inner positivity, we release masses of positive chemicals, and of course feel a whole lot better about ourselves and about life. So, instead of potential heart disease, imagine the benefits of meditating on your heart centre and releasing the love that dwells within!

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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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Where the desire for more money might not serve us

9 February 2012 By Leave a Comment

How much money you have, whether you have enough money, whether you are secure, whether you have “financial freedom” are all questions that buzz around so many people’s minds. “It’s what money can get me,” people say. While many of us might think that money can’t buy happiness, there’s lots of others that think it comes as a result, backed up by a lot of surveys that show that the wealthier tend to be happier. An odd mix of contradictions!

To a yogi, the pursuit of more money is an aspect of desire, an ego characteristic where we are never satisfied with what we have. We are, according to this line of thinking, wanting and wanting and always wanting. It’s like an addictive cycle. We want, then we get and then we want again. The getting doesn’t satisfy, or not for long. It’s seen by yogis as a major trap on the spiritual path, for example where our minds in meditation get caught up in thinking in some way connected with desire. By contrast the sadhu cultivates non-attachment to desire, but instead equipoise, balance, evenness of mind, patience, allowing, and letting go. Desire introduces unevenness of mind, anxiety, fear, anger, frustration, jealousy, and off we go into some pit of unease. To the yogi this is how happiness is lost, in among other things addiction to desire.

Of course there’s more than one side to desire. We could also say that there’s a positive wanting, where you set yourself a goal that you intention to achieve, and here you have something you want to do. You might be positively motivated in this. Also you might want to earn money to put food on the table in the sense that it is a need, a fundamental to living. Maslow is well-known for his “hierarchy” of needs, all considered natural to the human being. We could debate these but at least it gives one perspective on the value of needs.

“Need” and “want” overlap, as you will see if you consult the dictionary definitions, and it depends on which meaning of each you are using. So at one end a need might imply a requirement or a necessity, while at the other end a want could be a wish. Take your pick!

Whichever word you are using, it can be useful to enquire into what you mean when you are pursuing a need, want or desire. Because the other side to desire is the wanting that suggests a deficit need, the sense that one is really driven by a lack or a fear of a lack, or by some compulsion or addiction to wanting, or some ego attachment in which the sense of identity is wrapped up with wanting. So the need or want for money might be ego-driven. For example, my sense of who I am is that I have worth if I have enough money, and I might see myself as worthless if I’m so badly off without it that I’m destitute. Interesting that we use “worth” to include both a financial value and also a human value! This is where the pursuit of more money becomes an unhealthy driver than harms us ourselves and/or others around us.

 

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When flexibility turns into resistance

26 January 2012 By

We could say that at the other end of resistance is change flexibility, an openness to change, an ability to be adaptable, to see new ways of doing things and a willingness to adjust and even to embrace the change. That sounds nice and positive, and no doubt those sponsoring the change would welcome it, but when you hit a change you don’t want, then the boot is on the other foot.

In emotional intelligence terms, flexibility can be placed with other “behaviours” within a cluster which is referred to as “self-management”, the ability to mange one’s emotional responses. These can include, as well as flexibility, the ability to keep one’s emotions under control, to be open and transparent, an achievement orientation, proactivity and drive to take action and take the initiative, and a disposition to be optimistic. This is where one is either in awareness or outside of awareness influencing one’s responses in a positive direction and perhaps the key word is optimistic.

Underlying all this is the emotional driver, how you feel about the change, or whatever it is that is calling on your ability to let go of being resistant and become “flexible”. I can somehow hear all those change-weary people saying “Oh yeah!” Of course it depends where you are on the change curve, whether you are still in the early stages of grief, let’s say, and you’re feeling those upset feelings or in the midst of feeling depressed and “in the pits”. But it might be a change too far, one that doesn’t chime with where you at, which might now be different from where others want to go. Or maybe its your fundamental interests that are affected, what you cherish and value that’s at stake.

There’s a lot of talk at present about resilience, the ability to bounce back from adversity, and it is worth seeing beyond the immediate response we have to something we don’t like to what it has to teach us. While we might get very self-righteous in our defence of our interests, we might not see the underlying lesson in our resistance. It might be that we are right, for our destiny in life, not to go along with what is being proposed, but we might need to look for the real lesson. For example, there might be another direction we need to take. In staying stuck in denial or in resistance, we might continue some battle against the change and therefore miss the breakthrough or the new direction that might be there waiting for us.

So flexibility doesn’t necessarily mean giving way, or giving up on your values, or denying your real purpose. It’s more about being able to take a step back and take the over-view, to be really honest with yourself and from a perspective free of ego, in humility. This invites us to really learn what letting go really means, and learning about allowing, and about openness to what is.

In that unconditional space, the universe speaks to us, and we really hear.

We study these crucial self-awareness and self management skills in The Point of Awareness program.

 

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When you’re totally and utterly stuck

25 January 2012 By

Psychological growth can occur after periods of feeling stuck. When we’re stuck it’s as though we can’t see a way forward or a way out. We’ve still got the problem and it continues to get to us and be getting in the way of our life. In Gestalt terms, we have some awareness and but are immobilised at the point where we’re seeking options and choices as to what to do. Stuck phases can seem enormously frustrating, if not depressing.

Physically it can feel like we’re rooted to the spot, weighed down, lacking fluidity and ease of movement. There can be a tendency to go round in circles, going over and over the problem or challenge as if that’s all there is. It’s very hard to see the bigger picture. We’re down in some hole.

I once had great help from a friend over being stuck, when he helped me visualise being stuck in one such hole. In working on it, I imagined going all around this hole till I knew it backwards, so to speak. He helped me think of what the sides were like and I realised the sides weren’t as high as I had imagined and that there were sticking out bits and roots that I could cling to so that I might be able to climb out. I then had to learn to believe I could climb out. We didn’t talk of him giving me a rope and pulling me up. This was about me getting out myself.

Taking responsibility and realising we have power over our situation, and then actively doing something about it that changes it are vital components. Yet it helps to reframe the perception of the situation and then to find options to use. Vitally though, we very often need to go back to our awareness and find what else we might become aware of but haven’t yet. Then once we’ve done that, there’s a much more powerful energy at our disposal. Then effort is needed, tapping into the energy, to make the changes that are needed, even dealing with the part of us that is reluctant, and resisting becoming aware and making the change. Often the resistant bit is about a part of us we’re not willing to recognise, embrace and change. The resistance and the clinging on to the old understandings helps keep the stuckness in place. It’s us ourselves that need to do something about this.

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How we so easily forget what we most need to learn for our higher purpose

22 January 2012 By

In one of my talks last week, I was asked about the challenges of remembering and practicing what we were talking about after the session was over. I remarked that it is very easy to forget it and to continue with one’s old ways.

In fact one powerful amnesiac is getting in the car after the talk and turning on the engine. If you think about it, how much do you do it and where does your mind then tend to go? It’s a knee-jerk response, like much of life lived in the ego state, with a whole lot of well-established patterns that will kick in. You literally switch them on. Like for example listening to the music available or thinking about what you are going to be doing next, or some work problem, etc.

The point is that we have all sorts of well-established patterns that some well-used trigger will then activate.

The challenge is to bring our minds back to what we’re wanting to work on as part of our self-development, or to the state of mind or whatever, that you see as important or are wanting to cultivate. Our minds can so very easily go off on one, down well-trodden, familiar neural pathways.

The ego doesn’t like to be unsettled and, as it is about survival and keeping us safe, will seek to reinstate the old patterns as soon as possible. “You’d better get back to thinking about that problem, because xxxx might happen”, and back you go to that worry you had on your mind before, let’s say, the talk. It’s such a powerful pull.

This is why managing the mind is so important, learning to spot when you ego is in motion, what your ego tends to do, and bring your awareness back on track. Managing the mind requires awareness and practice, not a one-off quick fix. So, maybe today, look out for when your mind has gone off on one in a way that isn’t serving your higher purpose.

This whole skill is taught as part of our powerful program, The Point of Awareness.

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Working through sadness and fear to find the real self

17 January 2012 By

When we’re depressed and down, it can feel like it’s who we are and there doesn’t seem like there’s any way out and we’re stuck with it. That’s exactly when it can get very hard to see what it’s got to teach us. The part of us that’s self-aware and enquiring can be dulled by the sheer weight of depression and the energy we might put into self-enquiry is stilled.

One major reason why our dark nights of the soul are so important is that they are revealing to us our dark side so that it may be healed and transformed. Jung called our dark side The Shadow, that which we disowned. Yet once people commit to a path of self-development, that is what we’ll get, those things we need to learn from. This again is Neale Donald Walsch’s point when he says, “In the absence of that which you are not, that which you are, is not.” You get challenged by the seeming opposites to who you think you are. It is healing because it is helping to clear out aspects of the ego.

So our “dark nights” are so important, although hard to see for what they are. Your hidden negativities are being brought to the surface. Imperfections you didn’t know existed will be right there in your face. Invaluable. No wonder yogis speak of the way yoga brings up and heals the samskaras, the impurities from past lives.

We can get paralysed by these experiences. Yet it is so important in self-development to work them through. The most powerful obstacle is fear, and yet this is the biggest illusion of them all. The important thing is to not hang on to them but to find a way to let them go. The more we carry on with the “story” of what we think to be so, the more we keep the illusion alive. It is an invention, a creation of ego. None of this stuff is who you really are. Through self-awareness work you can come to know more and more who you are, and thus the illusion becomes clearer. You can get this in meditation, by becoming aware of the ego stuff and refocusing your awareness on the breath, the mantra and the pure awareness of Being. Thus you are reinforcing the reality of your real self.

Also it’s about being easy with yourself and forgiving yourself, letting it go, and allowing your real Self to be there. Letting go can include letting go of the attachment to feeling sad or depressed. We can get heavily attached to who we think we are, and invest huge energy in trying to maintain it, like believing this sad, fearful self is who we think we are. Yet fear drains us massively of energy. The more you can face your fear, the more you can learn to dissolve and release it and let it go. Then you can discover a massive new energy and explore the love that until then has lain hidden.

This is important work, and it can need skilled help to support you through it. We deal with these kinds of issues on our program, The Point of Awareness.

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How drinking limits our awareness of being

11 January 2012 By

After the “excess” of Christmas comes the reckoning. And it’s not just in our bank balance that we feel it. The New Year is also a time for confronting our addictions in other ways. Hence people include “losing weight”, “getting fit” and “less chocolate” on their to-do lists. Food has tended to figure high for ages, but alcohol consumption has been a more recent addition, no doubt fuelled by the high levels of town-centre and youth drunkenness recently and the rising warnings of the dangers to one’s health not just of drinking binges but also long-term, steady consumption.

It is quite sobering, pardon the pun, to read for example of the symptoms, or rather lack of them, for the onset of liver disease. What I was struck by was that people are likely to be laregly unaware of any potential life-threatening risk until quite late on. Hence not surprisingly people are mow warning us to not just cut down but cut it out for parts of each week.

“What!” you might think, “Can’t I have at least some pleasure?” I can almost hear the puritan preacher in the pulpit warning of hellfire and damnation, or those Hogarth engravings of the Idle Apprentice, or of Gin Lane, both in 18th Century London.

However, part of my family is Catholic and Irish, so there’s a mixed heritage. As a lover of a glass of good wine, I’m aware of the challenges of steady drinking myself, albeit at a small level, and have found it helps to abstain except at weekends when I choose a good bottle of wine to enjoy. But I noticed the effort initially required and when engaged in that effort became aware of the subtle power of the bottle. For example, drinking was habitual, like it formed a distinctive and pleasureable part of the evening, and not to have a drink left, initially a sense of something missing. However, it could be subtler than that, because alcohol deadens the senses and gives a short-term lift. So, rather than rely on my own inbuilt or developed ways to manage my state, I was using something artificial. And alcohol stays in the system a long time, and thus there’s a long time that it is limiting one’s awareness.

Now for a lot of people, that has a value, one they may not be aware of, that cuts them off to some degree from how they feel, for example if you want to avoid something difficult. But you can see how tempting it is to become over-dependent of this prop to avoid facing our challenges.

Looked at another way, using alcohol even at low levels, such as I am writing about, is limiting our ability to tune inside and be aware of the subtle, powerful and very positive forces within us, for example that still, small voice within that speaks to us of our higher purpose, that seeks to remind us of Who we really Are, that senses when something is true or not true for us, that is tugging at our sleave saying, “You are so much more than all this.” It is like an amnesiac, blotting out our awareness for parts of the day to some extent. It’s like we’re escaping that which potentailly offers us bliss. Ironic.

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