Fear of speaking the truth

12 April 2012 By

Do you find yourself struggling to get a handle on what’s really on your mind, and do you find it hard to say what it is too? If so, join the human race.

I’ve just been doing a bit of research about how Google is changing its search methodology and I found this blog comment: “Apparently what we type in is not what we actually want, most of the time… Therefore Google is studying how to develop a mathematical model for language to interpret what we are actually searching for: Amit Singal said,“When it comes to human language understanding we are still at the toddler stage…But over the next ten years we will attain the level of an eight or nine year old. We’ll be able to perfect experiences we don’t fully trust today””.

I was struck by the “what we type in is not what we actually want” bit. So human! What comes out isn’t the full story and we don’t always even know it ourselves!

People may very often struggle to express themselves. They might not be able to find the words for what’s on their mind. Then they might feel reluctant to say what’s really there to others, what is often a fear of speaking the truth. And then they might not really know what it really is anyway. Confusing.

So it can be for people.

I’m not so sure about the infantile allusions in that quote, and yet there’s a ring of truth too. In the sense that we “grow” psychologically, there is an aspect here of us learning more about what goes on for us, our raised self awareness, and this can have the feel about it of maturing, feeling more calm and steady in ourselves, more centred. And this comes over to others. Psychologists speak of us having a “developmental arrest” at certain stages in our growing up, when we get a sort of psychological freeze-frame around a certain event and our inner response. These events “mark” us in a way, and we make up all sorts of meanings about ourselves, others and about life based on these events. So, “growth” can involve becoming aware of what remains of these events in our psyche, and in our bodies, and releasing ourselves from their hold over us.

However, such events will have the effect on us of our cutting ourselves off from certain aspects of ourselves and how we feel, desensitisation, and/or of it being too painful to go there, and we tend to deflect our awareness away on to something else.

There again, part of our pattern might be for it to take time for a thought to come clear in our minds, let alone type it or speak it. This can relate to confidence, or simply being slow to formulate things clearly. I say “slow” but this too is an interpretation and we may be very effective in our our own way in how we formulate our understanding.

There’s also others’ reaction to what we say: “What will they think?” Or say or do? Our fear of others’ negative reactions, our perceptions of what others think, or what we think they think (!), is a big inhibitor too. As I said, welcome to the human race.

But it’s fascinating to me that Google is trying to get clever around second-guessing what people are meaning, when they can’t or don’t say it themselves. Which brings up the whole area of how much we can really, genuinely, “know” what others mean. And the programs will be written by humans. And humans filter their experience and interpret it. So, this will be interesting.

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To keep going is also to hold to your vision

11 April 2012 By

Keeping going despite the odds is also about holding to your vision and your intention. The Law of Attraction says that while we are focused on adversity, that is what we get more of. When we focus on what we want, and do that with positive intent and in a feeling-good state, then we are vastly more positively attracting.

What can be a really striking example of this is how when we are in a state of fear, our minds are much more closed off to creative thinking. The emotional part of the brain is engaged, our fear hormones are being released and we experience stress. This is the flight/fight/freeze response. In a state of fear it gets very hard to think of creative solutions to our difficulties. All we can see is the problem and then we think of negative solutions. We can get so disliking of the fear that we’ll do anything to avoid it. After all we are drawn to pleasure and seek to avoid pain. Yet fear is an illusion and can be released without changing direction.

When in a creative, resourceful state, we can see multiple options. In any one moment there are always multiple options. This is one very important point from the Quantum world. If we get into an open resourceful state, we get to think outside the box. This is how successful entrepreneurs operate. There’s the well-known story of how Richard Branson was marooned in the Caribbean with a whole lot of other passengers when his flight was cancelled. However he went off and chartered a plane, advertised the flight to the others and so recouped his costs! Not one to miss a business opportunity! Thus, the fear doesn’t get in the way.

If you get fearful, you close off the options. The key is to get into that positive, unattached resourceful state. This is one reason why it is so important to learn to manage your state, to manage your mind. Our minds can create utter bliss for us, or utter hell. And the more you progress on this journey, the more this can come up, to point the way. Hence the great value of the dark night of the soul alluded to in the last post. We might be doing really well, and then we might flip off somewhere really dark. yet the dark is an illusion. We get tested.

Hence adversity is an opportunity to re-connect with purpose and align yourself with your truth. Out of adversity comes real strength.

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Filed Under: Creating your Reality Tagged With: , , ,

To keep going could be to have blind faith

10 April 2012 By

Keeping going despite the apparent odds – that’s what life can sometimes seem to be like. It’s a moot point whether to decide to abandon what you’re doing because it’s getting difficult, or whether to soldier on, as they say, in order to somehow accomplish your goal.

You might for example be really feeling up against it at the moment. You might be in a state of fear or panic and be really concerned that it’s all going to go belly up. People doing business start-ups, or people in a new product launch, would recognise this frequently at various stages in the process. So too would travellers way out on some journey and things are going wrong, or people out of work and the cash is running low. What about when you’re really running short of money? Should you abandon your venture, give up on your goal, your dream,  and accept second best? “Get a sensible job!” the sirens wail.

This situation can also apply to one who has come up against their own dark night of the soul, when lets say in the middle of the night you awaken from a very bad dream, in which your fears were somehow being acted out, or when some state of depression takes you off down some black hole. Our so-called ordinary (what’s ordinary?) life can bring us into face-to-face contact with our own despair, when we can’t see any hope, and all life offers seems to be going nowhere.

Wherever we are in our minds is wherever we are in our minds. It’s important to remember that. Faced with adversity, another person may view the same situation differently. The perception of lack of hope and faith is just that, although it doesn’t feel like that. It can feel utterly real, like that is reality, that is how things are. Somewhere inside we need to access our resources that tell us that this is a perception. It is not reality, since there is no one reality in the world of illusion, of maya. This is where the will is so important, and the will may need to be cultivated.

Developing one’s inner resources, the inner awareness of Self, of Oneness, of love, of the state of bliss, of inner peace and contentment, all that practice in awareness, brings us into contact with a Presence that shows that what can occur in extreme states of negativity is still not real. It is a state and we need skill in shifting our state, on re-focusing on that which uplifts us.

The great value of the dark nights of the soul is to point out to us that which we need to learn order to re-connect. Sometimes you might just need to be aware that this is a simple shift that’s needed, and sometimes a big effort is needed. And effort is part of the journey. Despair is ego, love isn’t. Despair and loss of hope and faith is being ensnared in maya. Love, bliss and joy isn’t. And it is something for all of us, while also being compassionate with our tough times. They are teaching us something really important.

No wonder faith is often called “blind faith”.

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Filed Under: Inner Self Tagged With: , ,

There are always reminders of our inner presence

9 April 2012 By

Yesterday we went out to visit a friend for her birthday and took the chance of this “re-birth” day too to go to a local architectural beauty, Tewkesbury Abbey. Inside the building was decorated with yellow spring flowers and it was filled with incense from the morning Easter Sunday service. The incense hung in the building as a thin mist, which gave an even more ethereal feel to the place. It was suitably mysterious but full of energy from the earlier celebration.

Tewkesbury Abbey altar and choir

Tewkesbury Abbey altar and choir

Easter Sunday celebrates the resurrection of Christ, and whatever your views about this or other aspects of Christian beliefs, it still felt good to be around a celebration of a major event in people’s lives. The event has  symbolised for so many people the conquest of death, and offered immense and reassuring hope to people despite the difficulties of their lives that in the end, if they stayed with their faith they would live for ever in paradise, that life is everlasting.

This aspect runs through much of religion and spiritual practice around the world, that if you change direction, or keep on your path, you will be rewarded, that the current dispensation is prone to suffering but that it doesn’t have to be like this, that humans are liable to go off down some unhelpful side alley but they can return to truth and awaken to what is really there for them. However, to do this, they need to challenge the devil within them and re-focus on that which uplifts them.

How we interpret this, and what gloss we put put on it is down to us, unless you buy into those that insist that their particular version is the only way.

I walked around the building in the mist. It was a quite dark day and so very dark inside, despite the subdued lighting, which helped create the particular mystery that these buildings have. The Abbey is very old, dating back to the 12th Century, and has lots of chapels built for the local medieval aristocracy. It was a monastery until the 16th Century but clearly well-endowed by those well-heeled who needed prayers to be said for their departed souls, as they saw it.

The darkness of the building took my awareness within and the lofty heights raised it upwards. In these places the eye is almost naturally drawn up, which was no doubt intentional for its creators. The smell of the incense penetrated my lungs and has stayed as a sense of the spirit of the place. The presence in these places stills my mind and remains as an image reminder of inner stillness for hours afterwards.

Whatever we do and wherever we go, there are always reminders of our inner presence. It’s a matter perhaps of noticing them and re-membering.

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Devotion to a spiritual practice may not be easy

4 April 2012 By

The idea of following a spiritual practice is one that is likely to be an instant turn-off to the “I must have it now” culture. Yet, the real fruits of a turn-around at the level of consciousness tend to come after long periods of focused devotion to that which uplifts you.

I say it’s a turn-off for many and it’s therefore important to ask what that’s about, since even a new devotee to adopting a practice needs to be aware of what can get in the way, so as to be able to counter it. We’re many of us used to the idea of instant gratification: it’s all around us, for example in the click of a mouse, the flick of a switch, grabbing the remote, the purchase of food and drink, the use of drugs, buying some new gadget, even a quick break, and many of us can quickly distract ourselves. I gave a talk recently about how we create our own reality, and one of the attendees, among several, paused from his absorption in texting or whatever he was doing with his smartphone to ask me, “Is there any quick fix?” When I said, “No”, he lost interest and returned to his phone.

However, people who have raised their levels of consciousness have usually dedicated themselves to the path, in whatever way suits them. A spiritual practice will involve things like regular silent time, meditation, prayer or contemplation, reading uplifting material, singing or chanting, work or voluntary activity that involves stepping outside the constraints of the ego often by service to others, care over what they eat and drink, attention to what they “take in” from their environment, the careful attention to their mind’s activities, keeping “good company”, a focus on the object of spiritual devotion, and so on. In more general terms, one who is working on their own personal development could take out the more overtly spiritual aspects of the above and still follow pursuits that ensure their minds are focused on what takes them forward, studying material that helps them know more of who they really are, engaging in new activities that help them learn new more empowering skills that takes them beyond limitation, challenging that in the ego which holds them back, taking care of themselves, and acting in other ways that help support their development.

To the “instant society”, this is boring. To take our awareness beyond the material is scary and actually sounds negative. Yet the careful cultivation of the purity and clarity of the mind is to recognise that the “instant society” is cluttering up and distracting the mind and keeping it firmly in the domain of the ego. Thus we lose the possibility to open our minds to the joy and beauty of the Self. Cultivation of the inner Self means to practice in ways that stills this “mind stuff” and negativity, quietens incessant thinking, and allows the peace and joy of who we really are to be present. Spiritual or personal development practice is about being present, aware, still, silent, connected, at One. It requires effort and devotion. It’s the paradox of finding lightness through doing something that’s not to be taken lightly.

So Easter and re-birth is a good time to reflect on where we’re going with all this and can we really commit?

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Filed Under: Inner Self Tagged With: , , , ,

Opening up and allowing in the new is essential to our growth

3 April 2012 By

Developing an ability to open up, to allow in the new, is very important. It’s a part of our growth function in psychological terms. Hence we need change flexibility, to be able to adapt. If we don’t do this, we close off access to part of our life force. It also makes us more able to awaken, which is a facility open to all of us.

Many of us have got so locked into resisting change and are focused on what’s missing and on the past that we miss this potentiality that’s there.

We can spontaneously wake up every day, literally as we wake up from sleep. These times just before going to sleep or on awakening are very important. It’s worth paying attention to the moment of waking. Alan Watts described how he’d have the experience of an awakening every morning. “Every morning, as I first awaken, I have a feeling of total clarity as to the sense of life, a feeling of myself and the universe as a matter of the utmost simplicity. “I” and “That which is” are the same. Always have been and always will be.” (from In my Own Way)

The ego of course can very quickly shut this off, and whatever is preoccupying our minds can fast crowd in and off we go on our familiar thought patterns. Yet, being open to allowing, to be present, to let this initial moment of awareness to be there, is very important.

Psychics say that these moments of waking up from sleep, or just before going to sleep are times when our consciousness is much more open. Similarly people who wake in the night with insights have potentially similar experiences.

Thus it is useful to cultivate our wakefulness through such things as mindfulness and meditation. This is when we can still our mental activity and allow an intensification of awareness to occur, to be “aware of awareness.”

So as we approach the Easter weekend, with its powerful symbolism of re-birth, here is an invaluable practice easily available, if we just choose to give our mind to it. Shift our minds away from whatever cares there are, give it all a break, and spend time to be aware of your awareness.

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What part of you now needs to open up?

2 April 2012 By

No doubt many people are now either on holiday or preparing for one, or at least looking forward to a little time off over Easter next weekend. Does it feel like it’s well-deserved?

Traditionally at this time in the west we’re coming up to Easter and the celebrations to mark Christ’s execution and resurrection. As a feast, it’s partly pagan in origin in connection with fertility and in religious terms seems to have roots in such areas as the Jewish Passover. More broadly, we could look at this time as one of re-birth  or re-awakening. After the winter, spring is now in the air and nature is opening up, trees are in blossom and here in the UK the woods are full of bluebells, like what you can see on our homepage.

I guess many of us look forward to this time, with its anticipation of the arrival of summer and all the positive associations that go with it. For some people, we might notice it but part of us is metaphorically still stuck in winter. So, odd though it may seem, it can be hard to shake off the habits of thought from wintertime. Then we have colder spells still and the weather here in the UK can suddenly switch back into cold. So there’s reason still to keep hold of our winter clothes for a while yet.

So the notion of re-birth can be treated with caution by some. Has it really happened, is it true and can I trust it? Or is this something “happy clappy” people do? There’s a big part of us that is reluctant to open up and let in the spring. It’s like we even think we don’t really need it, that we’ve got by OK so far and why do anything different. Old habits die hard, they say.

So it can be difficult for some to imagine that there’s a new possibility out there or that there’s a fresh, new part of us that is getting ready to emerge. We can get so sceptical that we even cut off its possibility.

Yet, having fresh interest, enjoyment and satisfaction can be really good to have. We perhaps need a leap of imagination, to think so being a way to bring it into being, a new way of Being.

So, it might be worth using this upcoming time of Easter to reflect on shifting your state. Maybe spend time with uplifting books or other media and deliberately focus attention on what might uplift you. And set some intentions for living in a more uplifted way. And challenge the old tendency to slide back into wintry thoughts.

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Letting go when we’re really down

1 April 2012 By

I was struck on Friday by how low morale was in a particular organisation. It had plummeted after the 2008-9 slump and subsequent restructurings and has stayed low ever since. Not surprisingly people wanted to know about ways of motivating their staff and seemed to have run out of ideas.

As individuals we can also get stuck in low points in our lives and when whole groups get like this too, the effect can seem like it’s magnified. This is when it is so important to have our own strategies for lifting ourselves up. This may well need to be a range of strategies.

Sometimes we can re-motivate ourselves quite quickly, which lends credence to the old advice given to people, “Snap out of it.” We just drop it. However, at the other end, we can go right down into a pit and feel very low. Then trying to “snap out of it” goes nowhere against the massive forces going on in one to really mope around the pit and almost feel justified being there.

So sometimes we perhaps shouldn’t give ourselves such a hard time of it. Sometimes bad hair days happen and rather than beat ourselves up for “not being positive”, or allow ourselves to receive the same metaphorically from others, maybe it’s more about giving ourselves a bit of permission to mope about in our pit. Sometimes we also need to have a good look at what’s got us there in the first place, and explore around. Never mind what others think. Then there’s also something to be said for simply allowing the phase, for phase it can be (and I’m not talking about real, long-lasting depression here), to work itself through and exhaust itself.

At some point, if we really practice the art of letting go, and know about that, our organism will exhaust the stuff going on, or know enough about the number we tend to run that there’s a point when it’s time to intervene and say “stop”. Also the aware part of us tends to know what we’re up to. So it’ll be calling us. The pit-behaviour can run out of energy or simply start to look like we’re getting overly attached to a pattern or a line of thinking. So, with this pit-behaviour, there’s a judgement call about when to start to “get off it,” and to choose how to manage your own morale.

So just be easy with yourself about when you do that.

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Filed Under: Coaching and self help Tagged With: , , , ,

Heal your own pain if you want to help others

26 March 2012 By

Have you used a skilled helper like a counsellor, a therapist or a coach and found during the work you were doing that the problem you were discussing with them was one they weren’t really comfortable with?

It might show in the body language or in the interventions they make, as they they don’t seem quite appropriate or too judgemental, or you feel the issue isn’t really getting addressed, you aren’t any further forward and your hunch is that they aren’t very comfortable with it.

This is a thorny subject but to trained, very experienced practitioners a key part of their work.

Basically, to guide and support someone along a particular path, you need to have, to some degree, trod that same path yourself.

Very often in particular schools of therapy it’s a requirement of the training, to be in therapy yourself. It applies in coaching too. For those hoping to become coaches there’s a big health warning that should be on coach training companies’ advertising, but isn’t always too obvious, that to train as a coach you need to get coaching yourself, to have experienced it.

However there’s more to it than just that. It’s also about really exploring your own personal material, developing your self-awareness, knowing your blind spots, seeing where your buttons get pushed and what that’s about, identifying and exploring the challenges you have faced in your life, especially if you are doing life coaching, and knowing what your underlying drivers are. This would include doing some work to heal your own past pain, or knowing how to manage it so that it no longer disrupts your life. The extent to which people do this work will vary, but the more you go into your own personal material and learn the courage to face your demons and find they are illusions of your own creating, the more you can be with someone else who is in pain. It’s really like, at some level, you’ve been there. You might not have experienced what they’ve experienced, but you know the process of inner exploration and where it goes and then you are better equipped to help another.

That’s not to say training doesn’t do that. Good training should. My point here is about having experienced your own journey for yourself. That way, you have your own inner road-map and you know what goes on for you and you know how to heal yourself or support yourself through the difficult times.

Thus, for example, if you are to help one who has lost a job, it helps if you know first hand about loss in some form, and the process you go through, as well as the theory of the grief cycle and the change curve.

There  are then many ways this experience can be of benefit. But one quickly stands out. You can then authentically be in a space of real empathy with another, right there for them. It is easier to put on one side whatever might be happening for you as you hear the challenges of another. The ability to resonate in this way is a powerful part of the healing process.

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In longing for inner peace don’t neglect its polar opposite

25 March 2012 By

The longing for peace is as ancient as you can get: it’s called “Shantih” in Sanskrit and part of the practice of yoga was, and is, to focus on inner awareness in order to open up the pathways to the peace of the Self (Atman).

I wrote in an earlier posting about meditating on the mantra Om Shantih.

It’s interesting therefore that our current perceived reality is often very much the reverse, busy lives, busy minds, busy environment, conflict, aggravation. It’s a polar opposite. In this way, as in other ways, we humans experience duality, in this case between the desired objective and current perceived reality. In fact it may seem that the more you focus on what you want, you actually get the opposite, if not in your own life then in the lives of those around you.

It’s a very contemporary issue. The marketing people say that what people want now is peace and calm after the turbulence of the past couple of years and thus for example are furnishing their houses to create peaceful-seeming environments. The trouble is, what you resist, you get. The more you try to move away from something, the bigger it gets. So we need to transcend it. Hence the value of looking at what the turbulent bit is about, what it means, what it represents, why we are creating it.

So, if you want peace in your life, do by all means look at developing the experience of peace, but do not neglect its polar opposite. This feels like a paradox and it is. How on earth, you might think, do I get inner peace by looking at all this negative stuff?! Firstly, by being aware of what we are creating, and how we create it, we can grow our self-awareness, manage our minds, more effectively let go and connect. Letting go is important. However, secondly, and I’m being more subtle here, by embracing what you resist you transcend it. The point here is that the world of opposites is an illusion. All is really one. So, if for example I am afraid, and I am really hooked on that, right there in my fear is my salvation.

I have written in my book, “Connecting to Inner Peace”, how by focusing on the feeling of something, and letting go of the thoughts, you can dissolve fear. It’s by facing it, that’s the point. It’s by facing fear that we release ourselves from its hold over us. While we resist it, it persists, and hangs around or keeps coming back.

That’s why I find meditation so useful. Take whatever is going on into your meditation and sit with it. Breathe deeply into the feeling, let go of thoughts, as one does in meditation, and allow things to be. Become the Witness of the experience. It is not who you are. Through the fear, love is shining. It is beckoning to you, like a long lost old friend. If you allow yourself to transcend fear, with the knowing that Reality is love, love will gently and gradually emerge. It is a letting go.

That’s where we meet inner peace. When we contact the love that is who we really are, we have the potential to cultivate an awareness that leads us to the “love that passeth all understanding” as the Bible says (Phillipians 4 :7), where there is often the sense of coming home, of feeling complete, of utter satisfaction, complete contentment, supreme bliss (Ananada).

Thus it is vital, as my guru Swami Chidvilasananda said, “for a seeker of the Truth, a seeker of peace, to cleanse his or her heart. Not just once, not just from time to time or whenever you happen to think of it. The heart must be purified continually. it is a constant sadhana.”

That is why we do self-enquiry and personal development.

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