From Surviving to Thriving: A No Tools, No Techniques Shift from Stress and Overwhelm to Fulfilment

Is your world shrinking? Are you avoiding things because you think they make you feel bad. Like certain people, situations and circumstances. Or are you forcing yourself to do certain things because you think you cannot be okay without them. Like meditation, journaling and yoga. Either way, are you attributing your feelings to various things outside you and deciding your life based on that?

I am sorry to say you have been sold a lie. Your world is shrinking unnecessarily! Your feelings do not come from the outside world but they come from your thinking about the outside world. You don't have to shrink your world to feel better. I promise you don't.

Do we really have a choice? It can look like there is choosing happening can't it? But who is doing the choosing. The same mind which has created the options. The same conditioning deciding one thing is right and one is wrong. The same thinking which is creating all our experience.

It's easy to beat ourselves up afterwards when we see things differently. But self compassion can come in when we realise there was just what looked true in the moment and now something else looks true. Rather than focusing our attention on making 'better' choices, why not focus our attention on the system which creates the choices instead. In understanding the system we can actually develop more ease around choices. We can become more conscious. If you would like to make 'better' choices from a place of conscious presence, drop me a message.

Loneliness is the state of being lonely. Lonely is defined as, 'being unhappy because you are not with other people'. But being alone is not a prerequisite to feeling lonely. If we feel unhappy about not being with other people then that is because we have unhappy thinking about not being with other people.

Everyone will feel differently. We might have a different length of time we are happy being alone, think there has to be a certain number of social events to not feel lonely or we might actually prefer to spend more time alone than with other people.

There is nothing wrong with any of these perspectives. We all think differently and feel differently as a result. The trouble is that we are being told that being alone is making us feel bad. It does not have the capacity to do that. This does not mean that I want you to ignore the old man on your street who is living on his own. But it does mean that I would love for us to stop perpetuating the myth that the world works outside in at all ever because it just doesn't work that way. Without the threat of damage to our mental health, we still might seek time with other humans and look out for the humans in our lives who are alone but do we really need the threat of mental illness on our minds? 

I suspect not!

Are you aware of the associations that you make? How you connect one incident to a similar one in the past. We are all doing it all the time. I did it this morning. Wrapped a story around a message. It felt awful - jittery! That was the clue. The clue that I was associating and wasn't in the present moment. From that place of awareness, it fell away (eventually). All it takes is awareness.

Optimism is something we are encouraged to be more of because being pessimistic is not the done thing. I completed a gratitude journal for 5 years, every single day with the aim of becoming more optimistic! 

But now I see this differently. Optimism is defined as, 'hopefulness and confidence about the future or the success of something' and pessimism as, 'a tendency to see the worst aspect of things or believe that the worst will happen'. But they are both lies about the future!

What we have a tendency to do is create a pessimistic future and then talk ourselves round with a more optimistic version of it. This is replacing one lie with another. There is no reality in either version of the future. And whilst we are thinking about the future, we are not actually anywhere near the truth. The truth is in the now, in the body and in the breath. A better place to be rather than your pessimistic or optimistic lie about the future, is the present moment! Here is where you can act, take the next step and course correct. Creating any kind of future just confuses your system, creates stress and has you missing what there might be to do now. Today I declare that I am not an optimist or a pessimist! I am a presentist! (which I realise is a made up word but I don't care). Do you want to join me here?

It's mental health awareness week! The most powerful word in that phrase is awareness because with awareness you can see that you are not any of the thoughts in your head, you are not what you believe you are and that you are the observer of those things. It is in the separation which awareness creates that we can see the light. The light of who we really are; peace, wisdom and love

Not the thinking and feeling that looks like us.

How much time do you spend inside other people's heads? Have you noticed how that can make you feel? Angry, frustrated or overwhelmed.  That feeling is telling you that what you are thinking isn't true. Your feelings are always telling you about the state of your mind in fact.

When you think you know what someone else is thinking, that's your thinking creating that, not theirs. It's your thoughts not theirs. The fact is there are 8  billion ways of thinking. You cannot know what someone else is thinking E-V-E-R! They are unique and so are you. When you see this, it changes all your relationships especially the one you have with yourself. Imagine never thinking about what other people are thinking about you again

When we are caught up in our stressful thinking and tired, we don't have clarity. Literally there is too much noise in the system. Just knowing this is helpful! Because when we realise, we might take a breath and give ourselves a minute. We didn't spot it last night when my fiancé lost his phone but we are human.

There is a force in the universe! It gets a lot done. It makes the earth spin around the sun, my heart beat and my lungs breath and it makes the flowers bloom. I guess it's a relief that you and I don't have to do that isn't it? 

But did you know that the same force is inside you. Not just running your internal organs but there guiding you every step of the way. This force is like gravity, we all get the same amount no matter who we are. I know you have experienced it. Maybe you were aware of a deep inner knowing about something, perhaps a sense of peace suddenly washed over you or it might be that you found yourself knowing what to do in a new situation.

It's there all the time, always available. Trusting that is life changing.

Should is a much over used word. I spot it in my clients quite often and in myself. It comes from a sense that something is supposed to be different to how it is. Another person's behaviour, a situation or the way we are.

When we use the word 'should' it feels unpleasant and it is easy to think that feeling is coming from the person, situation or what's wrong with us. That feeling truthfully has other information in it. It's letting us know about our thinking about those things. It's letting us know that we are resisting what is. All we need to do is see that and it gradually falls away.