I spent a long time teaching people to add in order to feel okay. Adding affirmations, meditation and gratitude practices. Adding knowledge from self-development gurus. Adding podcasts, audio books and courses. I encourage others  to see themselves as broken and needing fixing. Like there was something missing which needed putting back in from the outside. 

I didn't see what I see now. That we are actually whole and well and that it is only our noisy head which stops us seeing that over and over again. When you see this truth, it makes less and less sense to add more things to our already busy heads. Tools and techniques are thoughts after all and more thinking takes us away from our innate wellbeing. Once we know how our psychological system works, it makes less and less sense to add more noise to it.

My journey to calm really started in January 2020 but before that I thought I was on it. For a long I thought the journey to calm was about meditation, yoga and affirmations. I experienced calm but it was hard work and I thought I had to keep doing all those things to be okay.

My journey to calm since 2020 has been so different. Rather than a process of adding, it has been a process of subtracting. A realisation that we are made of calm and that all those tools and techniques tend to cover that over rather than reveal it. So much has fallen away. My belief in my thoughts. The wrongification of my feelings. The need to be in a different feeling state. The need for other people and circumstances to be different.

Trying to control our feelings is like trying to fix a system which is not broken. A system which was created perfectly to support you in life. A much misunderstood system. You see, your feelings only have one piece of information in them; they are telling you about your state of mind. They are a perfect warning system. Like a tap on the shoulder from your amazing system to say, 'Hey you! Your thinking is like this right now.' Once you understand how this system is working and you begin to work with it instead of against it, your experience of life will transform.

We all have preference. That is pretty human. But have you noticed how some circumstances don't seem to be preferences. But there are some things in life which don't seem to be preferences. They seem to be necessary in order for us to feel okay. Past examples of this for me were other people's behaviour, my career status, my success on Tinder and how much stuff I owned. When I thought my experience was created outside-in, I spent a lot of time trying to fix my feelings by controlling the outside world. Exhausting behaviour which led to burnout.

You see, our experience is not created outside-in. It is created inside-out.  It is our perspective and thought in the moment which creates our feelings not our circumstances or other people. There is a very different feeling which comes with a preference as apposed to 'must be in order for me to be okay.' It is a lighter feeling with less pressure and a quieter mind. My circumstances have to be a certain way for me to be okay changes to I would prefer them to be a certain way. From this place we are calmer, have more clarity and can take the next step to our preference.

Noticing is one of the most powerful ways we can change but it is a particular kind of noticing. It comes from a place of understanding how the system works. Knowing the connection between thoughts, feelings and behaviour. It comes from knowing a fact that when we feel an emotion in the body, that is an update telling us about our state of mind. 

From that place, noticing is powerful. It brings up questions like what am I believing that isn't true, what story have I created here and what behaviour would be helpful? But here's what is not helpful when we are noticing; judgement, wrongification, outside in thinking and poking around in the past. Noticing when those start to happen is helpful too. As your awareness rises, it is amazing what starts to fall away.

I spent a long time being right and goodness did I get riled up about it. It was my way or the highway! I would get angry and upset when someone didn't behave as I thought they should. I still sometimes do it now to be honest but a whole lot less than I used to. 

You see I have had some realisations about the idea that I am right. Firstly knowing that the things I believe are just the things I learnt from other people as I was growing up. I used to see them as my opinions but now I see them as the opinions of my ancestors. Of course they often look real because they were learnt unconsciously but they really are not. Secondly I now see that the awful feeling I get when I rant about someone else's behaviour is coming from my thinking about that behaviour not from the behaviour itself. Thirdly I know that I am fundamentally connected to everyone in the world. They have their thinking and I have mine but in reality we are all connected. When I come from the idea of that connection, it seems easier to ignore different opinions and see what is similar about us rather than what is different. The final thing is that I know I work better psychologically when I am in a nicer feeling and understanding all the above has me there more of the time. So it just makes sense.

Here are some things you might think are real which really are not! What you think someone else is thinking, thoughts about the future, the limiting beliefs you have about yourself, the things you think you are right about and your memories of the bad things which happened in the past to name but a few.

You might be wondering why I am telling you this. Why I am telling you that a big chunk of what passes through your head is a pack of lies. Just read the list again and think about how those types of thinking make you feel. Uncomfortable, angry, anxious, stressed and powerless. That's your amazing system working perfectly, telling you about your state of mind. Using our feelings as a guide to tell us about our state of mind is the route to freedom from suffering. A simple raising of awareness which is more effective that anything you have ever tried to make yourself feel better.

Work-life balance seems to be something we should pursue. The lack of it is blamed for all sorts of ills such as burnout, stress related illness and heart-attacks. But what does it actually mean to have work-life balance? But work-life balance is unique for each and every one of us; a concept created in thought. In other words having balance will look different depending on how you think about it. 

For example, I often work very early in the morning because I happen to be up then but don't try to get me to do much after about 7pm because that's when I am ready to chill out and watch something mindless on the box in the corner of the room. We are all different and we all have a different idea about what balance looks like to us. The trouble actually occurs when we try to shoe-horn ourselves in to someone else's idea of balance. That can lead to overthinking and actually increase our stress levels. What is most important is awareness. Things like noticing the voice saying keep going when you are tired out and the voice saying you are not good enough if you don't. Balance is something we can create easily with a rise in awareness. 

We all have problems to solve and it seems there are lots of possible ways to do this but there are problems with these strategies. They are using our old, conditioned thinking to find a solution to a problem which has been created by the same old, conditioned thinking. Perhaps you have noticed that feeling when you are going round and round in circles and the same things keep coming up again and again. It's like you are shaking your mind but the same things keep falling out.

I suspect you have also noticed when the best solutions appear. All of a sudden and out of the blue. When you are thinking about something else or in a more relaxed state of mind. They appear like magic and you say, 'Why didn't I think of that before?' It's because, when we are not thinking about something with our conditioned mind, we connect to something deeper; wisdom and the intelligence of creation. It is in that quiet that new thought emerges and thus we can experience clarity and see the solution.  We are told to make our minds busier to be more effective but we have been sold a lie.

It took me a long time to see how my experience of my physical body was being created. I have had a few physical things over the last few years including adrenal fatigue, under active thyroid, the menopause and everything that brings, a frozen shoulder lasting a year (so far) and headaches caused by histamine intolerance. At first I couldn't accept that I wasn't experiencing my physical body just as it was but now I see this very differently. Even our physical body has to be experienced through the power of thought and awareness in the moment. It cannot be experienced any other way and when we see this, a whole world of opportunities for healing unfolds.