What do you need to let go of?

In embodied living we are moving to a new connection with ourselves and the world. And to make a new connection with something there is often a need to let go of something else. This sense of letting go can be an important and profound part of self development.

On a day to day level think about the batchelor come newly-wed. He has to let go of the drinking nights down the bar with his mates, if he is to make a success of his new marital state. The runner training for a marathon needs to let go of Friday night partying if she is to train successfully every Saturday. By doing this she is committing to a new relationship with the running.

If you want to create a new connection or a new relationship then, you may need to think about what it is that you need to let go of. Sometimes that letting go is difficult. I am finding this at the moment. In moving to a new relationship with embodied living, I need to let go of (or losen my grip on) another key aspect of my life. And this letting go is painful, is challenging; but I know for sure that means that it is all the more worthwhile.

Once I have moved through letting go; I can move towards the new relationship. And the most beautiful thing about this is that relationship, that connection with the new, will change me. When we are in relationship with something meaningful, that we are committed to, it works on us. Rather like the astral bodies, the 'gravitas' of this 'other' influences us and changes our stellar orbit, transforms our being.

Keep listening at this blog for news about the new Embodied Living website.

Be less attached to things and be happier

Do you subscribe to the view that we live in a time of profound social pessimism? Do you find yourself with a positive view about yours and your family's prospects, yet find yourself being negative and pessimistic about other people (believe them to be unkind, untrustworthy)? The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has uncovered these themes in its new 'Social Evils' report. The crux of this thesis is that we live in a time of profound social pessimism and social unease. Despite the fact that we are wealthier, healthier and have more of what we want than ever before in human history (yes even despite the blip of the recession), a dark seam that has been exposed by this latest research is undeniably there.

Rampant individualism, social inequalities (high profile overpaid bankers and rip off politicians!) and a erosion of values are clear indicators. Matthew Taylor writes a compelling debate in his Reflections on Social Evils and Human Nature, part of the Rowntree Foundation work. It is the very affluence that we are bathed in that cause us to bypass cultural safeguards and commitment devices. Affluence and our culture of 'instant gratification' breeds impatience and makes us flout social norms, higher values and institutions that encourage a more long term view of society.

But, as the spiral down into anxiety and credit crunch are starting to make us realise, it is impossible for us to thrive without a deeper sense of values and purpose to our collective lives. 'Affluence breeds impatience and impatience undermines wellbeing'. Remember, our brains have developed over 400,000 years and have served us fine for the majority of our existence; 99% of our lives have been consumed by scraping by to find food and shelter to get by and survive. We hunted, we were hunted, we struggled, we died young. In the scheme of things, it is the last few seconds of our existence where we find ourselves 'never having it so good'. Yet our poor brains remain hardwired for short-termism.

So no wonder then, that we get attached to our wealth. That we succumb to selfishness and self indulgence. And then get indigestion! But really it is our ways of thinking that are failing us. We get attached to our comforts, to our jobs, to our incomes, to sex or exercise, to our materialistic rewards and believe that it is these that bring us happiness. And it is this attachment that cause us problems.

If we want to transition from anxiety, unease, and lack of wellbeing, we need to look to higher goals and values and move towards self-actualisation. And the foundation for this is to start to work on our attachments. If we are overly attached the new car we just bought, we get all stirred up when the little boy down the road, who is severly disabled, accidently runs his bike into it scratching the shiny new paint.

We have two choices here: if we are 'attached' to our new car, overly identified with it, we get annoyed, perhaps shout at his parents, and start to watch every minute they are out in the street. This wastes emotional energy and and sets us on a spiral of negativity. However, if we are detached from this object, we are filled with compassion for the little boy and the scratch is of no importance whatsoever. We experience the car as an object to get us from one place to another; rather than a status object that serves to boost our ego and make us feel good about ourselves.

Hence through practicising non-attachment or non-reacting, we are increasingly liberated from the pointless energy-wasting activities of the ego and become filled with increasingly deeper contentment and equanimity. In a sense, this is a move from doing to being.

Meditation helps us to move from doing to being, it helps with softening of the mind. By relaxing the psychosomatic grip on the moment, it allows events to be just as they are. Success is proportionate to one’s willingness to let each new impulse to control or improve simply appear, bloom, and fade.

We then begin to realize how much of our emotional and mental energy has been engaged in end goals of stimulation and gratification, and how attaining them never produces anything like a lasting happiness. This perceptual re-education,called vairagya, or “non-reacting,” involves entrusting oneself to one new experience after another. As each fresh anxiety, agitation or 'reaction' is recognized and permitted to settle, one unexpectedly notices that familiar triggers of disturbance no longer have any effect.A profound equanimity has quietly developed.

Get content now!

Today's 'Times' has an article that talks about the 'sense of contentment' that we now so often lack and how this contributes to a broken and downhearted society. Contentment, or santosha in yoga terms, is a precious state of being. Try recalling a time when you felt a deep sense of gratitude or appreciation or care for someone or something.

This could be something as simple as a walk along the river, like the one I took with my husband last weekend. We saw this beautiful swan with her goslings enjoying themselves in the sun. For a few precious moments, she let me be. She let me intrude on their moment and take the photo you see here. She could have easily attacked me, as in her eyes I was behaving in quite a threatening way (poking my camera at her beautiful offspring), yet she allowed me to be there. I was filled with appreciation for her, her chicks, for the time I had in that moment with my husband.

Take yourself back to your 'moment in time' now and notice how easy it is to feel content (in fact try not to feel content!). And when you are back there now feeling that sense of appreciate and gratitude, notice how your breathing is and notice how full your heart feels. If we truly want it, we can have santosha (contentment) whenever and wherever we want. Perhaps we should try not to look so hard!

Surviving and thriving

I was at a girlie gathering at a friend's house last night with some delightful people. Middle class, ages ranging from 30s to 60s and most of my conversations somehow ended up turning to the stresses and strains of coping with life.

Thyroid problems, back problems, coping with change, coping with 'the change',working 12 hour days, headaches; for some reason last night people were drawn to telling me about their lives, and I saw beneath the smiles.

My heart reached out to touch these lovely ladies, to give them something back to make their living easier, healthier, more fulfilled. So we talked about yoga and how it helps keep the spine healthy, so often key to a healthy body. We talked about the breath and its direct link to the mind and its potential for positive effect on health and physiology. And we talked about emotional resilience.

It seems resilience is a much needed skill. It can be taught and people can benefit tremendously. Here are the components of resilience that I found in a modeling study I did a couple of years ago:

- emotional regulation ; resilient people have the skills to control their emotions, attention and behaviour. Eg stay calm under pressure

- control of impulses; they have strong personal discipline and a healthy sesnse of ego. Eg they don't blurt out inappropriate responses or indulge in inappropriate behaviour

- positive inner attitude; they are realistic optimists with empowering beliefs

- problem solving; they have strong thinking strategies and are able to accurately analyse their problems and be flexible in their thinking. They can also read others accurately (empathy) and not 'project' and 'bulldoze' others' emotions or desires

- self empowered; they have an internal locus of control and see themselves as in control of their own destiny, believe they can solve the problems they are likely to experience and have faith in their ability to succeed

- social skills; resilient people build a support network and reach out to others to help them in adversity

These elements form the basis of my one to one and the BEST programme of psychological resilience I have developed: building resilience; embodied living; synchronisation of the 'brains' of the body; and transcendence or self actualisation. Yoga is a huge part of this programme; simple postures linked with the breath, breathing, mindfulness and simple meditation, and relaxation.

Note to self

Here's a link that poetically elaborates on my previous post: personaltransformation.com

It's all about energy

I recently came across a blog that I contributed to about creativity and libido or sexual energy. And I thought it was time to revisit my thoughts on this subject mainly because I feel that in the past I have seen sexual energy as something very precious. I have always said to myself that sex is a spiritual thing. But something has changed, in me that is.

I think that sometimes, I used spirituality as an excuse for a good appetite for sex and high doses of sexual energy. But now I feel like the schoolgirl moving to university and realising that there is a lot she doesn't know. I have a sense, a feeling that to think of sexual energy as a spiritual thing denotes a level of unconscious incompetence. Now I do believe that a truly spiritual person channels this wonderful and powerful sexual energy into higher social and spiritual goals. Of course, not to say that sex is not part of a spiritual 'pilgrims' life, but in a way akin to 'bramacharya' or moderation, that it becomes less dominating and perhaps more sublimated.

There is a very interesting dialogue between Deborah Anapol, Ph.d and Taber Shadburne, MA on this topic: 'Love without Limits'. Sex, like meditation, is a trance state, an altered state of consciousness; and as such I believe it plays a significant part in spirituality, but only if there is freedom from ego and attachment or vairagya (non reaction) so that we don't get attached to sex for bodily pleasure only. And therefore get stuck in the sensory based world and the false sense of self and consciousness. I guess this is why most religions and a good proportion of spiritual traditions have had an uncomfortable relationship with sex. And also perhaps this is why, the indian notion of bramacharya often gets translated as celibacy (aka Ghandi). But actually it means moderation or not getting overly 'into' something (and not just sex either).

Perhaps tantra came about as a backlash to this repression of sexuality in spiritual traditions? But if you consider other spiritual modalities such as chakras or even Grave's spiral dynamics I find more evidence to back up my feeling that people who are overly concerned with the sexual have their spiritual energy somehow stuck. See the following excerpt from the interview above:

"I'm thinking that if I had tried to do 10-day Zen retreat ten years ago, I would have just been sitting there staring at the wall and struggling with my sexual desire. Has that happened for you or people you talk to? I meant I would be overwhelmed by pure sexual energy. Of course this might have something to do with the fact that in the past most of the time that I would go into a deep meditative state, I would have some kind of psychedelic in my body, so that may have exaggerated the energy and sexual direction of my experience. ..... and having kundalini going up my spine, having kriyas, and probably wanting to release it in some way and not being able to get there through pure meditation."

Sure we have all been there, but we progress and the energy evolves and moves through the body into higher levels and thence into higher levels of consciousness. There are reasons we can get stuck here though!

Freud is the psychoanalyst most oft quoted on sexuality (repressions, id, superego all abound!). Yet Jung seemed to have a more evolved notion of this (in my humble and not particularly well-informed opinion). The relationship between sexuality, spirituality and the libido lay at the heart of Jung’s theoretical differences with Freud. In 'Psychology of the unconscious', Jung sought a broader definition of libido as psychic rather than just sexual energy.

Jung’s core process of individuation leads us towards a unity with the Self, but only after experiencing and finally transcending the 'opposites' of masculine/feminine and sexuality/spirituality. And I feel, that once you get to taste this 'transcendence' the whole language and experience of sex and spirituality changes so dramatically.

The inverse of happiness

We all want to be happy. I certainly want to be happy, content ; it's the most important goal in my life. Yet how often do we pin down this concept of 'happiness'? It is a nominalisation which we need to define and name in our own terms. When we do this we might just find that it is closer than we think. And we might find that it costs very little. Most often, and not wanting to come across as a cliché , happiness is found in simple pleasures.

Here's a few steps to get you started:

1. What is it, exactly, that want when you want 'happiness' ? .. Perhaps you want to be happy with what you have got?

2. What is the experience of being happy for you? Think of the sensory experience - see, hear and feel etc. Connect to this experience of happiness and remember this.

3. In what context - where, when etc - do you want to be happy? If its 'all the time' - ask yourself how realistic is that?

4. Will being happy satisfy all parts of you, all aspects of your life? Or will it compromise or conflict? Ie a wife & mother with a husband who is abusive or who has developed npd (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_Personality_Disorder) would not fare well with 'i want to be happy in my marriage '

5. Think about What makes you happy? Those internal (thoughts, attitudes, beliefs ...) and external (activities, other people ...) resources. TIP; spend some time on this.

6. Finally, what stops you or gets in the way of your happiness ? And how can you use those things in point 5) to overcome them?

Sanity in a world of overload

"When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality." Henry David Thoreaux

I read an article in The Times yesterday that posited we are in danger of overload, of blowing our circuits from infotainment overload in this digital age.

That our brains simply cannot, are not large enough, to cope with the torrent and go into a kind of stress response, reptilian brain mode is one thing. But that this neuronal saturation actually makes us less humane is stretching it.

Certainly, as my old 'friend' Thoreaux maintains, it may make us less wise. Nevertheless, they may have a point ; and one backed up by science. That the more complex emotions of compassion, indignation, social awareness require more processing power than eg. Fear and happen in the higher region of the brain, the frontal cortex. It is this region that the brain shuts down when it is 'stressed' by overload.

So much for EQ then? Well, my brain feels close to bursting after 3 very stressful days, so what are my top tips for cooling down the system?

1. Breathe - regular, deep, rhythmic breathing creates space in the body and, soon, in the mind. It affects HRV too (heart waves) which help entrain the brain into a relaxed state of awareness. Do this regularly throughout the day.

2. Meditate - at least once a day for at least 5 mins. The effects, which Build up over time, are an amazing sense of peace and freedom and it increases brain capacity.

3. Yoga nidra - the most poerful form of 'altered consciousness' and deep relaxation on earth. 20 mins are equivalent to several hours of sleep. When I am feeling especially overloaded I do this each night.

Of course, there will be more ... Keep reading!