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Confrontation that leads to psychological freedom
[Excerpt from Unachievable]
Unachievable. That sounds a contradictory title for a book about getting whatever we want.
We’ll hear it many times throughout this book. Unachievable Wants are a dead end. A brick wall. These wants prevent the experience of what is wanted from ever being achieved. Unachievable applies to any want that aims to secure or avoid a particular experience of being ourself. These wants are Unachievable because, no matter how much it looks like it, the separate entity that t…
The mind is a powerful force
[Excerpt from Unachievable]
Have you ever stressed about getting enough sleep before a big next day and found yourself lying in bed wide awake?
If so, you understand the power of the mind to create worrisome projections, doom visions of the future, vulnerability and insecurity, imaginations of failure and negative opinions of others. You also have seen how these mental phenomena can make it temporarily impossible to experience what is there naturally and easily – the ability to fall asleep.
T…
What is here already cannot be achieved
[Excerpt from Unachievable]
We all want to feel happy, peaceful, whole and secure. This book is saying those are Unachievable. Hang on. Don’t throw the book away. Unachievable does not mean the things we are looking for can never be experienced. In fact, it means the opposite. It means happiness, peace, wholeness and security are here already. They are what we are. Because they are what we are, because they are here already, constant and never-changing, they cannot be achieved.
The attempt t…
Well - The Body
‘I am this body’.
It looks so true doesn’t it? It looks like the body is me and I am the body. There is no possibility otherwise.
It looks like there is an objective ‘me’ in this objective body, controlling it, that the ‘me’ is doing the reading now, that the ‘me’ is feeling the sensations, that the ‘me’ can use the body to be a better self, more loved, more respected, more successful.
It looks like the body is an objective truth. That the judgement on how it looks, feels and moves is f…
Nourishing the Body
“It is slavery to live in the mind unless it has become part of the body” said Kahlil Gibran.
The words of Gibran, born in 1873 in the Lebanon, are perhaps more relevant today than ever. The mind, this tremendous creative powerhouse, experiences great suffering when it gets lost, believing its own creations. The body, on the other hand, is always in reality, receiving and responding to real time chemical and biological information.
When the mind settles into the reality of the body, m…
How Peace is Revealed
The public speaking phobia continued through different jobs and roles. I scraped through the presentations I had to do feeling absolutely sick.
At the same time, I continued exploring what the mind is, what reality is, what the idea of ourselves is.
One day, I knew I was going to do a talk in my house for a small group of friends. The thought came in with dreadful inevitability. I felt sick at the idea of it and yet I knew it was going to happen. The same tensions aro…
Getting rid of negative emotion
[Excerpt from SANE]
A thirteen-year-old girl I was working with said ‘I get really sad sometimes. I worry that I might cry in my class. Can you take away the sadness?’
Take away the sadness.
Take away the fear and the worry.
Make me always happy.
That’s what she wants.
And pretty much all of us say the same.
Take away the anger.
Take away the low state.
Take away the feelings of overwhelm.
Take away the grief.
Take away the fear.
Take away the anxiety.
Take away the frustration.
Ta…
Creative block: Identity wants make creation risky
[Excerpt from Unachievable]
I’m writing a book. It’s going to be a bestseller. I keep picturing myself walking up to the podium to collect my awards. It’s so exciting. My family are all there, beaming up at me from the audience, so full of pride.
How’s the writing going?
Not very well to be honest. Nothing I write is measuring up to my dream. To be honest I’d be embarrassed for anyone to read it.
There are several questions that my clients hear over and over again from me.
One of them is: I…
Getting Real with Peak Experience
In 1964, Abraham Maslow published a book called ‘Religions, values and peak-experiences’.
It was his attempt to take these “rare, exciting, oceanic, deeply moving, exhilarating, elevating experiences that generate an advanced form of perceiving reality” out of the domain of the exclusively religious and into the realm of the universally human.
That was his focus in 1964 when religion held a far greater prominence in Western Society.
Now, almost 60 years later there is a different entanglem…
Get Really Specific
A client, talking to me about his adult son, said, ‘I just want my son to be happy.’
Left as a sad unfulfilled yearning, this want had the potential to keep creating a sense of lack and wrongness and to get in the way of the relationship between father and son.
So, we got really specific. I asked my client questions such as:
What does it mean to be happy?
What criteria will you use to judge this?
How will you know if he is happy or just pretending to be…