mindfulness

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

It’s fashionable in coaching circles to focus on the ‘Why?’ inside the want. The ‘Why?’ relates to a personal, driving motivation. The motivation might be through the roof, but it is a survival motivation. The attention is not on the project. It is on trying to secure an individual Identity that doesn’t actually exist.

It’s a great idea to expose these personal ‘Whys’. It is not a good idea to take them seriously, as though they are something that can ever be achieve…

[Excerpt from Unachievable]

The other day a client said to me, “I just want to understand myself. I just want to be true to myself.” It led to an interesting conversation about what the self really is and what it means to be true to it. What are we? Are we the beliefs about what we are? Are we the behaviours, actions and words? Are we our habits? Our values? Our opinions? Are we the experience of being us? Our tendencies and preferences? Our personality?

It is amazing how through this work eve…

In their book, Stealing Fire, Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal calculate that the industry of ‘shutting off the self' is worth $4 trillion a year. They include all the activities, substances, experiences and practices that ultimately have the result of shutting down – even if only momentarily the burden of self-focus.

As they pointed out, many of these are ‘impulsive, destructive and unintentional’. They include activities such as legal and illegal drug taking, pornography and gambling which can, o…

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…

[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…

[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…

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…

Getting REAL with the play of life [excerpt from GAME] 

This book is saying who you think you are is not real, that ‘self’ is only a made-up character in a made-up game. 

And it is saying that apparent reality is only ever a game resulting from the settings of that character. 

That is quite some statement to make. 

It sounds a bit insulting actually. A bit dismissive. Well actually seriously, rudely, uncaringly dismissive. 

Because we might, at this moment, be thinking of who we are, all th…

You know how when things get started and it’s amazing and it carries on and it is even more amazing and you’re thinking ‘keep going’ and then suddenly it stops and you’re a bit, ‘…???’

You know that?

That’s what we’re talking about today.

And we’re talking about it in relation to thought, free will and reality.

Ah. Sorry. 

If you’re still with me … here’s the thing:  once we get started looking into the nature of thought and what it means about who we are, we can’t stop until we go right on…

[Excerpt from SANE, getting real with reality]

The screenwriting expert Robert McKee, who has contributed to over 30 Oscar-winning films, talks of naive writers, who, knowing nothing about the category in which they are attempting to write, stumble blindly around in it, inadvertently trampling on the unspoken conventions that hold consistency and meaning for the viewer.

He compares them to the nervous writers, on the other hand, who are so scared of doing something wrong that they obey, withou…