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Innate well-being

How do I get down from an elephant?

When I was about ten, I had a joke book and in the book was this:

‘How do I get down from an elephant?

And the answer was:

‘You don’t. You get down from a duck’.

Bloody hell. That joke mystified me. I could not work it out. I asked my sister. It mystified her too. We read it over and over again, shaking our heads in bemusement. Neither of us had a clue. How could a question beginning ‘How do I…? be answered with ‘You don’t…’ . How could a question about an elephant, be answered in relation to a duck…

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The other side of the full stop.

If you are like me, there might be something along these lines going on in the back of your mind:

I am exploring the understanding of how we experience life in order to make my life better.

I am reflecting on the illusion of money in order to make earning it more simple and straightforward.

I am reading about how other people are a creation of my consciousness in order to be more connected to my family, friends and colleagues.

I am bringing the understanding of the illusory nature of experience into…

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The mid air moment (or why we can't cross a chasm in two jumps)

A revolution in our understanding of human well-being, resilience and resolve is gathering pace in business, sport, therapy, prisons, healthcare, psychiatry….

Those of us working in this area witness daily the tremendous transformation when an individual realises that experience is created through thought, that consciousness brings thought alive as if it were real and also allows us to see its illusory nature, that our well-being and resilience is provided for by the intelligence of all life.

Give…

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Hell is other people

‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’, is a line in Sartre’s play ‘No Exit’. Hell is other people.

In a typical week in my coaching practice, on social media, in the headlines, in opinion polls, in agony columns, in my own life, family and marriage, this is confirmed over and over again.

Whether it is parents in torment over their child’s anorexia, self harming or behaviour. Or adult children witnessing the decline of their parents. Walking on egg shells around a volatile partner. The agony of watching the …

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We paved paradise and put up a parking lot

Imagine paradise.

Not the regular paradise of hammocks and sunsets and pina coladas.

But a paradise way way beyond that, a melting. merging energetic intensity, formless and fluid. Abstract as love. Eternal as infinity. Indefinable as space. The abundant, creative source of everything. Real, permanent, constant and absolute.

Imagine that this paradise is you. It is all you know, all you have ever known. It is who you are, there is no part of it that is not you.

There is no place where you stop and s…

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Lost Season Two

You know how at the start of each episode of Lost there was the floating title and the dramatic voice over saying ‘Previously on Lost…’ and a recap of the highlights to date.

Well for people who are starting to see the inside out nature of their experience more clearly the voice over would say ‘Previously on…’ and it would show a fast paced montage of: annoying people doing annoying things making us annoyed nasty people doing nasty things and making us feel bad stressful jobs and too much to do m…

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Bypass?

I wrote an article exploring how we can understand endemic sexual harassment in relation to the fact that our experience of life is through thought in the moment.

I looked at the fact that people do terrible things and how that relates to the central principle of my coaching which is that we have innate health, that we are incapable of being psychologically damaged, that no feeling or thought is abnormal, that it is the nature of the mind to change, that at our core we are love, potential and cre…

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Me too…. All of us…. No damage

Hundreds of thousands of people are posting the words ‘me too’ on social media to say they have been sexually harassed or violated. I have my own examples, my own times of shock, fear, embarrassment, pain and intrusion.

Yet the coaching I practice is based on an understanding that our entire experience of life is from thought in the moment, that we create our own reality, that feelings of anger, fear, shame and hurt are caused by our thinking and not from anything in the outside world.

How can thi…

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The only way to change something is to accept it is in your life forever (that’s more useful than it sounds by the way)

It used to be all about change.

In life coaching we used to look at changing our circumstances, what we were doing or what we owned to try to be happy or successful.

In most therapeutic practices we looked at changing ourselves, our thoughts or our inner dialogues so that we could try to find peace.

In sports we wanted to change our mindset or our belief in ourself in order to win.

In business we wanted to be more driven or problem focused to bring in the revenue.

And that’s all… well… changing.

Becau…

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Look me in the eye

Look me in the eye.

That was what our Mum used to say when all the biscuits had been eaten and my sister and I, crumbs around our faces, would be looking off to the side in casual innocence.

And we wouldn’t be able to. Looking her in the eye would mean that it would be impossible to lie to her. Even if we could avoid confessing we knew that she would take one look into our eyes and know.

And that is what this blog is about. Looking ourself in the eye. Because why wouldn’t we? Why wouldn’t we want t…

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