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Innate well-being
Other People [excerpt from GAME]
[excerpt from GAME]
Now to make The Game ultra-interesting, there are at least seven billion other games going on at the same time.
Each of these games has a main character. We’ll call these other games ‘Their Game’. The other characters are the stars of Their Game. The whole appearance of Their Game is created by their settings. Nothing to do with anyone else.
These other games might intersect with The Only Game That Matters, which is of course the Game of Self. How it looks to us. We’ll cal…
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…
DIET [Excerpt from WELL, getting real with mental and physical health]
Let’s look now at diet and health.
We were talking in a small group recently about binge eating. One of the participants told us their eating pattern was totally out of sync with what they want it to be. They were eating junk food every evening and then were full of self blame which then led to more feelings of hopelessness and more binge eating.
What to do about that?
It can look like the way to make the self stable or stop the neediness is through more control of what we’re eating. It ca…
Reality becomes less real while immersion in reality increases
[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…
Who are they really?
Excerpt from 'It's not you... and it's not me'
Finally…
finally…
…we get to meet the other person. Well, as close as possible as it is to meet them.
The perception of them still belongs to us, the perceiver.
But with less and less projection of the innermost needs and insecurities onto them, there is now nothing pushing them away.
With less and less meaning of who they are, there are no barriers between us.
With less and less depending on their responses and feelings about us, their w…
The destruction of what never existed
Syd Banks, the founder of the Three Principles said ‘Every individual is sitting in the midst of mental health. They just don’t realise it.’
Many teachers of non-duality would agree with this. Minds are made of pure consciousness. Witnessing and using concepts and psychological phenomena without being lost in the belief of them is ultimate mental health.
The ‘individual’ that sits in the midst of this ‘mental health’ is believed to be an entity, separate from other individuals and from the…
The Shift
There is a participant, let’s call her Beth, who has been in our courses for a few years. When I first met her the subject of money was fraught and full of tension. In any interaction to do with money - giving, receiving, earning, requesting, quoting, managing - she would be anxious and panicked. Beliefs about lack and isolation were running wild. She was a fraud. She was irresponsible. She didn’t deserve the money…
That was the lived experience for her. And it looked absolutely true to …
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…
The Lab and The Field
In our courses we refer to the two environments in which realisation can occur.
The first is ‘the Lab’.
This is the world of spiritual books, webinars, courses, podcasts, videos and retreats. It is enquiry happening in the luxury of isolation. It is the allowing in of words, theories and ideas and the space of reflection in which they resonate or are rejected. All of it taking place as a relationship between theory and inner felt truth.
The Lab is dedicated study. It is simply the inte…
The Most Profound Perspective Change
I’ve recently started to learn rock climbing and had my first outdoor experience of it on the cliffs in the North of Sicily as part of a group holiday.
Often I would find myself desperately searching for a new foot or hand hold and there would be absolutely nothing available. The situation would look hopeless and I would be on the verge of telling my belay partner that I had to come down.
She was an excellent partner (Shout out to Shing the Great) because she would relentlessly call encour…