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Mind health

Other People [excerpt from GAME]

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[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…

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How Peace is Revealed

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[Excerpt from HOME] 

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…

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DIET [Excerpt from WELL, getting real with mental and physical health]

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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…

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Reality becomes less real while immersion in reality increases

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[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…

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Getting what we want

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I am often asked either in interviews or for the podcast, ‘What has changed for you through this conversation?’ 

There are many things I could say about how every aspect of my life has changed. And similarly, the participants on any of our courses will describe the transformations they have witnessed.

How relationships are unrecognisably easy, how much better they are doing at work, how their anxiety has gone, how things that looked impossible to attempt previously are now done with ease…

T…

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The love of our life

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[Excerpt from It's not you... and it's not me]

This is not an internet quick fix. 

It is not a way to secure the undying love and commitment of the person who we think will make everything OK. 

It is not a way to never feel rejected, lonely, sad or isolated. 

It is not a way to get them back or to change their minds. 

It is an orientation of healing and expansion for the rest of our life. 

It is meeting each moment of suffering in its fullness, of seeing what it reveals and how it points…

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The Wish List

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[Excerpt from FREE, Getting real with life, unlimited]

The music comes on and the three year olds start dancing. Jumping and twirling and laughing and bouncing and falling around. They can’t help it. Because music is playing.

The entire experience of self, life and world is transient and ever-changing.

And this prompts the question: if we realise it is all so fluid  why would we bother doing, creating or having anything?

Well, let’s imagine my wish list was: to be a billionaire and super f…

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What is really needed?

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Excerpt from 'It's not you and it's not me'

In the midst of our suffering, we have a skewed view of what is really needed. And the greater the suffering, the more skewed the need and the more desperate we are to get it. 

It looked like I needed the man to make me feel valid and worthy.  The only way he could do that would have been by convincing me how much he cared about me, how special I was… 

Because then I would feel OK. My self esteem would be intact. My view of the weekend I had just …

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DIET [Excerpt from WELL, getting real with mental and physical health]

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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…

Read more…

The Joy of Stress

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In his book, ‘The Body Says No’, Gabor Maté writes in great detail of the indisputable link between stress and a wide variety of diseases.

He demonstrates how stresses, often imposed on the developing psyche in childhood, continue to play out in patterns of behaviour in our adult life that create physically debilitating and even fatal illness.

This field of medicine is called psycho-neuro-endocrine-immunology. It investigates the link between stress within the system and the emergence of disea…

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