Mind health

What comes to mind when reading a book about no objective reality, no self, no identity, no ego, no separate other? An author telling us that everything is illusory?

Maybe you think:

‘Well, who the hell are you talking to then?’

‘Why write a book if there is no one to tell?’

It’s an interesting conundrum.

It becomes more and more obvious that the apparent reality of who we are and of everything else is illusory. Ultimately there is no one here. There is a transient idea of me and a transien…

How much would you need in the bank to erase all financial worries?

What income would you need to never again have a thought about homelessness or poverty?

What investments would protect you from the outside world?

What lottery win or bonus pay-out would secure the happiness of you and your family?

What amount of money would mean you never again worried about being swindled, conned or rejected or isolated?

What salary would ensure you felt successful, respected by other people, like you had…

My sister and I were in Costa one Sunday (we love a café). We were talking about holidays.

A memory came up of when we were in France in a swimming pool. I was waiting behind someone on the ladder to get out.

At the same time as I pulled myself up the ladder, the woman in front dipped down. Her foot went right down the top of my swimming costume.

In reality, it probably took less than a few seconds for her to extract her foot. In my memory it took so long that it is probably still there. My s…

In his fascinating book, ‘When the Body Says No’, Dr Gabor Maté says, “A therapist once said to me, “If you face the choice between feeling guilt and resentment, choose the guilt every time.” It is wisdom I have passed on to many others since. If a refusal saddles you with guilt, while consent leaves resentment in its wake, opt for the guilt. Resentment is soul suicide. Negative thinking allows us to gaze unflinchingly on our own behalf at what does not work.

That makes sense, doesn’t it? Resen…

[Excerpt from SANE]

Without an understanding of what the mind really is, mind management is just a playing out of confusion.

The self exists as a thought or belief or as a state of mind. It arises in that moment in whatever appearance it takes on. It doesn’t exist outside of that. The idea of who we are is whatever the mind is doing in that moment.

For the self to try to manage the mind creates a false separation and unfulfillable effort. Because self and mind are the same thing. A belief try…

[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…

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…

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…

[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…