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Getting rid of negative emotion
[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…
Creative block: Identity wants make creation risky
[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…
Getting Real with Peak Experience
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…
Get Really Specific
A client, talking to me about his adult son, said, ‘I just want my son to be happy.’
Left as a sad unfulfilled yearning, this want had the potential to keep creating a sense of lack and wrongness and to get in the way of the relationship between father and son.
So, we got really specific. I asked my client questions such as:
What does it mean to be happy?
What criteria will you use to judge this?
How will you know if he is happy or just pretending to be…
Getting REAL with the play of life
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…
Let’s go all the way
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…
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…
The Most Profound Perspective Change
When I started to learn rock climbing, I 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 encouragement …
It is Slavery to live in the mind…
'It's a Slavery to live in the mind unless it has become part of the body'
This quote from Khalil Gibran might be the most profound, far reaching and sane sixteen words we are lucky enough to have been given.
Such a simple sentence and yet it conveys everything we need to know about human suffering and how it ends.
It is Slavery to live in the mind…
In one powerful word ‘Slavery’ Gibran describes the torture, restriction and compulsion of a life lived from an identified, believing mind.
…Understanding choices and behaviour
[Excerpt from the book SANE]
Self-control. Will power. Determination. Commitment. Dedication. Restraint. Mind over matter.
All ways of describing the power that this apparent self of ours has or should have over what this body does or does not do.
It looks like this control is not just possible, but necessary for every aspect of life.
To succeed, we have to persevere.
To be happy, we have to banish negative feelings.
To be in good shape, we have to resist the bad food and do the exercise.
…