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What is really needed?
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 …
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…
The Joy of Stress
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…
The Unfulfillable Ask
What is your ask of the world?
What is your ask of your spouse or partner?
Of your children, parents or siblings?
Of your clients or customers?
Of your colleagues or employer?
Of your bank manager or landlord?
What is your ask of politicians?
Of individuals or groups?
Of businesses?
Of health-care providers?
Of your pets?
Of God, nature or the universe?
What is your ask?
It’s important to know.
Our ask is our most powerful means for navigating our lives and for interacting with…
WELL - Healing
[Excerpt from the book WELL]
We could consider that all reality - of self, other, past, future, everything - is essentially a film. A film created from thought, belief, association and imagination.
And the immediate question (especially in a conversation about physical and mental health) might come ‘Well that’s all very well but I need to know how do I get into a new film? A film in which I am healthy/happy/strong/clear-minded/loved/admired/free? A film in which I am not depressed, anxious, l…
WELL - Mental and Physical Health
[Introduction to the book WELL]
This book must come with a warning.
It is a warning based on what people embarking on courses or conversations or books about the nature of the self can find themselves saying:
‘I came here to feel better. But actually I feel worse: my sleep is terrible / my anxiety is increasing / I’m more depressed than ever / my physical complaint is intensifying / the suffering is worsening.’
And that, of course, looks like a failure of the course provider or author. The …
An Invitation
[excerpt from WELL]
This is an invitation to the absolute and infinite.
Maybe you are old enough to remember a time when television was something that began and ended.
Programmes stopped at midnight. And began again at 9am the next day. And sometimes there was no television in the afternoons. When there was no television, the screen displayed the test card or lines or static.
Not only was it tightly limited in time, television was of course also limited in scope.
In the UK, for example, unt…
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…
Other People
[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…
Who or what is the perceiver?
[Excerpt from SANE]
The body exists in a swirling maelstrom of data. Data is gathered and transmitted through sense organs.
The on-going assumption is that the me, the self, the ‘I’, is the perceiver, organiser, controller and interpreter of this data.
But what is that self exactly? Where does it reside? What is it made of? And how does the self exist if not via the same perceptual process as everything else?
Could it be that this self that seems so real is also just a creation of per…