The road to REALITY
The other day I expressed how sad and betrayed I felt over a certain situation. A well meaning friend proceeded to tell me what the lesson was and to proceed with a positive attitude. I know he meant no offence but sadly it doesn’t really work like this. None of us do. It’s ironic, don’t you think that society is so unbelievably happy obsessed that so many can’t bear the thought of being with their emotions and so end up on anti-depressents…or worse drugs, sex, alcohol, work addictions etc.
I was reminded of the incident when someone I knew asked me to point out why they might be afraid in certain situations. I told her that even if I pointed it out, it wouldn’t help. The reason it wouldn’t help, just as my friend pointing out my lesson is two fold; firstly each person’s relationship with the world is so unique that it’s impossible to imagine the meaning things or situations might hold for them and secondly even if you got it right, its essential that we unlock our own mysteries. Otherwise they remain purely intellectual and life as we know it, my friends, is not an intellectual process - it’s an experience full of emotion, complexity, mystery…
IF IT WERE that easy all we’d have to do is line up at some self professed guru’s door and wait to be dished up the answers with our morning bowl of oats. Fortunately the answers are inside us as we ARE the masters. So how then does one begin to make sense of it all?
Well recently I’ve been thinking about the path to wholeness…or becoming real….authentic - call it what you will. What does it mean and how do you get there? Practically I mean. I started thinking about the steps I’ve taken in my own life and also in working with clients.
Firstly wholeness (or any of those other words) is the ability to be with yourself always! Not just when you’re successful but always! It means being able to be exactly who you are; that doesn’t mean sickly sweet…it means real. It means being able to say what you think, express your emotions, ask for what you need, take risks, be vulnerable…you get the message. Basically CAN YOU LOVE YOURSELF even if you feel no one else does?
So how?
I’ve put it into a few steps (for those who love formula’s;-)
- Wake up and smell the coffee! I’ve met people who say they’re happy go lucky and nothing bothers them yet they smoke, can’t be alone and spend countless hours in front of TV. Yup the very first step is to wake up and smell what’s not so kosher. How? ASK WHY?! Why am I eating this? Why do I do this? Why do I love this person or hate that one? Why am I afraid of X? Why am I a certain way? Ask and wait for an answer.
- Go back! Whilst I don’t necessarily delving into what your mother did or didn’t feed you as a child, it’s essential to work through the trauma of the past. It’s essential not only in releasing the emotions bottled up from all that time ago but also in seeing how you formed certain beliefs about the world. E.g. “Life is unfair” or “Good guys finish last” or “People are scary” etc.
- Take another sniff of coffee. Be aware! What are you thinking everyday? What are you feeling? How do certain people, places, things make you feel. Most of us are too afraid to find out what’s going on inside so we make up a million ways to be too busy to pay attention. We overwork, try to fix other people’s problems, watch tv, smoke, drink, have sex, run (literally)…and a million more. Becoming aware has got less to do with what’s going on around you and more to do with what’s going on inside. It’s about noticing your habits, how you communicate, what you think, the ways you relate to people, things you want…WHY? Because you must see the ways in which you sabotage your deepest desires. You must see the ways in which you allow others to control you and vice versa. You must ultimately become ware of what subconscious beliefs are driving your behaviour. You must at some point - whether its in this life is totally up to you;-)
- Becoming aware of the director. Each of us are living our own movie and we have multiple directors. Sometimes there’s a dictator running the show, another time a critic, another time there’s a saboteur, others an inner child…and so they go. They’re called aspects of our personality. Unless we become aware of them and dare I say make friends with them, the fear of them drives their actions further. This leads us to…
- Seeing your behavioural patterns and the ways in which you manipulate others or are manipulated. Do you withdraw? Do you demand attention? Do you feel guilt? Or do you blame others? Do you criticise? Do you become a victim? Do you become bossy? Do you escape your life through a specific medium? Do you attract a certain type of person? Do you keep creating the same relationships with the opposite sex, money, work etc. These are all patterns of behaviour. This is not some exercise in proving how bad you are but the truth is that as Carl Jung put it in his work with ‘the shadow aspect of the psyche’, we cannot truly step into our light until we have seen how we hide it.
- Engage with your body! Your body is far more extraordinary than you might think. It houses every experience you ever had in it’s DNA. It stores information and processes the world in accordance with the mind and how it perceives the world. The body is where we change beliefs. How? Through stillness, through making love, through allowing ourselves to feel our hearts, through releasing past programmes through exercise and healing techniques such as kinesiology
- The very last step which is where most people begin to attempt the process of change and which is why they usually fail is in action phase. Once you’ve been through the process you will actually have to take physical steps in changing your life. Perhaps that means more boundaries. Perhaps it means saying no to a particular type of relationship. Perhaps it means a lifestyle change. Perhaps it means less TV time. Maybe it means more meditation or more family time or less work or even more work or maybe it means just 10 minutes a day devoted to you.
And voila you’re perfect…NOT! You’ll still encounter challenge and still deal with life but the way in which you do it will change and in changing the approach, the outcome is always changed.
In the coming weeks I’ll be talking more on each one of the above and paying particular attention to each point.
In the meantime keep it real and be good to yourself
Love Lisa
Changing default position
DID YOU THINK SOMETHING WAS WRONG ON YOUR PC WHEN YOU SAW THE ABOVE PIC?! Haha, isn’t it funny that we’re like computers? We come set with defaults and even though we don’t like it, we never think to change the default.
A couple of days before Christmas was my birthday. I woke up and cried. Despite the many messages of love I’d received, even at 5am, I hadn’t received one, as yet, from a person I’d hoped.
I decided to go for a run in the Botanical Gardens and as I ran a thought popped into my head “At some point, Lisa, you may want to choose to stop focusing on all the ways in which you’re not loved and start looking at and appreciating the ways in which you are”. I stopped to laugh because even though I’ve been working with myself a long time, I realised it’s all a choice. Everything comes with choice. I laughed because I realised there wasn’t even a need to ‘work’ on myself; just to make different choices.
Later that day in a discussion with one of my dearest friends (one who has loved me through infinitely many moments when I could not love myself), it suddenly dawned on me that my default position was looking at the lack of love and trying to change that instead of appreciating the love already there. I’m skilled in working with changing patterns and yet it doesn’ make working with my own that much easier. What I realised then however is, that once you’ve faced the trauma of the past, you must forgive. Failure to forgive will mean that the trauma remains in the present. That is what it means to forgive and forget. It doesn’t mean ignore what’s past; no, it means embrace it, face and then make the choice to let go.
So many of us are like this; we feel pain associated with the past and think ourselves as servers of justice in persisting with self punishment without stopping to think that it’s a choice.
Imagine waking up with your default as “I’m loved. I love. I’m loving. I am perfect”. Just maybe it’d put a stop to our endless search for perfection?
Well then what would we do? Nothing to cry about. No wounds to feel saddend about. No-one to blame. Just a whole bunch of choices to change. A little more of this and less of that. What then?
Have fun? Enjoy our lives? Dear God could it be that we’re allowed such freedom. The truth is we are and I write this to you in a plea to change your default. The more of us who change our default to love and being absolutely okay in who we are, the more we change the status quo!
Lots of love to all of you
Lisa
LOOKING FOR LOVE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES…an excerpt from my latest book;
It’s funny I always considered myself ill equipped to write on the topic of love but I had a ‘lightbulb’ moment before I sat down and began writing when I realised how can you know what a subject is truly about unless you also know what it truly is not?
Moral dilemma over, let’s continue. Please do me a favour; if you’re happily married, engaged in a loving meaningful relationship or even just engaged in a loving committed relationship with yourself, then step away slowly and continue with your merry life. Yes I’ll admit jealousy although no doubt you have other life themes to work on, however I would’ve gladly swopped at birth, had you just asked.
Now I’m pretty much talking to the rest of you; yes that 92% of the population who’ve read “Eat, Pray, Love” and “Committed”. I’m talking to you who thought that life is like “Dirty Dancing”. I’m talking to you if you cried in “Titanic” or “Pride and Prejudice” when Mr Darcy finally kisses Elizabeth Bennett. I’m talking to the rest of you who threw yourself into a relationship only to come out with clothes intact and little else.
I’m talking to you if you believe in true love but end up settling for true love for right now. I’m talking to you if you’ve lay down on your bathroom floor or bed or your best friend’s kitchen howling from the pain of love lost. I’m talking to you have experienced the enduring and uncompromising pain that sears away at one’s heart and self worth after having been let down yet ANOTHER time by someone who said they loved you.
Lastly I’m talking to you if you’ve believed in true love all your life only for you to feel like you failed or let it down in some way and are being punished because it abandoned you a long time ago. I’m talking to you if you’ve spent hours and weeks agonising over that someone special only to bump into them having a jolly good time or even if you’ve just felt like you’ve never found it.
I’m talking to those of you who’ve been searching for true love ever since you were eight years old and believed that Daniel (insert appropriate name here) from next door and you were destined to get married and have 3 children….that was until he left for boarding school and came home gay.
And don’t worry I’m not talking only to you females. I’m also talking to you guys. You think I don’t know but I know that Tracy (insert name of first girl ever loved) broke your heart. I know that when you found out she was actually dating or worse, shagging, George (insert appropriate name here) your heart broke and even though you know boys don’t cry, you ended up howling like a baby.
It hurt like hell and at that point both of us (boys and girls included) bar those special few mentioned in the first paragraph, decided deep inside that love wasn’t worth it. We decided maybe to settle because we thought if we set our hopes too high, we’d just be let down all over again. We decided that we’d either totally avoid true love by looking for it in the places we knew we’d never find it (don’t tell me you haven’t looked for it at the bottom of an ice cream tub) or we decided to settle for love we knew wasn’t right but at least it was safe….and safe kinda worked for a while until you resented your partner.
Welcome to my world! It’s the reason I wrote this book…because I spent a lifetime (well 32 years to be exact) looking for love in all the wrong places. For a long time I thought it was just me. I thought that only I was screwed up and everyone else happy. I delved into therapy and self help and even decided to switch careers to work with others in their quest for love. And that’s how I came to realise it wasn’t just me.
It wasn’t just me who felt alone. It wasn’t just me who had screwed up my marriage by mistake on purpose. It wasn’t just me who’d settled for about 10% of what I believed love to be because I thought that’s all I’d ever get. It was me who sabotaged my own efforts for love or looked longingly at couples who walked on the beach.
It wasn’t only me who ended up dating the recovering cocaine addict, commitment phobe or the unavailable other because I thought it better to be with a loser than be alone. Along my magnificent path I also tried looking for love in infinitely many tubs of Hagen Daazs. I looked for it in trying to achieve superhuman sporting feats and then I even looked for it in the pleasing of God.
As I worked through therapy I began to blame my complete inability to find love on my parents. I mean you’ll know that if you’ve worked through your issues with your parents then pretty much everything dates back to them right?…..
TO READ MORE ORDER A COPY OF LOOKING FOR LOVE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES
Let’s just all GET REAL
I had a client who called me after he attended a session and read one of my books. He said “Lisa it’s so refreshing that you’re not perfect and I don’t feel like I’m being judged”.
The truth is that we all look outside at the world through our uniquely tinted glasses and think everyone else is coping and happy and perfect meanwhile the truth is that everybody feels pain. Everyone feels challenged. Everyone is trying to figure out their own little world. The reason that we don’t see it is because no one says what’s really going on underneath the surface. So we end up like little particles bouncing off of each other and causing continuous reactions.
Ironically almost all of us feel the same. We’re all secretly afraid of not being good enough which is only indicative of the deeper fear we have which is that we’re actually not worthy of love which translates into a myriad of neurosis and defence mechanisms so that we never actually have to confront even thinking such a thing. I call it playing ‘small’. We spend our lives playing small by worrying, defending ourselves, trying to seize control…in a million different ways whether it’s with food, in relationships, at work or just with regards to our bodies.
I often ask clients how they perceive me and am amused by the fact that some clients think I live in a perfect world where I’m filled with an ongoing peace and love for myself and humanity. It’s certainly not the case; I feel vulnerable and exposed when life doesn’t go my way or in close relationships. I find myself trying to run away from things.
The truth is the only difference is awareness. I’m aware of how I feel and think in these situations and know there’s no point trying to hide it. It doesn’t mean I don’t feel fear and it doesn’t mean the little voice of “But I’ll never be loved” doesn’t sign its sad tale to me. These days I just acknowledge them, wave and say hi and tell them it’s okay.
I’ve learnt that the more REAL I am with myself and others the better it is for everyone. I’m also learning that the love we so desperately seek and crave is the love of self; I don’t mean in an arrogant way but in a soft and gentle way that says “It’s okay if you’re angry. I still love you”. ”It’s okay for you to feel hurt”
In this way I don’t have to keep up pretences of inner peace and total okayness. I think it’s a little unsustainable anyway but I reckon that true peace comes from being real; saying how you feel, being with yourself even when you don’t feel okay and from speaking your heart’s innermost desires and feelings. In this way I’ve found I have to spend less energy trying to fight the world and protect myself.
So next time you’re fighting with a colleague, feeling frustrated with someone who keeps hiding, having problems with a friend or just feeling frustrated because life just isn’t going your way, remember that in all likelihood others feel challenged too but are too afraid to GET REAL with you. Know too that you’re okay and others only harm you when you hold your sense of okayness in their hands. (And because so many of us need validation by others - we keep getting hurt).
I recently started a 30 day challenge to love yourself (and myself) just as you (I) am and today’s challenge is “allow yourself to just feel how you feel today without fixing it”. So in the spirit of that GET REAL, be kind to yourself and just be as you are. Why? Because you’re okay! You’re MORE than okay!
Love Lisa
Lisa is the founder of Life Inc and author a books including “Get Real - stepping into the truth of your life”. She’s had a few interesting turns which means she’s just getting a little more used to ‘turning’:-)
Why spirituality doesn’t smell like pot pourri
I’m in the “industry” so to speak so I often get send all kinds of mails regarding courses etc. You name it, I get it; swimming with the dolphins, astrology, yoga, counselling courses, therapy, dance….
The other day I received a mail regarding a workshop and without getting into too much detail it was all about the teachings of some long lost Tibetan guide. It was very in depth with many intricate concepts. No offence but surely if I were to get in touch with my Tibetan guide, I would have been born…well Tibetan maybe? The course prescribed eating weird and wonderful foods with chanting…in Tibetan of course…all of which made me wonder; what is spirituality and what leads us to embark on such weird and wonderful things in search of this intangible thing called spirituality. And if I have to spend a fortune on food which are supposedly natural, how could the rest of the population have a hope in hell of reaching the ever illusory state of enlightenment?
I have two dear friends; let’s just call them N and A for short. They must be two of the most spiritual beings I’ve ever met but what makes them so is that they’re the most real people I know. So I started thinking what defines spirituality? I came with spirituality is;
- Speaking the truth even though it may pain you to do so
- Listening to the truth even though it may pain you to do so
- Spending what you have (that means both time and money)
- Taking care of your mind, body and emotions although that means allowing yourself some slack too. (N, A and I have all decided that chocolate pudding is a spiritual food…in moderation)
- Asking for help when you need it
- Opening your heart even when it hurts
- Living a sometimes quiet existence
- Doing things you don’t want to but need to
- Saying no to things and people you want to say no to
- Ceasing to try to prove yourself in the world long enough to realise there was never anything to prove
- Being IN your life not getting lost in grand desires and illusions
- Genuinely caring about what happens in the lives of those around you
- Not having to rescue anyone and allowing everyone their own journey
- Expressing how you really feel even anger and pain
- Appreciating the fact that bad times have no reference to self
- Accepting what is
- Immersing yourself in your deepest joy
- Letting go of guilt and self blame
- Laughing at yourself
- Knowing you’re doing the best you can at any point in time
- Having the ability to forgive
- Understanding that if someone wants to see you…they will
- Understanding that if someone wants to change…they will
- Understanding you never have to work to be loved
- Holding yourself as sacred
- Knowing what you need and when you need it
- Having the gift of honest self appraisal
- Accepting responsibility for your choices
- Admitting your mistakes…in fact embrace mistakes
- Moving past your pain once you’ve held it with you as sacred
- Resting
- Seeing ALL your qualities and behaviours; not just the good
- Taking time out to do didley squat
- Having compassion for yourself and others
- Crying
- Having difficult conversations
- Knowing that freedom has nothing to do with circumstance and everything to do with letting go of beliefs you hold about yourself and the world
- Saying what you mean and meaning what you say
- Allowing yourself to make mistakes and get things wrong
- Seeing your judgement against others as a reflection of your judgement against yourself
- Being comfortable with being uncomfortable
- Not having the answers
- Not crossing off every item on your TO DO list
- Enjoying your body and all the wonders it brings including sex
- Letting go to life as a dynamic uncontrollable process with no guarantees
AND spirituality is knowing that you will NEVER get all of the above right!
So often people use spirituality as a guise to continue their ego’s deepest desires. It becomes a quest to see how much tofu one can eat (we all know my strong distaste for tofu), how much they can talk about ‘the universe’, how many good deeds they can do, how many years it took to study a certain kind of yoga technique (only known to masters from one monastery in Tibet)….
It’s easy to get along with everyone when you denounce all relationships. It’s also very easy to keep your ego gloriously satisfied with how “good” you are because of how much yoga you do or because of how many lives you’ve PERSONALLY saved (Please!)….as if when you fart all that comes out is lavender pot pourri. Ooh and how we LOVE to see ourselves as good. It’s that ever deceptive quest of goodness that hides the egos darkest self.
The same goes for religion. I have to laugh when I see religious debates going on; everyone’s so busy arguing over their religious ideology that they fail to recognise they’d happily stab one another in the hope of being proclaimed right! Ironic don’t you think?
The truth is that we’re all IN the lives we need to be. Such glorified rituals are merely another (okay so they’re marginally better than taking cocaine or hiding in work) method to hide away from the truth. They’re another means of escape.
I’m a little tired of Tibetan master guide courses, The Secret and tofu! My experience is that when I’ve visualised my perfect life…I usually got presented with the opposite thereof; in fact a right kick up the ass. Because when you want to progress on a spiritual path you will be tested. I’ve realised that if you want to dream, you will also have to face nightmares. That’s what the universe is; perfect balance.
I can only say such things because I’ve been studied such things, been to every workshop, visited healers, tried certain diets…and they all left me feeling more of a failure than before. Not because there was anything wrong with the courses themselves but rather because my approach was needing to find an answer. The answer is, of course, that there are no answers outside of yourself. There’s no life formula and no way you SHOULD be doing things.
It is only in accepting ourselves as human that we can ever hope to find the spirit within. So the next time you fart and think “my goodness that smells awful” - smile as you embrace being human; a truly spiritual experience!!
Love Lisa
PS Lisa is the founder of Life Inc. She loves chocolate and writing. Her cat Samwise supervises her studies and she’s NOT partial to tofu!!
Tales of retreat from a Buddhist Jew
I was born Jewish but found the philosophy rather difficult to apply to real life and so I turned to meditation and Buddhist philosophy 5 years ago following my divorce. At this point I feel I must confess I am, in fact, a meat eating (free range!) Buddhist and so not really a Buddhist but rather a free range meat eating Jewish born woman who studies Buddhist philosophy and meditation but you know what I mean.
I shall spare you the length and depth of the story from my divorce until now but let’s just say (true to form of not doing anything half heartedly) that I decided to sign up for the advanced silent retreat at the Nan Hua Buddhist temple in Bronkhorstspruit. I have climbed many literal and figurative mountains and cycled across them so thought, rather flippantly, that sitting on a cushion for 5 days would be … well like sitting on a cusion for 5 days. Let me say that if I knew you needed a solid set of balls for climbing mountains, I sincerely underestimated the fact that you needed them more for 5 days in silence with yourself!
I arrived at the temple on Monday and was given my seminary uniform as worn by those studying Buddhism at the temple. It consisted of a light blue set of loose pants with an over sized long sleeved cotton shirt that reaches down to your knees. It proved rather impractical for meal times and toilet breaks but I shall spare you those details and leave them to your fine imagination.
All was fine and dandy after the first meditation session until dinner. If I did not know that Buddhists were not prone to killing anything, I would’ve thought myself the subject of an evil ettempt on my life. Someone placed a bowl of unsuspecting green beans next to the rice and I gladly dished out a sizeable serving (a girl’s gotta eat you know) only to discover that they weren’t green beans but rather a scret weapon left over from the cold war; Chilli’s! And not just any chilli’s but the deadliest of deadly ones. Although meals are eaten in silence (to promote attention on and awareness of the food) my insides were screaming “intruder altert” and trying to extracate the offender via my nose, eyes and mouth. My fellow retreatants (all 15 Chinese and 3 white) thought it rather amusing and could not hide their mirth.
Mental note to self: Do NOT under any circumstances help yourself to food of which you are not aware either of the origin or in fact the specific identification thereof. This proved a little difficult and most meals consisted of various tofu in various shapes and forms; stir fried tofu strips, minced tofu, tofu nuggets, dried tofu, tofu soup, tofu sushi….Thankfully I was spared from the chilli tofu by my supreme sensing abilities developed on day 1! Breakfast even consisted of tofu in various forms along with rice soup (yes it IS as bad as it sounds) and stir fried carrots, broccoli, fruit and peanuts. I might’ve professed to mastering the art of chop sticks if it weren’t for those little bastard peanuts. Picture everyong situated in rows with the masters in the front row. Then picture flying peanuts trying to escape my clutches and ending up in the masters robes. Not funny!! Otherwise meal times proved a chance to just enjoy being with my food and my body as I am want to do. I am especially fond of sticky rice and looked forward to meal times of sticky rice and minced tofu.
The word retreat may conjure serene images of Zen masters meditating amidst doves and indeed there were 4 such masters on the retreat however the picture of the retreatants proved somewhat different. Our daily programme was;
- 5h30am wake up
- 06h00 breakfast
- 08h00 tea meditation (for an hour you get to master the art of drinking tea whilst one of the masters explains the philosophy of tea meditation)
- 09h00 3 hours walking and sitting meditation (walking meditation consists of walking in a 2m circule radius and keeping your attention focused on the body)
- 12h00 lunch
- 14h00 tai chi and walking meditation
- 15h00 sitting meditation
- 16h00 shower
- 17h00 sitting meditation
- 18h00 dinner (On the programme they wrote “slop” and I suspect they meant soup as dinner always included cabbage soup)
- 19h00 Dharma talk which is a talk on Buddhism and meditation practice
- 20h00 Sitting meditation
- 21h00 Bed
This is the daily schedule everyday. I might sound rather peaceful but if you’ve ever tried to ‘be with yourself’ for more than 5 minutes you will know how challenging it is. In fact every thought and emotion you ever wished not to have will surface. In fact the song stuck in my head on day one was “nowhere to run to baby, nowhere to hide…” This is not necessarily a bad thing. The Buddhist way of teaching is not to run from pain (indeed you cannot as you end up taking it with you) but rather just to become aware of it without judgement. The understanding is that everything is impermanent and doesn’t last (even our bodies) so the minute we get used to that idea and stop trying to find superficial happiness all the time then we settle into the “true nature of ourselves”.
Their whole thing is just to be where you are and acceptance. For us Westerners used to chasing dreams and goals this is very difficult. We’ve always been taught to try and move forward and see ‘standing still’ as either being lazy or non productive.
The truth is that our true nature understands that life is both pleasure and pain. Our true nature is one of stillness; the aim being to experience both pain and pleasure without preference or attachment. Wherever you are, BE there” - it’s as simple and as complex as that. I like this approach because it teaches you, contrary to popular belief, to be IN your life not to escape it. That is, after all, the aim of meditation - a tool for dealing with life.
After the first 3 days I settled into a stillness I can scare describe. It wasnt as if the world ceased to exist or even, the voices in my head for that matter but rather they faded into the background so I was able to hear the truth inside. I had a couple of profound realisations about life and myself and although I shall spare you to the detail of each one, the one I thought most relevant to all of us was that of;
“Can you be in your life and BE in your life? Can you be in your life and realise that you are not OF it?”
It means can you be in your life and really be where you are without finding a million ways to escape yourself (we all know those ways so well; working, thinking, ignoring, drugs, alcohol, sex, food, chasing goals, money…in fact most of us are so well versed in escaping ourselves even when we’re sitting still, we’re still running). It also means that further to that, can you realise that your are not defined by what you do and the circumstances of your life. It may sounds like a trivial understanding but I realised now that to know something and to KNOW it are two very different things.
Each time I come back from a trip I have this expectation that everything will be different. For the first time I cam back without that expectation and a deep contentment that, that is how it is.
So I’m back. Nothing’s changed and yet I feel like I’ve changed my world merely through my own perception. I find the only way to describe it is a sense of tender and shaky compassion towards myself and others.
If you’re really serious about learning to love yourself then give yourself the gift of silence and peaceful contemplation each and every day. And then again just like the Zen master would say if you’re serious about life, don’t take life too seriously!
Lisa
Lisa is the founder of Life Inc. She teaches guided meditation and likes a solid helping of free range lamb curry every now and then. (She’s not partial to tofu)!
Why we gotta train our brains…through stillness
Contrary to what many of us believe, the objective of meditation is NOT, not to think…that is an almost impossible ask especially for those of us raised in a ‘doing’ society. The aim is also NOT to achieve this almost unattainable sense of inner peace (Please do yourselves a favour and go see Kung Fu Panda 2 for further explanation). The aim is to get in touch with the very parts of ourselves we try to run away from in a gentle, non intrusive and compassionate manner. The aim of our meditation is firstly to become aware that we are thinking. It does not mean we follow those thoughts (often our thoughts are not true and seek to take us off on tangents) but rather we just become aware of how busy our minds may be at any point in time. The mind resembles a child and is always off to find something new and interesting. It does not help to scold the mind and force it to pay attention but rather to ‘entice’ it through the breath. It’s a matter of training the mind to rest in a particular place. We then slowly train the mind to come back to the breath and the body. The second aim of the breath practice is to connect back to the body. Many of us are afraid of our bodies and emotions. We’ve grown up in a society that discourages expression of emotion so we’ve been programmed into not feeling what we feel. The aim of the meditation practice is to become aware of what we may be feeling, without judgment. The greatest courage comes from learning to be okay with ourselves even when we don’t feel okay – this is the Buddhist practice of compassion. (The Western idea that we always need to feel okay is not practical nor is it attainable and only encourages feelings of failure) The greatest compassion we can develop is compassion towards ourselves. As we begin to become aware, without judgment, we find it much easier to deal with uncomfortable feelings. Usually we suppress these uncomfortable feelings in life which result in a stream of self destructive behavior or neurosis. Depression occurs when we continuously suppress what we feel or think that we’re meant to be different from how we are. (I have attached an article that explains why allowing ourselves to be WITH pain or uncomfortableness ultimately releases it) In my meditation practice I have combined the use of breath work with the use of creative imagery. The guided meditation makes use of creative imagery. The mind is unable to differentiate between a ‘real’ reality and a ‘imagined’ reality and because we learn / heal / progress through experience this provides the perfect avenue. We each hold beliefs about ourselves and the world very deeply within; on a cellular level. Using the mind in this manner stimulates the body to let go of beliefs that do not serve us or develop new beliefs. The brain is a highly efficient system that is connected to every cell in your body by billions of connections. It is divided into two sides ñ the left, logical side (words, logic, rational thought) and the right creative side (imagination and intuition). Day to day circumstances usually are met in a logical, left brain mode; however by yielding to the right, creative side of the brain we actually restore balance in the brain. This allows access to the mind-body connection to achieve what you want. The right side of the brain automatically steers you to your goal. It totally accepts what you want to accomplish without giving an opinion and acts upon it without judgement. That is why visualization targets the right, creative side of the brain and not the left, logical side. Most (in fact a very scary 90%) of our thoughts are dedicated to the past or future. In truth we only ever create the future with attention on ‘now’. As such most of us are only ever devoting 10% to the now which means we have limited energy with which to move forward. Meditation is the ultimate practice of brining ourselves back to the present. After all the aim of meditation is not just the 20 minutes of relaxation we experience but eventually to be able to take the experience into our lives by being more compassionate with ourselves, learning to take a moment to respond to situations and to evolve our ability to look at situations laterally and with the ability to solve challenges creatively.
The importance of creativity and imagination on everything
Many people tell me that they’re not creative. They tell me that their jobs aren’t creative and that they’ve never done art or painted. The truth is that creative expression has little to do with the activity and more to do with the process of doing it. When I ask perhaps if they’ve taken a different way to work when they’ve been stuck in traffic, they answer yes. When I ask if they’ve approached a problem with a different frame of reference to which they first begun, they’ve answered yes. This is creativity!
What happens in ‘real’ life can often be likened to what happens in the brain. Most often we do the same things habitually expecting a different result. The same thing happens in the brain whereby we think the same thoughts over and over again. Our thoughts (almost 90%) are directed towards the past (which we cannot control) or the future (which we cannot control). Our thoughts create neural pathways in the brain and these pathways literally become like highways. In other words it gets easier to think the same thoughts over and over again because we’re so used to it. The other challenge is that often we’re not even conscious of the thought process.
This is where imagination becomes important. The radical thing with the mind is that it cannot distinguish between an imagined and so called real reality so you can litterally ‘train’ your brain with a little creative imagination everyday. This is why activities such as creative or guided meditation are so important; not because they just relax you but because you’re literally training your brain to think differently.
What are the benefits? Well apart from a well rested sleep at night, the benefits include creative problem solving (incidentally a very necessary process in work that requires analytical thinking), the ability to direct emotions, the ability to bring the mind back into the present (which is the only aspect of our existence we are ever in control of) and the ability to bring down cortisol levels. Cortisol is the main chemical released in response to a perceived stressful situation.
So whether you’re looking to run Comrades, increase your performance at work, enhance your relationships or even just ‘feel better’ engage in some creative exercise or just close your eyes and picture yourself doing it…the response is the same.
Happy creative imagining
Lisa
PS Lisa is the founder of Life Inc (www.lifeinc.co.za) and facilitates creative meditation practice, counselling and retreats.
The Science of pain
When we are left without choice, we can only surrender as it is surely the most courageous of acts
It seems the world is going through its own crisis at the moment. The other day, at gym, I looked up at the screen and saw Egypt in crisis, Tunisians fleeing for Italy, a cyclone in Australia and half of America underneath massive snow drifts. A little closer to home I have had friends go through massive crisis such as loss of health, loved ones and businesses. Lately I have found clients moving through traumatic experiences. In my own life I too have experienced pain through my own set of upheavals. Ironically I would not have changed a single one of those upheavals knowing now what I did not know then.
Immediately when we feel pain we usually try to find some way to take it away. Mothers since the beginning of time have been giving their children the proverbial bowl of ice cream to ‘make it better’. Sometimes we see there is no bowl of ice cream that is going to make us better. In fact it we may find that no bowl of ice cream, job and even relationship provides the solace we are looking for.
Being ‘with’ it
Many people have chosen this time in humanity’s history to awaken and are choosing differently. For some of us that awakening is being facilitated through loss as we choose to leave those people and things dear to us. For some those people or things are being taken away suddenly and without prior warning. Let me not fool you for one minute; it is scary and it’s okay to be afraid. I have clients who say “but I don’t know what to do” or “I don’t know how to get through this”.
The thing is that you don’t have to “do” anything and that’s exactly the point. You don’t have to ‘do’ anything; you have merely to be ‘with’ the experience. Pain is funny like that; it will follow you around like a shadow until such time as you turn to face it and that is when it disappears. At the very moment you think you might shatter into a million pieces when you feel as though you could just step off the planet or at the very least, out your body, do what it counter-intuitive and step ‘into’ the emotion and just allow yourself to feel it.
Why you don’t have to make it right
These days society is much more geared towards and accepting of success than it is of what we deem the opposite thereof; pain and loss. We think we have to pull it together and make a plan. You can make plans (ask me, I know) until the cows come home but unless you can allow yourself to step into the pain, you will continue to create patterns and circumstances that bring you back to where you are. So what’s taking a day or a week or even a month to stop and step into what you feeling (and I mean really step into it, not just feel sorry for yourself) if it’s going to change your life for the positive ever more.
Developing new patterns
In this time much of our self worth is linked to our success or even just to things going right. If someone’s business is doing well, they are excited and joyful yet when things at work hit a downward turn their shoulders slump, they become agitated or go in recluse often because they feel ashamed.
Sometimes our self worth is challenged to the core when we lose people we love in a relationship. We think I wasn’t enough or perhaps we use arrogance to cover the hurt we really feel.
Unless we allow ourselves to feel and just ‘be present’ in every aspect of our lives, we are only allowing ourselves to enjoy one side of life. I mention the word enjoy, purposefully, here because there is much joy to be found in the freedom of experiencing pain. When we can allow ourselves to just ‘be’ in any situation we find joy in a myriad of places.
Working with the body to shift pain
You see (and I ask some poetic license from the body healers reading this) our patterns are stored on a cellular level. So there is no way to ‘intellectualise’ loss or pain. Even if we feel the emotions of frustration, anger, guilt or hurt unless we turn to feel them, they remain ‘unprocessed’ on a cellular level.
I’m not saying, for one minute, that you have to have a breakdown or need to experience dramatic loss to reprogram your patterns but even just allowing yourself the opportunity, for a few minutes every day, to feel your emotions, results in dramatic change. You will find yourself feeling lighter and more joyful irrespective of the situation. Ironically it is then that you will be able to shape your circumstances.
So for but a moment today, give yourself permission to sit. Just to sit and breathe because as you do, know that life shifts, positively, forever.
Lisa is a holistic wellness coach and founder of Life Inc. She facilitates clients in achieving sense of empowerment and wellness is all aspects of their lives. For more information log onto www.lifeinc.co.za
The 5 minute recipe that will change your life!
So every now and then my body asks my gently if I could possibly be a little kinder to it. It tells me when to sleep, when to eat and even what it needs most. This recipe is one I make when my system is feeling down or lethargic and needs a little lift. I call it the 5 minute recipe that will change your life!
· 1 sachet of laska paste
· 1 tin of reduced fat coconut milk
· Mushrooms, sliced
· Carrots, thinly sliced
· Butternut, thinly sliced
· Green beans, thinly sliced
· Corn – off the cob
· Prawns – optional
· Thin Thai noodles – optional
Put the laska paste and coconut milk into a hot wok. Thrown in everything else, bring it to the boil and serve in bowls.
If I may I generally find that this recipe is most prone to life changing when combined with a little R&R and perhaps followed by a long soak in a well bubbled bath. Lisa is a holistic wellness coach and founder of Life Inc. She assists individuals in achieving sense of empowerment and wellness is all aspects of their lives. With a love of forests and stillness, she regularly runs retreats in the forested paradise of Magoebaskloof. She is the author of “Learning to Love Lisa” and apart from her love of writing, she loves mountain biking, chocolate, her best friend Viv and her cat Samwise. For more information log onto www.lifeinc.co.za
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