I’m more than happy learning from people with whom I might not share every opinion. So, my hesitations over some of what she says aren’t the end of the world. However, I’m sure I’m not the only person who raised an eyebrow or two over how she dealt with a woman who had experienced incest at the age of 8.

For those of you who don’t know, The Work is a simple yet powerful process of inquiry that involves asking four questions and then a ‘turnaround’:

1.  Is it true?

2. Can I absolutely know it’s true?

3. How do I react when I believe that thought?

4. Who would I be without that thought/story?

Turn it around. (To self, other or an opposite.)

I’ve actually found that these simple questions lead to some rather profound realisations. However, it’s in the turnarounds that there is some real power for personal transformation. Some examples, from one of the official sites, include:

…“Paul doesn’t understand me” can be turned around to “Paul does understand me.” Another turnaround is “I don’t understand Paul.” A third is “I don’t understand myself.”

“Paul shouldn’t shout at me” turns around to:
- Paul should shout at me. (Obviously: In reality, he does sometimes. Am I listening?)
- I shouldn’t shout at Paul.
- I shouldn’t shout at me.
(In my head, am I playing over and over again Paul’s shouting? Who’s more merciful, Paul who shouted once, or me who replayed it a 100 times?)

Can you Turn Around Abuse?

Loving What is includes an account of the time Byron Katie leads an incest survivor through inquiry and turnarounds. It makes for uncomfortable reading, to say the least. The woman doing ‘The Work’ had been molested as an 8 year old by her step-father. Byron Katie is helps the woman see that she doesn’t have to live in terror from the memory - and resulting identity - of being a perpetual victim of abuse. She achieves this through turnaround, where she sees that she is abusing herself, by playing the events over and over in her mind. In fact, she has ‘abused’ herself in this way far more often than her step-father. But it doesn’t stop there.

She then turnsaround and accepts that she abused her stepfather! Apparently, the problem was that she allowed him to do what he did because she wanted his love. Like, I said, it makes uncomfortable reading.

However, the point - and this is easily missed when first read - is not that this is what happened. It’s not the purpose of The Work to convince us of anything. Instead, it’s more a case of showing us alternative story-lines and seeing which ones are less painful for us to live under. So, there’s a sense in which this woman is given the option of not considering herself a victim, but seeing if she might find more peace by viewing things differently.

Of course, that doesn’t change the fact the sexual abuse is a very serious and complex issue that is probably not best dealt with at the front of a Lecture Hall, by someone with no professional training. However, it does go some of the way to showing why it is that so many incest survivors have found Byron Katie’s work so helpful.

Here’s just one example.

What about you?

Do you have any experience with The Work? Have you found Byron Katie’s approach to things helpful? Has anyone else struggled with the incest dialogue in Loving What Is?

If you’re interested in exploring more, there are two MP3s available for download:

Incest and Abuse (1)
Incest and Abuse (2)

‘There are two ways to get enough: one is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.’

This strikes me as incredibly profound.

How much misery enters our lives through the desire for things - or circumstances - that we don’t have. Even if we get that one thing, the desire for more is insatiable and there is soon some other unmet longing to take its place. The most that we can hope for, in such a situation, is for a brief respite from the cycle of desire-dissatisfaction and reward-desire.

That’s a terrible prison to live in.

I intend to post more about this in the future, when I write about Embracing the Moment.

Goodlife Zen posts 35 Ways to Create Lasting Friendships:

I’ve collected 35 tips for you on how to create lasting friendships. Some of the tips are about finding friends, others are about how to deepen a friendship once it’s formed. Finally there are some points on how to repair a friend.

Then, under the marvellous heading, Good friends help us to understand who we really are, Mary Jaksch offers some useful tips that are well-worth a read

Speaking from personal experience, I would say that number 20 is particularly valuable.

20. Don’t gossip. If a new friend hears you revealing personal stories of othere, he or she will be wary of your discretion.

The one thing that isn’t mentioned, but that is related to the above (and is implied by a number of other points), is Honesty. I know of no other practice that I value most in my friends.

It is not simply your mental health which benefits from a broad network of friends but your physical well-being. There is a big biological pay-off, it seems, to having a strong social circle.

Friends can boost your defences against disease, help you heal, lower your blood pressure, improve your cholesterol and help you live longer in older age, says research.

The University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research says, “Social relationships or the relative lack of constitute a major risk factor for health – rivalling the effects of well-established health risk factors such as cigarette smoking, blood pressure, and obesity.”

…Many studies have found that friends – the old-fashioned kind that you talk to on the phone, e-mail, or meet with in person – can improve your immune system.

They help you handle stress by reducing your production of the hormone cortisol, which has a negative effect on your mood and your body’s natural defences.

…The Ohio State University psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, who studies friendship and health, calls social support the most reliable psychological indicator of an improved immune response that has been found.

…For women with breast cancer, social support is associated with a better outcome. Research by the University of California found that socially isolated women had a higher risk of dying after a diagnosis of breast cancer. In a study from Stanford University in the US, women with advanced breast cancer who attended a weekly support group lived twice as long as those who did not.

Another study by the University of California showed that women reacted to stress by producing brain chemicals that actually caused them to make and maintain friendships with other women.

Apparently, when women enjoy a supportive friendship, more of the so-called “love hormone” oxytocin is released, which reduces stress and creates calm. Oxytocin is the hormone linked with attachment, connection, nurturing, bonding, and mothering.

This calming effect is not as effective in men because when men experience stress they produce high levels of testosterone, which reduces the effects of oxytocin rather then promotes it. Oestrogen levels in women enhance oxytocin release.

But both men and women with a strong network of friends live longer, according to an Australian study that followed 1,500 people over the age of 70 for 10 years.

The research showed that having a group of good friends is even more important to living longer than having close family ties.

Friendship. Now there’s a topic we don’t hear enough about.

You can read the full article here.

However, we’ll be back before you know it with tips on moving house, more on teeth grinding, the next installment in our series on giving up cigarettes and tips on handling a sweet-tooth.

I can honestly say that when I was first taken through an exercise like the one below, I felt like I had learnt to relax for the first time in my life. It was a complete surprise when I later discovered that I could use that feeling of relaxation to combat future stresses that I would encounter.

So, if your wondering if you can use your imagination to relax and reduce stress, I’m living proof! Enjoy these 10 steps to relaxation and stress-reduction, through the simple act of visualisation:

Use Your Imagination to Relax and Reduce Stress

Sit comfortably in a chair.

1. Close your eyes and simply take a deep breath.

Breathe in through your nose, with the same intention that you would smell a rose. You can almost feel the end of your nose tingling.

As you breath in, imagine filling your abdomen, your lower lungs and then your lungs. (Some people have said that it helps to imagine your lungs are just behind your belly button as you are breathing in.) You are practicing deep ‘diaphragmatic breathing’ (rather than shallower higher lung breathing), so when you breathe in, your abdomen should expand.

2. As you breath in, say “Re” and as you breathe out say “lax”.

Imagine yourself breathing in peace and exhaling stress.

3. After a few repetitions of this, begin tensing and relaxing your muscles, from the top of your head all of the way down.

You should try to continue the deep breathing during this stage. If you initially find this too difficult, just stick with the breathing for now.

4. Your body will begin to feel relaxed.

This feeling differs from person to person. For some, their body feels soft and light, as if it is floating on air. For others, it feels heavy, as if it is sinking in water. Feel the relaxation and give in to it.

5. Visualize yourself walking on a path at the Sea-side.

In front of you are steps leading down to the Beach. You take the first step - say “One” in your mind - and as you do so you notice the gentle warmth of the Sun.

Count down each step as you go, down to the tenth and last. With each step you take, you become more aware of your surroundings, feel more relaxed, gentler, warmer.

6. As you reach the bottom step, you are now on the warm, soft sand.

Walk across the soft sand towards the Sea. At this point, you are using as many of your senses as possibe. Hear the waves lapping against the shore. Smell the freshness of the air. Visualise the cool blue Sea. As you step into it, feel the clean, refreshing water cleansing you from the top of your head down to your toes, washing away every bit of stress and anxiety. Enjoy how fresh and clean you feel.

7. Project your thoughts forward.

Now visualise yourself in a potential stressful situation, but allow the warm and gentle feeling of relaxation to continue to soothe your thoughts. Allow the relaxed state you are feeling now to flood your vision. Your mind and body are being conditioned to respond calmly to stress.

8. Leave the Beach, via the steps

Leaving the Beach, keep hold of the pleasing sense of calm achievement, warmth and relaxation.

As you take each step up, count backwards from 10. Feel the joy of knowing you are taking your new-found relaxation with you.

9. Open your eyes slowly

Take with you this calm and relaxing feeling, remembering you can always return to the Beach whenever you choose.

10. When you face a stressful situation, recall the warmth that you felt on the Beach.

If, for example, you’re about to walk into a a stressful board meeting, pause beforehand a take some deep breaths. This has always been sufficient for me to restore the previous feelings of warmth and calm. However, you might want to experiment with taking in 10 deep breaths and going down to the Beach before going to your board meeting. Just remember to come back up at some point or you’re likely to fall asleep on the job!

I know how simple this all sounds, but all I can say is it works. Long before I began Aikido, it was taking those 10 steps down to the beach that convinced me of the effectiveness of breathing, along with the power of the mind to imagine itself out of stress and depression.

Give it a go. And let me know how you get on.

Here are DLM’s points, with some commentary from me at the bottom:

1. Living in the present
2. Single Focus While Doing Things
3. Use of Imagination
4. The future is limitless
5. Always Joyful
6. Inherent Goodness and Trust in Others
7. Absolute Faith In Getting Their Wishes Fulfilled

All I want to add to these points is that I don’t believe it’s enough to connect with our ‘inner child’. In reality, such a construct may not even be helpful for us.

What is more beneficial is going out and living these lessons. Things like this cannot just be learnt through observation. These lessons, like all great lessons, can only be learnt through experience.

So, don’t just ‘get in touch with your inner child’, as if something like that can be accessed at will. Instead, get in touch with yourself. Discover that you never stopped being that child. The adult you are now didn’t surpass that child, replace it or reject it. Instead the child gave birth to who you are - and you owe your adulthood to that playful, wishful, joyful sprite. Instead of ditching that child, to simply be recalled when it’s convenient, it might be more helpful to think of growth as the wearing of an extra layer clothing. We don’t take our underwear off when we put our trousers on. And we don’t take our trousers off when we put our coat on! Quite the opposite, most of us check that we are first fully dressed before putting an outer jacket on venturing on.

Why then would we think that we can function as an adult without first acknowledging and accepting the child within?

I don’t want to belabour the point, so I’ll leave it at this:Don’t use the innocence and energy of kids as some kind of metaphor to learn from. Instead, see it as a challenge to be lived? If you’re up to the task…

Now, with that rather long caveat, go and read the whole thing.

Anyway, I wanted to repeat a popular quote of Abraham Lincoln’s that I used in that post:

“When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.”

Preach it, Abe!

I no longer think of myself as a religious person. (I’ll blog one day about how I realised I’d finally lost my faith whilst I was in the middle of preaching a sermon!) However, if I had to be, I’d sign-up to this do-gooding, feel-gooding spirituality.

What about you?

Smoking cessation is the big topic right now and seems like it has been for an incredibly long time. I’m guessing that by reading this you have an interest in giving up, wanting to help someone give up, or have already given up. Whatever one it may be, I can’t promise instant 100% success; I’m not a professional and I don’t have an ounce of cessation training in me - but I recently managed to quit smoking, so I’m going to put together a small series on ‘how I gave up smoking’, in the hopes that it might help someone else.

This first of three posts will look at preparation, why I think it’s important and how it helped me.

Preparation

All the big things in life will require some sort of preparation - and in most cases even the small things in life - so why would we presume that giving up cigarettes deserves less consideration? There are a variety of areas that would benefit from some preparation, but personally most of my preparation was carried out just by thinking. You may have already given up something addictive and will therefore understand the process you have to go through, mentally and physically, in order to come out the other side in one piece. But for most of us its our first addiction and - fingers crossed - soon to be our last.

The first area I believe you should consider is the motivation for giving up.

Why do you want to do this? My main reasons were money and the fact that smoking cigarettes directly contradicts the career path I want to follow. Lets be honest with ourselves, no one purely wants to give up just for the sake of their health if they are presently healthy, or at least believe they are healthy. A few different motivations will help you see why you are going to do this.

One thing I can say is that if I’d known I would love being addiction-free this much, it would have been my main motivation all along, because it genuinely feels great not to be addicted.

Without a sure motivation, you can’t be sure you really want to do this. And if you don’t want to give up and are just doing so out of some sense of obligation, you need to recognise that the success rate is very low.

Setting a date seems like a ridiculous idea, doesn’t it? But if you know that on, for example,  January 1st you are going to embark on this adventure, you are more likely to go through with it. In others words, I think it makes it final. Saying that, if you are one of those people that regularly cancel bookings in your diary, perhaps this idea isn’t for you!

Make sure you set a logical date. Don’t decide on a date that is surrounded by stressful events, or parties, where people are going to be smoking. I know that sounds obvious, but I’m speaking from personal experience here! Living in the 21st century can mean that more than our fair share of days are stressful, so take that into account.

My date was January 1st. Typical, eh? Once you know your date, tell everyone you know! I did this; I told friends and family. That way, there’s a big expectation on you to go ahead with it. I suspect that a good number of my friends didn’t believe I was going to do it, because I went through a stage in my second year of smoking where I tried to give up on several occasions. So who can blame them for being non believers? I think that also spurred me on when it came to crunch time; I don’t like to be wrong, so I had to prove them wrong!

I’m sure you’ve considered how you are going to conquer this. I used patches and gum. I know someone who just used gum – amazing. I know one person (but only one) who gave up cold turkey, but he was in hospital on strict bed rest and wired to machines. He had a lot of motivation – his life and family, but it’s still an incredible accomplishment. Some people swear on a quit smoking book. I know of someone who used hypnotherapy – and it worked!

Personally, I used patches because I knew I was seriously addicted and I didn’t like the person I became if I couldn’t smoke. Having that constant stream of nicotine was ideal, for everyone involved! You know how you work, so only you can honestly know what will work for you.

Last but not least, I think that you’ll need to consider how you are going to deal with the triggers, cravings and withdrawal symptoms. Take some time out to notice when you smoke out of habit and when you smoke as a reaction to circumstances. Self-awareness is the key here – you will know best how you cope with stress (other than having a cigarette, of course!).

You also know how you are when you haven’t had a cigarette in a while. If you’re irritable and moody, make sure your friends, colleagues, significant others or housemates know this. That way, they can support you more and are more likely to be understanding. Food, gym, walking, painting, cleaning and gum can all combat cravings; make sure you have a few tricks up your sleeve.

Once you’ve prepared and set the big date, you’re pretty much half way there. My second in the three part series will take a look at the actual quitting. I hope that after reading this first snippet you’ll still be up for joining me in that.

Last but not least, don’t put too much emphasis on having “the last one”. If you do, that’s all you’ll be thinking when you’re smoking it and you won’t enjoy it and therefore you’ll believe you deserve another – and that pattern can last for weeks. Trust me!

This will be a three-part series, consisting of:

1 - preparation
2 - the actual quitting
3 - the aftermath

I’ve had a sneak peek and it’s good stuff. More importantly, it works!