Ready

When the student is ready the teacher appears ~ Buddhist proverb

I keep hearing the same messages lately so it must mean I am ready. Ready to release. Ready to surrender. I think it is a positive way to look at things and patterns that may have been hanging around for years. Instead of saying 'here we go again', or seeing it as confirmation that we are 'bad', to instead look at 'it' and say "Okay this is my opportunity to finally let this go".

Letting go. A loaded statement if ever there was one, what does it actually mean? To me it means giving yourself permission to feel your feelings, not judge them and by feeling them, you process them and let them go, naturally, without effort. You do not have to swim upstream against the current and struggle, that is not letting go, that is hanging on. In the word 'trying', struggling is implicit (at least to me). Stop trying, just feel. Things come up for you to let them go, not to put you through the same trauma over and over again. We don't get that though. I think this phenomenon is related to feeling worthless, unsafe or undeserving. We believe that 'bad' things are there to prove to us that we are worthless instead of seeing them as opportunities to finally heal our sense of self. Our sense of being love, being peace, being anything that is good (God).

If you are worried about what words to use with EFT, in the set up statement and in the rounds, just use whatever words that come to you when you are describing what you are going through or feeling. There are no 'right' words, whatever words are in your mind are the 'right' words for you. Exactly the right words. They are your wisdom. Trust them. It is you sending messages to you. It is you helping you. It is you wanting to remind you that you are perfect, whole and complete. And loved.

Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet

Then a priestess said, Speak to us of Prayer.
And he answered, saying:
You pray in your distress and in your need, would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.
For what is prayer but the expansion of yourself into the living ether?
And if it is for your comfort to pour your darkness into space, it is also for your delight to pour forth the dawning of your heart.
And if you cannot but weep when your soul summons you to prayer, she should spur you again and again, though weeping, until you shall come laughing.
When you pray you rise to meet in the air those who are praying at that very hour, and whom save in prayer you may not meet.
Therefore let your visit to that temple invisible be for naught but ecstasy and sweet communion.
For if you should enter the temple for no other purpose than asking you shall not receive:
And if you should enter into it to humble yourself you shall not be lifted:
Or even if you should enter into it to beg for the good of others you shall not be heard.
It is enough that you enter the temple invisible.

I cannot teach you how to pray in words.
God listens not to your words save when He Himself utters them through your lips.
And I cannot teach you the prayer of the seas and the forests and the mountains.
But you who are born of the mountains and the forests and the seas can find their prayer in your heart,
And if you but listen in the stillness of the night you shall hear them saying in silence:
Our God, who art our winged self, it is thy will in us that willeth.
"It is thy desire in us that desireth.
"It is thy urge in us that would turn our nights, which are thine, into days, which are thine also.
"We cannot ask thee for aught, for thou knowest our needs before they are born in us:
"Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all".

Healing Words

Healing Words

I was listening to Oprah’s Soul Series the other day and her interview with Dr Larry Dossey who wrote a book entitled Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine, in 1993. He is a lovely man and I really enjoyed the interview as I have heard so much about him. At the time he wrote the book, there was only one scientific study to validate that prayer heals but now there are over 21 studies, and counting. It does not matter whether you have one person praying for you or a hundred, what seems to matter is the quality of the prayer, its sincerity and intention. If the energies of our intention are in line with those of God (intention itself) our prayers will heal or will remind us that we are healed and whole, we have just forgotten that truth. I believe that when we act from a place of Love and consequently are Love, we remember who we are and we reach a place in the person being prayed for which also recognises that they are love. Isn’t this what it means to love and be loved? Because God is Love, we are Love and that is the creative, kind, loving, beautiful, expansive, abundant and receptive force that reminds us we are healed.

Be as a clear glass through which God can shine – Meister Eckhart

The truth about back pain revealed: Fight or Flight

I thought the following article on back pain was excellent.
http://www.intent.com/blog/2008/12/19/series-truth-about-back-pain-revealed-fight-or-flight

Iyanla Vanzant - Until Today

Until Today is one of my favourite books by Iyanla Vanzant, one of my favourite authors. She always hits the nail on the head.

'I will know peace when ... I examine what I feel beneath what I am feeling.

It can be frightening to experience and express anger. Even more frightening is the hurt that caused the anger in the first place. When you get hurt, you get angry. You believe that the anger is directed outward, toward the person who hurt you. The truth is, anger as a response to hurt is always directed inward. You are angry that you trusted someone who turned out to be the wrong person to trust. You are angry that you loved too much. Cared too much. Because it is hard to admit these things to yourself, about yourself, you point the finger out there, at them! The challenge is to recognise that it is much easier to be angry at someone than it is to say, "You hurt me". When you are angry, you are in control. Control is what you believe you must have to avoid being hurt.

Being hurt is a sign that there is something in you that requires your attention. Being hurt is a sign that you have been engaging in a pattern of behaviour that no longer serves who you are. When you get hurt, it means that you have a tender spot you have been resisting the need to address. Along comes some unsuspecting soul, doing what they do, in the way they do it, and they stick their finger in the tender spot.

It makes you angry that you didn't see it coming. You are angry because you believe you should have known better. Anger in response to a hurt is a clear sign that you were hurt to begin with. You need to stop being angry long enough to examine your own heart and mind.

Until today, you may have believed that someone you trusted or loved has done something to make you angry. Just for today, lay your anger aside. Look beneath the anger to find the hurt that you have buried to avoid dealing with it.

Today I am digging up old hurts and putting them to rest!'

Trauma, Brain and Relationship: Helping Children Heal

Some resources on trauma and how it affects the brain:
http://traumaresources.org/
http://www.helpguide.org/mental/eqb_social_emotional_brain.htm

Psychological trauma or unexperienced experience

Excerpt of an article*(see below) by Irish psychiatrist Ivor Browne:

I call this sphere. . . the sphere of "between." Though being realized in very different degrees, it is a primal category of human reality. This is where the genuine third alternative must begin.
Martin Buber (1938)

My thesis is such that it is hard to understand why it is not already part of our everyday knowledge. Simply, when something happens to us, we do not experi­ence all of it at once. Experiencing is a process that takes place over time. It in­volves neurophysiological and somatic work on the part of the person to whom the experience happens. Further, the amount of work that is involved depends on how serious the nature of this external challenge is and several other internal factors that I will go into later.

I have perused much of the voluminous literature that has appeared in recent years in rela­tion to post-traumatic stress disorder as well as the literature on traumatic neurosis written dur­ing the nineteenth century. And yet, this simple awareness that experiencing something is a process that takes place within us over time seems to have been missed. Simply, when some­thing happens to us we do not experience all of it at once. This is all the more strange because if we consider our everyday experience of life, we know that if something disturbing happens to us -- say, for example, an unpleasant argument with someone on a Friday afternoon -- we may find ourselves going over and over it during the weekend and unable to escape the unpleasant feeling attached to it or resolve the problem. But then, having slept on it for a couple of nights, we wake up on Monday morning no longer troubled, even though we may have had no further communication with the person involved. Somehow the problem is now solved. This to me is clear evidence that some work has been going on within us during this couple of days so that the experience is now integrated into ourselves, is becoming memory, and has moved from something in the present, something unsettled and current, into the past.

There appear to be two main reasons why this simple phenomenon of everyday experience has been overlooked. The first reason involves certain historical factors that surrounded the early work of Sigmund Freud, now just a hundred years ago, for it was he who first clearly drew attention to the whole issue of traumatic neurosis. The second reason has to do with the way in which we use language. I would like to deal with each of the reasons for this oversight in more detail. Read more

Watch a documentary about this amazing man http://www.rte.ie/tv/wouldyoubelieve/ivorbrowne.html You will need the free realplayer.

*Browne, I. (1990). Psychological trauma, or unexperienced experience, ReVision 12(4): 21--34

Antonio Damasio and Emotions

A blurb from the book The Feeling of What Happens; Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness, says "One of the world's leading experts on the neurophysiology of emotions, Professor Damasio shows how our consciousness, our sense of being, arose out of the development of emotion". This book is a fantastic read for anyone interested in this subject.

BrainSync - Theta Wave with Fractals

To find out more about fractals visit http://classes.yale.edu/fractals/

The wisdom of the Heart

A heart of gold
My heart sinks
Full of heart
Heart broken
To speak from the heart
To come from the heart
He’s “got heart”
A heavy heart
My heart is going to burst
Do what your heart tells you
“Have heart”
A good heart
Home is where the heart is
Heartache
Heart throb
Heartfelt
Faint of heart
Warm hearted
Kind hearted
Cold hearted
Half hearted
My heart bleeds
Lion heart
To have a “heart to heart”
Young at heart
Follow your heart
Open heart
Closed heart
Big heart
To melt someone’s heart
Love heart
Sweetheart
In your heart of hearts
At the heart of it all

EFT clears the way to Love.

Accepting where and who you are right now can be difficult. But honestly it is the only place to start from. If you can love and accept yourself exactly as you are right now you can offer this same gift to others. You will automatically forgive yourself and others (in fact there won't even be a need to, you will just accept everything as it is) and you will realise that nothing that anyone has ever done had anything to do with you but everything to do with them (and how much they accepted and loved themselves) and vice versa. For-giveness is a state of mind and not something we "do".



Use the negative beliefs that come up when you say "I love myself". They are an opportunity to finally clear the way to Love. Gary Craig calls these beliefs tail enders, and you can use these tail enders in your set up statement. It's actually a great way to find core issues!