Category: Health

Heal Yourself With Compassion

Happiness, Health, The Pathway To Fulfilment

We treat anger, depression and other negative states of being as things to remove or reject, but sometimes they are valid feelings and sometimes we are in the middle of experiencing such feelings and it can be hard to know what to do.

Try treating these feelings with compassion. Think of them in the same way that you would a small child. You wouldn’t reject a child for being upset or angry, you would cuddle and care for the child and help them move through the negative feelings into happier ones.

There is always a reason we feel angry or depressed. If we approach these feelings with compassion we can discover the root cause and heal it.

Transforming Suffering

Happiness, Health, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

We all suffer, to some degree or another. For most it is to feel hungry or thirsty a few times a day, but we have the means to access food and drink. For some it is not having the ideal life that we want, but we have a lot of things that we do like. For some it is physical suffering like chronic pain. For some it is the mental anguish of anxiety or depression. We all fit on this spectrum at different places at various times in our lives.

When we are in the harsher end of the spectrum there is a trap that we often fall into where we think of ourselves as a victim and we ask ‘why me?’ This way of thinking makes us feel helpless. Having been there, I can tell you thinking that you are a victim makes what you are going through more intense and it lasts longer. There is a better option. We can think of the suffering in life as the curriculum we are given in order to live a fulfilling life.

I have Fibromyalgia and I am in pain every day and I often feel exhausted. I went through feeling like a victim and it did not help. I have realised that if I am to live a happier life I need to make changes to my thoughts and to my daily habits. I need to change my diet and to practice Chi Kung (Qigong) and to meditate every day, because this will reduce the pain in my body, increase my energy levels and put me in touch with the enormity of that which is outside of me.

When we suffer we can either think of ourselves as victims or we can take ownership of our journey through life. Taking ownership transforms your suffering into a curriculum and provides wise lessons, but you have to put the work in.

What We Focus On

Happiness, Health, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

When we eat an orange, or any kind of fruit, we want it to have ripened, but not to much. There is a window in time where the fruit is just right. If we wait a day or two it would not taste as good, or if we hurry ourselves and eat it a day or two sooner it will not taste as good.

We think about a great many things in these terms, whether they are ripe or not. The universal stuff that composes an orange, or anything else, does not change it’s own nature. It just organises itself into an orange and then into something else. Once we eat the orange, the parts of it that are useful to our bodies become our bodies and the rest is ejected and becomes something else.

We spend so much time focusing on the ripeness of things and we miss the truth that we are all composed of the same universal stuff, reorganised again and again. We are a happening. We are not just our conceptions based our skin colour, nationality, gender, religion or any other category. No one is better or more ‘ripe’ that anyone else. We just are.

The Work Of Being Happy

Happiness, Health, The Pathway To Fulfilment

There is an impulse in us to avoid negative thoughts and feelings at all costs. Some, however, dwell within the negativity and let it take them over. Neither approach, I feel, will be effective in the long run, if you want to be happy. It is better to engage our negative thoughts and feelings and invite them in for tea, so to speak.

Once they become familiar to us as aspects of ourselves then we can understand why they are there and resolve the underlying causes. This is the work of living a happy and fulfilling life. I recommend utilising both meditation and writing a daily journal.

Ask For Help

Achieving Goals, Happiness, Health, Success

Often we get faced with problems at work and in our private lives that we struggle to solve. We may well try to figure it out ourselves and fumble through, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. Sometimes we will leave the problem untouched until it becomes a bigger problem that we cannot ignore.

The answer is to ask for help. A simple thing to say, but a difficult thing to do. However, there are people with different knowledge and experience that may well know how to solve your problem with minimal fuss. The hard part is asking.

We feel embarrassed, as if we should be the knower of all things, solver of all problems. Nobody is, we all guess and try things out and get it wrong, but this is how we learn. No one came out of the womb walking and talking, things take practice. We need help to do what we have never done before.

My advice is to surround yourself with people who will help you without judgement and also to avoid judging yourself, and stop assuming others are judging you, because most people are so caught up in their own lives that your problem is not even on their radar. To learn and grow we need to ask for help.

Improve Your Life

Happiness, Health, The Pathway To Fulfilment

When a person is depressed we give them antidepressants, which changes their bodies chemistry into a happier state. Our body chemistry is changing all of the time from situation to situation. If we are sleeping it will be one way, if we are exercising it will be another, if we are having an argument it will be another.

What we are physically doing has an impact on our body chemistry, but our thoughts more so. A happy thought and a sad thought create very different states in the body. If we change our thoughts we change our body’s chemistry and we can elevate ourselves to a state of joy or excitement, all with our thinking.

Our thinking patterns have been hard wired into our brains by our beliefs about a variety of things. If we can identify the limiting beliefs and then prove to ourselves that they are untrue, we fundamentally shift ourselves towards a more powerful state of being.

Improve your beliefs, improve your thoughts, improve your life.

Looking The Wrong Way

Happiness, Health

Water is evaporated from the oceans of the world and the water vapour becomes clouds. The clouds rain on the hills. The rain become rivers and the river make their way to the ocean. This, as we learned in school, is the water cycle.

When we look at a cloud we rarely think of the ocean. We think of the rain that is about to fall on us that will either ruin our day or water our garden, depending on how you look at it. Likewise, we don’t often think about the causes of the things that happen in our lives. We focus on the effects of what happens.

A lot of what happens in life are a result of our habits, our diet, whether we exercise, the way we think about things and how we react to things. All based on our habits. We have patterns of behaviour that mean we have similar experiences again and again in life, due to our habits.

The point is that we are looking at the rain and we should be looking at the ocean.

Sometimes, Just Pay It

Happiness, Health

A few months ago I went to the dentist as a tooth was bothering me a little, but not too much. They found an infection in the root of the tooth and I was told that removing the tooth would be the best course of action. The cost was £65.

I decided to leave it as it was, because it wasn’t really bothering me. Towards the end of last year I suddenly had nausea and pain in my stomach. It lasted most of the day until I vomited around 9pm.

The pain in my stomach was so severe I ended up at Accident & Emergency (UK) at around 10pm. There was a 10 hour wait to be seen. By this time I had figured out it was the infection in my tooth that had leaked out and gone into my stomach.

I left the A&E and went home. I got the earliest appointment and paid the £65 to have my tooth removed. The point of the story, as with many situations in life, sometimes you should just pay the money and avoid what may happen further down the way.

This applies to fixing problems when they are small, not when the have been left to become bigger. The action does not have to be paying money, it is whatever fixes the problem, as soon as it arises.

What Can You Tolerate?

Happiness, Health, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Having Fibromyalgia, as I do, my threshold for pain and patience have changed. Over time my skin has become extremely sensitive to cold, so much so that cold water feels like hot oil when it touches my skin. On the flip side, having chronic pain means that pain becomes an everyday experience, therefore it becomes kind of normal, so the amount pain that I can tolerate and carry on with my daily activities has increased. But when I am fatigued and in pain my level of patience can drop drastically.

This got me thinking about the experiences we have and the level of tolerance we have for different things. Experiences that cause anxiety will greatly reduce what we can tolerate, but experiences that cause self-confidence or contentment will increase what we can tolerate.

Being someone who regularly meditates will certainly help increase our tolerance levels. It is worth having a look at what your day to day experience is and where your tolerance is with different things. Then look at how you can improve these through self-reflection, meditation or something like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This is on the path to self mastery.

The Power Of Water

Health

In the tale end of the twentieth century some scientific research began into the effect different words and prayers can have on water. The research was carried out by Japanese scientist Dr Masaru Emoto and his team. The process involved labelling small bottles of water with different words, exposing the water to different music and prayer before freezing the water and looking at the crystals that the water made using a microscope. According to the words on Dr Emoto’s website,

“In all of these experiments, distilled water for hospital usage produced by the same company was used. Since it is distilled twice, it can be said that it is pure water. The result was that we always observed beautiful crystals after giving good words, playing good music, and showing, playing, or offering pure prayer to water. On the other hand, we observed disfigured crystals in the opposite situation.”

They used words like Love and Gratitude, Wisdom, Thank You, Truth, Evil and You Disgust Me. Dr Emoto and his team have repeated these experiments many times, with mantras and prayers from different religions, as well as different types of music and there is a clear difference between say classical music and heavy metal music, between saying nasty words and saying prayers.

They also noticed that there was a difference in the quality of the water from natural places, like springs and rivers, and water that has been filtered and piped to domestic taps. Crystals that formed from naturally found water were more symmetrical and beautiful and those from domestic water were deformed. 

So, perhaps there is some truth to the idea that water can take on properties that we apply to it, via words and prayers. Maybe water has memory. If this is so, then what might happen to the water in our bodies when we are angry or peaceful, would the feelings we have affect our bodies? We are around 80% water. It is true that when we are unwell being more positive seems to help us get better and being negative can make us feel worse. Also, would the way we treat others effect the water in their bodies?

Dr Emoto’s research and pictures of the water crystals are available on his website.

Just Surrender

Happiness, Health, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Watching this YouTube video reminded me of a dark time in my life and how I got myself out of it. I don’t often talk about personal things on this blog, but I believe this may help some if you, so it’s worth sharing. I may have even shared details of this before.

I spent nine years working in a special needs school and enjoyed it for the first five or so, but we began to get children with more challenging behaviours and physical restraints became more and more necessary. I also developed Fibromyalgia during this time, so the physical restraints became challenging for me.

I began to worry about losing my job, which was our main source of income and I was working with young people who had already given me concussion. I began getting anxiety pain in my chest and feeling stuck in a difficult situation.

One day walking home from the bus stop at the end of a day in the special needs school, I had had enough and I looked up at the sky and said in my head, “universe, I surrender to you. I will take your signs and follow them out of this situation.” I cried and felt relieved.

I found another job which had an annual salary £3000 less than I was on, but I followed my gut and changed jobs. Two months in to my new job the company increased the salary to about what I was on in my previous job. A union had been working with the company for two years to get the salary increased and I arrived when it did.

The point I am making is that sometimes you need to surrender to the universe or God or whatever your beliefs call the oneness that we are all in and look for the opportunities it/he/she provides. It can have a profound effect on your life and wellbeing. Your journey will doubtless be different from mine, but shared experience is often shared wisdom.

2022 Goals: Chi Health

Health, The Pathway To Fulfilment

The idea of improving your Chi (Qi) is a distinctly Chinese idea and many in the West will not of heard of Chi, though Tai Chi is fairly mainstream.

For many of us our Chi is an untapped resource to improve our health, because it is often not even a consideration. Improving my level and quality of Chi has been instrumental in managing my Fibromyalgia symptoms.

Step 3 in the Pathway To Fulfilment is Good Health and the third element is Good Chi. Chi is a kind of life energy that flows through all living things, and when it does not flow properly through our bodies, or we have depleted reserves of Chi, we become unwell. When we have good levels of Chi that are flowing properly through our bodies we can beat off most illnesses.

So, how will you improve you Chi this year?

The main two ways that you can improve your Chi is through a daily practice of either Tai Chi or Chi Kung (Qigong), but eating natural healthy food, drinking good water, breathing clean air and getting out into nature can all help too.

There are two excellent books on Chi Kung (Qigong) listed in the Recommended Reading section of the Resources page.

Living A Healthy Lifestyle

Achieving Goals, Health, The Fullfilment Framework

Drop by drop a water bucket is filled over time. The quality of the water also depends on its source. Likewise our bodies are made up of what we eat and drink, drop by drop over time.

The state of our health depends on a number of factors though. Exercise is another major contributor to good health, but exercising for 3 hours once won’t make you physically healthy. However, if you exercise for 15 minutes everyday, you will become more physically healthy. Likewise, our level and quality of Chi (Qi) depends on us practicing Chi Kung (Qigong) or Tai Chi every day.

Our state of health, whether good or bad, is an accumulation of our daily habits. If we eat junk food every day and avoid exercise, then we will put on weight and develop bad health conditions. The choice is yours, you control your habits. If you are going to try and be healthy, starting in the new year, then the good habits you form need to be actioned consistently every day.

Starting tomorrow I will be sharing posts around 2022 goals which align with the Pathway To Fulfillment.

Choosing Hope

Happiness, Health

We often don’t believe something is possible, that we cannot achieve or do certain things. We have a diminished sense of hope. This belief, I would argue, is a choice, whether made consciously or not. Our life experiences, and the meanings we place on them, direct our thinking when it comes to our abilities.

However, every new experience changes how we understand and view our past experiences and our current selves. This process of new understanding can actually cause our memories to change, because what we remember is always held in our present mind, along with our understanding of it.

We might remember new details which change what we think happened or a change in our understanding of what happened can profoundly alter how we feel about these memories. For example, I have been living with Fibromyalgia for over ten years and for a long time it felt debilitating, with pain in my joints and muscles and feeling exhausted most of the time.

But, as is often the case, this struggle became something that led me to understanding how Chi (Qi), or energy, flows through our bodies and how Chi Kung (Qigong) gives us the ability to master our own Chi. It has put me on a path towards self mastery and a profound understanding that we are in fact our own saviours, we can heal ourselves, if we learn how. Hope very often rises like a phoenix from the ashes of the trauma and challenges in our lives. Hope has a power to transform how we look at ourselves and our circumstances.

As Maya Angelou said in her poem Still I Rise, 

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise