Articles - Page 4 of 4 | Sarah Wiesendanger

STORY OF THE GOLDEN BUDDHA – the inner being

I heard this lovely story from Tara Brach:

In the hall of a monastery, was a huge Buddha statue. It wan’t particularly attractive, as it was only made of clay, but the monks cared for it and did their best to show it off by painting it.

However, about ten years ago, it was exceptionally hot and dry, and the statue began to crack. A curious monk, wondering how the statue had been constructed, decided to train his torch into a crack. He was amazed to find a golden light shining back at him. The same was the case when he moved round to another crack.

The monks were intrigued, and decided to carefully break through the clay. Sure enough, within they discovered what is now the largest golden Buddha in southeast Asia that had been covered in clay to protect it from pilfering or destruction during times of war.

And the truth is, we can do the same. We protect our inner being, our true essence with a protective mask, a personality we feel is required of us by the world, but it’s not really who we are. So that now we may have some excavation work to do, to discover our true nature.

Moving Out of Fear

Nelson Mandela said: “The greatest glory in living does not lie in having never fallen, but in rising every time you fall.”

When things seem to go wrong time after time, some of us feel too weighed down by fear to keep trying. Fear is paralysing and exhausting, fueling in our minds loop feeds of worry that play over and over again. And so, although we want more good in our lives, we allow our fear to hold us back from doing those things that we know we need to do in order to succeed and move forward.

But what if we were to shift gears and live from a place of faith – in ourselves and our own lives? “It is a funny thing about life”, wrote Somerset Maugham, “if you refuse to accept anything but the very best, you will very often get it.” After all, successful people are successful because they have chosen to be just that.

When we trust ourselves, it’s not just that we have more courage to do what we previously hadn’t dared, but also that we become more creative, imaginative, inspired, so that new ideas and possibilities present themselves to us. As Winston Churchill said: “a pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity but an optimist sees opportunity in every difficulty”.

So, how do we make this gear shift? Changing our belief system is fundamental. We need to:

Believe that we came into this world to make a unique, positive difference. We need to identify that purpose, and believe that within us are the resources we need to develop in order to achieve that purpose
Believe that every with every end, there is a beginning, and that it lies within our power to make that beginning positive
Know that often, the tougher the challenge, the closer we are to success
Take full responsibility for our own lives
Refuse to give up until we have succeeded
Know that failures don’t have to knock us down, but can be used as an informative helping hand to setting us on a fresh path
Remember that life is a journey, not a race

To find out how Sarah can further help you in your journey moving out of fear, please contact her.

Breathing Technique to Combat Stress and Anxiety

This is a very simple technique that activates your body’s natural relaxation response. You may be surprised at just how easily you let you go a little bit more with each breath. It is highly effective to use when you are aware that your level of anxiety is beginning to compromise the clarity of your thoughts, or as you feel a panic attack beginning.

Simply:

Breathe in to the count of 4

Hold your breath to the count of 7

Breathe out gradually to the count of 8

Initially, repeat up to 3 times to a total of 4

After practise, total can be extended up to 8

It is important that your breath should be from your diaphragm, and not up in your chest and shoulders. Your shoulders should not rise at all on the in-breath. Rather your stomach should extend on the in-breath and deflate on the out-breath.

If you are often stressed, the exercise may take some practise as we often have quite a shallow and fast breath, or even hold our breath, when we are worried or pressured. You may want to start by counting quite quickly to make the exercise as easy as possible but, as you get better at this, you can slow the counting down to make each cycle of breathing longer.

It is also helpful to focus on the counting as this takes your mind away from its ruminating on worrying thoughts or feelings.

Begin by practising this exercise daily, at times when you are already relatively calm. You can be curious as to how quickly your daily base level of anxiety reduces. Once the exercise has become a habit for you, it will be easier to use when you really need it.

Alternative version…

This simply excludes the middle section where you hold your breath. Instead:

Breathe in to the count of 4

Breathe out gradually to the count of 8

This version you can repeat more often, perhaps totalling 20 breaths

To find out how Sarah can further help you combat stress and anxiety, please contact her.

Understanding Children’s Emotional Needs

NEEDS NOT WANTS…

We all know that we have basic physical needs such as having sufficient food, being sheltered and kept warm. But we all have important emotional needs as well which, when not met, can lead to anxiety and stress and even mental or physical illness. These essential needs are:*

security
autonomy and control
the opportunity to both give and receive attention
emotional connection to others
connection to a wider community
privacy
status
sense of achievement and competence
sense of meaning or purpose in our lives

NOW FOR THE COMPLICATED PART…

This is fairly straightforward. But where it gets bit more tricky is in understanding that we all have our own ways of meeting those common needs. And the methods of our children, may not resonant easily with us. For example, whereas we may instinctively work to get our need for attention met by pleasing other people, our child may decide it is more fun to be outrageous or shocking. This may rub us up the wrong, and our first reaction may be to get angry with her. However, if we take time to pause, to remind ourselves that the behaviour, albeit perhaps inappropriately, is attempting to get a need met, it is easier for us to respond to and re-direct her with understanding. That way she feels heard, and is more able to take the re-direction on board.

AND THEN THERE’S MORE…

As well as responding uniquely to the world around us, we also perceive it in our own individual way. This can be another area where there is a mismatch between us and our children. We have to be aware of this so that we can prevent misunderstandings. For example, we may be proud of our child who is achieving B grades across the board. We perhaps feel sure that her need for achievement must be adequately met. After all, we only ever got C grades. How good is that, that our child is doing that much better? And so why is it that we can see her sense of academic self-esteem is still low? Her perception is different from ours because her experiences are different and the conclusions that she’s drawn from those experiences is also different. So, what she has decided about herself, and what she has decided about the world and her place within it is also different from the things that we tell ourselves. Being open to these differences allows our thinking in response to our children to perhaps be more lateral, and our behaviour to be more compassionate and to resonate with them better.

NOW FOR THE GOOD BIT…

The good news is that being aware of these things can make parenting even more interesting as we don’t merely react to our children off the cuff, but take time to consider how their patterns of feeling and behaviour, and their beliefs about themselves, may not match ours and, given that, we can work towards helping them get their needs met in a way that both works for them and is socially and culturally appropriate. Even better news is that, in turn, this makes our relationship with our children even better, and everybody’s life easier and happier.

* This list of needs was compiled by the Human Givens Institute

To find out how understanding children’s emotional needs better could benefit you and your family, please contact Sarah.

Breaking Free with Meditation

When the escape artist Houdini was at the height of his fame, he was billed to perform in an Irish town. His challenge was to break free of both a strait jacket and the prison cell in which he’d been placed. The jacket was easy, but eventually he had to admit defeat over the cell door. He asked the jailor whether there was some new fancy lock. “No,” said the jailor, “I just didn’t lock the door.” Houdini had been working from an unexamined assumption, which proved to be false, and so he had been continually locking himself in. Without taking a fresh perspective, it was impossible for him to break free.

ALLOWING A WIDER FOCUS OF THOUGHT…

Like Houdini, our viewpoint can sometimes be too narrowly focused, perhaps because we are so intent on blocking out unwanted information or thoughts. Yet this selective approach to our thought-process, rather than keeping us free of unpleasant feelings, binds us to them tighter. If we are able to allow a wider focus that encompasses any thoughts and feelings, they have more space to both come and go. This, combined with a lack of judgement or prejudice, makes it more possible for us to come upon solutions.

This shift in our thinking habits takes conscious practice. Leaving our mind to its own devices may allow it to be rather like Mohini, a tiger from the DC national zoo in the States. For several years she had been kept in a small compound where she had continually trodden the same path of 15 metres forwards and backwards, forwards and backwards. So ingrained was this habit, and so used was she to being hemmed in, that when she was released into a far bigger enclosure, she created a 15-metre path, and continued to tread only that path.

MEDITATION CAN PROVIDE A SOLUTION…

Meditation can be a way to teach ourselves to both widen our focus and allow a free flow of thoughts that have no judgement attached to them. Being non-judgemental allows for more possibilities and prevents us from getting too attached to one way of thinking.

HEART MEDITATION…

Find a place to sit that is quiet and where you will not be disturbed. Sit with arms and legs uncrossed, and back straight; whilst it’s important to be comfortable, it’s also important to be alert and fully awake. Take a few deep breaths, breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth, allowing each out breath to be a real letting go breath.

Place your attention on your heart with the intention of allowing it to remain soft and open. Imagine, envision, sense in any way that you can, that you are breathing through your heart. Allow, with an easy acceptance, any thoughts or feelings to easily come and go. Soften to, and breathe through, any painful emotions. Often our instinct is to harden against unpleasantness, as a protection. However, if we can welcome and befriend it, we often find that our experiences of joy, pleasure, peace and love are greater; hardening against one set of sensations automatically hardens us against its opposite set, and vice versa.

If you are new to meditation, five minutes may be sufficient for this meditation. It is more important to do it regularly, than to do a long practice only occasionally. Once meditation has become a part of your routine, you may want to gradually lengthen each practice.

If you would like to join an eight-week meditation programme, please visit my Events and Programmes page, or contact me for details of the next course.

Healing Visualisations

HEALING VISUALISATIONS

Have you ever heard the phrase “spontaneous remission”? Its the term the medical profession gives to cures for which there does not appear to be a cause, i.e. no linked proven treatment. Despite their mystery, they happen all the time. It may be that one reason for the mystery is that patients are rarely asked by medical professionals what they did to effect their body’s healing. I would like to talk here about a few of the contributory factors to these spontaneous remissions.

LIVING WITH JOY…

In his book Peace, Love and Healing, Bernie Siegel says that in his experience of working with cancer patients, the most important predictors for longer life are a deep desire to heal together with an attitude of optimism, peace, love and joy. This is because every cell in our bodies is aware of what our minds are thinking, adapting their chemistry accordingly. More than that, our genes are also responding to our thoughts by switching themselves on or off as seems appropriate.

FINDING A PURPOSE FOR LIVING…

It is therefore vital that we are able to work through any trauma or depression that our diagnosis has caused, so that we can again engage in our purpose for living, no matter how changed that may be for the time being.

THE POWER OF PRAYER AND INTENTION…

There have been many clinical studies that have shown a significance in the power of prayer to promote healing. (A famous study from Duke University, North Carolina, found that prayed-for patients recovered faster, and with fewer side effects, than those who were not.) The truth is that the power of our minds can be immense. Deepak Chopra writes in his book Life After Death that he interviewed a man with great healing abilities who said: “I could teach you to do the same thing in a few days…It’s actually very simple. The hard part is removing your belief that you can’t heal.”

VISUALISING YOUR OWN HEALING…

Many people use the power of their minds to visualise their own healing. It seems that it doesn’t really matter whether what you visualise is anatomically accurate, so long as it feels intuitively right to you – it is a very personal matter. Cell biologist and practitioner of traditional Eastern healing methods, Joyce Whiteley Hawkes, has a precise, scientific method of praying for healing:

“May the cells that recognise and clear bacteria, toxic substances, and viruses be keen and fully supported by my immune system.

“May all the systems – inside and outside of my cells – that are responsible for optimal health have energy for their best work.” (Cell-Level Healing).

Others may prefer to call upon images of cleansing, renewal, or natural process in a way that is meaningful to their imagination. And it doesn’t really matter, so long as it comes from the heart.

To find out more about how Sarah can support you through your illness with medical coaching, please contact Sarah.

Negatives to Positives

TURNING YOUR NEGATIVES INTO YOUR POSITIVES

Our thoughts become our reality. This is because the human brain is designed to meet expectations, whether our own or other peoples’.

So, not only is it true to say that we learn from our experiences, but also that our experiences are shaped by what we have learnt.

NEGATIVE BELIEFS CAN BECOME OUR REALITY…

Schoolteacher, Jane Elliott, from Iowa discovered all this in a startling experiment which she conducted with her sixth graders. One day, as part of a lesson on discrimination, she told the class that people with blue eyes were not as bright as those with brown. It was not long before the brown-eyed children were asserting their superiority. And it was not long before the brightest girl in the class, who happened to have blue eyes, began stumbling over the text she was reading aloud, and was then unable to do her multiplication. All it took was a few hours, for the fabricated myth to become the childrens’ reality.

THOUGHTLESS COMMENTS THAT CAN SHAPE YOUR LIFE…

Gone uncorrected, how much damage would this have done in those childrens’ lives? Closer to home, are there things that you were told in your childhood – thoughtless opinions from unwise adults – which still shape your life today? Perhaps you were told you were bad at something and, taking that to heart, you realise that it’s a belief you still hold today.

The power of negative comments was shown by a study from Harvard University. It was shown that if someone is told they couldn’t do something by one person, it would take 17 other people to tell them they could before they believed it.

Imagine the thoughts in your own head. We all know what it’s like when they just go round and round, repeating the same thing over and over. How many times a day can we tell ourselves the same thing? If it’s negative, it’s going to create a negative belief and soon, a negative reality.

BUT NEUROSCIENCE HAS SHOWN THAT POSITIVE THINKING WORKS…

Our thoughts, and the emotions attached to them, create neural pathways in our brain. The more those pathways are used, the more established they become. Stop using that pathway, and it begins to fade until gradually you lose the ability to access it all.

RE-SHAPING OUR REALITY…

In the past, it was thought that the brain stopped adapting as we aged. Neuroscientists have now discovered that in fact the brain keeps learning throughout life. This is great news because it means that if we start consciously focusing on new positive thoughts, we will begin to create new neural pathways to create new, positive habits, and so a new positive reality.

To begin with, you don’t even have to believe the positive thoughts, pretending will be enough. But being as thorough and consistent as you can be is important. This simply means that when you notice an old negative thought, replace it with the new positive one, and allow yourself to dwell on it for a while. Like being at the gym, regular practise produces results. This doesn’t mean that you need to suppress the negative thought or feeling, just that you switch your focus onto the positive.

Emmet Fox, author and lecturer, suggested in his leaflet “The Seven-Day Mental Diet” that if we spend only a week focusing on positive thoughts, our brain patterns, our habits, the way we relate to the world, and our reality will already be much transformed.

To find out how you could benefit from counselling or life coaching with Sarah, please contact her.