The Secret of Life

Alignment

My Dad is 88 and hasn't got much memory left. He spends a lot of his time trying to work out what he's supposed to be doing. I reassure him that he doesn't have to do anything: that he is safe in the home for the elderly where he lives, where they see to his needs and cook all his meals for him. But he can't seem to quite understand this. 'Are you sure I don't have to go out to work?' he asks. 'Yes, quite sure,' I tell him. He looks unconvinced and peers down at the book in front of him, where we write down the things that we do on my visits, searching for 'the answer'.

Perhaps, after all, there is one thing that my Dad still has to do, and I suspect he has been doing it all his life: to teach me. He has always been a worrier, and in him I see my own worries amplified. For I, too, have been searching for 'an answer' - and feeling very frustrated not to find it.

It seems to me it is a Christian idea - though doubtless shared by others - that we all have certain God-given gifts which it is our obligation to discover and make use of. More recently, this idea of finding a life's purpose has also appeared in self-development books. I have always found the concept appealing, though I have started to believe that it can also be a trap.

I used to think it was writing, this thing that I had to do. I have been driven to write since an early age and used to berate myself for writing for fanzines instead of buckling down and writing that novel. So eventually, I buckled down and wrote that novel. And another. And another. I wrote two adult fantasy novels, of a type which turned out to be out of fashion, and a children's fantasy novel which was described by an editor as being 'original but too weird to publish'. I regard having written a fantasy novel that is 'too weird' to be a certain kind of success, but unfortunately it is not the kind of success which makes money or gets readers.

What I found very difficult about all this was that I very much liked what I had written. Clearly, I needed to do better to get published, but how would I know when I was writing something better if I liked the stuff I had written which wasn't good enough? I obviously needed to upgrade my internal critic, but I wasn't sure how to do that.

So, I decided I would write something else entirely. I wrote a spirituality book. And I did what I always did: I gave it to a few likely victims people to read, listened to their feedback, and revised the book accordingly. All of which took me a year or so, by which time my ideas about spirituality had moved on so far that it didn't feel like my book any longer. I had intended to self-publish it and market it online, but I no longer had the heart to do that. I still liked a lot of what I had written but the book's angle was all wrong. It just wasn't the book I would have written if I'd written it today. I could revise it of course, but that would take me a while. By which time...

I should have been pleased, of course, that my spiritual development was moving so quickly that my writing couldn't keep pace with it, but all I felt was frustrated. Here was I with this amazing natural God-given talent for writing (ironic smiley inserted here) and not making proper use of it! What is more, if I didn't find a way to use my writing, I would feel I had failed in my life's purpose, that I had let myself - and the universe - down in some way. And yet what could I find to write? I could no longer think of anything that would 'work'. I was already writing this blog, of course, but my readership here is not exactly vast. (You are reading it, of course, which is what is really important, but we'll get to that a bit later...)

And yet, if I didn't write, what else should I do? My current state of health dictates that everything I do has to be done in short bursts punctuated by rest/meditation breaks, which kind of cuts down the available options.

I couldn't see any way out of my state of frustration.

Or could I?

A week or so ago, I decided to take a look at some of the helpful stuff which I and others write on this blog and came across a quote by Helen about asking for help. So I decided that is what I would do.

But I didn't sit down and explicitly ask for help in finding my purpose in life. I remembered what Joe Vitale had said in The Missing Secret about the importance of aligning your will with that of your higher self, something which is also implicit in a lot of what I've written here myself at The Secret Of Life.

So I asked for guidance to align my will in that way: to put aside my ego-driven desires and declare myself open to whatever the will of the universe might be, to whatever my higher self might have in mind for me.

And the wonderful thing is that I got some assistance in this.

I held various suggestions in my mind one by one and waited to see if I got a reaction. I'll explain exactly how I did this later. One thing came over very strongly: that I should be with my wife Chris. And something else which came up is that I should carry on doing this blog. The idea of writing another book did not get a reaction, and nor did another creative project which I had in mind.

Humph.

Naturally, I queried this reaction. The idea of being with Chris was all very well, but it wasn't very 'grand'. It didn't seem to involve any fame and fortune, for instance. This was me, Simon, we were talking about here, and I had always kind of thought that I had some sort of well, you know, 'destiny'. Was the universe sure that it hadn't got me muddled up with somebody else?

But the universe seemed very sure that it hadn't made a mistake. Being with Chris and writing the blog: that's what I was to do. That was my 'destiny', for the time being at least.

Hmm...

I might have been rather more disgruntled if it hadn't have been for the other things which happened during this process:

1) I experienced a feeling of overwhelming love and compassion.

2) I received healing for my neck, a long-standing problem which had been giving me a great deal of trouble in recent weeks. Since that time, it has been a lot better. I have been lucky enough to receive a great deal of healing energy over the years, but I have never previously experienced anything quite so directly 'hitting the spot' as this.

So overall, I was very happy with the outcome, thank you very much, and any misgivings I had began to fade away as a clear picture began to emerge of what I had discovered.

It seemed to me that the idea that I had some 'grand destiny' to fulfill had been a weight around my neck. Was it any wonder that I had such pain and discomfort in that part of my body? What I was being told was that I didn't have to succeed in these 'great achievements' after all. It was my ego that had laid them upon me, not the universe or God or my higher self or anything else. There were other things which were more important than these grand designs, like simply being a good husband to Chris.

It also seemed to me that the emphasis on 1) my marriage and 2) this blog was telling me something else. It was encouraging me to focus on my spiritual development. Relationships are a great way to work on self realization, because what they are about - ultimately - is recognizing the divine in each other, and so helping us to find it in ourselves. This blog, too, is a guiding hand in this process: hopefully, in some small way, for some of you, but certainly for me, for it allows me to develop my understanding of such things and to maintain my focus on the spiritual part of my life.

It also came to me that I no longer have to think so much about how many readers I get. If people are meant to find this blog, they will find it. It is as simple as that. You have found it after all, and as I have said, that is what is really important. If I only speak to one person, that is enough. Thank you for being here to read this.

Perhaps, too, at some stage, I will find a larger audience. Perhaps I will return to my books and find a way to get them 'out there'. Or perhaps I will write others. But now is not the time, and I think I will only return to such things when I have learned to get my ego out of the way, when I have found my way back to sitting down to write them because that is the thing to do, not because I have some grand vision of a 'me' that I have to become.

To be like that would only to be like my Dad, vainly searching for the thing that I have to do. He and I must both find a way to peace.

There is more I would like to say here, to discuss the feeling of compassion and healing I received for instance, but this is already a long post, so it will have to wait for another time - or perhaps for the comments section.

But one thing I do want to add as a postscript here - as promised - is to say a bit more about the way in which I communicated with the universe or my higher self or whatever it was that gave me all that useful information. This is particularly important because it is something which you may like to try for yourself. I have certainly found it useful, even liberating. Perhaps it will open a similar doorway you.

So, when I held each of those ideas in my mind (my relationship, the books, the blog etc.) and waited for a reaction, how did that come exactly? Did I hear a disembodied voice? You may be relieved to learn that I didn't. What I used was a process I developed some years before, after reading some material by a guy called Bob Scheinfeld.

What Bob suggested was to develop a process of communication with your intuition by simply asking for this to be done: to ask for some kind of physical sign meaning 'yes'. So what you do is sit down and ask your intuition (or your higher self or the universe or the quantum field or God or whatever you think the source of deep inner knowing within you may be) for a sign meaning 'yes' to allow it to share its wisdom with you. Then you sit there and wait for the sign to come.

(It's a long time since I read that book of Bob Scheinfeld's, so apologies to him if I've got his teaching here all scrambled, but I hope I've captured the gist of it.)

I seem to remember that when I first tried this, it took a few weeks for my sign to emerge, but when it eventually came it was a kind of vibration around the eyes. My eyes are very sensitive, so perhaps it is not surprising that this should have happened. Nowadays, the sign is a rather more general vibration or energy, sometimes with flashes of color. So when I put forward each of those ideas, I waited to see if that energy would come. If it did, it meant a positive reaction. If not, then negative.

I'm not claiming that this process is 100% reliable, and it's as well to test any ideas a number of times to see if you get a consistent reaction. I still feel rather surprised that I usually do...

I hope that this doesn't seem too weird. If so, then I'll just trot out the usual mantra: give it a try and see if it works for you. It's really rather similar to the idea of kinesiology, as promoted by Dr David Hawkins and others, which gives you a strong muscle reaction for 'yes' and a weak one for 'no'. The idea is that you are tapping into some deep well of truth within you. It is allowing you to partake in a part of that truth.

Ten Words That Can Heal The World

A friend of mine recently introduced me to the audio program The Missing Secret by Dr Joe Vitale. Vitale was one of the contributors to the phenomenally successful video about the law of attraction, The Secret. As you might have guessed from the title, The Missing Secret promises to fill in the missing bits you didn't get in The Secret, the bits that meant that the law of attraction didn't work as well as it said on the wrapper.

There's a lot of this sort of stuff around, so I didn't have particularly high expectations when I listened to The Missing Secret. It therefore came as a pleasant surprise to find that it's a sensible, honest and comprehensive guide which happens to echo a lot of what I said in my own series of posts on the law of attraction, The Heart Of The Secret, and which provides exhaustive information on the various techniques you can use to defuse the problems which can get in the way of success.

I still have reservations about the practical use of the law of attraction for those of us who aren't either a) naturally positive people or b) enlightened - and to give him his due, Vitale pretty much accepts its limitations himself. But if you still want to give the law of attraction a go (and why shouldn't you?) then I can't recommend The Missing Secret too highly.

But what really excites me about this program is the third of the six CDs. This covers a Hawaiian technique with the unlikely title of 'Ho'oponopono', which in my opinion has implications of far greater importance than the kind of creature comforts we so often associate with the law of attraction. It has the potential to literally heal the world.

Vitale first came across this technique when he heard about the work of the Hawaiian psychiatrist Dr Ihaleakala Hew Len, who was in charge of a hospital for the criminally insane, the inhabitants of which were generally considered to be beyond cure or redemption. Eschewing all orthodox methods, and without even speaking to the patients himself, Dr Hew Len apparently used the Ho'oponopono technique to cure all but two of the patients to the extent that they could be reintegrated into society. The hospital was eventually closed because it was no longer required. Perhaps surprisingly, this remarkable and heartening chain of events appears to be well corroborated.

The version of Ho'oponopono used by Dr Hew Len was developed in the 1980s by Morrnah Simeona and is based on an ancient Hawaiian practice. Its underlying concept takes the law of attraction to its ultimate conclusion. If we do indeed create our own reality, then it follows that we create everything in our world, even (for instance) the things we hear about on the radio. It entails taking total responsibility for whatever there is in our life.

Yet this isn't about a pointless guilt trip. It is all about healing what has happened. At the heart of the technique, there are four simple phrases: "I'm sorry", "Please forgive me", "Thank you" and "I love you". Through these phrases, the healing (or 'cleaning') can be achieved.

The first two phrases are about expressing regret and requesting forgiveness for whatever in us has created the circumstances we wish to heal; "Thank you" is said in anticipation of the forgiveness we know will be forthcoming; and "I love you" reestablishes the original, natural relationship with God - or 'the Divine', as Joe Vitale and Dr Hew Len prefer to call It. If you have a problem with either of these words, you can of course substitute a word of your choice: the universe, consciousness, the quantum field, the source, whatever you'd like to use instead...

The Missing Secret has a section which repeats these phrases over and over again so that you can play them in the background whatever you are doing; while Vitale himself likes to keep repeating 'I love you' as he goes about his day, which is a powerful exercise in itself. Alternatively, you may prefer to use the phrases to work on specific issues. In earlier posts, I've talked about dissolving away negative emotions using both Nick Roach's approach and my own welcome breath. I still use both of these, but I find that Ho'oponopono usually works even better. I focus on the emotion and then repeat each phrase in turn until the energy changes and the emotion dissipates.

I suggest you try using the phrases in various ways and find out what seems to work for you. If you are drawn to the technique, then do investigate The Missing Secret and/or Joe Vitale's book Zero Limits (which is all about Ho'oponopono) to find out more. Or if you are within traveling distance, consider signing up for one of Dr Hew Len's seminars on Ho-oponopono, details of which which you can find on his web site.

Of course, you may be asking why you should believe a single word of any of this stuff. Given its unlikely nature, this is a fair question. I guess it comes down to the same as everything else on this site. Just give it a try and see what you think. Judge it by its results or any gut feeling you may have about it. I'm impressed by Ho'oponopono because it helps to dissipate my emotions, and I sense a feeling of power when I say the phrases. But you really have to try it for yourself...

You may also be wondering exactly why you should be expected to take responsibility for all this stuff on the news that you never thought had anything to do with you. You may not buy the idea that this is the ultimate consequence of the law of attraction. You thought that the law of attraction was all about getting a nice new house and that sports car you always wanted. You weren't aware of the little-known sub-clause that, along with the house and the car, come total responsibility for worldwide war, famine, earthquakes, crime, anti-social behavior and bad TV.

But the way I look at it is this: if we are all truly One (as I have argued on this blog), all part of a single field of energy, then of course we share responsibility for everything that happens in this world. If we are all interconnected, then collective responsibility follows.

But even if you don't believe in this spiritual stuff, if you prefer to ignore quantum physics and insist that we are all entirely separate from each other, then perhaps you will be willing to accept that we are nevertheless united by chains of cause and effect. Other people are affected by the way we interact with them, and this in turn affects the way they behave with others. Bearing in mind the widely held belief that there are, on average, only six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on the planet, it can be argued that the way we act has an important effect on the world in which we live.

All these actions are stored in memory, and for most of the time - in our current state of consciousness - it is these memories which shape events in our world. It is memory which elects governments, which makes those governments fearful of others, which promotes and prolongs war - because of who did what to whom in years gone by. And if we look in our hearts, perhaps we can come to understand that the emotions which arise within us when we come into conflict with others in our daily lives stem from the same source as those which cause others to kill, abuse, and exploit other people across our planet.

According to Ho-opnopono, all actions arise from one of two sources: from memory or from inspiration. The answer it presents is to heal or 'clean' those memories, to clear away those centuries of accumulated grievances, passed down through the generations, once and for all: to clear away the collective karma of the human race, so that all that remains is inspiration, connection to source, connection to love...

I have written before about the way in which our emotions get in the way of our natural connection to joy. Well, here is more of the same, yet for 'emotions' read 'memories', for it is memory from which those emotions spring.

Remember the four simple phrases: "I'm sorry", "Please forgive me", "Thank you", and "I love you". They can be used to clean away those memories and reestablish our connection to joy.

Find the best way you can to use them. They are ten words that can heal the world.

Related links:

Dr Joe Vitale

The Missing Secret

Zero Limits

Dr Hew Len: Foundation of I

The Door To The Garden

I didn't intend to go quite so long between posts as this, but things have got in the way. I mentioned before that I was going to spend more time gardening over the summer, so you might assume from the title here that I'm going to entertain you with stories of all the blissful afternoons amongst the shrubbery that have kept me away from blogging. But as so often in life, it hasn't been quite like that.

There has been time for a bit of horticulture in between the traditional English summer raindrops - not to mention the gale force winds that ripped the honeysuckle off the side of the garage - but in fact my protracted absence has had more to do with unscheduled health problems than to undue time spent dawdling over the bedding plants.

I mentioned a while back that I was going to be consulting a specialist clinic about my CFIDS. Tests have now been carried out and I'm duly imbibing a host of noxious concoctions to start to put things right. Which means that I'm now in one of those 'worse before you feel better' situations, with which all of you who have consulted an alternative practitioner will no doubt be only too familiar. On top of which, I think I may have contracted a stomach bug, though with everything else that's going on, the truth is that it's difficult to be sure.

I've been ill for about twenty years all in all, so you'd think I'd have got used to it by this time. But my condition is variable, so I experience different degrees of feeling ill. There are times when I've managed to organize my life around the condition so well that I pretty much forget about it altogether. But these last few weeks, I've found myself remembering how I was at my worst, and tapping into some of the trepidation, helplessness, and sheer mind-numbing frustration which went along with that.

In other words, I've been arguing with reality. I've been feeling ill but wanting to feel well, not just at some time in the future, but right now, this moment.

If I'd read my blog carefully, I'd have known this wasn't a good idea.

It's fine to imagine a healthy body, to conjure up dreams we would like to bring into being, but to wish for the present moment to be something other than how it is is like banging our heads against a wall. And that's what I've been doing.

It's funny - when you're down there, when you're doing that, it's often difficult to see that you have any alternative. I found myself wishing I had some complex routine of spiritual practice to which to turn to help me to find a way out of it. There's something to be said for Dharma, I think. The only thing I do every day is meditation, which isn't always enough to knock me out of that old familiar human condition of raging against what is.

But then, the other day, I suddenly found my way back. I found the key and turned it in the lock and emerged into that wonderful garden where struggling ceases. The tension inside me faded away and I felt an energy flowing through me, as though everything I'd been raging against was now a part of my own power instead. It was as though I had been struggling against the river of life, but now I had turned and allowed it to carry me forward.

All of this was familiar enough. I've now experienced it numerous times and have written about it here on the blog before. The key, too, was familiar to me. I've written about that too, over and over again. And yet, as always, to take that key and feel it turn in the lock and actually emerge into the sunlight of the garden came as a wonderfully welcome surprise - as though it was happening to me for the very first time.

Regular readers may have guessed that the key I used was acceptance: that I simply accepted the way things were, including how I was feeling, instead of raging against it and demanding that the universe be other than it is.

I feel I should scream this from the rooftops. Simply accept this present moment, really accept it, and you hold the secret of life in your hands. That is all you need to know about enlightenment, all you need to know about anything. Once you accept What Is, in this one moment, right now, then all the tortuous ego dance of 'what if', 'if only', 'I really have to' and 'I shouldn't have' can finally fall away and leave you free to live your life as it is, in the glorious wonder of the present moment.

It really is that simple.

At least, when you're there in the garden, it seems to be that simple.

And yet, curiously enough, when you're here on the other side of the door, it doesn't always seem to be quite so straightforward.

I spent that whole day 'in the garden', 'in the zone', feeling the universe moving through me. And just for the record, no, I didn't make a miraculous recovery. Yet feeling as relaxed as I did, I felt a lot better, and the remaining discomfort no longer seemed so important.

But now, several days later, I am outside the garden again. I have found my way back to the door and am holding the key in my hand. But I can't seem to quite turn it in the lock. You know how it is with keys sometimes. You need to have the knack. Just jiggle the key a bit to the right, or a bit to the left. Or pull up the handle of the door while you're trying to turn it. Every key is different.

But right now, I no longer seem to have the knack of opening this particular door.

I know that the key is acceptance, but I can't quite seem to quite manage it. I tell myself I am willing to accept what is. From time to time, I even seem to do this. But I am still outside the garden.

So I ask myself: what is wrong? What I am not accepting? Is it the way I am feeling? Or is it something else?

And I have come to the conclusion that it is something else.

What I am not accepting, right now, is that I am standing outside the garden.

And I won't get back in that place until I do.

The Taste Of Tomatoes

I recently attended a workshop run by Sally Chaffer, in which she introduced us to the spiritual experience of eating strawberries. Now, this may seem more like recreation than spiritual development, but it was all about mindfully eating strawberries: being aware of their appearance and texture as we held them in our hands, smelling their fragrance, and then eating them slowly a bite at a time, giving ourselves a chance to enjoy their luxurious taste.

I have to confess that this is very different from the way I normally eat: gulping things down mindlessly as I focus my attention on something else entirely.

I'm not sure how I came to eat like this. Was it because I would get into trouble with the adults if I didn't eat up my dinner, so I learned to eat as quickly as possible lest my appetite dwindled away and left me stranded half way through the green beans? Or is it because some primitive survival instinct kicks in and prompts me to eat up my food before some competitor grabs it away and I starve to death?

Whatever the truth of it, Sally's approach to eating is much more fun. And as you might have guessed, she was using the strawberries as a practical exercise in being in the moment, illustrating the advantage of focusing your attention on what you're actually doing, instead of being somewhere away in the past or the future, missing the experience of actually living your life.

If you happen to live within traveling distance of Leeds, UK, you may be interested in attending one of these workshops of Sally's. The next one is scheduled for 19th July. She titles the workshops Inner Peace Now! and you can find some details about them here. (You may recognize Sally from the comments she leaves here at The Secret Of Life - I've written more about my experience of her workshop at Sue Ann Edwards' blog.)

That experience with the strawberries reminded me of something which happened to me several years ago. A friend offered me an organic tomato she had grown, inviting me to taste it and see what I thought. Biting into that tomato was a real revelation. There was a sweetness to it, a subtlety of flavor, which brought me very vividly back to my childhood. It was a long time since I had tasted a tomato like that.

"Wow!" I said. "That's what tomatoes used to taste like!"

My friend smiled, clearly pleased at my reaction.

But afterwards, something unexpected happened. The next time I ate a tomato, just an ordinary non-organic tomato I bought at the supermarket, I tried tasting that one as well. And you know what? That tasted pretty good too. Not as good as my friend's tomato perhaps, but I could still detect that same sweetness and subtlety of flavor. And gradually, as I tasted more and more tomatoes, I realized that tomatoes generally tasted pretty good now, a lot better than all the tomatoes I'd tasted for many years. And I soon realized that this had nothing to do with the tomatoes themselves. It was all to do with me. It was simply because I had started paying attention as I ate. Tomatoes had really always been this good. It was just that I hadn't been focusing on what I was eating. I had been biting into something which my mind had labeled 'tomato' and then dismissed from my attention. Why go to the bother of tasting those things, my mind had been saying, I know all about them already!

But now I knew better. Now I had experienced the benefit of actually tasting the tomatoes, of being present while I was eating them.

Of course, I had failed to extrapolate this fully and bring the same degree of attention to all my eating, but it's never too late to start. And there may be more benefit involved than simply enjoying the taste. Some people believe that eating mindfully improves our digestion and allows us to extract more nutrition from our food. This seems to make sense. Why shouldn't our digestive system operate more efficiently if we're paying attention while we're using it? So many other things do - why not our stomachs?

Mindfulness can also be helpful in losing weight. Compulsive eating doesn't tend to be mindful eating. It tends to be something we do while we're thinking of something else, perhaps focusing on whatever problems have led us to eat compulsively in the first place. Or perhaps what's happening is that we're focusing on what we're going to eat next: eating a biscuit while our mind is on the biscuits that are still in the packet. Or worse still, on the packets that are still in the shop, just waiting there to be bought...

If compulsive eating is a problem for you, you could try eating mindfully for a change. Focus on that biscuit. Enjoy its taste, its texture. You may then derive more pleasure from eating that single biscuit than you did from all those packets you slung mindlessly down your neck.

And then: who knows? That one biscuit may be all you really desire.

Postscript: My blogging platform, Typepad, has now introduced more flexibility in typefaces, so I've taken the opportunity to increase the font size. I find this a lot easier to read. Do you agree, or do you find it too large? Any feedback is welcome!

A Native American Message

I just discovered this video on You Tube. I think you may like it...

You can read the message around which the video is built here. Research on the net suggests that it may not come from the Hopi Elders at all, but may in fact be the work of a Cherokee Elder.  It still speaks to me, whoever its author may be...

((Additional Note: There's an interesting discussion about Hopi prophecy and the possible validity of this message here.))

Acceptance & Friendship

There's a wonderful story in last week's edition of the Eckhart Tolle & Oprah Winfrey webcasts which echoes what I've been talking about in my recent 'Ultimate Truth' series of posts. It lasts about five minutes. You can listen to it here.

The whole of these weekly webcasts are available on free download (in either audio or video format) from Oprah's web site. If you haven't been following them, I urge you to give them a try. I thought that last week's (number six) was particularly powerful.

You may have noticed a picture which has recently appeared at the top of my sidebar. This is a recent award which was passed on to me by the generous Angelbaby. I think it's a lovely image and one which appears to symbolize a lot of what this blog is about, so I stuck it up there on the mantelpiece as soon as I got it. But it's a chain of friendship award and the idea is that I pass it on, not hoard it for myself.

So, if you are reading this, please consider yourself my friend! Please feel free to accept this award and know that you deserve it. You can use it on your blog (if you have one) and pass it on to others. Let's spread the love around and let it encompass the Earth...

The Ultimate Truth 4 - Living Fearlessly

Last time, I was talking about something I call the welcome breath. I've added a few more tips for using this technique in the comments on the previous post. You can find them here.

If you try the technique and would like to discuss it or give me feedback, do leave a comment. But if you've tried it and find that it doesn't work for you, then don't panic. There are lots of other ways of dealing with emotions - I mentioned a few of them last time. The only trouble is that some of them don't actually release the emotion, they just put a sticking plaster on it. It seems to me that the NLP anchoring technique falls into this category, for instance. Creative activity, which I also mentioned last time, is probably half and half. It's partly displacement activity, to take your mind off whatever you're feeling, but it's also possible that in your creative work you will be actually working through - and so releasing - the emotions.

EFT, emotional freedom technique, is the same as the welcome breath in that it seems to actually release the emotions. Nick Roach's technique for dissolving emotions (as described in the earlier post 'How To Deal With Difficult Emotions') also falls into this category. Indeed, it seems to me that the welcome breath is a variation on Nick's technique. Instead of simply observing the emotions, as Nick suggests, the welcome breath involves actively welcoming the emotions. The best thing to use is whatever works for you...

Quite aside from the sheer relief of getting rid of the things, there's another good reason why releasing these unhelpful emotions is so important. As I described in an earlier post, 'A Sun-Filled Room', our suppressed emotions block our connection to the sense of joy, of 'all-rightness', which is naturally ours. They block the connection to our true self. So releasing them is a vital part of spiritual development. This is true on a personal level but also on a global scale. If the transformation in consciousness which is needed for humanity's survival is to take place, then we as a race have to shed the great weight of hurt and grievance which makes our world such a painful, chaotic place. Only then can we stop hating and killing each other and join together to find a way to sort out our mutual problems. So when you work on releasing your suppressed emotions, you are not only helping yourself, you are helping us all. You are helping to shift a small part of the massive great hulking chip on humanity's shoulder.

Which really ought to be enough of an ultimate truth for one series of posts, don't you think? Except that this wasn't the ultimate truth I had in mind when I started this series. There's another one coming up in a minute, and this one is all about the full implications of total acceptance.

(That's the thing about ultimate truths: they're a bit like buses. You wait ages and then two come along at once...)

So just let's remind ourselves for a moment what we've been talking about in this series of posts. In part one, we discussed how practicing full acceptance means that sometimes you have to accept that you don't accept. This means being OK with all the 'negative' emotions which go along with that. In parts two and three, we went on to discuss how this acceptance can be achieved - and how full acceptance can actually help to release these emotions, freeing us from them forever.

But the point is that just being willing to accept these emotions is a big deal in itself. Think about what it means. If you can really be OK with the various negative emotions - the whole range of 'awful' emotions you can feel - you've done something very important. You've broken free to a place where there's no longer any need for fear. This is because, when you come right down to it, it isn't the 'awful' things in life of which we're afraid. It's the way they make us feel.

Just think about it. Think of any one thing of which you're afraid and ask yourself if it's really the thing itself which causes you fear or the way that thing makes you feel.

Let's do a few examples. Say you're afraid that your partner will leave you. Is it really their absence you fear or the way that absence may make you feel: the loneliness, the sense of loss, the hurt, the anger, the righteous indignation? The departure itself may have practical ramifications: you will have to make adjustments to your life. But once again, is it really those adjustments you fear or the way you may feel about having to make them? Think about losing your job or your home. The arguments are the same.

The ultimate fear, perhaps, is fear of death. But once again, isn't it really the feelings around it we fear: the having to say goodbye, the pain, the uncertainty? As for non-existence, is even that really an object of fear - or is it only the way we may feel about non-existence?

(I've a hunch we might be talking about this in the comments...)

So if all we really fear are our feelings but we've reached a stage where we're OK with having those feelings, what place is there left in our life for fear? What is there left of which to be afraid?

It seems to me that we have then reached a state of total freedom.

We should not underestimate the enormity of what this means. According to Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations With God, whatever action we take, our motivation comes from only one of two places: from love or from fear. If fear is overcome, then what remains?

In a post a few months ago, I quoted a Native American prayer about living fearlessly: "Oh Humankind," went the heartfelt cry, "we must stop fearing life, fearing each other... Life is wondrous, awesome and holy, a burning glory... Love is life believing in itself."

Could it be that there is a way to break free to this wonderful dream, this fearless life, this absolute freedom?

And could total acceptance be the key?

For if we've come to a place where we understand that all our fears are ultimately groundless, that it's OK to feel those 'horrible' feelings after all - and that if we do, it actually helps to get rid of them - then the hold which fear has upon us is overcome.

Then we are free to live the life we want to live - and to build the world of our dreams.

(I'm going away for a few days. As ever, any comments you make will be welcome! I shall respond when I return...)

The Ultimate Truth 3 - Breathe Away Your Emotions

As we've discussed in the earlier parts of this series, to practice full acceptance means that we sometimes have to accept our failure to accept - and the 'negative' emotions which go along with that (see part 1).  But what is really good is that if we can truly accept the way we're feeling, those emotions can be fully expressed and so released. Through acceptance, we can be free of those unwanted emotions for ever (see part 2).

Which sounds like it's worth a try, you might say, but how do we do it? How can we come to fully accept whatever unwanted emotions we might be feeling?

First of all, we may want to check if we really need to experience whatever we're feeling. Often, we experience negative emotions out of sheer habit. Take reactive depression, for instance. Something can happen which sets this off, but a year later, we're still stuck in the dumps, perhaps having even forgotten how we got down there in the first place. The anchoring technique (from NLP - neurolinguistic programming) can be useful for dealing with this kind of stuck emotion. I'll do a post about it one day but it should be easy enough to research on the net. I just found a good article about it here.

Habit can also cause us to have knee-jerk reactions to certain events, for instance always getting annoyed by the same people or similar situations. We get annoyed at such times because we always get annoyed. It's what we do. Here again, anchoring can be useful, or perhaps we need to simply become aware of what's happening and ask ourselves if we really need to be angry. If someone has pushed in front of us in a queue, for instance, does it matter? Are we really in a hurry or are we just getting annoyed because that has become our habit?

There's lots more information around about how to get out of a crabby mood - some of the excellent blogs in my mini-directory are good places to look for info on how to be happy if you're not. Creative activity has been a popular choice when we've discussed this subject before, then there's good old-fashioned endorphin-promoting exercise of course, and don't forget emotional freedom technique, which I described in a recent post.

The reason I'm going into all this is to make it plain that in encouraging you to fully accept negative emotions, I'm not promoting feeling miserable for the sake of it. But what I find is that there comes a time when you've tried everything you know and you're still left with strong unwelcome emotions. Either that or you've used the techniques and they've worked, but the emotions keep on returning nevertheless.  This is when it can help to practice acceptance.

We may be feeling negative emotions because something really substantially unpleasant has happened in our lives, in which case it is only natural to feel the way we do. In this instance, we can't necessarily expect that acceptance will 'magic away' our emotions. There are times when it is simply natural to feel 'bad'. Even so, if we are willing to fully accept what we are feeling and allow ourselves to fully experience it, the process of working through these emotions will be accelerated.

Alternatively, we may be feeling an unwelcome emotion for no very good reason. We may have become habituated to feeling this way, or perhaps something has come along which has triggered some emotions we have previously suppressed. In this case, the emotions we are feeling will usually be out of proportion to whatever has happened.

This is where acceptance can really work its magic, and emotions can actually disappear instantaneously (as I described in the previous post).

But how exactly do we put the technique into practice? How do you practice total acceptance? How can you get into the kind of mindset where you can fully accept your unwanted emotions?

You might think that one good way would be to bear in mind what I've just said: that accepting your unwelcome emotions is a good way to get rid of them. But unfortunately this doesn't work. In order to truly accept your emotions, you have to be willing to accept them staying around. If you're only 'accepting' the emotions in the expectation of getting rid of them, it isn't really accepting at all - it's just pretending.

So we need to have another think: what reasons are there to really accept having those negative emotions?

These are the reasons I use myself:

1) Bear in mind that as long as you feel these emotions, you're alive. Try to really get into this idea. Uncomfortable sensations are a part of life on Earth. We're here to experience.

2) Remember that you need to feel these negative emotions in order to feel positive ones. Darkness is needed here in this world in order for there to be light - otherwise you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. In order for us to feel happy, we sometimes have to feel sad.

3) These emotions have surfaced in order to be released. They are on their way out... Notice that this is subtly different from expecting them to immediately disappear. You have to willing to accept that the process of release may take a long time...

Like I say, I use all of these (though number 3 is my favorite). Then, when I have convinced myself that I am prepared to accept, I go a bit over the top. I welcome the emotion. I feel it with all my being. I take a deep breath and hold it for as long as is comfortable. (Please note that turning blue isn't part of the process.) I imagine that I am breathing in the emotion so that it surrounds me like a fog. It may help to imagine going for a walk by the sea on a cold blustery day. We think of the cold and damp as being unpleasant but there is also something very stimulating about this. It makes you feel alive. Think of that emotion like a cold mist all around you. Allow it to be there. When you feel the need, take another deep breath. Keep on doing this for as long as you wish. I find that it doesn't take very long until the emotion fades, to be replaced by a kind of heady, peaceful feeling. But don't anticipate this happening. Simply allow the emotion to surround you...

I used to call this technique EBT, emotional breathing technique, which was kind of a pun on EFT - but I decided it would be less confusing to call it 'the welcome breath' instead. I find it works best when the emotion you're focusing on is strong, simply because that makes it easier to totally surrender and imagine it all around you.

Right then, now it's over to you. I'd be interested to know if this works for you. The specific breathing process, the welcome breath, is something I've developed myself, so I'll be very interested to know if it works for anyone other than me! Please leave a comment if you try it - even if it's a long time after I've posted this. After all, you may not have an unwelcome emotion to try it out on right now...

Next time, in the fourth and final part of this series, I'll talk a bit more about some alternative ways to get rid of emotions - and I'll also get further into the reason I've called these posts 'The Ultimate Truth'.

The Ultimate Truth 2 - Into The Jaws Of The Tiger

In the first part of this series of posts, I discussed a bit of a paradox about acceptance. To really practice acceptance, you have to accept that sometimes you don't accept things. Sometimes you do get angry (or whatever), but that's OK.

To explain a bit more about this, here's a quote from Sri Bhagavan. (It is worth also reading the whole of this quote. You can find it here.):

"Whatever you are, just accept it. When you accept it, there is no conflict... Physical pain itself will become bliss. Sincerely experience all psychological pain. If you fully experience, it becomes joy. Don't try to escape. If you try to escape from pain, you are putting it under the carpet. After some time it starts stinking. That is what most people are doing. They never confront their pain. Somebody dies in your family, you lose your job, some other problem, but you don't experience the pain. You run away from the pain...

"Suppose a tiger enters this room. Most of you would climb up on the fan and hang on there! What I am telling you is that hanging from the fan is really pain because the tiger is here and you are hanging on there... Come down from the fan and let the tiger eat you. If you are eaten, the pain is gone. Allow the pain to eat you. The pain is the tiger. See what happens. It will become joy."

Huh?

When I first read this, I couldn't relate to it at all. Pain becoming joy? That didn't seem likely. And who wants to be eaten by a tiger anyway?

It was only when I started trying it out for myself that I began to understand what it was all about. "Whatever you are, just accept it," says Sri Bhagavan. So one day, I did just that...

I was consumed with anger over some household skirmish or other. The emotion was out of proportion to what had happened and just wouldn't go away. It was hanging around to such an extent that it was really annoying me. Know what I mean? I didn't want to be annoyed but I was annoyed nevertheless, and the fact that it carried on just stoked my annoyance further. I was caught up in a vicious circle of disgruntlement.

But Sri Bhagavan's words came to mind and I decided to give them a try. I turned things around and deliberately welcomed the anger. I embraced it. I breathed it in as though it was an exotic fragrance. I don't know how I did it exactly, but I did it nevertheless. And then suddenly something wonderful happened. It was like turning a key in a door. All of a sudden, like magic, the anger was gone.

How could this have happened?

I think the process is best explained by Carl Jung's phrase: "what we resist persists". This seems to be what happens with emotions. The emotion gets stuck because we don't want to feel it. We don't want it to be there.

It's this resistance to the emotion which is the problem. The resistance stops us expressing the emotion. And unless we can fully express it, it won't be released.

What we have to do is to allow the emotion to be. Allow ourselves to fully feel the emotion. Only then will the emotion be released.

How quickly this happens depends on what is going on in our lives. If something truly tragic has happened - something really big - it's only natural that we're going to feel bad for a while. But even in this situation, it seems to me that the process of working through our emotions will be speeded up if we can drop the resistance and truly accept how we're feeling.

In a great many cases, however, we have much less genuine reason to feel so bad. A lot of the time, what we're feeling is out of proportion to whatever has happened. This is because the event has served as a trigger, and suppressed emotions from earlier, similar events have come to the surface.

And why do we have such suppressed emotions?

It's the same story again. Because in those earlier times, we did not allow ourselves to fully express those emotions - and what we resisted persisted. The emotions have remained with us, bubbling under. Now they have risen to the surface again in order to be released.

We therefore have two choices. We can either refuse to accept the way we are feeling and so maintain our store of pent-up emotions, or we can simply accept those emotions, allow them to be - and be rid of them forever.

Next time, I'll be looking at how we can put this into practice... 

The Ultimate Truth - 1

Well a title like that ought to bring in a few more readers, surely? I might have called it 'the secret' but I think that's been done already, so 'the ultimate truth' it is.

So what am I talking about here? Is this series of posts going to be something special or just a load of hype?

I'll leave you to judge for yourself...

And the truth is, if I'm perfectly honest, that you've heard it all before. But there's a difference between hearing it and actually getting it. The point is: I've written about this 'ultimate truth' myself on this blog, but I didn't get it either. Only now am I starting to get it - to really understand its full implications - which is why I'm going to share it with you here.

What I'm talking about is acceptance. You may remember that I wrote about this in a previous post. I pointed out that there is no point in 'arguing with reality', that the only sane approach to take is to accept that things are the way they are, because they are the way they are whether we like it or not. We may be able to change them in the future but just for now, in this moment, they are as they are and we have to accept that. End of story.

I wrote that, but I didn't fully understand it. When I wrote about acceptance, I was thinking about something bad happening to you and you being OK about it. Like for instance, going back to where you've parked your car only to find that a parachuting elephant has dropped on top of it - just to take a typical example from everyday life.

So an elephant has dropped on your car. That's OK - you're perfectly cool. You just accept it...

Yet what if you don't accept it? What if you're really furious about it? What if you're really, really p*ssed off about this elephant dropping on top of your car? What happens then?

'Ah,' you might say, 'but you shouldn't be annoyed! That means that you haven't accepted what's happened!'

And yet you are annoyed. In this moment, you are really, really annoyed. So how now, right now, are you able to practice acceptance?

The answer is simple. All you have to do is accept that you are annoyed.

That is the bit that I hadn't understood before.

To really accept, you sometimes have to accept not accepting. Because that is the way things are...

It may take a while for the full implications of this to sink in.

If we really accept that we sometimes don't accept, what it entails is being OK with all the 'negative' emotions which this might bring. It means us being OK with anger, OK with sadness, OK with fear, OK with frustration, OK with the whole ghastly gamut of *stuff*, the whole range of troublesome feelings which afflict the human race...

Which is not an easy thing to contemplate.

But what if I told you that this 'trick', this acceptance of 'negative' emotions, is the ultimate key to happiness? That if you can really be OK with whatever 'terrible' stuff you might feel, then you finally have the key to the garden of Eden.

I'm going to explain why - along with some practical advice on how to accept your emotions - in this series of posts. Part Two, 'Into The Jaws Of The Tiger', will be along very shortly...