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Our Suffering creates our Motivation to Change

One choice can change our future.

The Buddha in his first noble truth said that all of life is suffering. We don’t like to suffer but we do suffer. Let’s take a look at ‘Chaos Theory’ ...

How to Release Negative Emotions

If you are not releasing negative emotions – you are suppressing them.

The thought/feeling system is a circular system that feeds itself. The thoughts feed the feelings and in turn the feelings feed the thoughts. Or looked at another way, the thoughts create the sensations we feel and the sensations we feel perpetuate the thoughts. The sensations create ...

All craving comes from wants.

I was once told that 50,000 thoughts are bubbling up in a person’s mind each day and many of these thoughts are the same thoughts. I don’t know how anyone managed to count them but the figure is irrelevant. We have thoughts bubbling up into our consciousness on a continuing basis. The thoughts are meaningless until we ...

Imagine sitting still in a valley on the stump of a chopped down tree, with the roots still deep in the earth creating a solid foundation. It is just before dawn. The night is quiet and you are waiting for the sun to rise in the sky. Across the valley is the silhouette of a mountain in front of a night sky covered in bright twinkling stars.

The first hint of red appears behind a mountain and the lower stars begin ...

Try to find yourself. Am I this hand that I see before me typing on the keys? It looks like my hand; it has my wedding ring on it and my short stubby fingers. But am I these hands? Can I feel the wetness of the blood running through the fingers or the individual bones and muscles? No. Can I feel the finger nails or know the length of the fingers without looking at them? No. Can I feel where ...

Our judgements become filters of perception.

When we make a judgement we are saying this is good for me or bad for me – we are polarising our opinion. One example of this could be the weather. On a cold, wet and windy day someone might say they hate this type of weather. It’s just weather, not good or bad, it just ...

There is no time but NOW!

If we were in possession of a time machine, we wouldn’t go back to the worst past we could think of or forward to the most frightening future, but isn’t that just what we continually do with the mind? We think back to the past with regret, disappointment and guilt. Then we think of the future ...

Physiology of stress

Acknowledging how our minds affect the way we feel is to realise how our thinking creates changes in our physiology. We can also start to see what the Buddha was talking about 2500 years ago when he said that all of life is suffering and all suffering comes from craving. The craving comes from the intense desire for relief from the uncomfortable chemicals we release in the body when seeing the world in a fearful way – from ...

Negative focus

Now we might be starting to understand this defence mechanism, this ego, and we might be beginning to understand it isn’t us. It’s just a programmed version of looking at the world in a threatening way through a filter of negative beliefs. Much of it is created through the use of disconnecting habits and the withdrawal of connecting habits. – habits that we then turn on ourselves and continue to feed by our own negative self-talk.

We can now see ...

Shifting your focus from wants to expectations

How do we change the mind from wanting? This should be the question you are asking yourself by now. Well, this shift is subtle. If we look at a want as a fear of lacking something, we can see it is pessimistic, rigid, fearful and focusing on problems. The subtle change is to turn this want into an expectation. Why? Because expectations are more optimistic, flexible and focus on solutions.

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