Words of Encouragement

Getting to 'No'

When in my 20s I received a slightly odd gift from one of my Aunts: a coffee mug with the words 'I'd Rather Not' in bold letters on the side. Puzzled, I put it down to my Aunt being eccentric. I have only recently come to understand the importance of those words though the mug is long gone.

For most of my life I have found it difficult to say 'No'. I was brought up in a tradition of service, duty, loyalty and honour, taught to be helpful towards others, to those weaker than myself; an archetypal hero always coming to the aid of those in need.

Saying 'No' can be difficult whether it is to an extra helping of food when you are already full; to another glass of wine when it is one too many; to joining friends for dinner when you need time alone; to staying late at work when you are exhausted.

We strive to please others and that is surely a wonderful aspect of our human nature. However when we do so to win favour and appreciation, or out of fear of exclusion, then we have surrendered our boundaries for those set by others and in doing service for others we do ourselves no service at all.

Respecting our own boundaries allows us to maintain balance, knowing when to conserve energy or direct it towards that which we choose according to what we believe to be right in the moment. Not giving in to emotional blackmail, usually self-inflicted, is not selfish. Choosing to say 'No' is self worth in action. I have missed so much by giving my energy and time out of duty and blame no-one for the choices I made, not even myself; a decent regret is enough.

My son visited a school friend recently whose father is a very senior banker. They have a beautiful home and his friend has every gadget under the sun to play with. I asked my son if he regretted that I did not have that earning capacity anymore. He looked at me and said "he never sees his father".

Living inside out

Everywhere you look there is something that you need, or at least something you will decide you need; given some encouragement from the marketing and advertising people whose role it is to tell you what you need. Shops offer such an array of what promises to make us more attractive, more beautiful, more comfortable, more loved.

So here is the proposition in a nutshell: buy this, own this, do this and you will experience the power, confidence and happiness, social and sexual success that is apparently being enjoyed by the models or celebrities who you would secretly like to emulate.

What we want of course is not the thing itself but the subjective experience. It is always the experience that matters - how we feel as a consequence of the accessory or stimulation provided. The problem is that we are sourcing external means to raise our spirits, build our self-esteem and simply feel better. As one of those clever cards put it "The difference between humans and animals is that we can accessorise".

Unfortunately, we too easily become like golfers who spend all their money on the best clubs and clothing instead of on lessons; they shout and curse, generally play and behave very badly and go home depressed. Aspirations outstrip ability and inner torment precludes any experience of the inner game.

The truth is that if we want to feel well we have to feed ourselves well, rest well and tackle destructive 'free radical' thoughts with life sustaining 'anti-oxidant' positive attitudes. If we do these simple things then we naturally build our vitality and keep our minds clear for fresh ideas and experience. The body does not benefit from fashion; the mind does not flourish in front of a plasma TV.

There is an important choice to be made - to live 'outside in', relying on what is outside you to bring you the inner experience you desire; or live 'inside out', nurturing your whole self first and taking on from the outside only what you truly need and what is genuinely conducive to your well-being.

I believe that real power is the power to do without things. This does not mean that you will have to do without, only that things will then not have power over you. As Agnes Repplier put it "It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere."� Happiness is an inside job!

Where is the Will, There is my Way

'A strong intention can make "two oceans wide" be the size of a blanket, or "seven hundred years" the time it takes to walk to someone you love.' Rumi

Now is the season of resolutions and new beginnings. Christmas and New Year are come and gone like fireworks and we are left in an excited, or perhaps exhausted, stillness and anticipation of the year ahead.�This is when we like to make new resolutions; ones that may we hope resolve our ills and excesses and undo the harms of indulgence or emotional upheavals that so often accompany the festive season.

The media will be full of de-tox programmes, fitness regimes, gym membership offers and acres of advice on the making and keeping of resolutions that will be broken within hours, days, weeks of being uttered.�So why is it that we seem generally incapable of keeping to our resolutions? I suspect it is because very few of us have conscious access to our deepest and most powerful resource, our will - an immense source of power in each of us that has the capacity to transform our experiences and our lives.

What we think of as our will is no more than a very shallow and shifting capacity to determine our preferences, one all too easily swayed by desire. I have heard myself say to friends and family that I intend something and then failed to honour my stated commitment. I have placed hand on heart and said aloud "I can not carry on like this" and carried on regardless. So many lessons in humility; and humbled we all might be by the true power at work, our true will and intention.

The truth is that we are incredibly powerful and can bring about any change if only we can connect to the willingness - that quality of intention that has a still small voice and can move mountains. One way to access our will is to silently ask the question: Am I willing to accept whatever lies on the other side of this choice? If the answer is a still small and unemotional 'Yes', then you are ready. The most important changes in my life have been preceded by signal shifts within me that take their own time in coming; any resolutions have then been effortless in the keeping.

Peace

It is easy enough to understand why we should want love and joy, conditions in which we are expansive, enlivened and abundant. Peace on the other hand suggests stillness, calm and equanimity which might seem a little dull. Why then is peace so important to us and placed on a par with the others?

The Buddha image is seen everywhere these days, a serene face with eyes gently closed suggesting harmony and peacefulness. One of the four 'immeasurable minds' in Buddhism is equanimity or 'upeksha' meaning non-attachment, non-discrimination and even-mindedness; the other three being joy, love and compassion. In the concept of upeksha is a vital clue to the experience of peace: if you want peace then you must give up 'positionality', in other words don't take a position on anything or anyone.

To give up positionality is a tough one as it means forgoing melodrama in your life - no more stories in which you are the hero or the hard done by; no more soap opera; no more perpetrator-victim polarity. This is where we get to the heart of true peace as an experience: peace being the cessation of hostilities - no more conflicts within you or with the world and those around you.

To achieve a cessation of hostilities requires of us two qualities: acceptance and surrender. Acceptance of what is: accepting things being as they are rather than as you might wish them to be. Surrender to what is: giving up our positions rather than giving in to them. When we experience love and joy then peace arises naturally - all is well with the world and our world view softens to one that embraces others as we are embraced. Peace is a condition of active restfulness and of panoramic focus in which we can embrace the apparent paradoxes of life. Peace is our natural state.

Gratitude

Gratitude has the power to bring us the inner subjective experience of peace, the cessation of hostilities. One of the best texts I have read on gratitude is in Wayne Dyer's 'Manifest your Destiny' in which he points to the experiential benefits of gratitude and the generosity of spirit that prevails when we focus on what is present in our lives rather than what is missing - the cup being half-full rather than half-empty.

Gratitude is quite easy to practice - simply begin to list and savour one thing after another for which you can be grateful, for those things you have and experience that you see as positive and beneficial to you. These may be friendships, family, children, health, sight, hearing and the myriad of blessings small and large that we can all identify. How often we are humbled and inspired by those who appear to struggle with disadvantage and disability and who nevertheless display courage, kindness, goodwill and gratitude for what they can enjoy and for the gift of life itself.

Gratitude is a sure way to drown out the clamour of the negative ego, the gremlin that points to all we appear to lack and crave with the shallow promise that when we have what we do not now have we will be 'happy'. An attitude of gratitude releases you from the toil of grasping for what is out of reach, the resistance and persistence that drains your energy and closes you off from love.

Try it, try it right now. Close your eyes or look away and think of just one thing; one person; one kindness; or one joyful moment for which you are grateful. Allow the feeling of wholeness and peace to fill your awareness and body. You have evoked the emotional and psychic opposite of the 'fight or flight' response. This is very real. This is subjective and experienced truth, for you - you created it in yourself and for yourself, and you can do it anytime you like for free!

Gratitude is not self-delusion, or if it is then so what as long as it makes happiness more easily accessible. You have the power to influence and moderate your experiential reality - seize that power.

Forgiveness

We are all, in one way or another, suffering from PTSD - post traumatic stress disorder. Our unhealed wounds are not there for all to see but lie within us; within our psyche and trapped in the fascia of our bodies.

There is no meaningful comparison to be made between wounds as the slightest thing can hurt one so deeply and barely touch another. Let no-one say that another's wound is slight as it is in suffering that the truth of subjective reality is experienced. Mark Twain famously wrote: "there have been many tragedies in my life; about half of them actually happened". Imagined or real, the hurt is 'real' enough and the knife of resentment will twist and energy will drain from us until the blade is removed by the grace of forgiveness.

I have experienced and once suffered from a number of very painful betrayals in my personal and business life and doubtless have been the cause of such experiences in others. Betrayal is shattering as it goes to the very foundations of our sense of self, our emotional security and place in the world; our confidence and self-esteem can be comprehensively undermined. We can suffer for years, a lifetime if we choose, waiting for acknowledgement, apology, to be asked for our forgiveness.

Forgiveness means to 'let go' - of that which causes us this suffering and anguish. Yet how are we to do that? I tried everything and in the end found a very simple teaching: each of us makes choices based upon what we believe to be good for us, although we do not know what is good for us in truth. We each therefore do our best according to what we believe to be for the good.

Being willing to accept this teaching I recognise that whoever may seem to cause me hurt was simply doing their best and that is so easy to understand and so to forgive. A still greater challenge is to forgive oneself as beneath resentment towards others the real driver of our suffering is revealed to be anger towards ourselves. However, I too was doing my best; the best I could do at the time as I was in that moment and so I can forgive myself and find peace.