I’m probably one of many who’ll be jumping on the “May the 4th be with you” bandwagon today! Pure coincidence as I came to write this piece about imposter syndrome, and the confusion at play with it: The Force is already with you.
Imposter Syndrome is defined as “the persistent inability to believe that one’s success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one’s own efforts or skills.”
This leads to people saying things like “Everyone else is better than me. I am not as good as people think I am and I am going to get found out.”
In the belief of those thoughts, people who believe they’re imposters work really hard and commit themselves to lots of learning to try and quiet that voice. …
Really, it is not required, and neither is any other habit, practice, or technique — nothing is a requirement for life. But they’re all available to us — so what do we do from here?
“Meditation is what we are, not what we do; the separate self is what we do, not what we are” Rupert Spira
I was talking to someone in the Heartfelt Presence room last week who was struggling to meditate. I presume he’d been told, or read somewhere, that meditation could help with his addiction. But it wasn’t having that effect. He had resistance to it and wasn’t finding it useful at all.
We talked about meditation not being required to reconnect to who you really are, or indeed to change your experience of life, but that if meditation makes sense…
Do you cut yourself off from speaking? Maybe you wonder for a moment too long whether what you’re about to say is the ‘right’ thing and then you don’t say it because the moment’s passed. Or maybe you do say it and it lands with a clunk. There comes a point when the psychological effort required from this self-editing process becomes untenable and then what…?
I was interviewed by Sara Sanderson for the When Women Speak podcast last week and I remembered another childhood phrase — ‘think before you speak’. It seems that what came out of my mouth wasn’t always considered acceptable — probably that thing where little kids very honestly observe what they see in the world, and which often goes against what we’ve labeled as polite or acceptable, when in fact they’re being beautifully truthful.
Anyway, it seems this was another phrase that stuck with me and made it seem like I had a job to do, to make sure that what…
It was Michael Neill who first raised my awareness to this distinction. Have a read and see what occurs to you.
What are we looking at here?
A couple of people in my life this week have been in touch about feeling stressed and anxious even though they don’t have a lot on. And then of course there are times when we feel stressed when we do have a lot on. Consider that ‘stress’ is an exaggerated form of ‘busy’, and that busy feelings are a reflection of a busy mind, not of a busy life.
Busy is a feeling. Having a lot on is maths.
Have you ever had a situation where you felt so busy, frantic busy? …
At what age did boredom start becoming a ‘thing’ for you? So what was happening before that? Where’s the freedom with ideas of boredom or feeling fed up?
Let’s start with exploring how experience is created
We, including the neuroscientists, don’t really know how we work.
We can see a piece of machinery inside people’s heads that we call a brain and we can see bits of it light up with different activities — but nobody has yet proven if or how a brain has anything to do with our conscious experience.
What we have learnt is alot about the machinery of the brain which correlates with behaviour (note — no proven ‘causal link with’ behaviour).
One of those correlations is how the left hemisphere is involved in the chunking-up of life.
*Rather than be in…
I always believed that once you saw through the illusion of self you would automatically be a loving, emotionally intelligent being. But it turns out, no!
I’ve been watching alot of Ken Wilbur this week and I love his Integral Theory with stages of: Waking up — Growing up — Cleaning up — Showing up — Opening up.
Waking Up
is the altered state of consciousness that gives us a first person, direct experience of oneness and connection to all things. It can be increassed / maintained via the progressive path (e.g. ongoing meditation and spititual practices) or via the direct path…
After seeing the quote in the image last week I got to thinking about it in the context of truth.
I was reflecting yesterday about when I first worked with Piers Thurston and heard him say “it feels real and isn’t true”.
I considered how this phrase can get a reaction from egoic thoughts, self-referential thoughts, or what I call sandbank thoughts.
When we think we’re being told that something that’s happened in our life isn’t true – in fact that everything that’s happened in our life isn’t true – the automatically assumed implication (at that level of egoic thought) is that we’re lying.
I guess in some ways it is a lie we’re telling ourselves, if we believe something…
Four realizations about the nature of addiction and how thought keeps us cycling the same habitual loops
I’ve been on social media for over 7 years now, including plenty of times when it’s been my primary place for social interaction, and with that interaction seemingly more important than chatting to my husband, or kids…
I’d started to notice, in the weeks leading up to this, that every spare moment involved going straight to my phone, going through each app in turn, checking for notifications and messages, looking at a few posts, liking, commenting. Fine. …
My inbox is full of business end-of-year emails lamenting 2020. Friends and family are talking of looking forward to 2021 with the vaccine and going back to “normal”. A consistent theme of 2020 being a terrible year. But what if it wasn’t?
“I know how devastating 2020 has been” began one company’s email.
It was perhaps the most striking of them all, it stopped me in my tracks, I haven’t experienced 2020 as devastating so it leapt out at me as a surprise.
It also leapt out because I seem to have developed an allergic reaction to the media / emails / other people whitewashing a whole experience into one ‘thing’ and assuming that ‘thing’ is a universal experience for all. Telling people how they must be feeling.
I know for some there’s good intent, trying not to assume it’s all fine, trying to be respectful of what has been a difficult year…
My client, Phillipa Bray, shared this beautiful piece of writing from a key phase of our work together and she kindly said I could share here. Each client goes on their own journey and has their own experience of realising what’s true — who knows what your journey would be like, but this is Pip’s. I invite you to swim in the wisdom and beauty of it all.
“I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing Light of your own Being!” Hafiz of Shiraz
Excerpt from my journal, 4 weeks post-mastectomy, 10 minutes after my weekly coaching session
‘Wednesday 21st October 2020 10.55am
I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO CONTROL!
Cancer is the most wonderful lesson in this regard.
Even as I write this my mind grasps for answers. As the tears drip down my face and little whimpers leave my mouth, like a child that has just realised she doesn’t get to have her own way, even now my mind races for all the solutions for certainty and control … I could get Jo to read…
