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Some super good news (if you’re up for it)

13/3/2017

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Human beings do not have the capacity to change their feeling state at will. Which is super good news (if you’re up for it) because it means we can let go of trying to manage life to make us feel a certain way.

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Us humans love to think we’ve got this thing under control. We love to think we know how things work. We love to think we know that if you do this and this, you get that.
 
But that’s not how it works. Not how it works, at all.
 
We so badly want to feel that we’ve got this; that we’re in control of this little - infinitely masoooof - thing called Life.
 
We do our damnedest to convince ourselves that if we work really hard at doing life ‘right’; managing our thinking right, making the right decisions, making the right parenting choices, we’ll keep whatever it is we’re afraid of: death, shame, ‘failure’, at bay.
 
We really (like to) believe life works like that.
 
I too have been caught up in the idea that I can bend life to my whim in that way: if I pay attention, learn from my mistakes, if I notice what works and what doesn’t, I can slowly find a way to an easier, nicer way of doing life.
 
That way of living builds expectations, which - when you look carefully - get dashed all the time.
 
An extreme example of this is someone lamenting on hearing about a cancer, or death of a loved one: ‘But…., I did everything right, I was a good person, I tried to do the right thing by people all my life, and THIS happens…?
 
MIND BLOWN
 
I found myself commenting to a friend yesterday that when I wake up in a bad mood, noticing I’m in a bad mood often helps shake me out of it.
 
But on more exploration I realized that actually some days I’ll notice I’m in a bad mood, and I head into a worse mood, or my mood stays the same, or it improves. There is no predictability. There is no cause and effect.
 
This kind of blew my mind as I realized I’d been playing the age-old game humans like to play of looking for ‘reasons’ why things happen to help explain our experience:
 
‘You do this, you get that, you do that you get this.’
 
IT DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT (shouty capital letters for my own benefit …)
 
THERE IS NO CAUSATION between something you do, or something someone says to you, and how you feel as a result.
 
Meditation does not make you feel a certain way.
 
Chocolate cake does not make you feel a certain way.
 
Think about it: sometimes you meditate and you feel amazing afterwards, other days you feel the same, other days you feel worse. Same with chocolate cake: sometimes you LOVE the experience of eating it, sometimes you feel guilty, sometimes you don’t have an opinion – you’re too busy nattering or watching Netflix to notice.
 
What determines how we feel in any moment is energy.
 
The formless energy which moves through us, animates us, keeps us breathing and our hearts beating. It’s the ebb and flow of that energy which gives us our experience. And WE do NOT control that.
 
(If you really want to get into it: there is no ‘we’ because we are that energy - non-duality, oneness and all that jazz.).
 
Human beings DO NOT have the capacity to change their feeling state at will.
 
Which is super good news, if you’re up for it, because it means we can let go of trying to manage life to make us feel a certain way.
 
Because it just doesn’t work like that.
 
Take that news to heart and (in my experience) two things happen:
 
  1. Your mind gets kind of blown apart
  2. You can sit back and enjoy the thrill-ride.
 
So watch yourself meditate, or not meditate. Eat the chocolate, or not eat the chocolate.
 
There is no holy grail to feeling the way you want to feel.
 
All you ever feel is the flavor of energy moving through you, moment to moment to moment.
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You are not you

10/3/2017

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You are not you. 

You are a pile of formless energy. 

You are also you of course, but the you you think you are, is just that: the you you think you are. 

And that can change in an instant. 

Don’t think it can’t. 

You’re taught in school, by teachers, by mass media and by marketing that it can’t, but it can. 
In an instant. 

So don’t ever feel boxed in by what people, or you, think you are. You are so much less fixed than any of that. More ‘less fixed’ than you can ever believe or know. 

You see what you really are, and the you that you are shifts. Again and again and again. And there’s fun and freedom in that. Not fear. 

You hold onto who you think you are. You repeat behaviours which thwart your work in the world, which thwart your relationships – all for fear of who you’d be without the thoughts of who you think you are holding you - the you you are today - in place. 

That you you're trying to protect with recycled thoughts of who you are doesn't exist.
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Look in the direction of who you really are. Be open to it. Be free.
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Love - the only Personal Guidance System you'll ever need.

10/3/2017

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There are times in my life when I've allowed my Personal Guidance System (PGS) to guide me effortlessly. 

('Effortlessly?!!', my husband cries: 'You kept me hanging for 6 months!'). 

Okay, so not *effortlessly*. 

But the decision to marry, in the end, did *feel* effortless - ONCE, I let my intellectual reasonings take a back seat and let my PGS go to work.

It seems to me it's the human condition to tussle with the intellect from time to time (okay, make that a lot of the day - or at least it certainly used to be for me...).

But what I love seeing more and more is that the quiet voice of my PGS is always there, if I'm willing to listen. And the willingness to listen is becoming more of a default, as, having played with it, and tried and tested it, it never lets me down. 

When I'm in struggle or in discomfort and not sure how to proceed, it's a sure sign it might be time to turn to my PGS for guidance. 

A common point of struggle or discomfort could be feeling stumped by my four year old's behaviour, but it could equally be feeling confused as to how proceed with a challenging relationship, or feeling stumped as to how to make a decision.

The quickest way to access my PGS' wisdom is to ask consciously or unconsciously, out loud or just in the quietness/ tumult of my mind: 

'What would love do?'

The answer is always absolutely obvious. Clear as day. And normally quite straightforward. 

What would love do? 

This. 

And this. 

And this.

My very own Personal Guidance System in motion. 

The intellectual wranglings can be addictive. And part of our journey. Nothing wrong with them if that's the way things go in that moment. 

But if you ever want out of the exhausting circling thinking - try out your own PGS - we all have one. 

Ask yourself:

'What would love do?'
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The end game of parenting

10/3/2017

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You know how you hear about a parent's love for their child being unconditional?
 
Well not this one, not me, not yesterday.
 
I woke up after (another) shorter than I'd like night's sleep and my husband watched as I played a rather pathetic game of, 'I'll behave like a grown up, when you do', 'I'll be nice to you, when you're nice to me', 'I'll love you when you behave 'right'', with my 4.5 year old son, in the kitchen, over breakfast.
 
The conditional love game, not the unconditional one.
 
To be honest, in that moment, that's the best I had. Not proud of it. I wish I could parent better in those moments, but that was the best I had.
 
I have a friend and colleague, Phil Goddard, who talks about love a lot - it makes things really simple and really clear:
 
When all there was, and all there ever is, is love, there isn't all that much to say: we're in it, we are it, and how to live and be suddenly doesn't require all that much thinking about, the way forward and the way to be, magically presents itself.
 
In essence: the end game, and the game, of life, is love.
 
*(Check out Phil's work, because he, and it, are rather wonderful).
 
After my performance in the kitchen yesterday morning, I was feeling disheartened and out of control. I brought my feelings up with my husband in the car last night and what he said took me totally by surprise.
 
The conversation went something like this:
 
Me: 'I feel like I'd know better what to do and how to react [re. dealing with our son] if I knew what the end game was?
 
My husband [Without missing a beat]: 'What if the end game is love?'
 
Oh my. *What if the end game is love*.....?
 
That stunned my racing mind to silence.
 
What if the end game is love?
 
If the end game is love, then....
 
then.....
 
Many things.
 
I realised I'd been wanting a guarantee that whatever effort I put in to my parenting was going to result in the desired result: a perfect son, a perfectly running household (yesterday morning, I honestly thought, THAT was what the end game was).
 
I suddenly saw that if all human experience happens in the present (even our experience of the 'past' and 'future'), well then the 'end game', the purpose of my interactions with my son, is in every moment.
 
And if the end game is love and it's happening in the moment, then all I have to do each moment is love. And I am love, so there’s not actually anything different I need to do.
 
If the end game is love, and I am love, then I don't need to come up with some kind of clever 'strategy' to 'manage' my son.
 
If the end game, if the whole purpose of my interactions with my son, is love, and I am love, well I can do that right now, in the best way I can.
 
And sometimes that might look like out-of-control shouting, and sometimes that might look like a hug, but if the end game is love and I am love, I'm already there and I'm already doing it (though to an outsider, who doesn't get the 'Love' thang, it might look like a possible case for social services/ Samaritans/ strong gin ;) ).
 
And if all of that is the case, then I can stop looking for a 'better strategy' and focus my energy on being in the moment - living this crazy life and being in it. Not wishing it were different or he were different or I were different.
 
Because that's where all my energy goes when my thinking goes in that direction - out of the present moment and away from reality.
 
And we CAN do reality - (we can't do future thinking very well, that's exhausting, my state of mind yesterday was testament to that) - but we CAN DO moment to moment to moment reality, really, really well. However tired we are.
 
I think I'm almost saying, and almost seeing, then, that love is presence.
 
Not always perfect, not always pretty, not always controlled, and not always what you might think of as 'love',... but present, and 'in life', and responding, and doing it's (and my) best with the thinking I have in the moment.
 
And I think, what I'm realising (slowly, and again and again and again), is that I am always going to be dipping in and out and in and out of the present moment, in and out and in and out of that 'flow' state where things feel effortless and thought-less and things just come through us (the good the bad and the ugly).
 
It is entirely, human nature.
 
I think what I'm remembering and what I'm realising is that (once again(!)), the reason I've been struggling of late with my thoughts about my son's behaviour and my response to it, is that I've been lured away from reality by an expectation that life should be different than it is; that parenting should be easier, that my son should behave better, that I should be coping more gracefully.
 
Sure, all those things would be nice; those would be my preferences - and it's cool to have preferences - but I also have to remember that as soon as preferences become conditions for me to love my son, my life, me... I'm heading down a sticky road, a road of disconnection from what's actual, and what's real, and away from love, and it's answers, and that way madness and dis-ease, and dis-comfort lies.
 
The pain I was in yesterday wasn't coming from what was happening in reality in the kitchen, it was coming from my thoughts about my son, my parenting, my imperfect life.
 
Whenever I go there - away from reality, away from the answers that presence, the present, and love, present - I will struggle.
 
And what's interesting to me - in this moment - is that, paradoxically, we (I) put those conditions on life because we're not comfortable with accepting the discomfort of the moment. But there literally IS no discomfort when we are FULLY present (there is no anxiety, disillusion, frustration in the centre of the present moment - those only come when we leap forwards and backwards with our thinking and lay judgment on our perception of reality).
 
It's okay for life to feel uncomfortable.
 
It's okay to struggle and to wish you were somewhere else, had an easier son, had a better parenting technique.
 
It's so so normal.
 
But for me, the thing that's helpful to practice is being okay with the discomfort of an 'imperfect life'.
 
Because the more I stay in it, the more I see that the imperfection is not imperfection at all, it just is; any ideas of imperfection come from me.
 
I can choose to live in the 'un-reality' of the imperfections, or when I remember, head right back to the present where none of that exists.
 
My choice. When I remember.
 
I'm under no illusion that I'll likely have (many) other moments of raising my hands to the sky and wishing into existence a magic solution to this parenting malarkey.
 
But I hope to remember more and more, as I did this morning, that we actually already have one:
 
The more I and my husband can channel love, can be *in* love, with our selves, our lives, our boy, then the answer, the way forward, in each moment (even the most sticky ones), magically presents itself.

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Learning to roll with it (and a mystery bruise on my leg...?!)

10/3/2017

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Time to give our divinely human selves a break:
 
It is SO normal to go up and down in mood.
 
It is SO normal to get angry and throw tantrums and act like a two year old.
 
It is SO normal to feel blissfully happy and on top of the world, one moment, and like a heap of shit on someone's shoe the next.
 
It's SO normal to feel like you've got this, you can do this job, this parenting-malarkey, this relationship, and the next, feel like you hate it all, and want to disappear to a desert island, jack it all in, run away, hide your head in the sand/a bottle of wine/ the refrigerator.
 
The thing is, I used to think it wasn't normal AT ALL. Or 'good'.
 
I used to try and try, and WISH, I wasn't such an up and down (fly-off-the-handle-occasionally(?!), nutcase.
 
I tried for years to 'rein' myself in. To TRY to be more steady, less erratic in my emotions.
 
Then I saw the truth of the fact that we are ALL doing the best we can with the thinking we have in the moment. And the thinking we have in the moment is not something we can control.
 
Life moves through us in ways we will likely never understand.
 
We are consciousness in motion - life/god/ consciousness having an experience of itself, through us/ in us.
 
Who are we to know *why* a certain thought comes into our minds when it does, or exactly *why* one day our mood is up, and one day, our mood is down.
 
Perhaps there's a grander 'reason' for it, perhaps not. All I know is that life in the moment is easier, and much more fun, when we don't try to control what's coming through us.
 
So I'm done, and have been for a while, with 'censoring' my thoughts and emotions.
 
And I'm done, particularly, with berating myself when occasionally things get ugly, and I fly off the handle (or find myself beating my thigh with the metal spoon I'm holding in pure anger and frustration - with what? Who knows? It doesn't matter - though the fact I looked at my leg the next day and wondered how a gigantic bruise got there and started going through all the possible reasons - child, car door? - until the truth dawned....! still tickles me).
 
What I notice is: the more I look to marvel at whatever it is that's *creating* our experience in the first place, the more joy, and pure wonder at the miracle of life, comes through, on a more regular basis. And *that* is blissful.
 
More and more, the experiences - though real and difficult when I'm in them - stop mattering quite so much. They pass into the rear-view mirror more quickly, or get added to the list of incidences that are actually quite amusing in hindsight - mystery bruise, anyone...?!
 
You can argue that we can choose what we do with the thinking that arrives in our heads, but I'm not even so sure about that any more.
 
What we can do, is learn to roll with it.
 
All of it.
 
The punches - and the caresses - that Life throws our way.
 
The 'fairness' and the 'unfairness'. The 'luck' and the 'un-luck'.
 
Because if we're alive, we're on a divinely human magical mystery tour.
 
Noone gets to choose how that unfolds or how it turns out. (Though we can play with the illusion that we do... :))

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    Kate Barsby

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    Coach and mentor to professionals, business owners, and passionate people leading busy international lives.

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