Where does the time go?

It is now 8.35pm, UK time, and I am just getting down to writing this Friday Blog.  My commitment is to produce this blog every Friday, come hell or high water.  And commitment means commitment.  It does not mean: "I'll try!"  "I'll try" is a cop out.  Commitment means "unless I am dead, too ill to move, or kidnapped by an evil demon and incapacitated, I WILL DO IT!"

Commitment can move mountains!  "I'll try" is an excuse looking for an opening to opt out.

Anyway, hello.  And welcome.

It feels like an eternity since I wrote the previous blog.  I remember lots of rainy days; and lots of work; long days.  So much so that today I decided to take a holiday.  Renata and I went to Manchester.  We had a lovely time.  We went to Waterstones book shop, and I read four or five books on philosophy.  We had lunch at a coffee shop nearby, and then went up to the City Art Gallery.  We looked at the main exhibition upstairs.  I am always blown away by the Battle of Balaclava.  Such a powerful image of the horror of war - the madness of men with swords, directed by men with rage in their hearts.  There were also some peaceful images, and beautiful images. 

I am still reading Eckhart Tolle's 'The Power of Now'.  It's a very important book.  I strongly recommend that you get it, and study it.  It has the power to change your life.  Since I have read 140 pages, it is difficult to pick one piece to share with you, that will make a contribution to your life.  Here is one piece, from page 69:

"If there is truly nothing that you can do to change your here and now, and you can't remove yourself from the situation, then accept your here and now totally by dropping all inner resistance.  The false, unhappy self that loves feeling miserable, resentful, or sorry for itself can then no longer survive.  This is called surrender.  Surrender is not weakness.  There is great strength in it.  Only a surrendered person has spiritual power.  Through surrender, you will be free internally of the situation.  You may then find that the situation changes without any effort on your part.  In any case, you are free".

In terms of CENT theory, "The false, unhappy self that loves feeling miserable, resentful, or sorry for itself" is a manifestation of the Bad Wolf.  The Good Wolf is capable of accepting defeat, setbacks, of accepting that reality is the way reality is today.  I may be able to change it tomorrow, but today - which is the only time that actually exists - I had better accept that it is the unfortunate way that it is.  There is peace and contentment in this surrender, which is not an abdication.

Chapter 8 deals with relationships.  Human sex-love relationships are one of the most beautiful features of human existence, when they work well.  When they don't work well, they are hell on wheels.  Tolle has some significant things to say about the role of consciousness, 'presence', in accessing real love in relationships, instead of the phony 'in love' bulltish which can quickly turn from so-called 'love' to violence, hatred and even death.  How could real love ever turn into hatred, jealousy, possessiveness, domination, control, and so on?  It couldn't.  If you've got something you are calling 'love' and its a source of misery in your life, then you've made a big mistake.  That's not love.  You need to find out what real love is.  Eckhart Tolle has some very helpful things to say on this subject, but you need to read the whole book in order to be able to fully understand Chapter 8.

This is a very significant book.  I strongly recommend it.

Best wishes, and have a great week.
Jim

Jim Byrne
Doctor of Counselling
ABC Coaching and Counselling Services

Email: jim.byrne@abc-counselling.com

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HUMAN EMOTION AND PERSONAL LIBERATION

I was raised as a good Catholic, and then moved into being agnostic, then into being an atheistic Marxist; then into Zen Buddhism.  But because of my experience of the superstitious and authoritarian aspects of religion, I have always been wary of saying I am “spiritual”.  I have done Zen meditation since 1980, and experienced transcendence several times; and I normally live several levels above the normal hum-drum reality of the materialistic mind.  However, I am still wary about the word “spiritual”.  A few years ago I had a client who had been helped a lot by Eckhart Tolle, a spiritual teacher.  She wanted me to try reading Tolle.  I was resistant, and did not do so.  I assumed he might be a bit cultish; a bit airy-fairy; a bit fancy-pantsy.

On Monday morning, on the way to the office, I picked up a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s book – The Power of Now – which Renata had dropped on the settee.  I thought it might divert me during my bus journey to Halifax.  I would have preferred to take my collection of Freud essays, which I am reading, but it weighs a ton, and the Tolle book is quite thin and lightweight.  (What a criterion of selection.  Don’t tell him, as this is not very flattering!)

On the bus I began to read this book.  I found it surprisingly good; so much so that I read a segment of it to my first client in Halifax that morning. 

On the bus on the way home I continued to read it, and whenever I got a chance since then.  One section that I recently marked is concerned with the question of emotions and emotionality – the stuff of counselling and psychotherapy.  This is what Tolle says about emotion:

“Basically, all emotions are modifications of one primordial, undifferentiated emotion that has its origin in the loss of awareness of who you are beyond name and form. Because of its undifferentiated nature, it is hard to find a name that precisely describes this emotion.  ‘Fear’ comes close, but apart from a continuous sense of threat, it also includes a deep sense of abandonment and incompleteness.  It may be best to use a term that is as undifferentiated as that basic emotion, and simply call it ‘pain’.  One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove that emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily.  In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.  The mind can never find the solution, nor can it afford to allow you to find the solution, because it (the mind) is itself an intrinsic part of the ‘problem’.  Imagine a chief of police trying to find an arsonist when the arsonist is the chief of police.  You will not be free of that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind, which is to say from ego.  The mind is then toppled from its place of power and Being reveals itself as your true nature”.

He goes on to explain that positive emotions are linked to the self, to Being, and not to the ego.

What is Eckhart Tolle really saying here?

1. We are born as little elements of a whole reality, which is all of a piece, and which has evolved from the primordial soup of many billions of years ago.  We are all one.

2. As soon as we are born, we are in the hands of a culture that insists upon individuality.  We are given a name label, and given rankings and ratings and value labels, roles, and a language that is slippery than a bag of eels, and more treacherous than a bag of rattle snakes.

3. We are wired up with a lot of social lies about who and what we are, but at some level we long to be reunited with our identity as a little piece of the whole; permanently connected; never separated; unborn and undying .  That is to say, we long to return to Eternal Life, evolving, rolling forward, changing form, but never separating.

4.  However, mainly, we identify with our social ego image, which is just a story.  That story is in danger of being contradicted in every social encounter we experience, or every challenge we face.  We may find we are not the potent ‘person’ we take ourselves to be.  Thus, there is anxiety, fear, pain.

The image I found most helpful from my readings many years ago is of the individual as being about as real as a wave on the boiling ocean.  The wave is whipped up by the wind, the gravitational pull of the moon, and sea temperatures, and sees itself as separate and free. The tide washes towards the shore, and let us assume you are the wave that is seventh from the beach.  And one by one all seven of you crash onto the beach, and disappear, as you are reunited with the sea.  Where did you go?  You didn’t go anywhere.  You never really existed.  You were just a transitory phenomenon; a tiny part of the evolving, moving, energetic whole.

Another image – which comes from Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind – is the image of life as being like a very high waterfall.   Imagine a waterfall that is fifteen hundred feet or two thousand feet high.  The water comes over the top, and at that point it is all connected up.  No problem.  But as it begins to fall, it breaks into dribbles, rivulets and droplets.  Imagine how lonely each droplet feels as it falls through space, not knowing how long it will fall, not knowing what may befall it on the way down.  Anxiety, panic, fear, dread.  Then, as quickly as it was ‘born’, it ‘dies’ again, as it reunites with all the other droplets and dribbles, as they combine into the river below.

I don’t like superstition.  I don’t like authoritarian priests.  But I like the reassurance of the Zen images described above.  I came from the Whole.  I will return to the Whole.  And in the interim I must suffer, to some extent at least, because of the illusion of separateness, of lack of connection, of isolation, loneliness, and vulnerability.  Roll on the reunion!

Hang in there.
Love,

Jim

PS: Why ‘love’?  Werner Erhard used to say: “Every human being has an absolute love for every other human being.  The only thing that’s tied up is the expression of that love”.  I have moved on from that.  I agree that every human being has an absolute love for every other human being, and that that is normally tied up, or blocked in some way.  But, unlike Werner, I also think that every human being has an absolute hatred for every other human being.  Not either/or; but both/and.  And those two absolute tendencies I call the Good Wolf and the Bad Wolf.  We can choose to live from the Good Wolf, or allow ourselves to degenerate into Bad Wolves.  I choose to operate from Good Wolf; from love.

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Trading Time for Greater Mindpower

I awoke later than normal this morning.  Renata and I had been out with some friends for a drink, and then we headed off to a restaurant for supper.  Unfortunately the restaurant had closed down, and so we spent some time looking for an alternative, which turned out to be a very nice, but slow, hotel.  Hence our late retirement, and my sluggishness this morning.

But why am I telling you this?  Is this really of any value to know?

Well, it’s part of the context of what I want to share with you this week.  (If it’s too long, or too slow, try Twitter!)

I got up, realized it was late, and went into my breakfast routine.  Why didn’t I say: “Look, you have overslept, Byrne; so now you are going to have to skip breakfast in order to catch up on the work in hand!”  Because, I do not rate time as more important than the quality of my mind.  What I sell to my clients is based on high quality mindpower, and that needs nurturing.  If I skip breakfast, where will the slow-burning fuel in my belly come from to fuel the slow release of glucose to my brain, which underpins my mindpower?

While I was eating my breakfast, I played a mind enhancing audio programme which would reinforce my positive mindset, and ensure that I tackle my work and my day in a positive, energetic and happy mode.

My breakfast consisted of yeast free rye bread, with nut and seed butters, plus a green drink; weak coffee with no milk; and a herbal drink.  I also took some vitamin and mineral supplements.  Our brains depend upon receiving the right kinds of nutrients to work efficiently.

After breakfast I meditated.  Meditated?, I hear you say.  But you’re running late.  Get on with it!  But meditation is crucially important to clarifying a ragged mind, and all minds become ragged through external stressors and self-neglect.  So I sat and meditated and collected my mind for a busy day.

After meditation – and the time is really ticking by now – I did my Chi Kung exercises, while the computer was firing up (which can be a slow process when so many programmes insist on loading at once).  Chi Kung introduces more oxygen into the body and brain, increasing my alertness, and breaking down antioxidants and unfriendly bacteria in my body.

After the exercises, I had to do my Daily Pages.  Daily Pages is a practice developed by Julia Cameron, in ‘The Artist’s Way’, and is designed to promote creativity and to clear out mental clutter and chatter before the creative process is begun.  It is also very good for breaking up writer’s block.

During the course of writing my pages, it occurred to me that my blog today could be about the relative value of time versus mindpower.  If you neglect your mind in order to maximize the time available to you, you will have a lot of poor quality time on your hands to do poor quality work.

What I sell is a function of the qualities of my mind and my time.  I cannot increase the amount of time I have, but I can work on the qualities of my mind, so that, to generalize the concept, the Quality of my mind improves dramatically.  Then, with a smaller amount of time, I can produce greater creative outputs with my clients, and thus I can justify charging a lot more money than I could justify if I was rushing around with a ragged mind.
 
In other words:

A poor quality of mind x 1 hour of time = A poor quality product/service

But a high quality of mind x 1 hour of time = A high quality product/service.

Why does this matter?  Because it takes time, every single day, to optimize the qualities of our minds.  The temptation is to skip the nutritious breakfast, skip the meditation and physical exercise, skip the daily pages, skip the reading and other forms of mind enrichment.  But look at the cost!

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POSTSCRIPT: CHANGING YOUR LIFE BY CHANGING YOUR MIND

While I was meditating this morning, the following idea popped into my mind.  I quickly jotted the heading on a file card, and went back to meditation.  This was the idea:

Your life is a reflection of your mind.  If you don’t like your life, work on your mind.

In what way can it be said that your life is a reflection of your mind?  In this sense:

If you are in an unhappy relationship, know that this is a product of your mind, combined with the functioning of your partner's mind.  Those are the essential ingredients of the relationship, interacting with your life’s circumstances.  If you want to change your relationship, know that the only person you can reliably change – and that with some effort – is yourself.  Namely, your mind.  So if you change your mind, or improve your mental functioning, then a space opens up in which it becomes both possible and perhaps also inviting for your partner to change their mind, or their mental functioning.

On the other hand, if you get out of the relationship, and get a new one, chances are that the new one will quickly prove to be much the same as the old one.  Why?  Because you still have the same mind!  It still functions in the same way to drive your actions and your interpretations.  And you may well be experienced in much the same way by your new partner as you were by your old partner.

The same principle applies to jobs, locations, families, careers, financial circumstances, and so on.  If you change your mind, you change the quality of your life.

I offer high quality mindpower to address the problems of your current mind organization.  Do you want to change the quality of your mind?

Best wishes,
Jim

Dr Jim Byrne
ABC Coaching and Counselling Services

PS: See the About Albert Ellis page for the commemoration of the second anniversary of the death of the creator of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy

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DOES LENGTH MATTER?

All week I have been busy developing pages and pagesof material to celebrate the second anniversary of the death of Dr Albert Ellis, the creator of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy.  By contrast, yesterday I read that there is a growing crisis in the Twitter-world, as “followers” abandon their Twittering idols if those idols publish too many “tweets”.  (A tweet, I think, is a single sentence, or two-sentence statement of great simplicity and ease of digestion, published electronically, on the internet, at Twitter.com.  The “followers” are not bookworms!) 

Some idols have thousands of “followers”, presumably because they are so bland and unchallenging that the “followers” don’t have to wake up during the process of reading them.  But now it seems that three sentences is enough to cause the "followers" to wake up and run away in horror!

We live in an era of mental laziness and sound bite culture.  Can you imagine how unpopular my blog is, given that it contains several sentences, sometimes several paragraphs, and sometimes even challenging ideas?  Perhaps three Shakespearian actors and a Magdalen College don “follow” my words of wisdom.  Should I therefore “dumb down” in order to get lots of “followers”?  What would be the point?  Tweeting at the sleeping masses achieves nothing.  You have to be awake to participate in life, and you have to be open to the hard labour of thinking, which necessarily involves reading challenging materials which constantly stretch your mind beyond its current level of development.

If people become what they think about all day long – according to the Buddha, William James, James Allen, Earl Nightingale, Napoleon Hill, and on and on – then what will “the followers of Twitters” become if they spend their lives reading the “hollowed out” banalities of tired celebrities?

I want to share with you that my life has been transformed, not all at once, or in an instant, but slowly over a fifty year period.  In that time I have moved from a miserable, depressing, deprived environment, to a joyful, uplifting and enriching environment.  In the process I had to change myself over and over and over again.  I had to grow.  I had to think, and rethink, and think again.  I had to set goals, work towards them intelligently; set new goals, and work and work and work to make them happen.  I had to find books, read them, make sense of them, and apply them.  I had to make sacrifices, to abandon locations and people who did not have the potential to offer me the fulfilment that I craved; the life satisfaction that I thought would befit a fully functioning, equal human being.  It was a long, slow, painful journey.  Sometimes it was lonely.  Sometimes it was sad.  At times I felt totally lost and cut adrift from the world.  Sometimes I almost gave up.  But something deep inside of me kept me going: self belief; the idea that I deserved a good life; a decent life; a life of happiness, fulfilment and joy.  I would not settle for the mess into which I was thrown by fate.  I wanted to create a better life for myself, and create it I did. 

I cannot fit this message into a single sentence or two.  But I want to share this message with you, because I want you to know that you can change your life!  You do not have to settle for second best.  You do not have to settle for the mess of limited possibilities into which you were thrown by blind fate!  All humans are born equal in potential, and you can realize your potential, against all the odds of an exploitative, unequal society!  You can set goals for a better life for yourself, and then work your ass off to make it happen.  (See Dr Jim's Life Tips).  And if you visualize it clearly, and feel it as a reality in your guts, and you then do whatever work is required to get you there, you can make it!  You can have the life you want, and you can live the life you love: if you have the courage, the application, and the willingness to listen to those who have gone before you.

Tweet, tweet!

Best wishes,
Jim

Dr Jim Byrne
Doctor of Counselling
ABC Coaching and Counselling Services
 

Email: jim.byrne@abc-counselling.com
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WHAT IS THIS BLOG ABOUT?

Hello,

Today I want to try to define what my blog is about. I will begin by describing the start of my day:

Got up this morning at 5.00am; 25 minutes of meditation; breakfast (seed and nut butters on yeast-free rye bread, weak black coffee freshly ground); 20 minutes of physical exercise (Chi Kung and Zham Zhong); and then 20 minutes of Daily Pages (or writing in my journal).

Why did I do this? Most people live stressed lives, and I don't choose to do so. People who get up late and have to rush to hit their deadlines place themselves under immediate strain, and the pattern is set for a day of stress and strain, hassle and pressure.

Also, meditation calms you down, promotes loving-kindness and creativity, and calm objectivity in the face of pressures and hassles. Physical exercise promotes good physical health, which is a necessary ingredient for good mental or emotional wellness. Nutritious food feeds the body and brain; and the daily pages...?

Well the daily pages idea comes from Julia Cameron's ‘The Artist's Way', which is a great guide to how to live creatively, and to maximize your creative thinking and actions.  The idea is to write for five or ten minutes at the start of each day, to clear out anything that might be blocking your clear perceptions, and your creative actions.

So now, with all those preparations in place, I am all set to write today's blog.

What is this blog about? Well it began with a desire to ‘communicate with the world'. I just started it up, without much of an idea of where it would go, or how I would manage it. Overall, it has been an expression of the following facts:

I have completed 10.5 years of work as a counsellor/coach/psychotherapist. I have helped about 500 individuals in that time, including many couples. I have used 13 different systems of therapy, combined in different ways for different needs. And I have been guided by 11 different ‘thinking skills role models'. Somehow this blog seemed like an unconscious attempt to summarize or homogenise that experience.

People come to me with problems of anger, anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, hurt, and a whole range of behavioural problems, and objections to aspects of their environments. Underneath much of this distress lie relationship conflicts: between husbands and wives, live in partners, parent(s) and their child/children, children and their parent(s), employees and their employers, colleagues with each other, extra-marital relationships, and relationships inside the heads of the client. This started me on the track of trying to write about relationships.

I also hit on the idea of using the Buddhist perspectives on suffering - the four windows, or ways of framing adversity - as a way to potentially synthesize the various therapies I have been using. This may actually be the case, but I am going to put this approach on one side for the moment, and begin a different tack. Starting next week, I am going to begin to write about turning points in my own life; how to cope with particular emotional disturbances; current developments in my life; and random events as they arise.

I hope that over time this blog will become a useful resource for people who are on some kind of developmental journey. If that includes you, then perhaps today you could just focus on these questions: How much exercise do I do, and what do I want to change, if anything, about that? Could I benefit from daily meditation, and how could I learn? Is my diet a sound, healthy option? And would it benefit me to take up writing 10 minutes of daily pages at the start of each day, to clear out undigested stuff, to clarify my agenda for the day, and to promote creative thinking about the problems I have to resolve today?

I hope this helps?

Best wishes,
Jim

Dr Jim Byrne
ABC Coaching and Counselling Services

Email: jim.byrne@abc-counselling.com

PS: If you want to talk to me about the possibility of working together on some of your issues, please phone 44 1422 847 882 (from outside the UK), or 01422 847 882 (inside the UK). We could take five minutes or so to look at possibilities, and to allow you to experience what it would be like to work with me for real.  Or take a look at the Homepage for further information.

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