SPRING HAS SPRUNG!

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I like to acknowledge the change in the seasons, and to remind myself, and you, that we are part of the natural order, and also shift as the seasons do.

Spring is a time of renewal and growth. We see the plants begin to refresh themselves: the trees with fresh leaves and buds; the bulbs offering their bright colours; the perennials beginning to show new shoots. We notice the lighter mornings and evenings as the daylight time lengthens. Everything starts to come to life.

And in us, springtime is a time for renewal and growth as well. My mother always used to spring-clean our home. She would open windows, clear out cupboards, wipe down paintwork, and generally refresh the place. I may not be as thorough or as prompt as her, but I do get the significance of having a good clear-out, clean-up and airing. It makes our environment feel better and is part of the inner drive to match the season.

As well as the external aspect of refreshing, we usually have a resurgence of energy – our sap is rising, just as it is in the trees – and it’s a good time to look at what we want to do in the rest of the year: what we will experiment with; what we want to achieve; how we want to be.

We can prompt this in ourselves by just asking those questions, and taking a few steps towards the things that we think of, even if it’s only planning when we will do something about it.

Don’t just dissipate that energy, use it to begin to introduce a new useful habit, or to clear something that’s been hanging over you, or just to go for a walk and allow creative ideas to come to you.

It is in our nature to feel the urge for renewal and growth at this time of year, so let’s use our natural bent to make our lives even easer and more enjoyable. Spring is springing in you as well!

WHAT IF…

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A little while ago I wrote a blog about ‘if only’ – that not so useful way of replaying the past. This time I’m looking at its equivalent about the future: ‘What if..’.

There’s one thing for sure about the future: it’s mostly unpredictable. We don’t know in advance what will work out and what won’t. We don’t know what might happen to help or hinder our plans. We don’t have control over the future.

Yet we spend a lot of energy trying to cater for possible problems, where we have some concern over the way it might go. This can be at the micro-level: ‘What if I miss the train tomorrow?’, or at the macro-level: ‘What if I get ill and can’t earn my living?’

Once we switch on the ‘what if’ button, we can take ourselves very easily into a place where everything could be a problem, because our thinking has that flavour attached to it – we get the ‘what if’ syndrome, where we run scenario after scenario of things going wrong.

And that is the issue with ‘what if’. It sends us into a lot of ‘rehearsals’ in our minds of things going wrong. We imagine what could happen, we feel the emotions attached to that, and we get ourselves in a right old state! It uses a lot of energy, and sets us up perfectly to be anxious when we reach the part of the future that we’ve done this not very useful rehearsal for!

And have you noticed how many of our ‘what if’s’ don’t come to pass? So all that energy we used was completely wasted.

If we spent that energy on rehearsing in our mind how we make it more likely that it works out OK, that would be far more useful. ‘I’ll catch the train I want to, and to make that easy, I’ll go to the station early, and buy my ticket in advance’. This is a useful rehearsal, and prompts us into preparing properly.

Now I’m not saying that it’s wrong to have a back-up plan. It can be useful to have an alternative approach up your sleeve. So we can come up with an alternative by saying to ourselves: ‘And if that doesn’t work out, what I’ll do is..’ This prompts us into rehearsing a back-up plan in case we need it.

We can neither control nor predict what exactly will happen in the future, but we can make it easier for ourselves to handle it, whatever it is, by sticking to useful rehearsals in our minds.

Life works, most of the time, so don’t stick a spanner in the works by ‘what if-ing’ yourself!

DISTRACTION CAN BE USEFUL

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We tend to talk about being distracted as if it’s a bad thing, and sometimes it is – but not always. Distraction means to be pulled away from something.

Now if the something is a task you need to finish, or paying attention to something important, then it is not useful. We lose focus when we’re distracted, and it means that we are less effective.

However, most of us benefit from distraction when what we’re being pulled away from is what’s going on in our heads! You know what I mean: those spirals we can get into where we play anxieties and annoyances over and over and make them so much worse.

When we realise we’re beginning to do that, it’s time to roll out a distraction that switches our mind to another channel, and gives us a chance to regain perspective. And obviously, if we want to change channels in our mind, the distraction needs to be some form of mental occupation, something we are sure to pay attention to.

It helps to have a repertoire of such distractions, so you have choices ready, depending on the circumstances. There are the ones you can only do if you pay attention to them, like Sudoku or jigsaws; there are the ones that gradually draw you in, like gardening or watching something that makes you laugh; and there are the ones that give your mind a different rhythm to follow, like counting your breath or how many steps you take as you walk – by the way, counting is a really simple way of distracting your mind: children learn to do it as a natural way of occupying their thoughts. All of these take over your conscious mind and give it a chance to settle down again.

Physical movement helps too – if we move our bodies we move our minds.. To increase the speed at which physical movement sorts us out, it helps to deliberately focus on what we can see or hear externally while we move, or again, to count repetitions: steps, cars passing.

So just have a ponder on what works for you as a distraction, what ‘takes your mind off things’. And next time you find yourself stuck in one of those mind ruts, go instead to a useful distraction!

IF ONLY…

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There are some phrases we would be better off not knowing, and one of them is: ‘If only…’ It almost always expresses regret about something in our past: ‘ If only I hadn’t eaten that chocolate cake’, or ‘If only I’d held my tongue in that conversation’, or ‘ If only they had noticed that I was struggling’.

Most of them give us reasons to beat ourselves up, and some of them give us reasons to resent other people. None of them are useful!

They are usually referring to things that have already happened, and we can’t change that. It’s a terrible waste of our energy to wish something in the past were different, and positively sinful to beat ourselves up about it!

The alternative is to use those thoughts as a means of doing something different in the future. We can use those phrases to help us to create a different story for ourselves from now on.

If I hear myself doing an ‘if only..’, I ask myself a couple of questions:

  1. Can I do anything to rectify it?
  2. How can I approach similar situations differently next time, so that it turns out in a better way?

Can I rectify it?

If I ate chocolate cake, it’s done! But if I was mean to somebody, or unfair, I may be able to apologise to them and acknowledge that I know I got it wrong.

If someone upset me and I’m holding a grudge, there’s not much I can do about being upset, although sometimes when we re-examine the situation, we have a different perspective on it, and realise that it wasn’t really that serious – we just took it that way at the time.

How can I approach similar situations differently next time, so that it turns out in a better way?

Here’s the useful bit!

If we think about alternative approaches we could use, we are doing two useful things:

  1. We are learning from our experience, instead of repeating the same errors, or beating ourselves up about it – and by the way, beating ourselves up about it means that we replay the experience and practise to do it again next time!
  2. We automatically play our improved version in our minds, and this is like rehearsing to do it more effectively next time we experience something similar, so we have some practice at the new improved way of handling it, and are more likely to use this version.

So next time you find yourself saying: ‘If only..’, use these two questions and stop it in its tracks!

DON’T RELY ON YOUR MIND TO MAKE DECISIONS

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Early this morning, my mind was telling me to cancel my Pilates lesson, because I have a cold and I was feeling a bit groggy. Then I remembered a message I had received which said, ‘Don’t rely on your mind to make decisions. It’s not that reliable!’

What this means to me is that our minds are well-trained in logical argument, but most good decisions are not based purely on logic. To make a good decision we also need to take account of emotions and our intuition.

When I considered my emotions, I remembered that I always feel more energised and positive after a Pilates lesson, and that during the lesson, I don’t think about anything else. I then considered the alternative: I would sit here feeling a bit sorry for myself, and eventually push myself into doing something. At this point it was a ‘no-brainer’ – isn’t that an accurate description for what I am talking about!!

How is this different from thinking through the pro’s and con’s in your head? It is the move from thinking to feeling which will work best for you. By imagining myself in the two alternative scenarios, I had a better sense of the experience of each. My imagination gave me the physical, mental and emotional effects of the alternatives, so that I could choose the one which felt most useful in its effect.

My mind could only work from how I was feeling at that moment, and we all know that our minds will reflect a negative mood in the way they think about things. They can give us reasons to believe that everything’s awful if we’re feeling a bit shitty in the first place. So our mind colours our thoughts according to our mood at that moment. (By the way, that is also why we are often more creative and constructive in our thinking when we’re in a good buoyant mood).

By shifting to imagining the outcome of the alternatives, I gave a chance for my body, heart and guts to play their part, so the mind was no longer prevalent.

So next time you’re trying to decide something that isn’t obvious, imagine your alternative outcomes and ask yourself:

  • How do I feel if I get this outcome?
  • What effect does it have on me physically?
  • What effect does it have on me mentally?
  • What effect does it have on me emotionally?
  • Now, which one feels most useful/right?

By the way, I feel so much better now, post-pilates, than I did first thing this morning!

ACCEPTING WHO YOU ARE

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It is very easy for us to identify what’s wrong with us, what we don’t do well, what we fail at – we’re well trained in that! And we can try to counteract that by things like affirmations: I am beautiful; I am a good person, etc.

I don’t know about you, but I’m never quite convinced by that. So I tend to give up on affirmations quite quickly, and I needed an alternative approach.

I think there are three things that need adjusting for this to work.

  1. Don’t counteract, have both sides

By this I mean that we can have a list of our ‘failings’ and a list of things we do well. The first stage of acceptance is admitting to all of our strengths and weaknesses.

  1. Add in some qualifiers to make it easier.

The statements we make about ourselves tend to be all or nothing statements: I’m moody; I’m useless at being consistent etc. And we have the same problem with affirmations: I’m a good person will almost always bring to mind the examples when we’re not being a good person!

The qualifiers are words like: usually; sometimes; at the moment; often; mostly; occasionally; just for today. They allow us to acknowledge what we’re like without over-exaggerating it.

Examples would be: I’m usually kind; I sometimes have a bad mood; I mostly eat healthily; I occasionally have a bad day; at the moment I’m feeling miserable.

The qualifiers require us to look beyond the immediate feeling and assess ourselves on a longer-term basis, which gives us more perspective.

  1. Allow for progress

If we want to get better at being a certain way, we need to give ourselves a chance to develop it.

‘I’m beginning to..’ ‘I’m learning to…’ or ‘I’m starting to..’ will allow us to count those first steps towards improvement.

‘I’m getting better at..’ ‘ I now more often…’ allow us to recognise that we’re moving beyond first steps and towards habit.

These then become more realistic statements as well as being kinder to ourselves.

With these adjustments, we have a much better chance of accepting how we are, whilst helping ourselves to be more how we want to be.

I want to be more of who I can be, and this helps me to not get stuck on my failings, but instead build on what I have already. It also helps me to remember that it’s OK to not get it ‘right’ all the time – being human is different from being perfect!

So next time you decide to beat yourself up for being crap at something, have a go at this approach instead and see what happens.

 

SOLITUDE

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There is something lovely about being on your own. We often confuse being solitary or alone with being lonely, feeling deprived of company. The two do not necessarily follow: we feel lonely if we wish we did have company, but being alone is a choice to enjoy your own company.

And that choice allows the possibility of just doing and being whatever we feel like – it is a form of freedom. When no-one else is involved we have the opportunity to follow our own rhythms, to indulge our own fancies, to consider ourselves first.

We can eat and drink what we like, when we like. We can sing our hearts out, or have complete quiet. We can get up when we’re ready to, or lie in bed with a cup of tea and read a book. We can even have complete control of the TV remote!

In our busy world, it is good for us, once in a while, to have some solitary time. It allows us to replenish our energy, and that freedom to be completely ourselves,

So this year, see if you can find yourself a little solitary time. If you live with others, suggest they go out for the day, and bask in the freedom of solitude for a little while.

May 2019 be a great year for you!!

PEACE ON EARTH, GOODWILL TO ALL

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This blog is called Ways of Remembering. In our world today, I think it’s worth remembering what Christmas really stands for. The message that accompanies the birth of Christ is simple and profound: peace on earth, goodwill to all.

It isn’t Christmas trees or presents; it isn’t overindulgence in food and drink; it isn’t spending money, going into debt. Jesus set the example of a different mind-set, and whether we believe in him or not, it’s a great example that we can all attempt to follow.

He demonstrated by example that everyone has value and deserves kindness, no matter how different from you they may be. He used stories to remind people that it may be the outcast or stranger who actually lives the values we say we have, and those who claim the highest ground often use it to exclude or condemn others, rather than to help others to be in the same place. This is what goodwill to all looks like – inclusiveness and kindness.

Jesus also famously said, ‘Turn the other cheek’. This is often interpreted as weakness or submission, but I think it simply means: stand in your place, but don’t fight for it. If we truly believe we have got it right, we have no need to prove it to others, or try to force them to agree with us . We are more likely to influence another person by being our truth than by trying to convince them with words. This is peace on earth.

So this Christmas, let’s be kind and warm with others – (and ourselves!). Let’s be the best we can be, and let others be how they are without judgement. Let’s have some peace and goodwill, at least within our own sphere of influence!

May you have a peaceful, warm and joyous Christmas time..

TAKING TIME TO REFLECT

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It is easy in our busy world to just keep going, with that feeling that we never quite catch up. Yet taking time to reflect can help to make that constant activity more purposeful and productive.

The first thing that some time for reflection can give us is a reminder that we are doing some things well/right. We often don’t notice when we’ve set a ‘new normal’ for ourselves, because we haven’t perfected it.

I may be better at giving myself a break, even though I don’t always do it. I may be good at noticing the little everyday pleasures, and forget that I didn’t used to do that very much. I may occasionally go for a walk in the fresh air, and just criticise myself for not doing it more often.

Noticing our own progress in improving our lives matters. We are always developing and growing, even if sometimes the pace of it seems slow. By acknowledging our progress to ourselves, we encourage ourselves to do more of it.

The second part of reflecting is to set some intentions for the next period of time. Rather than beating ourselves up for not getting to where we wanted to in some areas of our lives, we can choose what we want to pay attention to, to take it to the next stage.

For example, I may want to pay more attention to eating good food, or I may want to focus on doing more things that make me feel good, or I may want to get better at stopping when I’ve run out of energy. By setting ourselves four or five intentions, we give ourselves a good chance of applying them, and thereby enhancing our own development. It also reminds us of what’s really important to us, so that we adjust our busyness to include things that really matter, and feel OK about not doing some of the stuff we just do habitually.

Most of us have a bit of time over the Christmas period, where we could allow ourselves to reflect. Why not have a go at it, and see what comes up for you?

(I’ve put some beginnings of sentences below that you may find helpful in this.)

my progress                                    My intentions

I’m better at…                                           I want to pay attention to…

I’m good at…                                              I want to focus on…

I’ve started…                                             I want to get better at…

I now sometimes…                                       I’ll have a go at…

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY

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So much in our world at the moment seems to be doom and gloom: our politics, our ‘news’, the lack of compassion for others. It is hard to break out of the predominant zeitgeist sometimes, and remember that this isn’t the only human condition.

Yet in amongst this, there are always reminders that there is so much more to being human. I was reminded this week in a way I wasn’t really expecting. I went to see “Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again”. I don’t really like musicals or Abba’s music, but I sat and soaked up the atmosphere it created: warm, funny and joyful. It made me laugh and cry, engaged me totally, and left me with a feeling of hope and optimism. Why? It told the other side of the story of being human.

Most of the people I know and meet are kind and friendly. They are not selfish or greedy. They may worry about things, but they find their way through it. It’s time we boosted these aspects of being human and began to offset that unpleasant version that seems to infect everything.

If we’re going to change the zeitgeist, we have to start with ourselves. We can be the role modes and demonstrate the best of the human condition.

So let’s start by refusing to take on the story:

  • Let’s find the reasons to be optimistic rather than despairing
  • Let’s notice the good in people rather than what’s wrong
  • Let’s be kind and compassionate rather than critical
  • Let’s find reasons to laugh rather than be miserable
  • Lets appreciate what we have rather than wish we had more
  • And let’s enjoy all the good moments in our lives

It’s time we all told the other side of the story by how we live our lives, and that way we can remind even more people that life can be good.