Imagine that you are reading a book. It is a a great read, a murder mystery. You are near the end of the book and it is nearly evening. You know that the murderer will be revealed somewhere towards the last page.  A friend walks by:

“The butler did it,” he casually remarks.

You throw the book down in disgust and shout angrily at your friend.

“You’ve spoilt the book for me by revealing the murderer.” You storm off.

Later, I ask you if you are happy and you reply no.

Here’s another version of the story: Read more

There are a lot of miserable people in this world and there is a vast industry to help them:

• An army of therapists
• Libraries of self-help books
• Self development and motivational speakers
• Psychics
• Agony aunts
• Prozac and other drugs

Anyone can set themselves up as an expert on curing human misery. Most of these people are papering emotional cracks, putting plasters on mental wounds. Few really go into the very nature of the mind and how we get miserable in the first place. They may claim to do this by going back into childhood stuff, your relationship to your parents and your siblings. Of course, if you were regularly beaten by your parents, then you are probably fairly miserable now, so there is some merit in re-visiting childhood trauma.

How far do you want to go back? What caused your father to beat you up? Did his father beat him up? What about his grandparents and his great grand parents. When did this cycle of abuse begin? Read more

Stress can have a major influence on your health. Whilst some stress is a natural component of life, too much can seriously affect your health. Many conditions such as heart disease and IBS are linked to stress.

One of the causes of stress is being disorganized, which makes you feel that you are not controlling your life.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Is your office so cluttered that you waste valuable time searching for the things that you need right now?
• Do you sometimes wish for more hours in the week to finish all the tasks that need doing?
• Is your lack of organisation holding you back and causing you stress?
• Have you got the ideal work/life balance?
• Do you lose your car keys because you have forgotten where you left them?

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I’ve just finished reading Smile or Die by Barbara Ehrenreich. The book is a critique of positive thinking and positive psychology and how it has infiltrated American life in such a way to become a negative force.

What’s wrong with having positive thoughts?  Well, obviously most of the time it’s OK to think positively but taken to a fundamental level, as has often been the case, then positive thinking is not always realistic thinking. Barbara makes a case for positive thinking being a large factor in the  recent collapse of the banking system. Many people were making money from the sub prime mortgage market in which money to buy housing was given to the less well off. These mortgage debts were then sold on in the form of financial securities to people who saw vast amounts of profits to be made from them .

A few individuals saw that there was a basic flaw in the prime mortgage market. The system  relied on house prices always going up. If a low paid worker could not keep up with the payments, they could always release some funds by re-mortgaging to finance the payments. But what happens if house prices start falling?

People who voiced these concerns were not listened to. They were accused of being too negative, and in a banking culture where positive thinking was the order of the day, negative thought was not to be listened to.

Of course the ‘negative’ people were right, and when house prices started to fall, the whole banking house of cards began to collapse, resulting in the failure of the banking system.

If positive thinking and positive psychology can have such devastating effect, then how are we to proceed? What is needed is realistic rather than positive thinking alone. What is realistic thinking? Read more

I used to do some work for a business that taught massage therapists a new approach to bodywork. Using new techniques they became better therapists and this benefitted their clients who received deeper and more healing bodywork. The office of this company had a large board that was filled with glowing testimonials to how great the training courses were.

Everyone associated with the company was encouraged to think positively, always aware of the great things that the company stood for. The more massages people received using their approach, the more the world would improve. We were on a mission to help the world! Read more

Time is a funny thing. On the one hand it appears fixed. A minute on my watch equals a minute on your watch.

 

On the other hand the way you perceive time varies.

 

Time appears to runs slow when you:

 

• Are watching water boil
• Are waiting for a bus when you are running late
• Are watching the second finger of a watch rotate.

 

Time appears to run fast when you are:

 

• Watching a great movie
• Playing action video games
• Falling in love

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Breathing exercises become essential as you get older because age reduces the level of oxygen in your lungs. When you only take shallow breaths, as you do in normal breathing, you will eventually notice stiffness in your rib cage as the muscles surrounding the diaphragm start to lose their elasticity. This causes stale air to build up in your lungs that is composed mostly of carbon dioxide.

Rapid shallow breathing also leads to heart disease after a number of years or excessive feelings of tiredness. Breathing exercises to cleanse the stale air in your lungs should be practiced on a daily basis. You do not need to set aside a long period of time for this – five to ten minutes is sufficient. You can do the exercises when you wake in the morning or just before you go to sleep at night.

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You cannot avoid stress – it is part of the hectic world you live in.

Did you know that ?

• Up to 80% of all diseases are stress-related?
• Workplace stress costs the (USA) nation more than $300 billion each year in health care, missed work – (source New York Times  Sept 5, 2004)
• Stress is a major cause of people not turning up for work
• Stress is the major cause of couples splitting up
• One of the main causes of stress is worrying about your finances
• Stress causes over tiredness and this causes more traffic accidents then drunk drivers.

Do you know how much stress is costing you?

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I was looking at my doctor’s website yesterday and in particular the statistics on what they have treated. Ten per cent of patients are treated for depression.  How many more people are not yet at the stage of clinical depression, but are very unhappy?

Are you happy? If not, what can you do about it. Positive psychology  believes that it has the answer to happiness. Research has shown that 40% of happiness is under your conscious control. The other 60% is due to our circumstances, where you live, the family that you are bought up in and so on.

Happiness has two main components. You can asses yours by asking yourself the following questions:

• How satisfied are you overall with your life and are you progressing in your life goals?
• How often do you feel positive emotions and how often do you feel negative emotions?

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Do dolphins need self development?

This week I am in Florida. I met a dolphin called Rascal who let me swim with him. I also fed him some fish which he enjoyed. He seemed very happy with his life and probably needs no self development tips from me!

Dolphins lead a simple and natural life untroubled by:

• The recession
• Finding a job
• Paying the mortgage
• Taking up a health program

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Can mindfulness meditation make you happy?

I have a friend that calls herself spiritual who attends an evangelical Christian church every Sunday. She also does lots of voluntary work in a Christian organization that distributes food to homeless people.

Despite her spiritual practice and her good works, she is not happy.   I also have some Buddhist friends who are miserable.

If you consider yourself to be a spiritual person then ask yourself the following questions:

• Does your spirituality make you happy?
• Do you struggle to make sense of life and how you fit into the larger scheme of things?
• Are you content with where you are, or are you reaching for some spiritual or mystical state that always seems just out of reach?
• Have you found your purpose in life?

If you answered no to any of the above questions, then your spirituality could be, instead or a source of comfort, a cause of conflict in you.

All this has got me think about spirituality and how genuine spirituality should, at the minimum, make you happy. Read more

A lot of people who practice self development use positive affirmations and positive thinking. Often your positive thinking lasts until life sort of gets in the way. Difficulties arise and worrying starts.

In a new book “You Are Oprah: Igniting the Fires of Greatness,” Howard Glasser reveals the surprising reason why most positivity fails.

He says: “Most positivity is really just more negativity in disguise that keeps us energetically stuck.  For example, we don’t have to stuff or energize our WMDs – Worries, Misery, Doubts. Instead, we can learn how to use the intensity of those emotions to propel ourselves forward and into even greater greatness, not fear.”

How can this book stop negativity ruining your life?

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Do you worry too much?

I was bought up in a house called ‘Wywurri”. I’m not sure where the name came from – it could have been named after a group of granite rocks in the Maryamma distriuct of Australia also know as Wywurri.

If I ever get around to writing my autobiography it will be called Wywurri, as this is a principle by which I lead my life. Why worry?

I used to worry about a lot of things:

• My bank account which was never full enough.
• My relationships which always on the brink of ending
• My job which was never quite right for me
• My body which was never light enough

Do you dwell on your problems. There is productive worry and unproductive worry.

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How do you cure loneliness and build self esteem?

The only time in my life that I felt really lonely was when I first moved to London at the age of 20. I lived alone in a small bedsit and although I met people at work, I spent most nights on my own and did not have friends because I was very shy and found it difficult to communicate with strangers.  I felt disconnected.

Loneliness is all about disconnection.

• Disconnection from the community
• Disconnection from yourself
• Disconnection from your core identity Read more

There are plenty of wonderful movies produced with thought-provoking, compassionate stories — but they almost never make it to your local theater.

Occasionally films like The Secret or What the Bleep become mainstream, but what happens to all the other poignant films from around the world? There are dozens of stories that could touch deep within your soul… If only there was a way for you to see them.

Now there is…

Spiritual Cinema Circle is America’s fastest growing DVD club that specializes in delivering four, heart-opening, soul-stirring films on DVD to your home every month.

Join Spiritual Cinema Circle Today!

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