I have been really busy preparing for a course I’m running with a colleague, Michael. Although I worked with Michael many years ago in the computer world, this is our first adventure into Personal Development stuff!

And for me it’s difficult……I’m not used to working with other people. I’m used to working for other people in a supporting role.

Usually I get along pretty well with others, mainly because I’m easy going and I like to please people.This has worked to a certain degree for most of my life, but something is shifting. I’ve noticed that I’m not prepared to be easy going and please the other when there’s something important at stake. Namely, this course. It turns out I’m passionate about getting the message across and getting it across in a simple way and I’m prepared to not please Michael in the process! Who knew?

It’s been a revelation and it’s been uncomfortable.

The revelation is that in spite of my not pleasing, Michael still seems to get along with me. I think he might even still like me – how bizarre (to my way of thinking)! The uncomfortable comes in the way I feel when I want to disagree with some point he is making.

What was happening was he would make a suggestion about something we might present and I would feel slight annoyance but say “Ok, right, that sounds fine” . He would think (naturally) that I agreed with his suggestion and go on to elaborate on it. By which time my slight annoyance had grown to extreme annoyance and continued to grow through his deliberation until I was fully angry. Now, Michael is a counsellor and very aware, so he was noticing the signs that suggested there might be a problem and he would say “Well what are your thoughts so far on that?”.  Of course I had no thoughts, well no coherent thoughts anyway, just blind emotion. And in my blind emotion I attacked every position of his suggestion. In this outpouring I was not very aware but I do remember registering the shock on his face! Eventually I would run out of steam and feel exhausted.

After each meeting I would feel huge guilt and wonder why I had ever agreed to work with another human being when it was so difficult, well honestly I was thinking he was so difficult!

This happened at almost every meeting we had. And then there was a wake up….

One of the exercises we run on our course is called Conflict Resolution and it involves standing in the other man’s shoes. The participant (person A) choses a conflict situation to work on and begins by seeing the situation from their own point of view. Then they move into the other person’s (person B’s) chair and sees the conflict from that person’s point of view and finally they move to an observers chair and see it from their point of view. So naturally we had to run through the exercise for ourselves to road test it. I picked what I thought was a pretty innocuous disagreement that I’d had the previous week with a friend. I expected to run through the exercise and pass it as useful.

But I didn’t run through the exercise!

It started fine, I described how I met my friend and we chatted and she said something which I didn’t agree with and I nodded and she went on and on with her erroneous opinion and I became so angry (internally) that I made an excuse and left. I resolved not to meet her again because she was so difficult.

Back in the exercise it was time to move to the other person’s point of view. I began to describe the situation from there. At first it was difficult, I didn’t want to be my friend; she’s annoying and difficult and irritating; but I really wanted to use this exercise in the course so I stuck with it.

And it was a revelation.

From my friend’s point of view we were having a lovely chat about things that interested both of us and suddenly her friend (me) started to look a bit odd and then rushed off without hugging or setting a date for the next chat. Very odd.

For you it might be obvious that my friend didn’t know what had happened but I had no idea at the time!! As soon as I realised this something shifted inside of me. Could it be me who is “annoying and difficult and irritating”? Could it be me who is acting a little crazy?

But we were still running the exercise…… so the next part required me to move to the observer’s chair. From here I could see person A (me!) – in her habit of pleasing everyone – was dishonest to her friend when she feigned agreement. Also, person A’s anger was not caused by her friend but by her own reaction to dishonesty. Her dishonesty….. my dishonesty.

The exercise was over but the learning continued. At our next meeting Michael bravely asked if the “friend” in the conflict exercise was him. I was amazed and speechless. I finally said “No, how could you think that, it had nothing to do with you….”.

But it did. It was the same pattern. The one that begins when I don’t agree with something being said but I keep nodding… keep pleasing. The one that progresses into extreme annoyance, blaming the other person for being difficult and irritating. So it was me! It’s my pattern. Phew, now I’m in a position to change it.

Something as simple as changing position increases perspective and now it’s possible for me to take responsibility, be honest and change this. Next time I disagree with a colleague’s or a friend’s opinion I will notice (be aware) of what’s happening inside of me.

Already I feel peaceful and more in control.

Is there something you’ve been doing for a long time that has outlived it’s usefulness – like my people pleasing? Is it time to take responsibility for you own actions and be honest, at least to yourself?

Sometimes a story can reveal the shame and fear we hide behind…. or the treasure we hide inside.

While on a Mythoself© course in Princeton with Joseph Riggio this month, the following story turned up in the middle of the night…..

There once was a handsome prince and he lived in Boston (or was it Barcelona? or Brisbane? never mind it was somewhere that started with a B) and he was very princely in his duties. Everyone thought well of him – nobles and peasants alike. That’s why they accepted some peculiarities- namely that the prince insisted on sleeping in a sound proof room in the dungeon of his castle. He cited experts in Sweden or Denmark, who said “soundproof sleeping in dungeons is beneficial to long life and health”. Of course no such experts existed, the prince was lying.

No one in his kingdom knew the real reason, the prince had a dark secret……

He was ashamed and so kept the secret to himself. Every night the prince woke up screaming and shouting. A  prince can’t be seen or heard screaming and shouting in the night, it wasn’t right. No one must know. This was the reason he slept in the dungeon in a soundproof room.

It was the same thing every night….. The prince fell asleep and within moments he was dreaming. He was standing at a podium delivering a speech to his subjects. Behind him there was a huge stained glass window, probably 20 feet high, in front of him there was a room full of people.

The speech was going well and his subjects were listening intently. And then it started, quietly at first. A persistent scratching on the glass of the window. The scratching continued and got louder until the prince stopped speaking and then the whispering started. The thing that was scratching outside the window started whispering. Over and over and over again…… “I’m here…. I’m here…. I’m here…”.

And it wouldn’t stop.

Then the prince, when he could bear it no more, started shouting, “No, you’re not good enough, you’re not good enough, I have everything under control.” That’s when he woke up shouting and screaming, “No, you’re not good enough, I have everything under control”.

But then one night there was a problem with the basement, it was flooded. The prince couldn’t sleep in his soundproof room, he had to sleep in another room in the castle. He was very worried and tried to stay awake with strong coffee and loud television, but eventually he fell asleep.

Of course he awoke screaming and shouting.

His manservant heard him and ran to the room, but the prince assured him that everything was fine. When it happened twice more, the prince decided he would go out to the garden where dawn was just breaking. It was cold and he knew there was no way he could fall asleep out here. So he walked around the garden until he noticed how beautiful the dawning day was and he sat on a bench and watched it become what it was becoming.

And that’s when he fell asleep!

But this time something different happened……

The dream began in the same way. He was standing on the podium speaking when the scratching started. Then the voice, “I’m here.. I’m here”. Then the prince was about to start shouting but something stopped him. Somehow he remembered that he couldn’t shout because his manservant would hear. Instead, he decided to crouch down low under the podium, close his eyes and hide. He was very afraid and he began to whimper.

The voice outside the window got louder and louder and the scratching turned to knocking, and the prince started to sob and shake.

Suddenly there was a loud crash and the stained glass window shattered, some bits of coloured glass landed on the stage by the prince’s feet. Everything went quiet for a moment, then the prince heard the audience let out a collective sigh. He opened his eyes and poked his head around the side of the podium just in time to see an enormous magnificent white eagle glide through the broken window. As the prince rose to his feet the eagle came around to land near the podium and they both stood in awe of each other.

After a few moments the eagle blinked a slow blink and the prince said “Oh, you are here” and he put his hand on his own chest. And as he let out a deep sigh he said, “and I am enough”.

Slowly the prince became aware that he was sitting in the garden watching the sunrise and there was a white eagle gliding over the east wall. His manservant came running down the path with a blanket saying “Sir, are you okay?” and the prince replied,

“Yes, yes of course……. I’m perfect”.

As the butler handed him the blanket the prince said “Be a good man and move my personal stuff to the large bedroom on the main wing. I’m going to be sleeping there from now on.”

I’ve been reading Jill Bolte Taylor’s “My Stroke of Insight”. It’s a true story. Jill was a brain scientist and at the age of 37 she experienced a stroke. She recalls the morning of the stroke and the days in the hospital that followed and the eight years it took for her to fully recover.

In chapters two and three she explains very clearly the role of the two hemispheres in our brains. The left hemisphere deals with language, naming, describing. It also divides our experience into time – past present and future, it is our left hemisphere that knows we need to put our socks on before we put on our shoes. It also effects critical judgement and deduction, always comparing one thing with another. The left mind keeps us informed of who we are and where we are and how we fit in by constant “brain chatter”.

The right hemisphere has no concept of time, with it this moment goes on forever. It thinks in pictures and sees the big picture. It can interpret non-verbal communication and can notice inconsistencies between someone’s words and what their body “says”.

Because the stroke disabled Jill’s left hemisphere she had first hand experience of her right hemisphere working on it’s own. Her story explains why we get so caught up in our thinking and how we can help ourselves to live in peace. As she recovered she experienced the left brain’s growing influence and how to live peacefully with this influence.

The first thing I found amazing was the idea that the job of our left brain is to chatter to us with ideas, comparisons, judgements, fears, etc. I thought this chatter was a bad thing because it is distracting and it seemed, much of the time, to attack the things I did and judge others unkindly. But when this chatter was missing from Jill’s life on the morning of the stroke she kept “forgetting” that she needed to get help. She had to work very hard to remind herself that she was in danger and that there were things she needed to do to survive. Our left brain keeps us in touch with what’s happening around us and allows us to function effectively in the world.

With this new piece of information you can look at the chatter in a different way – as a necessary function of a compulsive, detail and judgement-orientated left brain. It’s intention is not to attack you. Also, the chatter is not you!

I used to think that meditation was impossible, that I was doing it “wrong” because I couldn’t silence the chatter. But the chatter cannot and probably shouldn’t be silenced. Instead maybe it could be ignored, or managed?

I’m only half way through the book so I’ll keep reading and write more when I’ve finished.

“My stroke of insight would be: peace is only a thought away,

and all we have to do to access it is

silence the voice of our dominating left mind.”

Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D.

The Smell of Seaweed.

I went to visit a friend who has a house by the sea in Co. Wexford. I grew up at least a hundred miles from the sea and due to other commitments we saw the ocean only occasionally. I still remember the screams of delight as my brother and I (my favourite sister wasn’t born yet!) began to notice the familiar smell of the sea. Only years later having moved to less than a mile from the sea did I identify the smell as seaweed! I still love that smell and it brings me right back to childhood.

My friend’s house is about a hundred yards from the sea, so I was a child again for two days. I woke early on the first day and wrote my morning pages and while my rice porridge was cooking I skipped out to take a look. It was inspiring. The wind was blowing and the waves crashing and the tide was out so there was a huge expanse of firm sand running for miles both left and right. I ran back inside to get dressed and eat my breakfast so that I could start to experience its power. The sand nearest to the house was very soft so it kept getting into my shoes and when I took them off to empty them I realised I’d forgotten how great it is to walk barefoot, so I ditched the shoes and began to feel my walk…….

Sugar Free Away from Home.

When I arrived at my friend’s house on Monday I wondered how I would be able to keep to my sugar-free diet. I had packed two shopping bags with my supplements (including my sugar craving little helper Chromium) and my grazing snacks (by the way I would be there for just two days!). In a way it was a trial run for going on holidays which happens tomorrow……..

The Sugar Monster.

The biggest problem with going off sugar for me is hunger. In the past when I’m hungry the sugar monster comes and makes me eat sugary snacks. So all the grazing snacks are protection against the sugar monster. When I’m well fed I’m impervious to his attack. A friend loaned me a book called Adrenal Fatigue way back in March and I read it in an afternoon. I read it so fast because it was like reading my life story. It was the seed I needed to begin my healthy eating and led me to sugar-free life.

There’s way too much information in the book to tell you all about it but the bit I want to mention is one of the solutions it proposes to Adrenal Fatigue – eat between meals.

Eat between meals!

I was eating between meals anyway, but it was mainly sugar foods. That’s not useful for the adrenals. But there are other foods that don’t contain sugar and do taste good. For example, at about 11 am I might have a sugar-free yeast-free cracker with avocado and seeds, or a slice of Yoghurt Soda Bread with humous and whatever meat I’ve kept from the previous evening’s dinner. At about 4 pm I could have grated carrot and beetroot with pecan nuts or cracker with nut butter (my favourite is hazelnut, to me it tastes like chocolate!). So I eat five meals a day and I’m loosing weight without trying!

The Master Meringue Maker.

It turned out not to be difficult to stay sugar free while visiting my friend. Even with the addition of a huge temptation in the form of a Master Meringue Maker (her reputation had proceeded her and I am only sorry I met her too late to appreciate her gift). In my past life I loved meringues, why wouldn’t I they’re mainly sugar! The Master Meringue Maker arrived with a tin of meringues, strawberries and cream. I was sorely tempted as the bowls were filled but I had a tomato instead! Even as I write that seems crazy and impossible and not something I could have done pre my sugar-free life, but I did eat a tomato instead of a meringue and I survived. So I think I’ll survive and even thrive on my two week motorbike trip through France.

Do croissants have sugar?

Habits are easy to Keep.

I mentioned in passing in my last post that I have a “walk every day” habit, that began about 3 months ago. In the past few days the concept of “good” or useful habits has been keeping my mind occupied. We are sometimes ruled by our habits – the ones we don’t choose. The nail biting, the comfort eating, the gossiping, whatever. We started doing something and now we don’t even notice we’re doing it. When we do notice (or when someone points it out to us) we feel guilty and promise to break it, but breaking a habit is harder than making it and we often fail.

The thing that’s been going through my mind is: Since I find it easy to “do” habits (easy to bite my nails, really easy to talk mean to myself when I make a mistake), then what if I could make something useful easy to do – by making it a habit!

How I Started a Habit.

For months I had guilted myself out about not walking. That made me feel worse. No motivation to walk only mean self talk. Then one day I started, it was accidental. The sun happened to be shining and I was near the beach bringing my son to school. Instead of driving back home I went for a walk. It wasn’t much fun. I worked out how far I’d have to walk to do 30 minutes (for some reason a 30 minute walk was what I wanted to do) and then I went back to the car. During the day I did feel better though because now that I had walked, anytime I was reminded of walking I felt great instead of guilt. (Great good! Guilt Bad!)

Next morning I didn’t think about walking, just brought my son to school as usual. But driving home I remembered and grudgingly parked the car and walked. It kept going like that. My walk was now connected to the drive to school and it became harder not to walk. For the first few weeks I didn’t walk on the weekends but something shifted and I started to miss walking. Now my son is finished school and I still walk every morning. Now I look forward to it. Maybe I’ll start a “walk twice a day” habit!

The Experiment.

I’m going to try an experiment : Start a habit to watch (only) one hour of television each evening. (I already have a habit of watching television from dinner to 10 pm). Looking at how I started the “walk every day” habit, I think I can identify some before and after steps:

Before:

1. Positively, minutely, specifically, name the habit. (I had a thirty minute walk in my mind for a long time before I began.) I will watch television from 9pm until 10 pm, only, each evening. I will read or paint or draw or write between dinner and 9pm.

2. Make it possible. (I had rain gear and sun cream in the car to cover all eventualities.) I’ll have writing, reading, drawing and painting material set out on the kitchen table.

3. Make it real! (I’d been imagining how much better I’d feel if I walked more.) Choose something you want to achieve and daydream what it would be like if you had it.

4. Connect it to something. (I connected walking to driving my son to school.) Dinner.

5. Tell someone. (I told my son.) I’m telling you!

6. Start!

After the Start Date:

1. Once started, keep going. This is especially true for the first 21 days, after that it becomes harder to stop!

2. Do it at your pace. (I walk at a slow to medium pace when I walk on my own and for some reason it “feels” right.) One hour of television each evening “feels” right for me, even though I may cut that to 3 hours a week for my next habit!

Start a Habit.

If you want to join me with your own habit, can I suggest that you pick something that seems easy to start with, because success is very motivating. And even easy things can help you shift an old unwanted habit!  After you’ve got good at this you can go for a bigger challenge!

What habit do you want to start?

I’ve got a new habit – one that I like. Going for a walk every morning by the beach. Since I started early in the spring there’s a message in graffiti on a wall that continues to grab my attention.

“No right or wrong just the consequences of your actions!” Destiny.

and a p.s.,

Sorry about the wall.

I think it attracted me because it’s scary and exciting! Ever since I was a little girl I was “good” – you know the type, plays nicely, smiles at visitors, helps mother in the kitchen, works hard at school and doesn’t bring shame on the family. Good was: follow the rules that parents and teachers have set and fit in with what others in your community believe is right.

And it worked very well for me, I got plenty of positive attention and I rarely got into trouble at school. But the things that work well for us as children, don’t work so well when we grow up. Now, I did my best to force the same kind of goodness into my adult relationships, my committee memberships, my working life, my church life and it worked – to a point. (Let me just say, in my defense, that I was unaware that I was forcing something, it was a habit I had never noticed, it was normal to me.)

When I joined something or helped someone I was doing what was generally considered right. I never checked if I wanted to help or to join – I was asked so I said yes. When my daughter was seven I joined the parents association at her school because I heard it was a great place to learn about advances in education. To be a good parent was the right thing and to gain information for my daughter’s education was being a good parent.

I was there about a month when I had another opportunity to do the right thing. The chairman, wanting to retire from her position, asked for volunteers for the role of chairman. Long story short she needed help, she’d been in the job for years, no one volunteered, it was the right thing to do so I said yes!

Less than six months later I had resigned (in tears) after a particularly bitter feud between the committee and the school board. Friendships were damaged and it was a big mess.

Now, I’m not saying it was all my fault, but would things have turned out as bad under a chairman who wanted the role for reasons other than to be good and to do the right thing?

That experience was a turning point for me. Being good up to that point brought me compliments, friends, gifts. Now it brought me notoriety in my community, criticism from my peers, and angry thoughts in my head. I imagined everyone was talking about me (in a bad way) and I was certainly talking to myself, in a bad way!

Nearly 15 years later I’m not so good and I don’t do the right thing so often! That’s why the graffiti excites me. I’ve replaced doing the right thing with being responsible for the consequences. And that’s what scares me – it’s easier to do what everyone else thinks is right than to be responsible. The right thing is: follow the rules others have set and fit in with a moral code that’s in majority in your community at this time. Being responsible is: look at each situation as it happens and decide based on your own wisdom and beliefs what is the right thing for you to do and then live with the consequences.

I’ve just finished reading a book called The Help by Kathryn Stockett. It’s a story about how black maids were treated in Mississippi in the 1960’s. The moral majority in 1960’s Mississippi considered all black people as second class citizens and treated them as such. In 2009 things are different and the moral majority in the United States agreed that it was right to elect Barack Obama. Would there have been a black president sooner if everyone considered each situation as it happened and picked (based on their own wisdom) the responsible thing instead of the right thing?

It’s now 11 weeks into my No-Sugar diet and things have settled down in the food area. The breakfast menu varies from Rice or Quinoa Porridge or Spelt Pancakes to boiled eggs. My lunch varies according to the salads in the fridge but is often Rye crackers with humous, tomato, scallion, cucumber and grated carrot. And dinner is easy because there was never any sugar in dinner! (Well… except for cheese, which believe it or not is a kind of sugar in digestion!).

But a funny thing has started to happen: Other stuff has begun to shift!

I got a toothache 3 weeks ago. Very painful but it was possible to relieve it with tapping (EFT). Anyway that led me to a holistic dentist who told me my jaw was out of alignment and I needed to go to a chiropractor. So this week I visited Nolene a chiropractor in Greystones and I am amazed by how flexible I feel. Flexible in my movements but also in my thinking. It’s like a space has opened up around my head.

The x-rays she took showed a twisted spine that “must have caused you to be stiff?”. Oh… but I only know how stiff I was because I am so free and flexible now! I didn’t realise how numb I was to the things that were causing me damage. I couldn’t feel pain until it was really bad. Since going to Nolene if I’m sitting or standing in an awkward position I notice straight away and shift my body to a more comfortable position.

This got me to thinking about being “stiff” in other areas of my life.

When I began the No-Sugar diet back in May, I was very stiff in my thinking about sugar – I had to have the sugar fix after every meal; it was impossible for me to live without biscuits, buns or cakes; a cup of tea only works with a chocolate snack.

I was stiff in my thinking about sugar, but was I also numb to the damage sugar was doing to me? What would it be like if I became aware as I ate of “awkward” eating and then straight away shifted my body to comfortable eating. (By “comfortable eating” I mean eating food that makes my body well, no pain or bloating or blood sugar imbalances like the shakes). That would be miraculous! And I want that. I want to be able to notice straight away that I am uncomfortable or off-balance and stop eating that food.

With the No-Sugar diet I have been re-training my taste buds away from the addictive sugar and towards the vegetables and wholemeal grains. In the past 11 weeks I have not given myself permission to choose one or the other because my sugar craving took the choice. Soon it will be time to allow my body to choose and then it will be as ready to choose comfortable eating as it is to choose a comfortable sitting position.

Another thing is happening: It seems like when I made the decision to give up sugar and gave it up, my requirements began to line up, things began to fall into place, doors began to open. Like the friend who knew a herbalist, the Recipe Book, the toothache (yes, even that!), the holistic dentist (who used tapping), the chiropractor (who lives 3 minutes away and is brilliant!).

As Joseph Campbell said

… follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

Campbell noticed that some people lived their lives not doing what they wanted (or loved) to do. They worked hard at what they “should” or “must” do. From time to time he used to talk to his students individually about their studies. Whenever a student would start to talk about something that really excited them, Campbell could see the change in them. He would watch as their eyes lit up and they became animated. This was it! This, he guessed, was their rapture – their bliss.

For a long time I wanted to eat healthily, to choose the things I wanted to eat. For the first time it looks like this is possible. I will keep you posted.