Shying at Gigs

My day started in a very exciting way - or at least my heart missed a beat when I checked my in-tray. I thought I'd been booked for a gig at a well known singles club in the metropolis ...
"Ladies! Kick-start your love life and find Mr Wright - FREE tickets."

It reminded me of the countless number of occasions where my name has opened introductory doors both for me and for someone else - ranging from "Is that Right? With an 'R' or a 'W'?" on the one hand to "Ooooh Mr Wright. I've been wanting to meet you all my life," on the other!

Shying Away

Of course back in my bad old "shy" days, both these comments would make me wither inside, make me look down and to the right (just to confirm and kinaesthetically reaffirm that feeling), drop my voice and try to make an unembarrassed response. And that was always try-and-fail.
I never used to get even mildly annoyed about the Right, Rite, Write errors in my name - it was all my fault for having a surname that people could make fun of. AND on top of all that I had a first name that - given my stammer - I struggled to say with any s-s-smoothness. In fact there were certain scenarios where thinking about having to say my name felt worse than the prospect of leaping off a cliff.

Energies

Animals are very attuned to energies - and animals that interact a lot with humans are very attuned to the energies of those interactions. If I shout at something or someone on the TV my dog will creep out of the room, probably 'thinking' that I'm shouting at him for doing something wrong. He's picked up the energy that I put into my TV oriented retort and decided to distance himself from it. If I laugh or cry however, he doesn't lower his tail and slink away, he'll come towards me and respond in a different way. Horses, too, have a particular relationship with man where man's energies are interpreted with intelligence.

So what happens when I look at a particular metaphorical animal - my mental horse.
In terms of my shyness, at what point did I manage to make my horse ride at fences instead of shying away from them? Well there is an interesting metaphorical link here between horses, fences, riders' energies and mental states and horses' sensitivities and picking up their riders' energies - like that.

When I began to ride my mental horse with a different energy then the horse moved in a different way. And, even now, if I am approaching a fence that needs to be jumped, my particular energy in that approach is THE most crucial factor in determining how my horse jumps the fence. He'll pick up my bodily tension from how I'm sat in the saddle, he'll notice how I'm holding the reins, he'll hear the tone and other submodalities of my voice, etc.
Now I haven't regularly stammered for many years and yet, if my energies are aligned just right, I'll stammer in a quite involuntary way. However, I don't see this as involuntary - rather it is that my horse has stammered through this particular fence, purely because of the particular balance of my various inner energy levels. My inner energy determines how my horse interprets what he thinks I want him to do.

The Zone

It's fascinating to watch the riderless horses in the Grand National steeplechase. A lot of them still jump the fences, but in a way of their natural choosing. The jump is free and unfettered by any rider's energy - the execution is smooth.
Surfers talk about catching the energy of the wave as being an optimal experience. Athletes and sports persons talk about detachment - the game playing them rather than the other way around. Writers, artists and composers talk about the creative force moving through them and being a process they had no conscious control over.

So it could be argued that for optimal performance in any area of our life both significant and trivial, we need to be outside of the conscious - aware and yet unaware. Almost super-conscious.

Stammer

In the case of my stammering I am over conscious.
I am in a self-conscious loop, I am continually conscious of myself.
And as speech formation is very much an unconscious process, then this self-conscious loop is getting in the way of that.
This may take many forms in terms of the sensual feedback I'm continuously looping.
I may be hearing myself saying what I want to say, in advance of my unconscious speech forming process. I may feel uncomfortable about the person I'm talking to and the overload of incoming kinaesthetic data of that context will be getting in the way of the unconscious speech forming process.

In terms of unconscious processes, too much awareness, attention and response to incoming sensual data is likely to impair and degrade the process.

Gigs

So let's say I run with my imagination and it really was a booking for a gig to talk at a singles club about dating! What content might I deliver? Well there's a number of angles ...

There's the comical and curious historically personal aspect to consider - I was very shy when young, and yet I still had dates, girlfriends etc. How? Were they, like me, of a similar mental configuration? Did they, like me, and look away from Alpha males? Who knows! It was exceedingly random on the face of it.
And maybe it was, in part, about the face of us, or personality, or sensitivity, or personableness, or just something felt at an intuitive level? Which leads to the next aspect ...

Now I've often poked fun at eHarmony, and the whole concept of going for digitally discovered compatibilites - when the whole thing about attraction at all levels from deepest to shallowest is very much an analogue discovery. But there's a lot to be said about consorting with like-minded people, or people we have a lot in common with. That mere act of something shared taps us into the lives of people who, in many other ways, we would judge from a distance as exceedingly random, ordinary, unattractive or whatever.
Here's the thing - the more diverse is your life, the more different contexts of people you have in your circle of connectivity. Signing up to compatibility matching can be very much like house buying - where you're both at the mercy of the estate agent, and are looking for Perfection. Whereas going to a singles club is much more like adding an App to your circle of connectivity.

At the end of the day these are all contextual examples which may, or may not, be useful for you and present you with more, or less, fertile ground for your dating or relationship-seeking success.

We are all human, however and it is within the broad base of our humanity that lies manifold opportunities for all relationships. Once we, as individuals, take that broad base and view our context within it, then we get the realisation that the answer to all our needs lies within ourselves AND it is an unconscious process.
The thing is, if we pay too much awareness to all the conscious things, then we find ourselves degrading our ability in that unconscious process. Then we start to stammer through that process.

Conclusion

I've met a number of people, not necessarily clients, who have said "it would be nice to meet that special Someone," or "time's running out in my life and I'd like to meet the right person, maybe start a family... " I'm sure you're familiar with comments like that too.
These are genuine felt needs and desires for people with big spaces in their lives that they'd feel more fulfilled when those spaces are no longer present. And, to be fair, the same applies to all our big spaces.
Attracting things - and people - into our lives is mostly about our own ideas about attraction.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is a phrase very closely linked to "Whatever does he or she see in him or her?" Both these phrases come from the school of thinking that pays no attention to the beholder themselves and their own attractivity. However, understanding our own attractivity is crucial.

"What does the mind of the beholder see beautiful about themselves that helps them know what beauty to find and experience in others?"

I have talked to people in the context of change, and have witnessed some amazing physical transformations, from neutral to attractive, from plain to beautiful, purely in the course of the changing the levels of their inner energy over the course of our conversation. Sometimes these dear folk have not been aware of what I've noticed, because they've not yet felt it at a conscious level - seemingly, it's not yet arrived for them. Which is why I often like them to knowingly feel what I've already seen, before our conversation has finished.

Our bodies have an extraordinary way of acting out our thinking and the general level of inner energy engendered by that thinking.

To meet that special someone, Mr or Miss Right, is not an outer quest - but is rather an inner question. And when you hear the answer from your own lips, notice if there's a hint of any stammer there - degrading that attractivity!

The Wellness of Performance

There’s no room for baggage on the field of play – it just clutters things up and gets in the way of the game. Leave it all on the sideline, or in the changing room – or, better still, keep it out of your life altogether. In aspiring to be a masterful competitor it’s worth remembering that the best fighters, the best players, always ‘travel light’.

OOO

“I think you can’t be afraid when you go into a match.
If you’re afraid that you’re not going to do well enough then you’ll just be trying to replicate what you think other people want you to do.

And, like pretending to sneeze, replicating is never the way to convince people that you know what you’re doing.

Part of being on the field and involving your team mates with your performance, and connecting with the opposition as well, is not thinking twice about everything you’re doing – you just have to be really well prepared. As prepared as you can be.

You’re never completely ready – you just do your best in the moment.

I think really the best thing you do when you go into a match, regardless of whatever has been going on in your life beforehand - is just to go into it looking forward to it, expecting it to be a lot of fun, and realise that everyone involved wants to have fun, they want to enjoy the performance, or if not have fun - at least have a satisfying experience. 

So they are going to look for that in the contest, and if you have a satisfying experience of being on the field then that really helps with the unity of yours and the team’s performance.   

And in terms of preparation, there is no shortcut around taking care of yourself.”

OOO

The pleasure is all about playing the game. There is added pleasure in playing the game skilfully, and skills are a set of processes. If you apply those sets of processes well, then you can compete. Competing can only be a pleasure if you link it to applying your skills and your love of playing the game. And out of the pleasure of competing well comes the satisfaction of true success.

So, what of winning?

If you only play the game to win then, sadly, you can never have the satisfaction of true success.

And to this end, you can also take the parallel view that life is a game - not a drudge, a chore or a duty - and that you have every right to be part of the pleasure of the game.

Dicing with Life!

I should be so lucky...

We all have a perception about the nature of luck – what luck we have, the luck other people seem to have, the way the gods of good fortune smile in this place and not that one.
If somebody shoots at a target and they just miss we think, and often say,
“Oh – Unlucky! How unlucky was that?!” and so on.
Luck is that seemingly intangible resource that we’re always trying to tap into, because if we could only just have it – then we have an understanding that that would be a sure-fire guarantee to us getting what we really want in life, or at least in this particular part of it.

Our colloquial parlance is full of references to luck – Good Luck AND Bad Luck. Familiar remarks like,
“Best wishes and good luck with your interview; exams; new date; the big match; operation; speech etc.” We’ve all said and had them said to us time and time again.
Of course if you know you’re someone who is not exactly blessed with good luck then these best wishes can easily be pessimistically responded to, with something like,
“Yea thanks – although knowing my luck something awful will be almost bound to happen!” Especially if you can’t find your lucky charm, your mojo!
And then, when we get to meet these self same people later, we’ll probably end up saying, “Well never mind – better luck next time.”
Then there’s that massive imponderable that either makes (or breaks) our lives – the weather. “We were so unlucky with the weather there last year,” or “The wedding went really well and luckily for us the rain kept off until after the photographs.”

Luck is always implied as being something outside of us, and those of us that do seem to have it – whether that’s good or bad luck – somehow seem to have found a way to let it into our lives, or maybe we were even born with it! And even then, once it’s in, there is an idea that we have to do things a certain way in order to keep it in if it’s good or let it out if it’s bad. Lucky numbers, unlucky numbers, black cats, ladders, horseshoes pointing upwards or downwards, omens, portents, superstitions – they are literally everywhere.

Cheating the Unknown

We live in a scientific and gadget filled world, and yet think how many people read and follow their horoscopes. And with horoscopes, funnily enough, the more we look for something, the more we notice it being there – or if it’s not exactly the same at least something very much like it. Our facility to generalise, delete and distort is very good in this regard. And because luck always starts outside of us we try to steal a march on letting it in by getting to know about it before it’s actually arrived!

I’m getting changed before a match – I have a lucky peg or a lucky corner in the changing room. If I can’t occupy these places for some reason or other then things are already going wrong on this particular day. Now I’m going to start attributing every discomfort, every feeling, everything negative that happens – to not being in my ‘lucky place’. I might be even more obsessive than this; put my kit on in a certain sequence, tie my footwear up a certain way – the possibilities are only as endless as the limits of my imagination! These are massive pre-frames, well before the competition has started!

We are always trying to steal a march on luck, endeavouring to harness its resourceful ‘power’.

The Game

So – where’s this all leading? Well, as luck would have it, years ago I chanced upon this game called ‘Dicing with Life’. I suppose it was called that since there was a parallel opposite with Dicing with Death, and it was a game about navigating your life’s way through the world. You won’t imagine what I felt when I found it, quite by accident, when I was rummaging in my uncle’s attic - for a pack of tarot cards, would you believe!
It must have been inspired by the success of The Game of Life because there were a number of similar features, but what made it rather surreal was the inclusion of certain episodes in the game that can only be described as almost Faustian in nature.

The mechanics of the game involved a player’s “Life” token, which was propelled forward on the ‘temporal board’ by the throwing of a set of dice. At every throw some of the dice accessed certain cards, which permitted the player to add attributes to certain sections of his token, and to add to his wealth of knowledge, experience, money, and to add to his health and happiness. There were also certain configurations of resulting throws of the dice that caused fortunate or less fortunate happenstances to impact upon the player’s Life token and ‘silos’ of health, wealth etc.
And then there were these Faustian moments, where the player’s morality could be strengthened or traded!

It’s easy to see that such a complex game would not be too successful in the marketplace – however, it contained all the elements of chance, luck, cause and effect, and controlling our own destiny that we are ever likely to encounter in real life. All, curiously enough, controlled by random throws of dice and pick-ups of randomly shuffled game cards.

Anyone really getting into such an addictive game might then find themselves stepping out of real life and playing the fantasy game for real. And there are many times that we might, if we only realised it, find ourselves Dicing with our own real Life, by stepping out of it and trusting to luck or an excessive random throw of our personal set of dice. Yet, all the while, failing to see the nature of how things really work in paradise.

Alignment

We think we know what is really going on around us, but in truth we are only aware of a fraction of that. We can broaden our perspectives and our perceptions to make that fraction slightly bigger – but it will still always be a fraction.
If we go up in an aircraft or balloon, or even to a mountain top, and then look down upon what is happening beneath us we will see an ever changing sea of events involving people, other beings and objects and environmental forces.
Let us remember that within the mind of every person in that vista there a perception of what is going on around them – and for each and every one of them, that perception is based on a fraction of the actual data. Remember, also, that sat firmly in the middle of the formation of all these perceptions are the filters (that delete, distort and generalise) of each individual!

Now, in terms of this overview I’d invite you to take a look at Luck. Where is it? Do you have an awareness of it? Are there noticeable patterns and alignments that can be construed as Luck?  

Next, come out of that overview and down into the mind of one of those individuals – and again examine Luck. Not his or her luck at this stage, just Luck per se. Now, are there noticeable patterns and alignments that can be construed as Luck which may (or may not) impact upon him or her?

It’s an interesting exercise which I find keeps my feet firmly in the objective camp where Luck and alignment are concerned. When I consider cosmic order and cosmic chaos, I find that this alignment plays a significant part in all things – including people’s lives.
Luck, appears to me, to be a particular alignment of events, objects, natural forces and living things as noticed and interpreted by an individual’s mind.

Transit of Venus

There’s recently been a Transit of Venus – where there has been an alignment of Earth, Venus and the Sun. This has enabled observations on Earth (and in nearby space) to be made of Venus passing across the face of the Sun. In terms of our solar system, this is the last time such an event can be observed in the 21^st century.

There is a significance here to aid our understanding of the relationship between alignment and luck – and once we can perceive our own Luck merely in terms of an alignment of events, then we need never again be prisoners of our own mental construct.

“Okay,” you may say. “This is all well and good, Pete – but how can I get to be more lucky, to be luckier? I want more good luck. Show me how.” 

However - does it work like this? You’re talking about Luck in the same way you talk about Confidence! Yet, aren’t you really after something for nothing, to arbitrarily tip the scales in your favour? Won’t that be playing with the balance of alignments – the yin and yang? Won’t that tip someone else’s scales the other way? Maybe the law of attraction should really be about attuning to and understanding the nature of alignments. It’s just a thought of course, all of it!

Conclusion

And as 100 years is only a small fragment of time in terms of alignment of just three celestial bodies – so also are a whole range of alignments happening for us in small fragments of time, repeating many times over.  Every single day there are thousands of those alignments which we are totally unaware of – and that’s how lucky we are. And if we want to be more lucky, it merely starts with noticing more alignments.

So, to return to common parlance, and really state the obvious –
"We don’t know how lucky we are!”

Floodgates at the Ready!

It's early days before being available at Amazon and other outlets...however, the good people at Lulu Marketplace already have my new book "Mind How You Go" on their virtual shelves!

http://www.lulu.com/shop/peter-wright/mind-how-you-go/paperback/product-20227330.html

If you want to read a little more about the book's journey to fruition please visit my 'brother blog' over at Have A Mind To:
http://haveamindto.wordpress.com/2012/07/10/early-doors-are-now-open/

Meanwhile - with all this summer rain giving us a mirror image of S.A.D I'm happy to announce that the floodgates are at the ready!

Mind How You Go!

Just a sneak preview of the Front Cover of Mind How You Go - which will now be available very soon!
Big thanks to Cheryl Laidlaw from Reyl Design group for her expertise!