Walking for Health, Walking for Change

“Walking is Man’s best medicine” ~ Hippocrates

Amidst the hurly-burly of life, we can often become detached – whether from our inner selves, from a clear perspective, or from our sense of wellbeing. In these times we can feel overwhelmed by circumstances or our environment, and what we need is to slow down our thinking, bring more clear light into our lives, get out of our heads and back in touch with nature in a complete change of surroundings.

“You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you're going - because you might not get there!” ~ Yogi Berra

Since I started walking seriously, in the autumn of 2016, I’ve fashioned some considerable changes in my life. These have been both at the physical as well as the mental level. But there has to be a Plan, a purposeful process to the journey. And it starts with the signpost or, as Yogi Berra puts it, have some idea of where to go and what you want to achieve.

 The Physical

Through regular walking I brought my understanding of those pillars of physical wellbeing, fitness and conditioning, to life. Normally this would be a pathway of understanding for the athletes I coach, but this time it was for Yours Truly.
Over that first autumn in 2016 the first gain was that I lost weight – and it was weight I had been trying to lose for a long time yet to no avail. The irony was that the weight loss just happened for me in an effortless, no-trying kind of way.

It was my wish, as I celebrated #Milestone70 last autumn, that I could reach the weight I was at the age of 20 - 10.5 stone. As 2018 unfolded I noticed movement in that direction. Then the moment came, earlier this year, when I reached 10.5 stone – whereupon I went out, celebrated with a slap-up meal and at once put a few pounds back on! I got it down again, I’m pleased to say, and have kept it “sensible” since then.

The second gain was my fitness, and conditioning. The fitness to walk and climb the distances and heights, and the conditioning to maintain the consistency and not break down. I learnt a lot from my climbing the two Yorkshire peaks Pen y Ghent in October 2017 and Ingleborough in September 2018. On each occasion I found myself in The Zone whilst tackling the climbs, and these two achievements have continued to sustain me through tough walks ever since. I am now fitter and in better “nick” than 5 years ago, and definitely 10 years ago.

The Mental

Having alluded to The Zone I now find myself able to move more comfortably into that state of effortless action described in Taoism as Wu Wei.
In terms of any action – athletic or otherwise – there is always this idea in Western culture that we should try, try hard, try harder. If there’s an essential outcome in mind, then SHOULD quickly evolves into MUST. We must try as hard as we can, or else the consequences will be … ?
Wu Wei espouses taking action from a perspective at the other end of the scale to this.
The other thing I often notice about the effortless action of performing in The Zone is that well known quote from Bruce Lee – “Be like water, my friend.”

There’s an effortlessness about water in that it goes as it is, where it is. It is both hard and soft, spectacular and serene, benign and fierce, still and rushing; it shapes the land and our perspectives. When we follow the pathway of “being like water” then we are more aligned with the cosmos. The universe facilitates our actions in an almost magical way – we, like water, are not trying.

Trying puts us in a physical and mental state of tension rather than ease. And part of trying is our ego’s way of proving to our Self and Others that this matters, that we care of its importance, and that in the event of failure we have a ready-made excuse for that failure. “We did our best.”
On the other hand, when the action comes from a perspective of being effortless, we find our body and mind working much more In-Sync, and things seem to go much smoother. It’s as if the plug in our “Bath of Thoughts” has been pulled at the same time as the taps have been turned off.

Understanding of the varying states of our Mental Focus also sustains me through both the regular and the challenging walks. When conditioned with Open Focus as a default state of mind, this enables us, on walks, to take control of our Attention which is enhanced by the whole idea of “Communion with Nature.” This is a communion that is a working model of alignment with WHAT IS.

While out walking in nature, and encountering some stunning backdrops, like me many people have experienced amazing shifts in perspectives, and for some these can be life-changing. As our minds settle down, insights and wisdom emerge from being hidden in the midst of all that noisy foreground of clamour, baggage and clutter. This sets the stage for us to get clear on those answers to important questions, problems and issues in our lives that have eluded us – in the daily pressure-cooker of our “real” world. And these answers, insights and moments of wisdom, all seem to arise effortlessly as if from Out Of The Blue.

Mind and Body are one system

Mind and Body are one system, and when they are working In Sync we are in a state of effortless wellbeing. When either part of that unified system is suffering ill health then we fall out of alignment with ourselves. Yet physical ill health and mental ill health are not mutually exclusive. Each one brings some action to bear upon the other; our neuro-physiological resource centres make adjustments to facilitate the unified system getting through the circumstances as best as possible. Sometimes, this brings about – for us – some symptoms that may alarm or concern!

After a punishing weekend of sporting action earlier this year in the summer heat wave, my body shut me down at the end of the following Monday. I was forced to move slowly, gingerly, sparingly – so I would not expend more energy than it was capable of delivering. By the Friday of that week I began to be able to climb up and down stairs more normally – so you can see how depleted my brain considered my physical resources to be. This began to have a significance upon my mental resilience – an area upon which I had and have a huge reliance.
Whilst my body recovered reasonably quickly, my mental health took a hit I hadn’t anticipated. Recovery from the mental health dip took well over ten weeks!

We may have experienced for ourselves, or know of others, who have psychosomatic symptoms of pain or discomfort, even though there is nothing physically wrong. This is where our mental wellbeing comes under threat from a lack of resources especially at those times when we pay more attention to the personal contents of our thinking.

We will have had experience of, and know of others who also experience, the emotional content of our memories of physical pain. The emotional content is a flag on the experience that we file away as a marker. “I don’t like going to the dentist,” is a comment built from memory, and the memory is built from what ACTUALLY happened + the emotion we added in.

I have worked with enough people on their emotional memory markers, to know that these play into BOTH their minds and their bodies. I’ve also enabled them to lose their access to these markers, so that the behavioural triggers they used to fire as a response no longer occur.

When I developed the idea of MIND RELAX sessions, I very soon reached the conclusion that in terms of the Mind-Body link, when one is functioning less well, why can I not use one to help the other? So that the Physical can help the Mental, and vice versa.

That was when I realised that Walking for Health is right up there with Walking for Change.

Merging my Passions – Old and New

Walking has become a new passion for me – and joins my other passions for coaching, for music, for sport, for performance. It started out as a desire, to get out and just do it and see if I liked it. When I put some action, some purpose into that desire, I realised that I was “catching the bug.” Once it became easier to say yes rather than no, I got the sense that I was spending a lot of time doing it, and a lot of time planning it as well. That’s how it grew into a passion.

Psychologist, Angela Lee Duckworth contends this, in terms of the contest between finding or developing our Passions - “Passions tend to be developed. It’s not just about being intense about what you’re doing but waking up week after week, month after month, year after year, wanting to think about the same thing.” It’s something fulfilling and enjoyable, but it’s not that easy; Duckworth calls it “hard fun.”

The next phase was to merge my passions for walking and coaching, to take my “office” out into those amazing places, and thus I developed the WALKING & COACHING programme now outlined on my website – here - https://thewrightwayltd.co.uk/mentoring/

If you are interested in joining with me on one of these journeys, setting up a healthy and purposeful dialogue for change with nature and with yourself, then get in touch and we can set the ball rolling.

Same Sea - Different Colour

On my early morning walk today I noticed the sea looking quite grey and then, as I rounded a small headland, I noticed a distinct line – going away from me out to the horizon – where on one side the sea was coloured grey, and on the other side it was blue.

Of course, this is related to the reflection back of the sky above and as I looked up I noticed the clear line of differentiation depicted by the clouds. They were more tightly packed together on one side and well-spaced apart on the other.

Natural phenomena are all around and noticed by us on a regular basis – provided we are noticing! There’s the bright sunlight, and a line of shadow from any structure such as a building, trees, or even the land – as in this photo where the line of shadow is cast by the hill behind as it rises to almost 1,000ft.

Metaphor

And, as always with my trains of thought, I considered how our perspectives of life on a day-to-day, even a moment-to-moment basis are often played out on an Outside-In basis.

Of course, they play out on this basis for as long as we are taking the perspective of the world as it is happening TO US. Our perspectives are very much framed by our Relationship with our Thinking, or – to put it another way – how we are harnessing the Power of Thought for our own purposes.

And thus it is with the sea that I saw this morning.
On the one hand – grey, forbidding, with a sense of foreboding, colder, more steely, the whites of the wave tops in a whiter shade of pale, the waves with more menace, more threatening …
On the other hand – blue, rich and vibrant, more inviting, warmer, the wave tops glistening with a sense of freshness, the waves themselves seeming more benign yet equally magnificent …

There was such a stark contrast, created from the sky above, that – as in life – it was hard to realise that the state of the sea, the waves, everything, was exactly the same on either side of that line in the water.

The Power of Thought (the sea) moves energy (the waves) past the lens of our perceptions. What we interpret through that lens personalises our thoughts. In terms of what I saw coloured up, courtesy of the sea reflecting the sky above it (the lens), any of my inner, personal thoughts would have been subject to those same filters, the same lens.

Provided, in-the-moment, I was of a frame of mind that was noticing and interpreting from an Outside-In (personal) perspective, I would expose my self to believing the illusion filtered through that lens. My “virtual reality goggles” would serve up for me a very real illusion of how things are. And I’d feel and act according to that … ONLY for as long as I allowed.

And when I’m deep in that frame of mind, everything gets reversed. And here’s the thing - the deeper we go, the faster the vortex, the spiral, seems to be. Until, with something approaching the state of mind we label as depression, we reach a point of no resilience where we have -

SAME COLOUR – However different the SEA.

The Light in our lives

When I talk of the light in our lives I can actually be referring (in metaphor) to brightness, reflective quality, clearness, illumination and so on – as well as a lightness in weight. Take phrases like light-hearted, heavy-hearted; the lightness that comes with less baggage, the heavy burdensome millstones that drag us down; a dense fog, a crystal clear day; temperature – warmth, cold, brighter, darker; all things filtered by our thinking (including our memories) processes, things that shape and colour our countenance, and how we are showing up in the world.

With the Inside-Out nature of reality, we are much more aligned with the default settings we had when we were born – when the complicated nature of the world we have been thrust into has not yet been revealed to us. Yet, have you noticed that Nature is not complicated – it just IS.

There is a scheme to things that our blessed human minds pay no heed to at our peril. The burning desire to bring all of THAT under our CONTROL, so we can harness it for our own ends, is what we all are led to believe is the Meaning of Life. THAT’S what it is all about, we are told. And we sign up – in varying degrees.

Yet when we do pay heed to the scheme of things, and apply the scheme to the filters, the lens, of our perceptions from moment to moment, then THERE rises our sense of being at one with the scheme of things.

Rather like I whispered under my breath this morning -
The SEA is just the same SEA whether it is on the grey side of that (light-created) line or on the blue side. The WAVES are breaking on the rocks with the same level of impact, regardless. The spray thrown up from that impact is still carried on the wind – and if I were to sit on the rocks on either the grey side or the blue side of that line, I would get equally splashed and wet.

We have no control over any of this, other than our filtering, our lens, our virtual reality goggles.

And when we do THAT, life becomes a lot more kind, a lot less menacing, a lot more negotiable, a lot less frustrating.

It may just be our Choice, and yet it is just a Thought also.

Cobblers!

Narrow Focus and our metaphorical Footwear

Now, don’t get me wrong -
Narrow Focus IS a very useful perspective for doing certain tasks in life, work, play and performance. The trouble arises for us when we feel compelled to use Narrow Focus as a perspective for ALL things.

It’s like when we have just one pair of shoes and make them DO for all day and every day. We KNOW this doesn’t work, yet we’ll make excuses and put up with the inappropriate times.
We despair when our shoes wear thin or go out of shape; when they fail to support our feet properly; when they let in water; when they stick their tongues out at us!

We also find that we need to replace them very regularly because we use them ALL the time – and yet, even if we had two pairs of the same shoes, they would actually last more than twice as long.

Living with just one pair of shoes – physically and metaphorically – is a very false economy!

Default is was all our own

The same goes for when we ignore the DEFAULT setting of our mental Attentive Focus, which is Open Focus.

We are born with that “factory” default setting and in our early years of growing up we build our perspective of the world around us through that same default setting. We learn well, we learn fast, we assimilate vast amounts of NEW everything on a daily basis. We are extraordinary learning machines! 

Until we reach that tipping point – the moment of IS/WAS!

At some time, usually between the ages of 4-7, we become hugely pressured to comply with the requirements of the society we are growing up in. These requirements start to make increasingly high demands upon how we manage our Attention – and we seem to lose touch with the DEFAULT setting of our Attentive Focus and get drawn into the vagaries of excessive functioning in a Narrow Focus.

Now, the various types or settings of our mental Attentive Focus are rather akin to having a reasonable variety of shoes in our locker. As Les Fehmi describes in his book “The Open Focus Brain”, there are four types of focus – narrow, objective, diffuse and immersed – each with a variety of associated characteristics.

Imagine in metaphor then, if you will, the type of shoes appropriate for Narrow-Objective focus as compared to the type of shoes appropriate for Diffuse-Immersed focus. These items of footwear might be as far apart as slippers are to sturdy walking boots, or stiletto heels might be to wellingtons.

Yet our society, particularly in the Western Hemisphere, demands we conduct our lives in Narrow-Objective focus reminding us that this is the way it is; this is life, get used to it; it’s a struggle, it is harsh, it’s dog eat dog; you MUST get to the top or you’ll fail, you’ll BE a failure – and the only way you’ll get to the top is to constantly compete, try hard, then harder; trampling over people on the way is legit, it’s all fair in love and war; and so on ad infinitum.

With all of this relentless drive to justified BESTNESS, is the perspective that life is ONLY about the climactic moments; be noticed, make more noise, OWN the moment, BE the alpha. And this relentless drive only has one Sat-Nav … Narrow-Objective.
Oh yes – and it is mighty compelling! Yet there’s just one drawback, one problem.

We weren’t born with Narrow-Objective. Nor were our start-out-right shoes built for that either. They were designed to allow our feet to grow in a well-balanced way, so that they could carry us well through life – not leave us limping and hobbling by the time we become adults.

Erlkings and Lurkings

So, it is down to our guardians, our Mums and Dads, to enable us with a range of appropriate footwear – both physical and metaphorical – so we can make our way forward to adulthood with strong, sturdy feet. Feet that will keep us balanced on the journey, feet that will support us in the storms, or on the glassy and icy surfaces, feet that can run and play as well as help us escape the jaws of the Erlkings. *

(* The Erlking is a supernatural being, or demon, in folklore.)  

Now our Mums and Dads are also having to look after their own appropriate footwear, plus - they are also subjected to Erlkings of their own. Of course WE (as young children) don’t know this at the get go. We aren’t aware that our Mums and Dads, by virtue of their OWN Attention Management, may sometimes make demands upon us at home and within the family environment, over and above what we might objectively consider to be our learning about our place within the life of the family unit. Witness this cautionary tale …

Recently, I was walking behind a family of four that included 2 children below the age of 5, and they were in my town on a seaside holiday. Dad was carrying the youngest on his shoulders, whilst Mum was pushing the empty pushchair with one hand and holding her little girl’s hand with the other. A typical leisure scene and, at the seaside, a joyous time for all, you might think.

Yet all I could hear was the mother shouting fiercely at her eldest,
“YOU are ruining my holiday. Yes, you are! You are ruining MY holiday!”

It was painfully obvious that here was some inappropriate footwear being worn by the mother, whose state of Focus was decidedly Narrow! Clearly, the desired benefit of the holiday to restore her default status of an Open Focus was unlikely to take hold, let alone accrue! I looked closer … and did I not see, lurking on her shoulder, the eager and slavering jaws of her Erlking?

Sadly, that Mum, with a tone of cruelty borne of frustration, eventually threatened to cancel her little girl’s Birthday with a vehemence and tone that even I (very familiar with an out-dated and old-school toughness) winced at.

Of course, you might say, these are everyday frustrations on the unwinding road of almost every adult that has accepted the mantle of parenthood – so what’s the BIG deal?

We drive ourselves to run all the elements and tasks in our lives with a Narrow Focus, because life is very demanding of our attention. We are constantly being pulled this way and that – and we have a label for all this pulling and how it makes us feel.
STRESSED.
And with sore feet from poor, ill-fitting, and worn-out mental footwear, a daily round of Narrow Focus and no resilience to break free from the stress of it all, we might easily end up finding ourselves bellowing at our pre-school children when they don’t instantly conform to OUR demands … yet are they really OUR demands?

In whose name is that Mum really threatening her little girl.

Afterthoughts

The shoes we are wearing are the springboard to our being successful or otherwise in dealing with every Erlking we’ve ever created that might by lurking on our own journey through life.
Young children ARE resilient – because of their default Open Focus setting they bounce back.
Yet, the more … the more. This we know. Through OUR actions we can erode that resilient springback to default.

It would be nice to think that that little girl will get her Birthday celebrations. It would be nice to think that her Mum has since relented, perhaps amidst tears, and got to receive some of the benefits that every holiday should afford to one’s resilience.

It would be nice to think that LOVE conquers all.

Cobwebs

Ingleborough, North face

Our lives, especially those millions of us who live our lives with many metaphorical cupboards, will gather cobwebs on a regular basis. And in whatever way we might utilise these cupboards in our day-to-day manner of being, it is essential we clear the decks regularly – for we are only human after all and we’re not weatherproof to the power of thought.

Thought energy comes and goes – and yet the moment we enfold any thought energy unto our aegis, we personalise it and it then becomes part of our thinking. And from that moment on, our thinking populates the cupboards and the whole cobweb cycle commences.

When we come to clean house and home from time to time, one of the good exercises to engage with is to clean the cupboards, wipe the dust off the shelves and blow away the cobwebs. 

It is very much the same with our Inner House.

The Cleanse

The "col" between Ingleborough and Little Ingleborough

I’ve just returned from climbing the mountain Ingleborough in the Yorkshire Dales, where I grasped the opportunity to blow away some cobwebs of my own! These had built up over the summer months since June and eventually I knew that only taking some deeper breaths then blowing hard, which included some shouting out at the top of my voice, would send the stale and dusty filaments packing once and for all. It was a very cleansing exercise!

(NB – I made sure I was sufficiently isolated so that no-one could hear me, but myself!)

Wardrobes and Cupboards

In my article The Wardrobe from November 2013 - http://pjwhypno.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-wardrobe.html - I wrote about the metaphorical clearing out of old clothes hanging in our wardrobes. Clothes we might have been keeping for a rainy day, but discovering sometime later, after many rainy days had come and gone, that they were just a waste of space. A waste of space, stopping us from populating our wardrobes with new clothes – the clothes that will fit us NOW, the clothes that are in style NOW, and not the clothes that wear that musty smell of age.

Whilst our clothes should only ever be a transient label, our cobwebs are a current label of unkempt and unattended cupboards. Cupboards of experience, of ideas, of thoughts and perceptions and occasional shibboleths of a bygone version of ourselves. Even the recent bygone-ness of just a few months – as it was for me!

Trig Point!

My resulting experience was akin to being able to really take in and enjoy that very first breath of new fresh air! Now, all my senses could properly translate the data I perceived around me – instead of being sullied from within. 

And that’s the first thing we notice after clearing away the cobwebs. Next comes a sense of feeling everything lighter. You could almost say it is enlightening! The baggage is no longer on the journey with us – and we realise we never needed it at all anyway!

And, as I started back down from the (by now) cloud-shrouded Ingleborough summit, my first task was to find not only the right pathway, but also to notice the precipices that loomed out of the clinging mist. For all was not yet as clear as you can see in the photo of the North Face I took the following morning!

No longer the scrambled mind

Scramble at Trow Gill

My “newest” cobweb, spun on the way up the mountain, was how might I negotiate the scramble at Trow Gill on my return journey? For some crazy reason I’d forgotten to wear the knee support this day, and I know that going down any climb is much harder for me, as I approach the age of 71 only held together by various neoprene supports!

With the lurking doubts blown away and with plenty of breaths of fresh air flowing through the cupboards, it was quite a simple and straightforward exercise – whatever had I been thinking and worried about!

Afterthought

There is no doubt that the way we breathe is the springboard to blowing away every cobweb that might by lurking in our cupboards … and a whole lot more besides! 

Breathe well, dear reader!

Coming Forward - Part 1

Cobwebs

Our lives, especially those of us who have lives with many metaphorical cupboards, will gather cobwebs on a regular basis.

I’ve just returned from climbing the mountain Ingleborough in the Yorkshire Dales, where I grasped the opportunity to blow away some cobwebs of my own! These had built up over the summer months since June and eventually I knew that only taking some deeper breaths, then blowing hard (plus shouting out loud) would send the stale and dusty filaments packing once and for all. It was a very cleansing exercise!

When we come to clean our house from time to time, one of the good exercises to engage with is to clean the cupboards, wipe the dust-off shelves and blow away (or vacuum up) the cobwebs.
And it is very much the same with our own, and very personal, "Inner House."

In my article The Wardrobe from November 2013 - http://pjwhypno.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-wardrobe.html - I wrote about the metaphorical clearing out of old clothes hanging in our wardrobes. Clothes we might have been keeping for a rainy day, but discovering sometime later, after many rainy days had come and gone, that they were just a waste of space. A waste of space, stopping us from populating our wardrobes with new clothes – the clothes that will fit us NOW, the clothes that are in style NOW, and not the clothes that wear that musty smell of age.

Clothes are a transient label, and cobwebs are a current label of unkempt and unattended cupboards. Cupboards of experience, of ideas, of thoughts and perceptions and occasional shibboleths of a bygone version of ourselves.

A Breath of Fresh Air

One of the ways of dealing with those cobwebs is that we can set up for ourselves a regular process of getting out into nature.

Walking, running, or cycling through nature with a purpose can drag our Attention from all those periods of Narrow Focus that we engage with on a daily basis – whether at home or at work – and that leech all the resilience out of us. 

The breath of fresh air not only gets deep into our lungs, it also (if we enable it) gets into the “cupboards” of our Mind and blows away the cobwebs.

Narrow Focus and our metaphorical Footwear

Now, don’t get me wrong - Narrow Focus IS a very useful perspective for doing certain tasks in life, work, play and performance. The trouble arises for us when we feel compelled to use Narrow Focus as a perspective for ALL things.

It’s like when we have just one pair of shoes and make them DO for all day and every day. We KNOW this doesn’t work, yet we’ll make excuses and put up with the inappropriate times. We despair when our shoes wear thin or go out of shape, when they fail to support our feet properly. We also find that we need to replace them very regularly because we use them ALL the time – and yet, even if we had two pairs of the same shoes, they would actually last more than twice as long.

One pair of shoes – physically and metaphorically – is a very false economy!

The same goes for when we ignore the DEFAULT setting of our Attentive Focus, which is Open Focus.

We are born with that default setting and grow up with that same default setting. Then, at some time between the ages of 5-7 (or, sadly as I will relate in a moment, even earlier), we become subjected to the requirements of the society we are growing up in. These requirements start to make increasingly high demands upon how we manage our Attention.

Our Mums and Dads, by virtue of their OWN Attention Management, may make demands upon us at home and within the family environment, over and above what we might consider to be our learning about our place within the life of the family unit.
Recently, I was walking behind a family of four (including 2 children below the age of 5) that were on holiday. All I could hear was the mother shouting at her eldest,
“You are ruining my holiday. Yes, you are! You are ruining my holiday!” It was painfully obvious that the state of Focus of the mother was decidedly Narrow – and the benefit of the holiday to restore her default status of Open was unlikely to accrue! Sadly, with a tone of cruelty borne of frustration, she eventually threatened to cancel her little girl’s Birthday.

We drive ourselves to run all the elements and tasks in our lives with a Narrow Focus, because life is very demanding of our attention. We are constantly being pulled this way and that – and we have a label for all this pulling and how it makes us feel.
STRESSED.

And with sore feet from poor, ill-fitting and worn-out footwear, a daily round of Narrow Focus and no resilience to break free from the stress of it all, we might easily end up finding ourselves bellowing at our pre-school children when they don’t instantly conform to our demands …

Opening the cupboards of our Breathing

When I work with clients – and myself – on locating that default Open setting of our Focus, I always start with that most primary and basic physical element that is the Breathing Cycle.

The knowing of WHEN our next breath is arriving, and HOW it is arriving, are probably two key factors that underpin our ultimate sense of security. 

I know that these two were vital elements for me during my period of 22+ years of stress-related anxiety of choking when drinking – even everyday liquids such as water, tea, coffee etc. For when I had a mouthful of drink “go down the wrong way” I found that, for me, there was no KNOWING of when and how – in those moments when the gagging and choking was happening.

Discovering and expanding our knowledge on the four parts of the Breathing Cycle is a great education and enables a wonderful resource to help us towards a more calm and grounded state of mind. “Take a deep breath,” is a widely use phrase of enablement for when we are agitated, stressed-out and overwhelmed. However, we need to go beyond mere words and discover where our breathing habits are RIGHT NOW before we can plot the pathway to improving them.

With even just a little more knowledge and practice we can dramatically change how we breathe and bring back a huge level of control of our grounded state of mind and tap into the innate sense of wellbeing that previously had seemed to have abandoned us – in the moment.

When good breathing is allied to any activity we undertake, then we’ll perform it better and for longer.

And when we do this, straightaway we’ll feel better about ourselves – which will feedback into our motivation and desire to continue to do it, and to do it more often as well.

These are simple processes, I know, yet for those who are beset in the Slough of Despond, or worse, that simplicity never seems to equate to EASY … even though we are always only just ONE THOUGHT AWAY from changing our mind.

The way we breathe is the springboard to blowing away every cobweb that might by lurking in our cupboards … and a whole lot more besides!

If you want to know more about enhancing your knowledge AND practice of good breathing, then contact me at pjw@thewrightwayltd.com to set the ball rolling!

Quo Vadis

Yin and Yang

You know that phrase from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities – “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times”? And it goes on … “It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,” and further examples of the Yin and Yang of Life.

This, all and more, has been the feature of the most recent 3 months of my life.

To be fair, this Yin and Yang is going on ALL the time for ALL of us, and most of the time we don’t notice the peaks and troughs, the ebbs and flows – EXCEPT when we do!

And we only notice, our attention is drawn to the major/minor balance in our experiences, when there seems to be a less than random or cyclic flow to things.

And because we ARE ONLY human after all, we find ourselves noticing the runs in sequences of DOWNS far more than the UPS.

This was how it happened for me – round about the time I overdid it in terms of some sporting action. The weather was hot, I’d done some strenuous activity for two days and then spent a lot of time on my feet on the third day as well.
It was on the third day evening that my physical body began to shut down, crying out loud enough for me to hear – “Enough IS enough, Matey. You’ve overdone it, and this now is the wakeup call.”

Although my awakening to physical frailty was only in extremis for five days, I subsequently took things easy for much longer. And that was where the other rot began to set in. 

In the midst of lots of simple and regular everyday stuff, I began to notice – and pay more attention to – things I would normally look upon with a grounded understanding and an objective eye.

Bit by bit, I began to arrive at conclusions I wouldn’t have previously arrived at. More and more I would trip over bits of mental baggage, as I plied the daily pathways.

Apocalyptic Horses

My relationship with my thinking took a turn to the dark side – I began to believe my thoughts 100%.

I began to take many more things personally. Lapses in memory, everyday things forgotten, became more than random happenings of a busy-minded person – they became categorised and catalogued. I increasingly noticed every time I was criticised, judged, questioned.

EGO was under attack – and when ego feels under attack, then ego fights back for one’s self.
Ego became defensive, aggressive and, on occasions, very angry.
On the battlefield of the Outside-In nature of reality, the responsibility for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune is ALWAYS with the world and, in my particular case, the people in it. It’s their fault for doing that to Me. It might start out as unfair or insensitive, yet the Horse gallops off and takes common sense with it.

When ego takes the reins of the Horse of Our Life and hangs on to them for too long, then things not only look apocalyptic – they very soon, in perceptive reality, become apocalyptic.

We might ask ourselves at some point, with blinding rhetoric, “Am I losing it?”

And in the midst of apocalypse, every answer we notice whispers Maybe, at first, then finally Yes.

In the end, this entire manic gallop came to rest in a “swamp of despair” that bore a remarkable resemblance to what John Bunyan described in The Pilgrim’s Progress as being “The Slough of Despond.”  * (pronounced Sluff)

The Slough of Despond

Without quoting Bunyan’s scary and indeed apocalyptic words, I can aver to this place as being where the Soul can feel - and be - abandoned.

Some may scoff at this declaration, saying that, “Surely the Soul cannot feel and be abandoned. What a ridiculous notion. The Soul is infinite, is eternal.”

I can also aver to this place being a “clearing house” for our state of mind and associated emotions.
It is like a quicksand – either you sink in deeper or you get pulled out.

Sinking in deeper will lead to depression and worse.
Getting pulled out will require some resource or other.

One of the awful and tragic things that is brought about by riding headlong into The Slough of Despond, is what becomes of the Horse of Our Life in that dreadful mire.
There are many metaphors and images that can spring to mind, as the Horse struggles to carry us back to safety. Yet, how true it is when we find that the life we lead cannot and will not bring us out of the Slough.

Some Resource or Other

There are resources, needless to say, that will enable us to be dragged from The Slough of Despond. These are the lifelines afforded to us, that are NOT always governed by knowledge, understanding, wisdom or common sense.

One of the lifelines is to abandon the Horse. By this I mean, that we extricate ourselves from our previous life, some or all its trappings and everything about it. However, some people might not want to abandon their way of life – and there’s a similar and graphic metaphor about how we might get ourselves out of a car that has been driven into the sea, a lake or a river.

We might break ourselves free of the Horse, stand on its back and jump to safety. We might then be able to rescue our own Horse as well.

Another lifeline is if someone Sees Us. We might hope that the someone has enough concern or resource of their own and have the will to throw us a lifeline. However, few people will either see or hear us. The Slough is a personal and silent place of our very own. We rarely, if ever, cry out for help … something I discovered at a very young age when exposed to drowning in a swimming pool. I might have waved and floundered around but calling out was not my intuitive action.

Another resource is Time. This is not THE most reliable of resources, since it is the gravity of thoughts, fears and judgements that weighs us down, pulling us deeper into the mire.

However, by lightening the load of our thoughts, fears and judgements we can shed some of the burdensome weight, allowing us to crawl nearer to safety. Of course, our lifestyle and trappings will be part of the equation too, which will play into this.

You may have some of your own considerations and conclusions about resources here too.

However, there is a caveat I will offer up to you.
When it comes to The Slough of Despond, then “Knowing Thyself” is the most distant of resources. We find our cupboards full of self-knowledge and self-understanding, of wisdom and grounded wellbeing, have been stripped bare. What was there yesterday has gone. When we are gasping for breath and flailing in the quicksand, our inner resources are removed from view in their usual place. We still have them, but our Soul will have laid them up, by way of preparation, into a place of safety.

“Quo Vadis?”

With my own recent journey, there were many questions related to “Am I losing it?”

Some were related to mental degeneration, a not unserious question in terms of my age, loss of synaptic connectivity, referential evidence of my own mental lapses and those evidenced by others. The instances highlighted in The Confession – “Left undone those things I ought to have done,” “erred and strayed like a lost sheep,” and “there is no health in me.” (NB - I’m not a religious person!)
Taking my “eye off the ball”; letting people down – both in my own judgement and being told so by others; being unable to let go of a persistent feeling of anger; having a sense of being mentally rendered down by complaint and criticism; and a catalogue of other instances.

As the Yin and Yang came and went like waves on the shore, it was a journey that was the best of times and yet also the worst of times.

Every journey we are on in Life WILL throw stuff at us out of the left field, and a reasonable smattering of curveballs. We ARE human, however – and we are not hermetically sealed from the things we come into contact with. Because we have nerves, there are always SOME nerve agents that are going to affect us. These affects are cumulative and can often come from the kindest, most benign and respected of sources. We need to be both vigilant AND honest with ourselves and others – and we also need to see the tell-tale signs in ourselves and others.

Finally, to those who really do care, I'd say just this ...

“In terms of Respect – our Soul Commands though never Demands.”