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!