Attachments.

We all have attachments to things. They vary from time to time, depending on what we believe our needs to be. Try and identify what they are. Write them down and be honest with yourself. It could be that you’re attached to a certain thought, belief system, your mobile phone or particular food types, i.e. cravings for sugar. Work back from the primary thought to understand where it comes from and what its trigger may be. Don’t judge yourself for it. Don’t try and go “cold turkey” on the attachment. Just work towards, each and every day, relinquishing your attachments, perhaps starting with one, and take baby steps in letting go of certain thoughts and feelings surrounding them. It will take time and so don’t be impatient with self. Honor your journey here, take your time and process each thought with love, forgiveness for self and patience. Keep a journal - put pen to paper to get certain thoughts and feelings out of your mind. Healing takes time. Embrace the “time” - for however long that may be and go forth into each and every day with the mission of feeling that little bit more free. 

Understanding Pain - Pt. 2

Now back to this pressure applied to my hand. If I increase the pressure, eventually I invoke a sensation that I would describe as pain, here a threshold of input from tissues to brain has been reached where the brain now interprets a problem. The pain experience has begun, a message to my conscious self to say, please pay attention here, something is not right. 

This is an example of mechanically driven pain. Now in the case of an infection, the pain is chemically driven, where nerve endings in infected tissues are responding to chemical changes and pointing out the problem area.

We feel chemically driven pain during and after a big training session, where so much lactic acid has been produced in tissues that nerve endings become chemically irritated and send these messages to the brain.

Some pains are relatively easy to understand, they are ones we expect, like when I have rolled my ankle, torn a ligament, the ankle swells, it hurts, I rest it, get some treatment on the local tissues to help healing, I get moving again and the pain goes away.

If however the injury causes me to have a large fear response, say I injure my back at work, and the injury has an impact on my ability to provide for my family and say my dad has suffered form low back pain for the last 20 years and I have watched it cripple his life I am going to be very afraid of what is going on, and when I am very afraid I am going to get over protective, create adaptive movements to avoid further hurting anything and I’m likely to become more sedentary. Further more, my nervous system is going to heed these fear messages and sensitise itself, so that I will in time feel more and more pain as part of my brain’s attempt to protect me.

Fear increases tension as it seeks to protect and in doing so can facilitate and perpetuate pain. It must always be considered when working with pain.

Education, creating understanding and empowerment has a huge impact on reducing fear and pain.

There are many things that can contribute to the creation of pain. You can get tummy pain from infected food; you can also get it from stress, and chronic anxiety. You can get a headache because you’re dehydrated, or because you’ve got a viral infection but also because you’re  holding onto a build up of frustration or anger.

Chemically driven pain can be created by poor nutrition. If we don’t eat well, we’ll hurt more. Other lifestyle factors too contribute. We are more sedentary now than ever before in history, and when we do exercise, our exercise is often uni-dimensional, jammed into a short time frame, and often ineffective in relaxing the tensions and moving the stagnancies in the body that drive pain. 

As kids we explore and express so much more physical freedom, we run and jump and hop and wrestle and roll around and dive and climb trees and as we get older, things become more serious, less fun, less play, more work, more responsibility, more burdens and so our bodies follow our minds into the contraction.

One of the biggest generators of pain both chemically and mechanically is stress. Under stressful situations stress responses involve suppression of the immune system, increase in heart rate, suppression of digestion, increases in biochemical’s like adrenalin and cortisol, which are involved in inflammatory pathways and the creation of tension.

Stressful emotions like frustration and anxiety are contracting of the body.

Anxiety for example is a fear, based emotion. It is generated within the body following a perception within the mind of threat or danger. The emotion drives an action. All emotions want to become actions. Anxiety wants to move, it wants to run away or race around and fix stuff or control stuff. If we wake ever day with challenges that strike worry and fear in us then we are constantly generating anxious tension.

Likewise the emotions of frustration and anger generate tension in the body for fighting. These are emotions of fighting. We have them not just in conflict with people but also in conflict with situations; at times when we feel powerless or out of control, which for many is often. Sometimes we might feel really angry and feel that we cannot express it. The body has been told to fight and then told to block the action of fighting and so a tension is created in the body. This is another pathway to pain.

We also commonly suppress the expression of the emotion of sadness. The emotional body lives within the physical body. When we suppress emotion we create conflict, tension and stagnancy in the body – all lead to pain.

So, when you have pain, pause before you hate it or become afraid of it, and instead, seek to understand it. Can you see its message and respond accordingly? In your search to understand the messages you may be confronted by things you’d rather avoid. Things like the origins of your stress. This is not pains fault, but rather, your challenge.

Get more connected to your body so that you can pay more attention to the messages it conveys, maybe you’ll pick them up before they have to speak so loud as to become pain. Be mindful of the way you move, how you live, what you eat, and what stresses you, and importantly learn about how to meet stress, release stress and reduce stress. This will be the greatest thing you can do to reduce your pain and help your health.

Written by Adam Cootes of Arising Self

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Understanding Pain - Pt. 1

Pain is not something we learn a lot about when we’re growing up, except that we don’t like it, we see others curse it, wish it away, see it as a problem, often an enemy, as an affliction, something being forced upon them from some external place. We learn to be afraid of it, rather than taught to understand it.

I remember as a child, the pain of sore throats and ear infections, cuts, scrapes, the loss of skin on knees and knuckles in hockey matches; the pain of a broken nose in cricket – all of these physical injuries or illnesses, infections and the like.

I was riding in a taxi recently whilst interstate teaching and said to the driver who had asked the reason for my visit that I was running a workshop on “pain”. After a pause, she said, now there’s something I hate. This said a lot for me. It’s our relationship with pain that is so important in being able to change it.

If you hate it, you reject it and then it’s hard to understand it and heed the message it is offering.

I appreciate now that there are many contributions to pain and that pain has a purpose. It is not the enemy, and although it is unpleasant, it is very unpleasant for a reason, because it is a message about a problem. It is essentially a message from myself to myself, and if I listen to the message and understand it I may be able to grow, heal, prevent recurrence of the pain and often times prevent further illness and even death.

Pain is part of our survival armory; it is like an alarm system, a response to perceived, actual or potential danger.

Pain is unpleasant – and is so for a good reason. We’re meant to pay attention to it. If it weren’t so uncomfortable, we wouldn’t pay attention to it.

I have come to learn also that pain does not exist in the tissues of the body. Although I feel that pain is in my thumb when I hit it with a hammer, it is not. It is in my brain. It is created there by centres of the brain that have interpreted messages coming via the nervous system, from the squashed tissues in my thumb.

Pain exists in the brain and is part of a much broader response to the perception of danger to the tissues of my body. These include:

·       Tension, which might be splint to protect an area of the body that has been damaged

·       The sympathetic nervous system (SNS), which drives the fight and flight responses through the body including chemical responses that kick start inflammation and healing pathways.

It is these neural and chemical interconnecting message systems between mind and body that mean that I can no longer allow myself to perceive that the mind and body are separate

Pain is an experience; it involves sensation, memory, and emotion and is unique and subjective to each individual.

Say I apply a light pressure to my thumb, a message is sent by a mechanically compressed nerve ending (well many lightly compressed nerve endings to be honest), to my spinal cord and then on up into my brain where it travels to many centres including the somato-sensory cortex, at the top of the brain. This is where the map of the body exists in the brain. This is how I know that it is a pressure applied to my thumb and not my big toe.

If I were a soldier, and had gone to war, and were involved in a skirmish and got shrapnel in my hand which got infected and had to be amputated I could years later still feel pain in my hand that no longer existed because the messages were still moving between these centres of the brain. This phenomenon is known as phantom limb syndrome, and proves again that pain is not in the tissues.

To be continued in “Understanding Pain – Pt. 2”

Written by Adam Cootes of Arising Self

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Personal Authenticity.

It’s one thing creating a world around you that appears to the outside world to be a certain thing. Does that make you a slave to society by creating an external reality that’s fit for them, but is not necessarily in true alignment to your own authenticity?

Being a “perception engineer” for the outside world doesn’t necessarily serve your own life or internal happiness, joy and truth. To truly be “free”, live authentically and happily, you have to address and live your own truth first.  That begins with working from the inside out; not the outside in. 

If you’re driven by certain things, such as creating the perception of being wealthy, sophisticated or successful, you must ask yourself first, where do your own personal values stand amidst that perception, and are you living as a wealthy, sophisticated or successful person within your own life, heart, mind and soul first? Are you clean, tidy, fit, healthy; do you take pride in your living environment; in your relationship with yourself? 

There’s nothing wrong with “branding” or “personal branding”. But if you’re goal is to succeed, achieve and be happy; ensure that the truth you’re living behind closed doors is the very truth that guides your genuine health and happiness - not the perception of it that others might or might not accept. 

Becoming Your Own Guide

Lets not kid our selves, creating positive change isn’t easy; personal transformation isn’t easy. It’s not hard to feel stuck and powerless in changing things about your own behaviour. There is often a great weight or gravity to your own patterns and your own desires for things to be the same.

In essence, to change you must firstly want to change; there must be sufficient reason, creating sufficient desire. You must know the why, the reasons and want to change badly. You must build this ‘fire of desire’, this want for change by reflecting on the reasons regularly. Without doing so there will not be the energy required to overcome the barriers to change.

Then, you must identify the barriers and break them down. To do this, you must learn to watch yourself – you require self-awareness first.

You have to be able to watch yourself, watch your old patterns of eating poorly or ‘being lazy’ or not exercising, or stressing out about things unnecessarily.

You can cultivate the ability to watch yourself through meditation and self-reflection. If you don’t meditate already, learn to – an untrained mind is as useful at creating personal transformation as an untrained violinist is at playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Find a teacher or source instruction on the net. You can find my introduction to meditation at www.arisingself.com

The self-reflection part can take many forms. Personally, I think it’s nice to keep a journal, this really helps you to be accountable and to call into question what your perceptions, feelings and actions are. You might for instance keep a food diary and call into question why you have consumed in a day what you have. Did you eat because you were hungry? Was it a genuine hunger, or was it stress driven, boredom driven or because of an emotional feeling of emptiness? Are there poor eating patterns because of a fundamental lack of regard for self?

In asking these questions of yourself you find your barriers to change; stress, boredom or loneliness as examples. These are the things that need further work if you are to change your patterns.

Another very useful tool of self-reflection is watching back the movie of your day in your mind. Slowly. Observing yourself: the way you move and feel, your mood, your reactions, your patterns and so on. On the first run through, just watch and observe.

On the second run through ask yourself questions like, “Why did I act like that, feel that, respond like that? Could I slow down, be in the moment more, not rush so much? How often to I actually deeply experience something in the moment? What perceptions, stories or beliefs do I need to change in order to feel less stress and enjoy my day more? Can I accept the nature of my reality and the things I cannot change and pour my energy into changing those things that I can?

On the third run through, press the pause button as you go, and this time seek to guide yourself. Consider putting on a different set of glasses, metaphorically speaking as you step into your day. What if this set of glasses allowed you to enjoy everything in your day, allowed you to see meaning and purpose in everything, see the opportunities for learning and growing and the connections and the enjoyment? Can you watch the movie with this set of glasses?

By Adam Cootes of Arising Self

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Choose To Play.

Rise and shine with each day knowing that life and your life is joyous playground. Each and everyday in this life, you have an opportunity to play. Choose calm, choose to focus on the vision of what you want for each outcome of anything you do and pursue. Focus in on each day with love, calm, joy and gratitude. Pay attention to how you’re feeling and embrace it no matter what. Don’t judge it. Just listen, breathe through it and make the choice to see each day as a beautiful playground to embrace with open arms and a hop skip and a jump in your heart. 

Battlefield or Playground?

The Hypothalamus is a master gland in the brain. It is a peptide-producing machine. Peptides are little protein chains and are essentially information carriers. 

The hypothalamus produces a different neuro-peptide for every different possible emotional experience. When you perceive a change in life you have an emotional response. In this emotional response the hypothalamus releases the corresponding neuro-peptides into the blood stream. This is one of the primary examples of the inseparable Mind-Body relationship. 

The neuro-peptides travel throughout the body via the blood stream and are able to connect to receptor sites in the cell membranes of cells in the tissues of the body including organs, muscles, skin and so on. This protein-receptor interlocking influences the activity and function of the cell. No prizes for guessing the differing influence of “angry” neuro-peptides compared with “joyful” neuro-peptides.

In this way the emotional body lives within the physical body and is constantly influencing it. Your emotional responses are a major determinant of your health. And your emotional responses are governed by your perception. 

Do you perceive your life as a battlefield or a playground? In the battle field you may be hurt, traumatised, victimised, lost, fighting, striving to control things, angry when you can’t or afraid of what is coming next: Probably not ideal for creating a healthy internal environment.

In the playground, life is for exploring, it is seen as a play or a dance, one to enjoy, there is fun and adventure, learning and creativity: Wonderful for a healthy internal environment.

If the battlefield is about survival, the playground is about exploring and learning.

Your perception determines it all. When you learn that you can be in control of the way you perceive and therefore respond to what is arising in life you will be happier and healthier.

Carry these questions with you: Playground or battlefield? If battlefield, why? Does it need to be so? How can I perceive it differently? What am I fighting for, fighting to control, fighting to protect? Am I fighting a losing battle? Can I let go and see it all differently?

Adam Cootes, Integrated Health Practitioner, Arising Self

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A Reminder of Why We're Here.

This morning I’ve been reminded that light and love emanates outside around and through you at all times in all ways - only if you choose to connect with and recognise it. If you want to connect with feelings of peace, stillness, empathy, compassion, happiness and energy in your day-to-day life (I know I certainly do), find time to commit to listening to your body, mind and your heart. Your intuition is your greatest guide. However, if you’re not still enough and make yourself too busy rushing around and choose not to listen, you’ll miss a greater path of clarity, focus and precision within your daily existence, and miss the whole point to the experience of life - living, breathing, inner peace and the reason why we’re all here - love. To love and allow ourselves to be loved. To embrace the experience of love at all times in all ways. 

Changing "Should".

Much pain results from tension. Much tension in the body is constructed in the mind. The body is constantly responding to instruction from the mind. If the perception in the mind is “this shouldn’t happen, life shouldn’t be this way or I should be better or different”, then it is likely that the emotion of frustration will be generated. This emotion in turn generates tension in the body.

So, pain is a consequence of perception. One of the perceptions that drives the most frustration, tension and pain is that of ‘Should’. ‘Should’ is a language of conflict: A fight between what is and what ‘should’ be. “I should be, should do, should have done…” “The world should be more like…” “This shouldn’t happen…” and the list goes on.

‘Should’ isn’t, it can’t be and won’t be. ‘Should’ is an alternate reality that does not exist.

Write your ‘Should Story’. Expose the ‘shoulds’. See how pervasive this language is and recognise the emotions and tensions that follow it like frustration, anger, shame and guilt. Get rid of ‘should’ and you’ll be happier and healthier.

So, what to do with ‘should’? Call it into question: “Who says I should or it should be: God, my parents, the media, society?” Where has this story come from? Can you let it go or give it back? What will you replace it with?

If it’s a story about the world or other can you accept the reality that is, even grieve what you think ‘should’ be but isn’t and then choose how you will respond to what actually is? If it’s a story about what you ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ have done in the past can you forgive yourself and move on?

If it is a story about now and one that you want to keep, change the language to: “I want or I choose…” If it is something you want to be doing, thinking or saying, then you need to ask yourself why you do not already? Here you will find a barrier to achieving your want. This barrier is tied to fear in some way. It is this fear that you must see and meet in order to execute your want.

Change ‘should’ for your health’s sake.

Written by Adam Cootes of “Arising Self”

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Image by: http://www.flickr.com/photos/krishhtine/4279362060/

Into the Wild.

Pack a bag and get walking. Go on an adventure: In your own neighbourhood, surrounding suburbs, towns, cities or states. Get out into nature and walk a path you’ve never walked before. Rely on your instincts to guide you on your journey. Allow your senses to guide your direction. Often they’ll tell you what they want to see, feel, taste, smell or touch. Challenge yourself to be “free”. Let go and start a whole new journey. Into the wild you go.  

Lessons.

We are all continually learning. I realised a long time ago that you can teach an old dog new tricks, as long as he is willing and open to grow. As long as he is aware...of who he is and of the ever changing world that surrounds him. Life's lessons are continually teaching and however insignificant an experience or moment may seem at the time, the impact it can have on our choices and our approach to life can be great. But to learn, we need to be open to change; to be bold and never scared to face something with a different attitude than what we have always known. Growth requires just a little provocation. Learn to be 'you' and do things 'your' way but always consider the impact on others, whilst remaining true to the person you are and choose to be. It is a choice. Wisdom comes through living each experience with awareness and being open to advice and external influence - within positive reason. We are continually growing into ourselves and hopefully better versions each time we massage in the new layers of daily experience. Like moisturiser; nourishing, feeding, thickening, yet softening the skin and beautifully refining the mind...there comes growth. Reflection is important, but never indulge in too much negative evaluation. Be happy with what we have experienced in the past and be proud of the awareness that increases our ability to do things with greater understanding next time. 

By Hayley Lentz. 

Hollywood.

...Also known as the City of Angels. Where there is just as much of a focus on meditation, yoga and healthy, clean eating; following dreams and striving to fulfill our deepest desires, also comes an equal balance of darkness amidst the light. Hollywood is an electrifying place full of passion for the good and bad. To achieve a sustainable life in Hollywood, I would say that it requires a constant focus on the light. Alluring as all of it’s temptations might be, life still has to be a balanced sanctuary. 

Gratitude.

If we really wanted to, we could find fault in absolutely everything in life. If we wanted to, we could also be grateful for absolutely everything we have in life. It’s a choice and it takes a while for all of us to realise this. In the past I’ve read - “The more I understand the mind and the human experience, the more I begin to suspect there is no such thing as unhappiness; there is only ungratefulness.” And when you truly focus on every single thing you can be grateful for, each and every day, you’ll soon see, know and trust that it’s a choice to be unhappy, just as much as it’s a choice to be truly happy. What are you grateful for today? Are you going to choose happiness over ungratefulness?