Well I’ve never actually hugged a tree physically but one of the most calming influences in my life have been trees, they feature a lot in my mindful walks.
Most trees we see in the woods have been on this earth far longer than we have and have seen history unfolding right under neath there branches. There are mighty oak trees that have stood and watched for a thousand years but the oldest tree in the UK prize goes to the Yew tree some over two thousand years old, imagine the secrets that they hold in their withered and ancient branches
Use all of your senses to be mindfull
One of the best methods to calm an anxious mind is to go and sit under a tree and just become aware of its presence through all of your sences.
A majestic tree
Observing colours of the seasons as they change.
You can start off by simply becoming aware of the colours of the tree, the best time for this is obviously during the autumnal months when the tree is displaying it’s most glorious colours with shades of gold browns and yellows and fiery reds.
Autumn
It can also be fantastic during the springtime when it’s redressing and blooming its new flowers and bloosoms in a display of beauty.
Spring time
Sping blossom
The summer is gorgeous is with its cool greens keeping you in the shade from the summer heat.
Summer breeze
Summer shade
The winter with its bare trees painted with frost.
Frosty winter trees
Wintry trees
Anytime is good to become mindfull with trees.
The time of the year does not matter the trees are always a place to go and be mindfull. Listening to the wind can blowing through the branches can be both therapeutic and exhilarating. Singing it’s tunes medatively as you tune into every sound.
Birds living in the trees can paint them with wonderful sounds, there really is nothing better than getting lost in the sounds of the woodland birds as they chirp and tweet to each other making us feel so relaxed and calm listening to them singing to the world in pure joy.
Watching and observing squirrels as they play amongst the branches can be a lovely experience or watching a squirrel just feeding itself on a tasty but.
Mindfulness is just paying attention to one thing at a time , the trees provide a perfect opportunity to lose all of your senses being around them.
Feeling the bark or the soft leaves underfoot gives us another sense to become aware of. And in the winter there is also the opportunity to use our taste to eat the burries and nuts from the trees.
Go on go and give a tree a hug and say thanks for just being there.
I wonder how much importance is placed on the role that thought plays in our lives. Thought is the catalyst for absolutely everything. If it’s man made then every single aspect of that object be it a car a mobile phone or a simple clothes peg or a biro someone at some point had a thought about it in order to make it. Every single design is made from someone’s thought. What colour is used is made from someone’s thought. Every single thing that we use and take for granted was constructed first and foremost by thought. Without thought we would have nothing. I needed some thoughts in order to write this blog, you need some thoughts to be able to process this blog and make sense of it. You may think it’s a load of nonsense or you may think it’s life changing, we all think differently.
Our thoughts construct our experience.
So, everything that is man made is constructed by thought. So what about things that are not man made like nature animals trees lakes and mountains. Well this is exactly the same, you see things through your thinking. Some may see the beauty in a snow capped mountain , some might think it’s a harsh brutal place , it all depends on your perception and to have a perception on anything you first have to have a thought.
Who likes Spiders?
For some reason most of us do not like spiders and yet most of us have probably never been attacked or bitten by one, so what makes us afraid? Again we can’t be frightened without firstly having a thought. We see a picture of a spider and it instantly creates a thought. The picture is not real and yet our thoughts make it seem very real, we actually feel our thoughts, that’s what makes our thoughts into experiences and feelings. Ever watched a wildlife programme and they are filming a nest of insects, how long does it take you to start feeling itchy, that’s the product of your thinking and then the feeling, you are experiencing your thinking that’s all it’s not real, you just made it up.
Mental health.
So much has been written about mental health. We focus a lot on our poor mental health, in fact in almost all cases we think ourselves into poor mental health. All of us are brought into this world in good mental health, it’s inate in us, a small percentage of us may have physical problems that can affect the brain but the vast majority of us have inate good mental health. So why are one in five people in developing countries suffering mental health problems.
Thinking our way to poor mental health.
We are only one thought away from sadness but equally we are only one thought away from happiness. I first heard this statement from a man by the name of Syd Banks you can find him on YouTube if you want to know more. Again we find thinking is controlling our mental health. Life throws us some nasty moments there is no doubt about that. There is also no doubt that how you deal with those situations ultimately is how you think about those situations. It’s hard to think positively about any tragedy or life changing happening but people do have a choice, and some people will think differently about the exact same situation.
So as you can see thought makes up our experience of the world.
Next time you are feeling down stop for a moment and ask yourself how you are thinking and could you think any differently.
Next time you find yourself not liking yourself see what your thoughts are saying to you.
Next time you tell yourself you’re no good or can’t do something try and change your thoughts.
“It’s not the things that happen to you, it’s the way you think about the things that happen to you.” Bruce Lipton cell biologist.
The past no longer exists and the future hasn’t happened yet so that also doesn’t exist and yet as humans we still spend almost half of our waking moments in the past or the future. Scientists have research that shows we spend 47% of our time not being present and with stuck in the past or stressing about the future.
The Past.
The past is no longer, yet we spend so much time thinking in the past. We think about events that happened to us, we think even about things we perceive happened to us and actually never did. We think of mistakes we made, we regret what we didn’t do telling ourselves I should have done this or I should have done that. We base our present on the past. How can we ever be happy if we are living in the memories of negative thoughts from the past. The worse thing is our brains actually forget past events and often recreate past events making them worse and worse the more we pay our attention to them. We can do nothing about the past, we can’t change it and we can’t control it. Let it go.
The future…
The future is not real. It hasn’t happened yet, it can’t be controlled and rarely turns out the way we fully expect it to. Just like our thinking of past events always has a negative bias to it so does our future. We create scenarios , we imagine things that could happen, we construct elaborate plans almost like directing a movie, but this movie plays in our head.
We base our future and the way we perceive it based on perceived and often distorted visions and memories of our past. We base our future on something that does not exist. Yesterday no longer exists just as much as tomorrow does not exist yet. When you really stop and think about it, how crazy does that sound.
Now…
Now is reality, this present moment in time right now as you are reading this is the only reality there is. How much of that reality are wasting worrying about a past that can’t be changed and a future which can’t be controlled.
The present moment is really all we have. How often do you take a moment to appreciate the present moment to rest your thoughts and just be, stop thinking of what you have done and what you want to do for a moment and focus on what you have instead of can’t have.
The present moment according to scientific studies is the place where we can be at our most happiest and fullfilled. We just need to stop and appreciate it. In fact the more time you spend in the present, the now, the less time you will spend in the past and the future.
To do….
So put down your to do list for a while , focus on what is happening around you right now.
You might here the birds singing, the feel of the sun. Listening to sounds the wind makes. In fact just putting your entire awareness on now is one of the most calming things you can do for a stressed out mind.
Leave the past behind, don’t try to control the future and enjoy the present moment.
One of our most easiest ways to get ourselves stressed is when we try to control the things in life that are not controllable. It’s an unwinnable battle.
Life throws us challenges all the time, some of which we can affect change and some we can do nothing to change anything.
Have you ever sat in a traffic jam and got yourself all wound up about it and yet what can you really do to change anything, you can’t make the traffic go away and no amount of yelling or moaning is going to change the outcome, you simply can not make yourself unlate.
I remember once being stuck at an airport waiting for a flight to arrive which had been cancelled because of a violent storm, I remember getting upset with an airline representative and blaming her for my predicament, she then said this sentence to me , what do you really think I can do to help get that plane here any quicker , it’s been grounded for safety reasons? This really made me think , whose fault is it? the answer, absolutely nobody.
I used to get stressed over lots of things that I could do nothing about and now I don’t. I have probably halved my stress just be realising I can not control the uncontrollable.
Write a list.
Try this, make a list of all the things that stress you out in life on a regular basis. Put a line through all of the stuff that you can do absolutely nothing about.
I bet your list has considerably grown shorter. Think about this, stressing does you no good at all, it never ever changes a situation that you have no control over, so why do it.
It is human nature to want to be in control, but the truth is we are in control of very little in our life. We can’t control the weather, we can only control our health to a certain degree, we can’t control what people think of us we can only presume (which is often widely inaccurate), there is so much we can’t control and yet we act as if we can.
When you look at your list learn to let go of the things that you can not control and you will be a far happier person for it.
As a driving instructor for ambulance drivers I’m well aware that there are many examples of people getting angry on the roads that we see throughout every day.
But although I see it frequently am I even aware of my own thoughts and feelings when I’m driving. Are you as a driver aware of your own behaviour when you are driving.
We all have an inner voice, you know that conversation you sometimes have with yourself that goes on in your head that a lot of the time you are not even aware is going on.
That voice is your subconscious and that controls over 95% of what you do and how you behave and yet most of the time you are unaware of what is actually going on.
How many times on your drive to work do you swear at another driver in your head, how many unkind remarks do you make about other road users as you are driving.
So what I get angry what’s the big deal?
Well for starters if you are getting angry when you are driving you are much more likely to have a crash. When you are angry or emotional in some way you can no longer focus on the task of driving and your decision making and driving behaviour goes downhill quick. It doesn’t end there, there are domino effects that last far longer than just your journey to work and back again. Anger doesn’t just go away at the press of a button, you body’s fight response stays on high alert for a perceived threat for hours after. You may not realise it, but a sudden burst of anger will flood your body with a wide range of biochemical reactions that keep your body in stress mode. In fact the more angry you become the easier it gets. That journey into work may be setting you up for hours of stress that’s going on below the surface just waiting to be triggered by the smallest events. This could lead to arguments at work, when you get home and even more important a gradual break down of your immune system and a far greater risk of becoming Ill. A body flooded with stress hormones and chemicals doesn’t stay healthy for long.
The behaviour cycle.
When we get annoyed frustrated angry or any other negative emotion we leave an invisible footprint in our brain. The more we get used to getting angry the easier it becomes to follow the path to get angry ,we start to hardwire our minds for trouble. Each time for example we drive to work we start getting used to our reactions so that anyone who upsets us sets off an automatic response from our brain. We snap into anger very quickly and almost all of the time we don’t take any time to look at the situation in another way, we only see a personal threat to us. This behaviour becomes so automatic that with out knowing it we start to search out the drivers that make us angry. We even start to predict bad driving behaviour from certain car types often stereotyping a perceived behaviour just from looking at a particular car model.
Becoming aware is the best way to change your behaviour.
It’s very difficult to change any behaviour unless you are aware of it. You could try this on the way to work tomorrow try to notice every time you find yourself thinking or talking to yourself in a negative way about another road user. You may be surprised each time you catch yourself doing it just how frequently you do it. I ended up smiling to myself every time I caught a negative thought, so much so that at one point I laughed out loud in the car when I realised I was in the middle of having a negative internal dialogue about something which happened but was nothing personal or even in my control.
Remember each time you catch yourself you turn off the stress response which can only be good for you in so many ways. What’s the point in getting angry wound up and frustrated over something you have no control over and will be out of your life in a few seconds providing you don’t follow your thoughts.
I’ll never be able to talk to her, she’s out of my league.
I’ll never be as good as he is.
Or so I thought it was…
That was years ago, that was my reality. My life revolves around these type of thoughts. The consequence is that was how I experienced my life at that time.
Everything was a negative way of thinking about things in my head, although at the time I had no idea I was even doing it.
If you don’t think your good enough you become not good enough.
If you think your ugly then that’s how you will experience yourself.
“If you can or you can’t, your right”
Fast forward to now, I’m an emergency response ambulance instructor, I never for one moment considered myself in this role.
I’m married to a beautiful women and I have two beautiful children, never could see that one happening.
When my children were born I still had these massive insecurities of not being good enough and I really struggled at first to take on this at the time in my mind it was a massive burden, and I just had thoughts of running.
I spent most of my life running from things, I spent around 15 years running from reality by working overseas. When I was away I could become anyone I wanted in my mind.
What changed?
Well I’m still the same person on the outside, I’ve not suddenly grown muscles or changed my appearance in any way. No, I’m the same person that you would have seen or known back then. The difference is I changed on the inside.
There was a moment, can’t exactly remember when but there was a moment when something so huge and fundamental to me took place. That moment was when I realised the truth in my reality was all based on my thinking.
Wow , what a life changing realisation that my whole life was never being controlled from the outside, that was a total lie and belief that I bought into for so many years, infact since I was a small child.
I believe strongly that so many people are living there lives by constantly telling themselves lies about themselves that they totally and utterly are sold on and believe in.
Over the past 5 to 10 years I have studied the mind, I’ve learnt about me, I understand me and now know the truth about me.
Every now and then I slip and go back to my own ways and thoughts. Sometimes I get stuck in an old way of thinking and suddenly my personal experiences of life change back, the insecurities come flooding back and I take a big step backwards to how I used to be.
Fortunately because I understand the truth, I understand also that I’m telling myself lies again and the realisation of that is enough to reset my internal programme.
We go through our lives making stuff up, have you ever stopped and listened to that voice in your head, I mean seriously stop and listen to that voice. What’s it talking about, what’s it telling you? Your probably going to tell me that you believe what it’s saying is right, of course you are , it’s been saying the same things for years and you have, just like me brought into it hook line and sinker. That voice is not you, it’s just a reflection of you, it’s a movie of you playing the same old movie over and over again on an endless loop.
If you suffer from a real lack of belief , have a listen to what you are telling yourself right now. If you think your ugly , listen to what you are telling yourself next time you look in the mirror. You see, the reflection we see in the mirror is the direct reflection of what you are telling yourself over and over again. Your inner voice has been there since you were born. Most of us are not really aware of what it’s saying, we just take it for granted, we just go along with the conversation. The conversation that’s constantly putting your own self worth down.
How do we change the conversation?
To change the conversation we have to be in it and fully conscious and aware of what we are saying, without that awareness we can’t do anything and it will just carry on creating the same movie. To become aware we need to pay attention to it. You could start by writing a few things down that you tell yourself. Notice a pattern just before you go to work or school or even just before you get home. What are you telling yourself before a job interview an exam or a driving test. It could be anything but I bet you that there will be a pattern of negative words in that inner voice. Can’t will nots and I’m nots will form the conversation.
Congratulations you have now completed step 1 you have become aware.
Step two is even easier, you now have to substitute the negative words to positive words, cant’s become cans, I’m not become I am etc.
Step 3, don’t expect years of talking down to yourself will change overnight, you need to work at it, you have to reprogramme that inner voice to become more positive. You have to work at it, remember, it’s only you in your head, if you want to change you then you have to change you from the inside. Nothing that happens to you on the outside can really change you if you chose to not let it. Buying nice things doesn’t change you, having nice things doesn’t change you , having money doesn’t change you, it’s all done from the inside out.
Many of us are stuck in our negative thinking about ourselves, this will never change untill you realise that this does not have to be your reality.
I wish you all a great day, take care of yourselves
First blog for a few weeks, ive been awfully busy training my ambulance students up and today is the last day of the course and the dreaded assessment day.
There is a lot on this because after 4 weeks of intense training the students have to perform one final drive and this is appropriate to the title of this blog they will be feeling their thinking.
So what does this mean, well If I wanted to go really deep and start talking about cell biology I would probably end up going round in circles, but the simple fact is that every thought you make whether it be on a conscious level or a subconscious level starts a biochemical reaction in your body. This is a constant process that goes on 24 hours a day, and so even when your fast asleep your brain is triggering chemical responses in your sleep.
Here’s a good example you can try now, close your eyes for a few seconds and just think about your favourite food. Within no time your body will start a chemical reaction to start the process of eating so you will get a feeling of hunger. You are now essentially feeling your thinking.
Let’s go back to my 3 students, and imagine how they are feeling, and one of them has already started to feel butterflies in her tummy, one is feeling a little bit sick and the other is cool and calm. If we could get in their heads and find out what they are thinking we would see two of them are having negative thoughts about the outcome of today, but although I know they are all good enough to pass the assessment.
So when we say you are feeling your thinking it simply means your body is changing the way you feel, it’s like your thoughts come alive in you.
Depression
Now this is fine whilst you are thinking positively, but what happens if your depressed, or your thoughts are negative and you feel down. This is OK for short periods of time but some of us start to get caught up in a never ending cycle of depression. Your thoughts are negative you feel bad the more you feel bad the more your thoughts are negative. There is only one way to break this cycle and that is to try and change your thinking. Changing your thinking changes how you feel.
There are many ways to change the way you think, try not to follow negativity, don’t read newspapers, don’t follow negative links on social media. Don’t follow negative people, look for inspiring people and articals that people post.
Try to see things from the glass half full point of view. Be grateful for what you have and not want you can’t have. Be kind to people and you start being kind to yourself.
The search for happiness.
Many people spend their lives searching for happiness unaware it is inside them all the time, but in fact happiness can start in your next thought. A happy thought will give you a nice feeling an unhappy thought will give you an unhappy feeling.
So yes we all feel our thinking, we we mostly don’t realise where our feelings are coming from. Some days we just wake up feeling meh, and we’ll that’s probably because our subconscious thoughts in our sleep have been meh thoughts.
Change the way you feel by changing the way you think.
Have a great day.
Ps my students all qualified to become emergency response drivers yesterday.
Most of us live our lives mistakenly believing that every thought we have is real. This just is not true.
Our thoughts are like the rudder on a ship they direct our lives in the direction they think we want to go.
Sometimes we pass through choppy sees sometimes it’s calm, but it’s all driven by our thoughts.
Our experience of life comes from the inside out, not what happens to us but rather by what we think about what happens to us.
I was once told I don’t have a lack of self confidence I just think I do.
This was like an enlightment for me, all of those years believing I had no self confidence, when actually it was just me thinking I had no self confidence. In fact you could add that to esteem, self worth, and any other negative feeling I used to get.
If it was true I had no self confidence, how come I spent 10 years as a holiday rep, away from home, working with people I had never met before and dealing daily with holiday makers hoteliers and on the problems that happen on holiday. How can someone with no self confidence do all that not to forget the singing and dancing on caberet night and entertaining bus loads of holiday makers on tours. All of this done with no self confidence, it just doesn’t add up, yet on the inside that’s how I felt.
Another example I can use is this, I’ve moved house twice in the last 12 years, the first move was a nightmare, this is when I believed in my thoughts, they told me it was going to go all wrong and it certainly did, I’ve never been so stressed and anxious in the days both leading up to and after that first house move. But, and here’s the strange thing about this, nothing actually went wrong, no disasters actually occurred, in fact now I recall it with a mind that is now far more calmer I realise that everything that went wrong went wrong in my head. It was the inside out catastrophic thinking that caused the feeling of it going wrong.
Now I still get good days and bad days just like we all do, the difference now is I understand that all I’m experiencing is my thinking, I also recognise if I ignore a thought and chose not to follow it a new one will replace it.
Going back to that rudder steering the ship through life’s High seas the journey can be changed just by steering a new course just the same as in our lives our journey can be changed by waiting for the right thought to come along.
If your having a bad time at the moment ask yourself what you are thinking and has any of it actually come true.
The word mindful sounds like your head is full but in fact it’s the total opposite, to reach a mindful state you become aware of the present moment. Most of us spend a good deal of our time in our heads thinking about the past or worrying about what might happen in the future.
There are many ways of becoming mindful but most people never really achieve it and that is for one simple reason they try too hard to be mindful.
There are many apps and breathing guides that you can watch many of which if you follow them you can if you try too hard end up becoming more stressed just trying to be mindful.
Monkey mind.
Monkey mind is the expression given to your mind when it just won’t settle. You have a constant internal dialogue with yourself and most of this consists of never ending to do lists and things that have happened in the past and things that might happen in the future.
Sometimes this monkey mind can be exhausting and can even effect our general mental health and our sleeping patterns. A head full of thoughts that won’t stop is the easiest way to become worried anxious and chronically stressed.
Sometimes you feel like your head could explode and you just want it to go away.
With a mind this chaotic you will be surprised to discover that most people that dive into mindfulness and expect it to switch the monkey mind off fail miserably.
Firstly mindfulness should become a habit that becomes regular practice and should start off very slowly without trying or expecting too much to happen.
So here’s a quick guide about how to be mindful that I find works for me.
This is firstly a simple exercise that you can do at anytime when you are feeling a bit stressed.
Find a quiet place.
Sit down and take a couple of deep breaths that are comfortable for you.
Then just for a few minutes pay attention to your breath, don’t hold it just relax and breath normally but ensure your inbreath is through the nose and the out breath is from the mouth.
Try just for a few minutes notice everything about the breaths, how your body rises and falls with the breath through your chest area, notice how the breath feels in your nostrils and through your mouth on the outbreath.
You should start with just a few minutes at a time and you become more relaxed you can go for longer.
Now if you expect your mind to instantly calm you will be dissapointed, but what you will start becoming aware of is the thoughts you are having.
You can’t stop thinking, thoughts will come and go as they always will, but the first goal to achieve the first steps is becoming aware of your thoughts.
Most of the time we are unaware of exactly what we are thinking, the more stressed our life is the faster and more mixed up our thoughts become.
With regular mindfulness practice you will after a short time begin to notice your thoughts slowing down.
So why not just spend a few minutes in the Now and switch off from the past and the future and give your mind a break.
There are many ways to be mindful my next blog will cover a few more.
Hi, I want to tell you a story, it may be true it may not but the message is one that I heard a few years ago and is a valuable lesson in life.
The story takes place in a mountain range in Tibet and two monks are making a journey through a flooded valley to get back to their secluded monastery, their normal route has been cut off by a landslide caused by the rains.
The monks belong to a particular strict monastery with strict rules. One of the monks is in his 60s and his companion is just into his 20s. They have been walking for days and the elder Monk suggests they take a rest.
The rains are still falling and he knows that they need to move fast to reach the monastery before they are cut off.
Whilst contemplating the journey ahead the elder Monk hears a women’s voice crying for help.
He stands up and listens and then walks towards the sound much to the disbelief of his younger companion. “Brother you can’t go to the women, you will break our sacred vowels”
He continues walking and ignores the pleas of the younger brother. He arrives at a clearing and in front of him a women is struggling to cross the small stream which is rapidly becoming stronger and stronger due to the torrential rains.
He wades out and without a word scoops the women up and carries her across the stream, sets her down gently smiles warmly and walks off to join his younger brother.
The younger brother is furious “why did you pick her up you know you have broken your sacred vow”.
The elder Monk just smiles at him and walks on. The young Monk doesn’t stop and continues to complain and harass the elder Monk.
Finally he stops and with a warm smile to the younger Monk he says “enough brother, I put that women down hours ago it is you that is still carrying her” and with that he smiled once again and walked off with his companion now silent.
The story has a simple message, we often carry our thoughts around with us untill they weigh us down, sometimes it is just better and easier to just let go.
Calming your anxious mind blog 