Go and hug a tree

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.

Why a random act of kindness goes such a long way

These ambulance training students were hit by a random act of kindness by a kind stranger.

They say that when you perform a random act of kindness you start a ripple of events that changes the world just a little bit, much like if you drop a small pebble into a pond, the ripples will slowly but surely spread out to change the surface of the pond.

Random acts of kindness can have so many invisible effects that you as the giver will never see but the universe will certainly feel. It’s like a disturbance in the force (star wars nerd confession time)

The side effects from doing a kind deed.

Every act of kindness has an affect on the person who does the kindness , it’s known as a helpers high. That lovely feeling of doing something good. When your feeling good it’s impossible to be sad depressed angry or any other negative emotion.

Feeling good creates a tidal wave of chemicals such as Dopamine, a neuro transmitter that makes us feel a sense of pleasure, this is part of your brains reward system, when you do something good it rewards you with the feeling of pleasure. serotonin which is the chemical hormone that controls our mood and sleep appetite and digestion, and most importantly our moods, a lack of serotonin is often responsible for depression, in fact most antidepressants are based on stopping the serotonin inhibitors that stop the release of this vitaly important chemical messenger. People with higher levels of serotonin frequently experience feelings of happiness and well being. Oxytocin also known as the love hormone which helps with relationships and bonding and endorphins these are our bodies natural pain killers. Each and everyone one of is has its own chemical  factory in our brain which releases the feelings we experience.

Imagine just smiling at someone and setting off a chain of bio chemical reactions that will make you feel good. When you are being kind to someone you are also being kind to yourself.

Today someone performed a random act of kindness on my ambulance students today whilst they were training for their blue light driving qualification.

We had parked up in a car park for a quick rest stop and a fabulous young lady gave us two huge Bars of chocolate and said thanks for the great job we are doing.

What an uplift that is, the feeling of gratitude is powerful. It’s makes you feel worthy, needed and respected. My students certainly loved the surprise, was it any coincidence that their driving improved straight after 😃 maybe!

Being kind is one of the best ways to change your mood if it’s in a low state. Just an act of kindness can change both your day and the person who you are kind to, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem.

Think how nice it feels when a complete stranger smiles at you and says good morning, or when your driving and a complete stranger lets you out of a junction, someone opens a door for you , pays you a compliment in fact any act of kindness makes a difference. 

Think back to the last time someone did something kind for you, I bet it gives you a nice warm feeling, you see that act of kindness is still producing ripples just thinking about it.

Being kind is easy, take the plunge, start the ripples. Go out today or start tomorrow and perform just one completly random act of kindness and you have changed the world, one ripple at a time.

Have a kind day

Woody

Comparison the thief of joy.

When I first heard this, I thought little of it, just another quote from a long list of quotes from various people through the ages.

But today something shouted out to me, it said pay attention Woody, and I did, and now I get it. It’s taken me the best part of 50 years to get it and understand where it’s coming from.

You see comparing ourselves to others or comparing what we have to others is never going to be a good idea, is it? It just can’t help us,o and yet we do it with alarming regularity, most likely we don’t even realise we are doing it.

Just an innocent thought about a neighbour’s car or their garden can start the comparison guilt trip journey, it’s a free ticket to self doubt and self esteem and will be calling at all stations along the way including self worth, low confidence and eventually will terminate at depression.

How many times have you compared yourself to someone else, told yourself I can never be as rich or confident or beautiful as that person.

When you are comparing things you are either in the past or the future and always feeling one step down than everyone you are comparing yourself to.

Well guess what those a beautiful confident people you are comparing yourself to are doing the same thing too. Because once you get on the comparison train it’s mighty hard to disembark.

Most of us before we do anything that maybe challenges us or puts us outside our comfort zone , make unwelcome comparisons with someone else.

I will never be as good as so and so, I will never succeed like he or she does, well guess what ? If you keep comparing the things you want to reasons why you can’t have them then you most probably will succeed in not getting what you want.

Comparing starts off with a thought, you have to be thinking about something to make a comparison. What if you could catch that thought before you acted on it.

How different could your life be if you become aware when your thinking when comparing things.

We stop disbelieving our thinking once we become aware of it. I’ve spents years comparing myself, my house, my car, my laptop, my phone to what others have, it has only caused me to feel inadequate or not good enough.

Today my thinking has changed I realise that for every judgemental thought I have I’m applying a new brick to a new barrier, it’s time you took your barriers down and you can make a start by stopping the comparisons in your life, it really is true comparison is the thief of your joy.

Have a great day

Woody

Thinking up a storm.

Many of us are finding times tough at the moment and are really struggling with their thinking whether they know it or not.

Each of us conjours up around 70,000 thoughts a day, most of which are taking place on a subconscious level that we are not aware of.

Every thought has a reaction somewhere in our body. When we become hungry we think of food, when we become tired we subconsciously have thoughts of sleeping which sets off a chain of events that makes us start to yawn and become sleepy.

Most of these subconscious thoughts are just part of inbuilt programmes that we have to allow us to function as human beings.

When we are in so called normal mode and everything is running how it should be in our lives these thoughts are just helping the mind and body to function.

But, when we add stress into our lives these thoughts multiply many times over. I like to use a weather analogy to describe this.

When everything is right in our world we have blue sky, we have clouds of thought that just come and go just as they should do, most of them don’t hang around too long they just, like the clouds dissolve and pass by untill a new one appears. Just like the clouds in the sky we can’t stop them and we can’t control them, they are just a part of us.

But sometimes all is not right in our world and our thoughts come in faster and faster and build up , just like the clouds that grow before a summer storm.

Sometimes our thoughts are coming so fast that we can’t seem to see where we are going , just like a blizzard in the winter , blinding us and leading us down the wrong path.

And if things get really bad we grow tornadoes of thought that spin around in our minds, never allowing to slow down an out of control mind. These are our very worst of times, the times where we have no idea where we are going and what we are doing, we are out of control and our thinking is manic. It is at these times that we turn to drink or drugs or some other addiction that takes is away from it all.

But tornados blizzards and storms never last for ever, they gradually slow down and they slowly fade away, then out of nowhere the blue sky appears and the sun comes out

Just like our thoughts when the mind settles the thoughts slow down and are soon replaced by new thoughts which create new feelings.

The blue sky is always there, but sometimes we just lose sight of it for a while, that’s all.

Take care, untill next time.

Woody

How you become anxious and how to change.

Today’s world is an anxious one for many people. Anxiety is like a virus on a computer. It’s a program that you accidently download that runs silently in the background of your subconscious mind.

It runs on what ever you feed it through your conscious mind. What ever you watch listen and experience feeds your anxiety.

It feeds only on negativity, every negative thing you follow it loves and devours with a hunger. It hates positivity, it hates kindness and gratitude, that’s what makes it sick.

Anxiety is your next thought , your thoughts come from what you feed yourself. If your on a diet of bad news or your follow negative people you will develop bad thinking.

When you allow a diet of negativity to take over, your thoughts change, they tell you that there is no light at the end of the tunnel, they cloud the sky no matter what the weather, the days become darker earlier and earlier.

But what if your next thought was positive, what if you told yourself I can instead of I can’t. What if you said I will instead of I won’t.

This next thought changes everything, it’s not what happens to you that makes you anxious sad depressed or unworthy it’s how you think about the stuff that happens to you that gives you the experience and the feelings.

Most negative thoughts are connected to the past events or perceived future events that have not even happened yet, how crazy is that, that our current life experiences are based on a past that no longer exists and a made up future which hasn’t existed.

Our real experience happens when you are present, when you are aware of NOW.

The average human spends 55% of their time worrying about things that rarely happen. So many of us exist in a world of past experiences often distorted from reality by our brains ability to recall accurately life’s events, or in a future of negative imagination.

Spend time in the present, focus on now, one simple technique is to just relax and observe your breathing, let your breath flow naturally and follow it, this sets you in the present moment. Thoughts will come and go, that’s what they are supposed to do, negative thoughts will come and go too.

One thing for sure is that thoughts are only passing and if you leave them alone they will dissolve and be replaced by new ones.

Thoughts can never hurt you, they often are not based on any truth , your diet of negativity creates negative thinking.

Change your diet and you will start to see your thoughts change, it doesn’t happen overnight but the time you spend in the present the less time you will be spending in a twisted distortion of your past and your future the less anxiety you will grow.

Remember it all starts with one thought in the moment, make your next thought a good one and start the change you wish to see.

Woody

New year new thoughts.

How many of you have made a new resolution, hands up who has broken it already.

What is a new year resolution? Well the simple answer to that is it’s just a new thought that you have had.

Do you know that we average somewhere around 70,000 thoughts a day, but you are only about aware of around 10% of those as a maximum.

So where are all the other 90% of those thoughts and what are they about? They are the thoughts that take place in the subconscious part of your mind.

Well quite simply you never stop thinking, your busy thinking every single minute of every single day. Evening at night time your busy thinking, you may occasionally be woken up by your thinking commonly known as having a nightmare.

Sometimes you may have awoken from a nightmare as if it had actually happened, cold sweats, goosebumps and a feeling of fright and anxiety all reactions to your nightmare.

Nightmares are just thoughts, these thoughts are happening in the subconscious domain of your mind in other words you are unaware of them, but they manifest themselves as feelings and emotions.

Thoughts can often feel so real to us and our brain often mistakes our thoughts for reality. Ever watch a horror movie , one that gets you really scared , your brain reacts as if you are actually there in the movie.

Where do our thoughts come from?

Well nobody can actually answer that with a concrete answer , some of our thoughts are a part of our body’s natural programmes such as hunger, we get a hungry feeling and we think of food or vica versa.

Personally I believe that our thoughts are driven by what we chose to follow and the experiences we have in our lives. The more we experience or follow negative things the more our future thoughts are painted in negativity, the opposite can also occur in that the more we follow positive experiences the more our thoughts both on a conscious and even more importantly subconscious level become trained to become positive.

So moving on to new year’s resolutions, we could all affect our future thoughts if we try to follow positivity. Don’t get stuck on following people’s social media posts that make you feel depressed, chose to follow those who make you feel good. One thing you could start with is to avoid the arguments about Covid, don’t get drawn in to them, everyone has their opinions right or wrong.

Keep positive

Woody

2021 is a time to write your new story.

Time to write your new story

2020 is no more, most of us would want to just forget it and rather wish it had never happened.

Time to start a fresh story in 2021. Let’s imagine that 2021 is a reset button, a chance to start again.

A chance to write a new story with new chapters in your life’s story, become the author of your life.

To write a new story we need a title, well I’m a big star wars fan so let’s call the book 2021 A New Beginning.

Every page is blank in our new book , and let’s imagine the ink is our thoughts. Your thoughts will edit this story.

Each page is decided on by you, not by what happens to you, but by you from the inside.

Each chapter title is a thought, each page is written through your thoughts, each illustration is an image in your mind created by your thinking.

2021 is the time you rewrite your story. Make sure that every page is sprinkled with gratitude, love and kindness and you have the perfect recipe for a great story.

Happy New Year and happy writing

Woody

How our thoughts control our experiences in life.

Most of us believe that our life experience is guided by what happens to us on the outside, in other words things that happen to us. This couldn’t be further than the truth and is a misguided understanding that we take to be true

So what is the truth?

Well the truth is all our experiences actually come from within, it’s not what happens to us it’s how we think about it that makes the experience.

Let me explain it in an easy way. We see a lovely country scene, a beautiful river flowing through the countryside. We take in the weeping willow leaning over the river and we create that experience depending on how we think about it.

We can’t use our senses without having a thought attached to it. We use our eyes to see but what really makes the experience is the thoughts we conjure about what we see.

We use our ears to hear but what makes the experience is what we are thinking about when we listen to something.

Let’s go back to our river bank scene, we think peaceful thoughts that make us feel calm, especially if we have had no bad experiences connected to rivers, but what if we have had a bad experience with a river, let’s say we once came close to drowning in a river years ago. Our thoughts generated are going to be ones of fear anxiety and negativity , this recreating that experience as it was before.

Essentially our present reality is based on our thoughts , we really do experience our thinking.

Once we have this understanding that we are experiencing our thinking about something, we can then come to the realisation that we are actually being frightened by our thoughts. Thoughts are not real.

So what if we could learn to change our thoughts, could that then change our experiences, I strongly believe it does.

Change your thoughts changes your experience which can change your behaviours.

So next time you feel you are having a bad experience check out your thoughts, what are they saying, what are you telling yourself could I change them for different ones?

Showing appreciation no matter what.

It’s hard to be grateful and show appreciation when you are having a tough time.

Yet despite what’s happening to you on the outside by searching for something to appreciate about your situation actually starts to change your perception of the situation and actually changes the situation you experience.

Let’s look at why, because once you have an understanding you can go out and make changes to the way you view aspects of your life.

When we are going through a tough time we don’t naturally look for what’s good in that situation we often are totally biased to see only the bad.

Next time you are in a tough spot in your life have a go at doing this.

Make a list of what is bad about the situation and then once you have done that cross out the things that you can do nothing about, remember you can not control the uncontrollable, it’s impossible. Next thing is to take the rest of the list what is left and try to find some kind of appreciation that you can focus on.

In every situation there will be a positive somewhere, sometimes it’s not visible because it’s hidden behind the negatives.

Listen to your heart.

To open you self up to finding the positives try to focus a few minutes on your breathing and in particular imagine your breathing is flowing straight from your heart and at the same time try to cultivate a feeling of appreciation.

Heart focused breathing often allows us to harness our hearts innate intelligence and allows us to see things from a different point of view.

Give it a try , you may be surprised at how a seemingly desperate situation suddenly appears to have more positives than we at first envisioned.

Have a good day

Woody

Rewinding the past

We spend so much of our present time playing old movies from our head from our past life experiences.

The problem is as time goes on these old movies get distorted and changed, often for the worse.

Our brains have a remarkable ability to store memories but a poor ability to recall them truthfully and accurately.

We keep playing the same old scenes over and over again in our subconscious minds and this affects the experience we are actually having now.

We can stop this at any time once we realise we can play a new movie through new thoughts.

Change your thoughts change the movie and change your life

Have a great day

Woody