the value of therapy

In the unconscious = ruining your life. In the conscious = unlocking your gifts.

Confirmation Bias

Idiots can convince themselves that they are extremely smart and well informed by reading erudite people who agree with their already existing views.

Helping

The best forms of therapy, in my opinion, are the ones where the clients are enabled to have most of the revelations themselves, rather than deferring to the insight of the practitioner for "wow"ing.

From someone who follows my work:

"I am honored to be a husband and the father of two wonderful girls, ages 14 & 4. I work full time while my wife works part-time and grows an online business. We really like your work. Your interview with Bonnie Harris has changed our lives. Thank you! "

Get my FREE CD on improving communication skills: https://beyourselfandloveit.leadpages.co/ultimate-communication-power/

A Touching Testimonial

"I'm very grateful for how things turned out last night. I absolutely enjoyed the conversation and I felt a very strong connection. It amazing to think about that I have known people for decades, and never even been close to anything like this with them.

I also enjoyed going outside, and looking at the stars. It was a great thing to do, which I will certainly remember. Anyway, I would love to talk to you more, and I see it as a great investment.
I`ll initiate the payment now, so please let me know when you have received the payment.

Also, I will be going on a weekend trip leaving tomorrow so I wont be available for another session until next week.

Looking forward to talk to you soon.

And, thanks a lot for your help Antony."

Avoiding Unpleasant Emotions

If you are always trying to avoid unpleasant emotions you will not be an honest person and you will probably not create anything fantastic either. Face up to your anxiety and deal with it now - make it fun! This is what you have to do now if you want to have a fulfilling life in the now to come.

Robin Balsiger: 'How do you mean "Make it fun"? Isn't that just another way of not really facing up to it and trying to make it into something else, because you wanna avoid the unpleasentness?'

 hmmm interesting what I mean is get into the spirit of the challenge , and see looking at your anxiety as part of an adventure of self knowledge. Sometimes when you do great things there are difficulties, but part of what makes those things so great is that the difficulties sharpened you for the challenge. Something like that, it's hard for me to put clearly. Great question!

"I Want to Break Free" - an article by yours truly

My article I Want to Break Free has just been published on Waking Times

Check it out here!

on The Healing Power of Attention

My article The Healing Power of Attention has just been published on Waking Times

Check it out here!

Passive or Aggressive

I know everyone is dysfunctional but I rather begin friendships with people who are the more passive kind that aggressive kind, because I can help them become more assertive, brave and honest, and they see can easily see the benefits.  People who are at the other polarity are less likely to change in my experience because using the hammer seems to "get things done" - they often get what they want from being aggreessive, it's harder to see what they are missing out on, what they are destroying in the process of being aggressive.

Me interviewed by Steven Summerstone on Freedom Words

Discourse on Necessity

 on retreat 01/09/13

There has been a lot of talk in this circle about needyness.

Bu what about needed-ness? Is that not more important? To know that we are needed? 

Perhaps when we reflect upon this a question arises inside us: Do I really need to be needed or do I just think I do? Perhaps I shouldn’t have to feel like I am needed and that is just my insecurity talking or my ego trying to make itself important. 

Perhaps you do not even feel the need to be needed and think me projecting the fruit of my own self-examination onto you.

Needed perhaps comes from the same root as necessary. We love to know that we are needed, because we are. And since we are, better then, that it is necessary for us to be. That we serve some purpose.

The universe, in its perfection, wastes nothing - recycles everything, thus by its very nature all that exists must serve some purpose. To know that we are is in to know that it is necessary for us to be. Should we cease to be necessary then we are surrendered to the oneness of all things, just as leaves become the soil, which becomes the fruit, which becomes the pray, which becomes the predator, and so forth.

A conscious surrender, in eastern traditions, is known as liberation, escape from samsara, or the path to enlightenment.

Should we choose this surrender to a life in service of the whole then even death is welcomed as a gift. We have already surrendered our life and so nothing remains to be taken from us. We are all going to die, and so it is better we learn to welcome it. 

An unconscious surrender is known as samsara, some believe this leads us to be born and reborn again in our habits into the material world of cause and effect, but it can be understood by the skeptic as a lack of willingness to change which leads us to have several similar unpleasant experiences occur and reoccur ad infinatum until we examine ourselves to find the root of the problem.

The practice of self-knowledge reveals to us our qualities, our qualities reveal to us our purpose, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the purposes from which we can choose to serve. Knowing our purpose shows us our value, which satisfies our need to be needed.

Staying Happy

In my time here I have found the most indispensible attribute towards maintaining hapiness in life is a conscious discipline of choosing not to view situations, even adverse ones, as oppositional to us, but instead as opportunities to learn specific skills we have have prescribed for ourselves. This attitude frees us from comparing ourselves to any (impossible to acheive) standards of perfection, but instead as students on our journey to mastery. Our awareness is now freed to view the effects of our actions empirically as we assess "what is happening here? what did I leanr? what would I do next time to acheive better results?" We begin growing into life instead of experiencing it as a never ending serries of challenges that undermine our sense of adequacy.

Excerpt from the self-help book I'm writing

from "The Healthy Emotion Expression Handbook."

Preface

“Healthy Emotional Expression.”

What a wholesome sounding phrase!

We would all want what is healthy for us, of course, and yet embedded in the idea that there is a “healthy” way to express our emotions is also the suggestion that there is also an “unhealthy” way to express them as well.

I imagine that way is something that we’re all very familiar with. We have all been exposed to unhealthy emotional expression at some point, and most of us have been guilty of it ourselves. Shouting, berating others, blaming them for how we feel, making judgments of them, calling them names, being vicious or even violent. These are all tragic ways we try to express hurt feelings in order to encourage others to change their ways, and yet more often than not they do more to harm than to help.

These approaches to self-expression erode the good will within our relationships, and make it less likely for other people to willingly help us meet our goals. Even if we can convince others to do what we want in these ways they are unlikely to do so happily. They may help grudgingly, with lingering feelings of resentment - and resentment is relationship carcinoma.

If we would all want what is healthy for us why would we continue to express ourselves in these unhealthy ways?

For all too many of us these are the only types of emotional expression we have the chance to bear witness to as children, and if we don’t replicate the model for self-expression we inherited we are as likely to: “If that’s what expressing feelings looks like then expressing feelings is not something I want to have any part of at all!”

Some refuse to express their emotions because they perceive it as a weak thing to do! (Nothing could be further from the truth – sometimes it takes extreme strength to express oneself honestly when it seems dreadfully scary to do so!)

Others don’t like expressing themselves honestly because they feel vulnerable, are afraid of intimacy, or within their history expressing how they felt in the ways they knew how scared potential partners or friends away.

In other cases our feelings were invalidated as children. “Don’t get angry.” “Life’s like that, you take the good with the bad, keep your chin up.” Or, “Stop crying, don’t be a baby” (which is the biological equivalent of telling a child not to urinate, because tears clear impurities out of the system.)

Or perhaps the feelings of our primary caregivers took precedence over our own, and our needs were seen as an inconvenience, and so we quickly learned not to feel anything at all!

How then may we have learned to identify what was going on inside us so we could express our preferences in ways which would help others to help us to meet our goals? How could we effectively offer others our willingness to help them meet their goals too, and develop the kind of fulfilling relationships that arise out of reciprocity, mutual trust and respect?

In the worst of circumstances, it holds true that in an abusive situation it is often safer not to feel anything at all than to feel all the effects of our abuse there and then. This is the mind’s defense against hopelessness. It learns to master the emotions by turning them off, and in doing so ensures its safety in the short term.

Sadly though, when we grow older and have the ability to remove ourselves from abusive situations these defense mechanisms do not always deactivate themselves lightly.

It seems all too true that if we were not shown a model of healthy emotional expression to follow then it is something we need to learn of our own volition, as adults, in the same way that were we not exposed to French as children it is something we would need to take it upon ourselves to learn.

Often our feelings are there to keep us safe, to teach us what we want out of life and about the way we think, to warn us away from those who might harm us, and draw us towards those who are nurturing and make our lives wonderful.

We are better not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. This book forms a concise guide on how to use your emotions rather than let them use you.