writing – Grow Mindfulness

Writing for Authenticity

Jeff Brown, author and self-transformation expert, places considerable emphasis on authenticity in his writing, his public speaking and his personal life. He regularly identifies ways to develop authenticity and, in particular, explains why he values writing as a pathway to authenticity. He notes that through writing, he came to identify his life’s purpose and realise his goal of using writing for authentic expression of who he is and how he is evolving.

Jeff suggests that one of the greatest challenges to authenticity is to be able to savour the wins of others, especially in a competitive environment. I still find this challenging when playing social tennis although I attempt to approach the game in an authentic way – being conscious of my intent in playing, managing my emotional response to expectations (my own and that of others), exploring my blindspots and managing my mistakes and related responses.

Authenticity can impact every aspect of our lives including our work effectiveness, our relationships and our mental wellbeing. Jeff strongly advocates writing as a way to achieve authentic self-expression and provides his Writing Your Way Home Course as a means to assist people to find their authentic selves. He suggests that not only does writing develop our own wellbeing but impacts the reader in a positive way. By being open to who we really are and expressing that honestly in writing we can enable others to achieve personal insight and growth.

Writing authentically

Jeff’s online writing course is very much about how to write authentically. He argues, for example, that we cannot find our authentic voice by slavishly following a formula for writing that entails only rules and related structure. He suggests that to write from the heart and access the heart’s intelligence, we need to go beyond our thinking and rational design processes to access our deeper selves. In particular, he argues for bringing our bodies into the writing process.

Jeff maintains that “our emotions, feelings, memories” live within our body – a point that is reinforced recently by research on trauma, its bodily impacts and effective healing processes. He argues that if we are “disconnected from our body”, our writing will be “stagnant” and “fragmented”, reflecting our lack of integration with our bodies – our storehouse of emotions.

Embodiment in writing, for Jeff, involves among other things movement (walking, riding, jogging) and modalities that release stored tension in our body such as yoga, Tai Chi and massage. He suggests that trying different massage modalities can help us to identify what works for us and gives us the greatest, unimpeded access to our creativity and authentic self-expression. He found that yoga classes helped his writing, especially where he was free to write notes as ideas, memories and emotions surfaced.

I have found that singing in a group is a great way to release stored emotions and I have often observed participants in Chris James’ workshops on Discover Your Natural Voice spontaneously outpouring their repressed emotions. Chris, like Jeff, is a strong advocate for authenticity in expression and works to help people find their natural speaking and singing voice that is a “unique and true expression of themselves”.

Reflection

I enrolled in Jeff’s writing course following his presentation on The Power of Authenticity at the 2022 Surrender Summit. My goal is to write a memoir as a means of self-exploration and to acknowledge the contribution of many people in my life who have helped shape who I am and what I have been able to achieve. In line with Jeff’s recommendations, I have been using walking, tennis, meditation and Tai Chi as ways to release tension and stimulate creativity and authenticity. I’m finding that memories are flooding in and I have adopted another practice that Jeff recommends – have a notebook handy to capture recollections. I have also been engaging in some “brain dumps” to organise my thoughts and recollections. I can relate to Maggie’s comments in Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down, “It’s all very telescoped in my memory”, even though at the time it seemed “interminable”. For example, I can recall that I lived in five houses in Taringa, Brisbane (all within four blocks of each other) and yet I can only bring three into visual focus at this time.

Stephanie Domet, creator of the Mindful Writing Course, suggests that if you become too focused on the outcome of writing (e.g. a novel or memoir), you can experience writer’s block and be unable to unleash your creativity, develop deep insight or be in-the-flow when writing. She places a lot of emphasis on the process of writing and the related experience of joy and “calm presence”. For her, the real outcome is the change in the writer themselves as a result of “showing up for your writing”. Stephanie maintains that focused writing can be a pathway to mindfulness and offers a series of exercises to get in touch with your body through your senses.

Another source of writer’s block is the expectation of producing something very special in the eyes of others. To address this issue, Jeff quotes a poem by Susan Frybort, Empathy, which is part of a collection of poems called, Hope is a Traveler. In the poem, Susan emphasises her “ordinariness” and stresses that “truthful writing” enables others to get in touch with “shared human experience” – the experience of pain and hurt. She maintains that what is good enough for her in terms of outcomes of her writing is that she can “extend and touch another soul with all that is in me now”.

As we grow in mindfulness through mindful writing, reflection and other mindfulness practices, we can gain increased self-awareness, insight, creativity and the courage to be truthful in our writing.

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Image by mel_88 from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Life Shaping Events and People: Finding Our Way Home

In an earlier post, I explored the concept of authenticity and ways to develop it – after listening to a presentation by Jeff Brown at the Surrender Summit. This exposure to Jeff and his thinking stimulated my reading of his early book, Soulshaping, A Journey of Self-Creation – a revealing memoir that tracks his outer and inner journey. As a result of the heartfelt responses to this book, Jeff came to understand that he was not alone in experiencing life’s challenges and exploring the inner journey to seek out peace, happiness and fulfillment. He comments that he came to realise that “so many of us have walked the same trauma trails and endured hardships”.

Jeff contends that his disenchantment with his early adult life was a result of following the “false-path”, instead of the “true-path” – alignment with his unique, profound life purpose. He points out that the world we live in values external achievements not inner progress and constantly distracts us from our life purpose with false rewards and endless enticements designed to capture our attention and cultivate our obsessions.

His personal story captured in Soulshaping describes how he started on his journey to authenticity by listening to his “inner voice” (which he calls “Little Missy”) and exploring his true-path with its multiple challenges and turning points. He argues that the inner voice is “the little voice that knows”, is persistent and unrelenting and contains what he describes as “the karmic blueprint for our destiny”. The challenge is to allow this inner voice to reach our consciousness and influence our words and actions and, ultimately, shape our life choices.

However, the journey to authenticity – alignment with our life purpose – requires what Jeff describes as “gut wrenching, self-admission” because it is only when we expose what is really inside of us that we are able to “liberate our own voice”. Admitting “who we are”, and not persisting with our social disguises (the face we present to the world), is essential for our liberation to a life of joy, profound realisation of our connectedness and experience of the well of ease with its inherent peace and tranquility – a stark contrast to the hurly-burly world we normally inhabit with its unceasing expectations.

Writing our way to our inner home

Jeff suggests that one way to access our true-path and the attendant inner sense of contentment and aliveness, is to begin writing to remove our “emotional debris” and uncover our inner voice. To this end, I have enrolled in his online writing course, Writing Your Way Home, and I have set out on my own writing journey while concurrently exploring Jeff’s journey through reading Soulshaping and his latter book, Grounded Spirituality. My core writing project will be a reflective memoir focused on acknowledging the people who have shaped, or are shaping, my life.

In a moment of synchronicity, I recently listened to an interview with Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, as he was discussing the fact that his life at the time involved parallel endeavours – his writings on emotional and social intelligence and his exploration of meditation through research and long-standing meditation practice. He disclosed that he was pursuing these endeavours on two fronts simultaneously by writing another book about emotional intelligence and writing what he called a “spiritual memoir”. He indicated that this latter inner journey was about the people who influenced him over his life and enabled him to be the person he is (and the person he is becoming). Daniel indicated that he was thoroughly enjoying his memoir endeavour and that he was initially writing it for himself, not necessarily for publication.

Jeff indicated that we each have events and interactions with people in our life that shape us and our way of life. Sometimes these events are traumatic and/or the people we encounter seek to turn us from our path through belittlement, envy or active discouragement. Others seek to support us to be the best we can be and assist us to explore, and stay on, our true path. As we are often reminded, “it is not what we experience in life (including traumas) that matters, but how we respond to life shaping events and people”. In reading about Jeff’s “journey into self-creation”, I came to see some parallels in my life with events and people that were life shaping for him.

Life shaping events and people

Jeff describes a number of key events and people who influenced the direction of his life and his pursuit of a writing path as a manifestation of his profound life purpose. As I read about his life, I experienced flashbacks to my own life as well as an intense motivation to begin writing my reflective memoir. I am strongly convinced that the simultaneous pursuit of his writing course and his life story will provide the fuel to energise my memoir writing and help to sustain me in this endeavour. Already, I have found the following parallels in life shaping events and people:

Adverse childhood experiences

In common with Jeff (and many other people), I had a number of adverse childhood experiences. Jeff describes having a father who wished Jeff had not been born (he wanted a girl, not a boy) and who was violent and abusive towards him, always seeking to diminish him and his achievements. He also had a mother who lived a life of “poverty trauma” and resorted to a world of fantasy as a way to cope with life’s harshness. She “closed her heart” to protect herself. Jeff experienced a life that was tumultuous and destructive as a result of the overflow of his parents’ challenging emotions and the constant state of conflict between them.

I had a similar upbringing with an alcoholic father who was suffering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of his imprisonment for three years in the Changi Prisoner of War Camp. He sought to drown his pain through alcohol and, while not physically abusive towards me, he would physically attack my mother and, on at least one occasion, put her in hospital with broken ribs. I can relate strongly to what Jeff describes as the verbal assaults of his mother which drove his father “deeper into darkness”. I can hear my mother berating my father about his drinking and wasting our family income, and the resultant shouting and escalating conflict. None of us, including my father who had no psychological or government support (apart from a miserly pension), had any idea of the impact of PTSD on a person’s life and family.

In contrast to Jeff’s mother, my mother lived in the real world but experienced a life punctuated by illness and grief (her four month old son died of a brain tumour when I was 4 years old). She found her life purpose in raising her other five children, including me, and continually sacrificed herself for our physical, emotional and intellectual welfare (professional support for our emotional welfare was unachievable). She worked endlessly at the local Woolworths to sustain us and provide for our private school education. She had high hopes for each of us and encouraged us in whatever we wanted to pursue in our sport, study or work. Unlike Jeff’s mother, she opened her heart to anyone in need and, in turn, accepted food packages from Vinnies to enable us to live from week to week.

Career misfit

Jeff describes his very successful entry into a high powered career as a defence lawyer. It was only as his Bar Admission Exams approached that he began to have doubts about whether this was a false path or a true path for him even though it involved the defence of innocent people who had been subjected to a miscarriage of justice. His inner voice (Little Missy) created some cognitive dissonance for him by suggesting that he was only pursuing the external accoutrements of being a lawyer – fame, visibility, high income and social standing. Ironically, it was when he was trying on a new suit for Court appearances (a clothing accoutrement) that he heard that persistent inner voice yet again, “Who are you, really?”

He arrived at a crossroads when he was due to sign a lease for a legal office to share with potential law partners. At the time, he was pulled by the Warrior in him and his survival instinct to sign up to an externally rewarding life as a defence lawyer in partnership with supportive colleagues. He described this period of sleeplessness, agitation and hellish indecision as being caught “between direction and exploration”, where he was unable to surrender to the joy of the unknown nor to experience the relief and certainty that came from “knowing where I am headed”. It was when he was in Santorini in Greece that he began to write a journal which led ultimately to his “calling” and true path of being a writer. He refused to sign the lease because his life as a defence lawyer seemed to him to be “living in disguise”, not living his real, unique self.

Immediately after I finished high school, I entered a novitiate in Sydney (about 1,000 kilometres from my home in Brisbane) and became an inductee into the life of Catholic priesthood as a contemplative monk. After completing my first year and confirmation in the religious Order, I moved to Whitefriars Seminary in Melbourne (a further 800 kilometres from home) to complete my studies and training before ordination. However, after four years there, I decided that this was not the career for me and returned home with $100 and the suit on my back. I had previously committed to vows of poverty, chastity and obedience as part of my confirmation. The decision to leave required formal approval from Rome to release me from my vows.

While I was studying in Melbourne, I consistently scored 90% in the annual oral exams for my various studies in philosophy and theology. It was suggested that I was earmarked to complete a doctorate in theology in Rome because of my academic ability and “model” behaviour as a monk dedicated to daily silence, meditation and study. However, I suffered from severe migraines and constant anxiety about my home situation where the conflict and domestic violence was relentless. I came to think that I had undertaken the vocation as a priest as an escape from my distressful home situation and to win the approval of my mother who was very religious. In some sense I was living my mother’s desire for my career – which filled a deep-seated need on her part. Like Jeff, I was torn between “direction and exploration”.

I had all the accoutrements of success – a sense of doing something worthwhile, high standing in the community and amongst my tutors and colleagues, a very balanced lifestyle and enjoyment of the journey. However, my inner voice caused me to be dissatisfied and I left the Order as I approached ordination as a priest. I had experienced an overwhelming sense of responsibility to the community generally and to my parents in particular. As it turned out, sometime after I returned home, I took my mother away from my father for her own safety (but this is another story). Both my parents blossomed when they were separated and I went on to pursue marriage and a career in the public service.

Reflection

Jeff recalls that as he set out to write a book that “talked about spirituality through the vehicle of my own journey”, he became caught up in self-deprecation. He was “riddled with shame and doubt”, questioning whether anyone would want to read about his “miserable journey”. While he recognised that the process of exploring his historical inner landscape through writing was therapeutic for himself, he doubted whether anyone else would benefit from it. His experience after publishing his book certainly put paid to these doubts about the beneficial effects of his writing for others who read his Soulshaping book.

Jeff encourages each of us to explore our life story and share it with others. His writing course provides the psychological support and technical knowhow, including insights into how to get published. He offers Soulshaping as a flexible template to assist us on our writing journey. His hope is that some of the themes he has written about will resonate with the reader/writer and provide the encouragement to follow our own true path.

Like Jeff, I have had considerable self-doubts about the benefit of writing my own memoir. However, I am encouraged by his experience and support and the resonance I have already experienced with some of the themes in his recorded journey. I am continuously flooded with recollections, insights and ideas now that I have chosen my reflective memoir as my core writing project. I am excited by the prospect of researching aspects of my life and recording my growing self-awareness. I am also flooded with feelings of gratitude towards the people who have helped shape and enrich my life. I can already envision my memoir as an e-book, illustrated with historical images from significant events in my life.

As I continue to grow in mindfulness through my regular practice of meditation, Tai Chi and reflection (including writing this blog), I look forward to exploring further my inner landscape, gaining in self-awareness and emotional regulation and experiencing the joy of creative writing grounded in lived experience.

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Image by Robert C from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

How to Develop Authenticity

Jeff Brown spoke recently at the Surrender Summit on the topic, The Power of Authenticity. Jeff is an author, expert in personal transformation and a lifetime seeker of his own authenticity. He does not only talk about authenticity; he pursues it relentlessly and tirelessly in his own life and work. Jeff experienced adverse childhood experiences but has explored his inner landscape mainly through writing to enable him to take his place in the world and to pursue his unfolding life purpose. He maintains that writing is therapeutic and a tool for developing authenticity.

To this end, Jeff has created his online writing course to make his personal lessons and insights available to anyone. The course, Writing Your Way Home: Answering the Soul’s Call, is available as a six-week audio course that incorporates inspiration and encouragement along with practical writing and publishing tips. Jeff describes this course and its intent to help the participant find their “deepest and truest expression” in his short video where he encourages others to undertake the “transformative journey” of writing.

In his book, Love it Forward, he recounts how he had a turning point in his life when he stopped to give some money to a homeless person in the street. He realised that this was a token action so he found out the contact details of the homeless person involved and arranged to send payments to him each week. This felt more authentic and heartfelt

In an earlier book, Soulshaping: A Journey of Self-Creation, he explored the traumas and successes of his life in search of his inner authenticity – what he describes as alignment with his “soul purpose”. He was able to set aside external achievements such as becoming a criminal lawyer and move towards his life calling as a writer. He established the Soulshaping Institute: A Center for Authentic Transformation to assist others to make this personal journey to authenticity – to identify and pursue their life purpose.

Ways to develop authenticity

In Love it Forward, Jeff provides a series of quotes and insights into what authenticity means in daily life. His book is a call to authenticity through overcoming any “emotional debris” and setting out on the path to our “soul purpose”. His written words identify ways to be authentic in our actions and interactions:

Learn to live in the present moment – not the future or the past
Have the courage to break the hold of our “comfort zone” which prevents us from realising our true potential – we tend to avoid new beginnings for fear of the pain of endings
Avoid connecting with people who diminish us, distract us from our path, or try to dissuade us from realizing our potential
Savour life, love, breathing, being-in-relationship, and the ability to see, talk, walk and run
Acknowledge that giving in service to others is reciprocal – they are giving in return by accepting our generosity and enabling us to honour our life purpose (it is not a one-way street)
Accept that chaos precedes clarity and that without confusion there is no movement forward beyond the present understanding
Recognize that when we actualize our gifts to serve others in need, we are paying-it-forward and backward (to the people before us who have not had the skills or opportunity to serve others or those who come behind who can walk in our footsteps).
Don’t take things personally – create a mental boundary between ourselves and the behaviour of others (it is not about us)
Let love blossom as we age – open our heart to everything and everyone (we will no longer have time for avoidance or envy).
Express gratitude for our mentors and elders who have helped us realize our potential and our calling
Acknowledge that sometimes people have to experience and express victimhood to be able to move to well-being
Develop a self-care plan that acknowledges our intrinsic value and worth
Measure our success not in terms of externalities but inner victories over unresolved traumas and our “inner critic”
Treat negative self-talk as a culturally-induced, false story
Maintain a vision of our purpose and its realisation so that we actualize it “when the time is right”
Value the success of others (avoid envy of other’s achievements).

Reflection

Jeff reinforces the fact that personal transformation cannot be rushed and that the journey to authenticity is paved with setbacks (lows), as well as joy (highs). There is excitement and exhilaration in the journey of unfolding and realizing our uniqueness and potential.

Meditation and other practices can enable us to grow in mindfulness, be fully present and have the courage and resilience to embark on our own journey to authenticity.

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Image by Ke Hugo from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Finding Your Life Purpose

In his book, The Human Quest for Meaning, Paul Wong maintains that finding a unique purpose that transcends yourself and realises your full potential as one of the pillars of a meaningful life. Identifying and pursuing your life purpose is a key ingredient to experiencing happiness in your life. People often experience dissatisfaction and unhappiness if they are not able to use their core skills, knowledge, and experience in the pursuit of something that is meaningful and transcends themselves. Each of us is attempting to create a meaningful story for our life that is not constrained by limiting, negative self-talk.

There are many pathways to identifying and pursuing your life purpose and each of us has to find our own path. For some, the catalyst for finding their life purpose is a life crisis experienced by themselves, e.g., a life-threatening illness or major job loss; for others, the catalyst can be observing others experiencing extreme or destitute conditions. Some people consciously pursue their life purpose through meditation and mindfulness practices and find the strength and sensitivity to pursue their life purpose.

Discovering and pursuing life purpose through nature

Ruth Allen, author of Grounded: How Connection with Nature can Improve Our Mental and Physical Wellbeing, tells the story of how she was totally absorbed by nature as a child and loved being amongst trees and wildlife. Motivated by this love of nature, she decided to complete a degree in geology and undertake related PhD research. However, she found that she ended up further and further away from nature as she pursued her research and work in a laboratory studying tiny samples through a microscope.

Ruth lost the sense of the expansiveness and the interconnectedness of nature and her own connection with it. She decided that to identify her true purpose in life, she had to get back into nature which she did over a number of years in forests and the wild. She had lost her way and sought to rebalance her life through her immersion in nature. She eventually discovered her life purpose as a counsellor and eco-psychotherapist helping other people to regain balance in their life through connection with nature. She is able to use eco-therapies in her outdoor practice and to motivate others to connect to nature through her speaking, writing and adventure modelling.

Discovering and pursuing life purpose through meditation and chanting

Tina Turner tells the story of how she overcame the various traumas in her life through meditation and chanting. She felt totally disillusioned with life and distressed by her abusive relationship. By persistent, daily practice of Buddhist meditation and chanting, she was able to find the energy, insight, and courage to pursue her life purpose as a singer who moved people and a social activist through her work as co-founder and contributor to the Beyond Music Project which seeks to develop connectedness and unity through the celebration of cultural diversity. Despite her adversity, she was able to develop resilience and happiness in pursuit of a meaningful and rewarding life.

Motivated to a life of compassionate action after observing the desperate plight of other people

There are numerous instances where people have discovered their life purpose by observing the destitution, desperation, or debilitating life of others. Here are some examples:

Nicolle Edwards and husband Gareth set up the domestic violence support service RizeUp Australia when they observed the plight of women fleeing domestic violence with their children. Their focus is on providing the set-up requirements for emergency housing and they have established the charity to gather donations (money and furniture) to support their work in helping domestic violence victims transition into a different housing environment. They have been surprised by the level of support that they have been able to muster through unified action in pursuit of what has become their life purpose.
Isabel Allende, in her recent book The Soul of a Woman, recounts how through her research of violence against women (including a visit to a small community of women in Kenya whose lives had been devastated by war and AIDS), she was moved to establish the Isabelle Allende Foundation whose mission is to empower women to “to secure reproductive rights, economic independence and freedom from violence”. Isabel’s poignant and soul-searching memoir, Paula, written during her daughter’s fatal, porphyria-induced coma was an outstanding success and generated the income which Isabel used to create the Foundation. She sees her life purpose as enabling women to be safe, valued and loved and to have empowerment through control over their own bodies and personal resources. Isabel pursues her life purpose through her Foundation and her writing – she has written 26 books selling over 74 million copies.
Olga Murray, a highly successful and widely respected lawyer, was moved by the impoverishment of children in Nepal when she visited Kathmandu and observed their destitute conditions, including young girls being sold into slavery and prostitution during a Festival. She established the Nepal Youth Foundation in 1990 to provide children who were the most impoverished with “education, housing, medical care and human rights.” She has continued to work to support the Foundation in her 90’s and the Foundation continues to save girls from slavery through their “indentured daughters” program.
Goldie Hawn, through her own experience of panic attacks as a child, developed a very strong empathy for children suffering unhappiness and depression through mental illness. She had used meditation throughout her own life to develop self-awareness and manage her own emotional stress and she became acutely aware of how mindfulness enables children to manage the stresses of their lives. This led her to establish the Goldie Hawn Foundation which developed the MindUP program which employs educational programs to facilitate the well-being of children. The programs for both children and teachers are soundly based on “neuroscience, mindfulness awareness, positive psychology and social-emotional learning (SEL)”.

Reflection

Many things can be a catalyst for discovering our life purpose and providing the energy and motivation to pursue it with courage and focused action. As we grow in mindfulness through meditation, mindfulness practices and reflection on our life experiences, we can develop the insight to identify our unique purpose and the resilience to pursue it through compassionate action.

Hugh Van Cuylenburg developed the GEM pathway to happiness and resilience – gratitude, empathy, mindfulness – after a visit to a poor village in India. He now pursues his life purpose as a motivational speaker and writer working with multiple organisations, including elite sport’s teams.

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Image by Vikramjit Kakati from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group, and the resources to support the blog.

Silence and Connection: Finding Peace in a Turbulent World

Last night I had the privilege of accompanying my wife to a fund-raising event at Stepping Stone Clubhouse in Brisbane – an organisation dedicated to enabling people with mental illness to rebuild and enrich their lives. The speaker for the night’s event was Trent Dalton, author of two recent books that were the focus of his discussion. Trent has become a best-selling author as a result of the first of the two books, The Boy Who Swallowed the Universe which features two boys who experience the darkness of adverse childhood experiences. The second book he spoke energetically about is his recently released novel, All Our Shimmering Skies – two girls experiencing trauma feature prominently in this book which is also an expression of hope, of wonder and life’s endless mysteries and miracles.

Life beyond trauma

Trent had many adverse childhood experiences and related trauma – including an alcoholic father, heroin-addicted mother, heroin dealer stepfather and a criminal baby sitter. His two novels then are part autobiographical, part fiction and part fantasy (“gifts dropping from the sky”). His two daughters had questioned him as to why he wrote the first of the two books with boys as the focal characters when he in fact had two daughters. So, two girls featured in the Shimmering Skies novel.

Trent mentioned that even though the books begin with darkness in the characters’ lives, they end with hope and wonder. He wanted to inspire his daughters to be strong and resilient despite what life brings in the way of obstacles and adversity. He also wanted them to believe in hope and a life beyond trauma as reflected in his own life – now as a multiple award-winning author who is internationally recognised for his writing craft and storytelling.

Finding peace in silence and connection

Trent spoke of his close connection to place and nature. His home suburb, Brisbane’s western suburb of Darra, features strongly in his writing as does Darwin which he visited a number of times, mainly on assignment as a journalist. He described with a sense of awe the natural beauty experienced during a guided walk through Litchfield National Park in the Northern Territory of Australia. His closeness to nature is reflected in his wonder at even the smallest living creatures.

His connection to family and friends provided a very real grounding and enabled him to rest in the strength of these relationships. Of particular note is his comment about how one of his daughters brought him very much “back to earth” after a whirlwind tour following his highly successful book, The Boy Who Swallowed the Universe. At one stage when he was at home and dropping naturally into his effervescent storytelling mode, his 11 year daughter said something to the effect, “You don’t have to impress us now – you just have to be Dad to us.”

Trent’s Shimmering Skies novel captures something of the stillness and reflection he experienced observing the night sky through his window in Darwin or from his writer’s den in Brisbane. His valuing of silence and stillness is reflected in his comment on Christine Jackman’s novel, Turning Down the Noise: The Quiet Power of Silence in a Busy World:

…a deeply personal assignment: treading bravely, beautifully into the wonder of silence.

Christine reminds us that life is full of noise, distraction and setbacks and yet there exists the wonder of stillness and silence – the unnameable space in which one was free to think and breathe and simply be. We just have to learn ways to access the silence in our lives – something I experienced at 5 am this morning when I walked along the Manly Esplanade in Brisbane as the sun rose and reflected on the shimmering water of the marina.

Reflection

Trent was able to inhabit the wounds of his trauma by revisiting his adverse childhood experiences through the key characters in his two books. In discussing his books and his life, he was able to be completely transparent and honest about his background, his challenges, and his small triumphs. This openness and curiosity about life are hallmarks of mindful living. By growing in mindfulness through reflection, writing and wonder, he could appreciate his connection to everything and his close relationships which are so central to his life and work.

I find it humbling and a source of gratitude that I personally was able to live a life of silence and contemplation for five years after leaving home and traumatic circumstances. I have lived through many adverse childhood experiences in my early childhood and traumatic events later in life. I found solace and peace in stillness and silence.

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Image by Ron Passfield – Sunrise at Manly Esplanade

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Discipline Creates Freedom and Success

Koya Webb, in her recent presentation at the You Can Heal Your Life Summit, spoke passionately about how discipline creates freedom and success. She made the point that discipline underpinned her success as a college track star and more recently as a celebrated holistic health healer and yoga instructor. Koya sustained two serious injuries that shattered her dream of becoming an Olympic track and field competitor. It was a breathing meditation incorporated in yoga practice that enabled her to recover from the dark hole of depression after her injury and go on to establish a highly successful career as a globally recognised yoga teacher. Koya has recently published her book, Let Your Fears Make You Fierce.

Koya maintained that discipline incorporating mindfulness practices leads to freedom because it releases you from negative self-talk and fear that depletes your energy and power and enables you to create the life you want and to make a difference in the world. She recommends a daily routine incorporating mindfulness practices in the morning and at lunch time. Koya suggests starting your morning practice before you become lost in, and stressed by, your email, text messages or your news channel. I have found this approach essential to sustain my daily practice of researching and writing this blog. Koya’s suggestion concerning a lunch-time daily practice is designed to break down the accumulated stress of the morning.

A daily routine of mindfulness practices

Koya described her daily routine that incorporated several mindfulness practices. Her recommendation is to develop your own rituals to create a daily routine that suits your preferences but engages your body and mind to reinforce your mind-body connection and tap into your life force. Some of the elements that make up Koya’s routine are as follows:

Breathing meditation – Koya begins each day with several breathing meditations, some involving slow, deep breathing, while others require quick, sharp exhalations. These breathing exercises clear away fear and anxiety if you envision the outbreath releasing you from their hold. The in-breath is envisaged as drawing in energy and power.
Movement – yoga is Koya’s preferred choice of movement; other people may prefer Tai Chi or similar meditation-in-motion practice. Her YouTube© channel provides videos offering training in several yoga poses for different levels of practitioners, along with inspirational videos on holistic health practices.
Connect to nature – there are numerous ways to connect to nature and enjoy its energising and healing benefits. For example, you can be mindful of the breeze, cloud formations, the movement of birds and butterflies and the sight of rivers, oceans or mountains.
Visualisation – the focus here is to visualise a positive, ideal future to replace negative perceptions about the past or present or a fearful future.
Writing a gratitude journal – gratitude has numerous healing benefits and serves to replace fear with hope, envy with appreciation and apathy with energy. It also blocks out negative self-evaluations and diminishing judgments about self-worth. Writing itself reinforces and deepens insight, leading to growth and development.

Koya maintains that the discipline of a daily routine incorporating mindfulness practices enables you to set up your day so that it works for you, not against you. She argues that if you establish a daily ritual for your mindfulness practice you will “put yourself in a higher state of vibration”, your energy will flow more fully, freed from the blockages of fear and anxiety.

Reflection

The discipline of daily practice is difficult, but the rewards are great. It requires forgoing some things and making space in our lives to enrich it in a holistic way. As we grow in mindfulness through these diverse mindfulness practices and the discipline of a daily ritual, we can restore our energy and motivation and experience freedom and success.

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Image by NickyPe from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Bringing Mindfulness to Your Motivations and Intentions

Diana Winston recently offered a meditation on the topic of mindfulness and intentions. Diana is Director of Mindfulness Education at MARC, UCLA and the meditation was part of the weekly meditation podcasts offered by the Center. The podcasts are accessible from the MARC website or via the UCLA Mindful App.

Diana explained that an integral part of mindfulness is curiosity about our self, what we do and why we do it. Many times, our intentions are not conscious – our thoughts and behaviour are often the result of habituated patterns. We might sometimes do things because we think it is the “right thing to do” or because “others are doing it”. As Diana points out, our motivations and intentions are often very complex, mixed in nature and not easily untangled. She offers a guided meditation to unpack these motivations and, in particular, to explore the question, “Why do we meditate?” If we are clear about the benefits that accrue for meditation practice, we are more likely to sustain the habit of meditating. I find, for example, that clarity about my motivations is a key strategy for enabling me to sustain my practice of Tai Chi and writing this blog.

Meditation on intentions

Diana provides a meditation on intentions that has four key phases:

Body scan – you begin by undertaking a comprehensive body scan, starting with the sensation of your feet on the floor and moving through your whole body. I find that a body scan is easier to do if you are following the instruction of another person rather than if you try to do it under “your own steam”.
Exploring why you meditate – what is it that keeps you going with meditation? What are the benefits that you experience? The clearer you can be about the personal benefits for you – the intentions that shape your habit – the more likely you are to sustain the practice through difficult times or when you are time-poor.
Grounding through your anchor – revisiting your personal anchor can help you to maintain your focus when negative thoughts or other distractions take your attention. Your anchor can be your breath, focusing on sounds in the room (such as room tone), or getting in touch with a sensation in your body, e.g. the tingling when your fingers touch (my favourite).
Exploring why you do other activities – now you shift your attention to something else in your life to focus on your intention in doing that activity. You can focus on a major activity that you regularly undertake and ask the fundamental question, “What am I doing this for?” Alternatively, you can focus on a less significant activity that you want to gain some clarity about – it might be a commitment or task that you no longer want to undertake but continue to do so. Diana cautions not to let yourself become frazzled if you cannot immediately find a focus for this phase of the meditation – you can always revisit the meditation at another time. She also suggests that a few deep breaths taken during this part of the exercise can be helpful for finding and sustaining your focus.

Motivation for meditation

When I undertook this meditation, I was pleased that I was able to clarify and strengthen my motivation for persisting with regular meditation practice. I was able to identify the following intentions behind my practice (you may have very different intentions based on your own life experience):

Achieving calm – this is a key aspect of my intentions in meditation practice. I find that calmness enables me to deal with the stresses of life and the inevitable traumas that I experience. At the end of a recent workshop that I was co-facilitating, a participant came up to me and thanked me for my “calmness and creating a calming atmosphere”.
Developing creativity – meditating releases my capacity to be creative in my writing and in designing and facilitating workshops for managers and leaders.
Dealing with difficult emotions – there are several meditations that focus specifically on difficult emotions such as resentment or anger. These meditations help me to temper the emotion and contribute to restoring my equilibrium.
Reducing reactivity – there are so many things in life that can trigger a reaction, e.g. traffic jams, and I can become less reactive through my meditation practice (especially targeted mediations such as “You are traffic too” and “When you are waiting, have awareness as your default, not your phone”). Now in traffic delays, I am able to revert to my anchor, fingers touching, to remain calm and increase my awareness.
Improving relationships – meditation helps me to be more conscious of my thoughts and emotions in any interaction and assists me to be sufficiently present to actively listen to others I interact with, especially in close relationships (even if I don’t achieve this very well in a particular interaction, my awareness and reflection help me to resolve to do better the next time). Awareness of my own thoughts and emotions improves my capacity to understand the dynamics occurring in my training groups.
Health and healing – meditations focused on nature support my emotional stability and contribute to my overall wellness.

Reflection

As we grow in mindfulness through meditation and reflection, we can develop greater clarity about the intentions behind our meditation practice and other significant activities in our life, sustain our motivation and enjoy the benefits that accrue both to ourselves and others we interact with. We can begin to more fully realise the benefits of increasing inner and outer awareness. Meditation focused on our motivations and intentions can help us to make explicit the implicit motivation behind our actions and, in the process, to strengthen our motivation.

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Image by Alexas_Fotos from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Sustaining the Momentum of Writing Your Blog

When I set out to write my blog on mindfulness, I intended to publish daily. I was able to maintain this for 3 months. However, the cost in terms of the impact on my other work and family life was increasingly high. When I explained to my friend and mentor, Bob Dick, that daily publishing was becoming onerous, he suggested that I aim to publish only three or four times a week. He indicated that this would not affect my Google search results – and this has proven correct.

Publishing three or four times a week has freed me up to do other things, including my workshops, and enabled me to develop a pattern of research and writing that seems to work for me. So, on the alternate days when I am not publishing, I identify a topic to write about and do the requisite research. I am often able to create a first draft from this research so that when the publishing day arrives, I have a topic and some ideas recorded as an early draft. I have also established the practice of doing my research and writing at a set time, usually early in the morning before I become embroiled in other commitments.

This process has enabled me to sustain my blog writing, freed up time for other things, and facilitated my own meditation practice. For example, I am often able to undertake a meditation practice before I write it up or explain its nature and effectiveness. The downside of my current schedule is that the regularity of the blog writing has impacted my practice of Tai Chi which I used to do daily. The solution may be to undertake the Tai Chi on alternate days also.

What I find that really helps me to sustain my motivation and effort in writing the blog, is to spell out what the benefits of my writing are for my readers and myself.

Being clear about the benefits of writing your blog

My intention in writing the blog is to provide the following benefits to readers of my blog and acknowledged mindfulness practitioners:

Raise awareness of the resources on mindfulness (free and paid) that are available
Provide inspiration and hope through the stories of those who have successfully overcome life challenges and difficulties
Offer mindfulness practices that can help to ease the pain and suffering of depression, anxiety, chronic pain and other challenging life situations
Provide resources to help people deal with difficult emotions such as resentment and anger
Help more people to become aware of the benefits of mindfulness
Assist in the promotion and development of mindful leadership
Promote the writing, work and practice of genuine mindfulness practitioners
Share the relevant findings from the latest neuroscience research.

The benefits for me in writing this blog on mindfulness are:

Enables me to access and practice different meditations and mindfulness techniques
Keeps mindfulness at the forefront of my mind and thus facilitates my ability to integrate mindfulness into my daily life and work
Provides me with the desire and energy to do the research to identify resources, key people and the latest neuroscience developments
Keeps my mind active now that I no longer undertake my academic work and associated activities such as examining doctoral theses
Provides some structure to my life in a period of semi-retirement when I have lost the structure of daily work
Realises the advice of Jeri Sedlar and Rick Miners, “Don’t Retire, Rewire” – which is designed to maintain mental health and facilitate longevity
Provides content and mindfulness practices for my manager development workshops which now include a session on mindfulness
Provides the knowledge and motivation to develop other activities associated with helping people to develop mindfulness, such as podcasts and online conferences
Provides me with the opportunity to engage in meaningful work (rather than consuming all my time in front of the television)
Develops “deep focus” – the capacity to stay on task for lengthy periods without being diverted by enticements such as social media, email or desktop clutter
Enables me to tap into the benefits of mindfulness practice itself – e.g. clarity, calm, managing difficult emotions, self-awareness, self-regulation and creativity.

When you are clear about the benefits of your blog writing for yourself and others, the writing task becomes more enjoyable, achievable and rewarding. In many ways, the more you write, the easier it becomes (although writer’s block can still occur on your off days).

We can grow in mindfulness if we bring clarity of intention and purpose to our writing through articulating the benefits of our writing for others and ourselves. Establishing a sustainable schedule builds self-awareness (re procrastination and avoidance behaviours) and develops the self-regulation that comes from a disciplined approach. If we can employ mindfulness practices to support our writing, we can gain focus, clarity, insight and creativity.

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Image by meminsito from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Opening to Creativity through Mindfulness

Professor Amanda Sinclair, in her book Leading Mindfully, devotes a chapter to the theme, Opening to Creativity. She argues that one of the ways that mindfulness releases creativity is through “turning down” the self-judging function of our brain which invariable acts to thwart creative activity. This negative self-assessment is a major blockage to creativity.

Amanda writes about the negative thoughts and stories that were circulating in her head as she contemplated writing her book – “no one would be interested in reading it”, “it will be just another management/leadership book”, “academics will view it as lacking rigour because it will include anecdotal information”. These negative messages blocking creativity delayed her writing, and even as she wrote, they took on different forms in a sub-conscious attempt to undermine her creativity.

Once Amanda started writing, she was able to quiet this internal chatter through mindfulness and give herself permission to create the book. She was able to tap into her research, life experiences and the experiences of her friends, contacts and colleagues to craft a book that was a different contribution because of her original integration of her perspectives developed over a lifetime of insights.

For instance, Amanda was able to draw on the seemingly devastating experience of Jill Bolte Taylor, who suffered a stroke at the age 0f 37. Jill, a brain scientist, gave a TED Talk, My Stroke of Insight, about how her brain had changed physically because of damage to parts of her brain, including the areas that controlled speech and “self-talk”. In her presentation, she explains how the stroke and resultant physical damage to her brain gave her the freedom and permission to be creative. She no longer had to manage the negative thoughts and stories because her brain could no longer produce them and thus they were not able to impede her mind’s creative endeavours.

Amanda’s experience in starting out on her new book writing venture, after having successfully written other books, resonates with the experience of Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray Love. In her TED Talk, Your Elusive Creative Genius, Elizabeth spoke about the fear-based, negative talk that almost immobilised her writing following the stellar and unexpected success of this earlier book. Her internal message, reinforced continuously by others, was fundamentally a concern that she could never match the success of Eat, Pray, Love and that her life would be a failure. Elizabeth described her succeeding book that was about to be published “as the dangerously, frighteningly, over-anticipated follow up to my freakish success”.

Elizabeth, through developing her insight and self-awareness, found a unique strategy to quiet her negative thinking to enable her to create the follow-up book. She ascribed her creativity to some divine genius within her that she could blame in the event of failure (as long as she did her bit of daily, disciplined writing).

Seth Godin, author and entrepreneur, considered one of the most influential thinkers in business, maintains that we each have to find a way to quiet The Lizard Brain, the amygdala, which sabotages our creative efforts through fear-based messages. Mindfulness is one way to address these negative thoughts and to become open to creativity.

As we grow in mindfulness, we can release our creative capacity from the capriciousness and irrationality of our internal negative messages that assault us whenever we risk creative endeavours. Mindfulness enables us to “turn down” the internal chatter and be open to creatvity.

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Image source: courtesy of lukasbieri on Pixabay

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Writing: A Pathway to Mindfulness

Albert Flynn DeSilver has written a book titled, Awakening through Writing: The Space Between the Words, as a wake-up call to the power of writing as a means for exploring our inner landscape.

In an interview with Tami Simon, Albert identified some of the key messages in his book and I want to reflect on them here.

Time as a Construct

The concept of time is a human invention to enable us to communicate, collaborate and manage our lives singularly and collectively. We need this agreed convention to be able to function in our world (and across the world).

However, own own sense of time – “I don’t have enough time”, “there are not enough hours in the day” – is a personal construction. It is a consequence of choices that we make – the kind and level of work we choose to do, our commitment to the quantity and quality of our work, our family structure and established norms and rituals, and how we choose to spend our leisure or “left-over” hours. It is a reflection of our prioritising, our sense of self-esteem and empowerment (“my time is not my own”), our goals in life, our need for recognition, our willingness and ability to negotiate “time” to meet our own needs.

When we discussed what you are going to do with the surplus in your life, we highlighted the need to create space in your life. Albert reminds us that to realise the benefits of writing and meditation in terms of being able to achieve awakening or to grow in mindfulness, we need to look at the way we spend or “expend” our time. We have to “make time” to engage in writing and meditation on a regular basis.

Assess your motivation – why write?

If your writing is aligned with your personal goals and values, you have a better chance of sustaining the effort through the ups and downs of life and the writing cycle.

I have to constantly remind myself why I write so regularly. I’ve found that having multiple reasons for writing (some primary, others secondary) enables me to maintain the momentum. So I have reflected on my motivation and identified the following:

to keep mindfulness at the forefront of what I am thinking about and doing
to use writing as a journey in self-exploration
to learn more about mindfulness and mindful practices
to engage my mind in learning new things
to share what I learn with others so that they can better handle life stresses and overcome the negative impact of depression and anxiety
to integrate what I have learned from my various roles in life – as a student, manager, trainer, educator & consultant
to help myself and others realise our creative potential
to better understand what I can contribute to creating a better world.

I used to say to my doctoral students, “Do your research on something that you are passionate about, otherwise you will not be able to sustain the effort through the vicissitudes of daily life”. The same applies here if you are going to write on a regular basis, you need to be passionate about the topic and the audience. The motivation has to come from you – not from what other people say you should write about.

Reading

Many of the great writers were great readers and this is often reflected in their books or novels. You will often see writers quote poetry or the works of other authors to reinforce a point or introduce a new idea.

Reading can become a source of personal reflection, offer new perspectives on an issue, illustrate key ideas or points through life stories or act as a stimulus to your own writing. I would include here podcasts and videos as a source of ideas.

I find that if I am stuck for a topic to write about or for something to say on a topic, I will read an article/ report that is relevant, watch a video or listen to a podcast as a way to stimulate my own thoughts and reflections.

Discipline

Albert stresses the importance of discipline to advance your writing and insights. He points out that most great writers have a routine that fits their own lifestyle and personal work style.

You need to develop your own writing routine that will enable you to sustain the effort of writing. Great writers often warn about not just writing when “you are in the mood”, but pushing through the emotional barrier in a disciplined way by sticking to your routine, even if ideas are not flowing.

It may sound trite, but the reality is to become a great writer, you need to write…write…write.

The immersive element

If you are able to persist with researching and writing about a topic or an area of interest, you gain the benefits of immersion – you see connections that you did not see before, you deepen your knowledge and understanding of yourself and the world around you, you improve your self-management (via discipline & insight) and you are better able to make a significant, original contribution.

You also gr0w in mindfulness and your capacity to be fully present to what is happening in your life and world. Albert maintained, in his interview, that to make the commitment to develop mindfulness through writing requires courage:

I think for people to look inside, and to pause, and to really show up and be present in the world takes a tremendous amount of courage. And it seems to be more rare than ever, which is alarming. That’s why I’m so devoted to this work. Because I want to keep reminding people this is the most important thing we can do as human beings. Without changing consciousness and awareness, and having that positive influence, we’re really going to be kind of screwed as a species.

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Image source: courtesy of Engin_Akyurt on Pixabay