Positive thinking – converting a good idea into reality

Positive thinking is very different to wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is where you hope for the best and do nothing about it. Positive thinking is where you hope for the best and do a lot about it! It usually takes commitment, determination, perseverance, resilience – a fair degree of focused attention and hard work.

I am speaking in Pt Stephens, Liz Schiemer’s hometown, on Saturday July 12th as Ruth and I continue our tour up the East Coast. Liz is deeply concerned about the health of her community. High levels of cancer, heart disease, mental illness, even suicide.

However, Liz is a genuine positive thinker. Not one to sit back just simply worrying, what Liz has accomplished is truly inspiring. So this week, as a model of what positive thinking can look like in reality, we share some of the initiatives Liz has taken that are making a significant difference in many lives, but first

Thought for the day

Mental health is 
       “a state of well-being 
       in which every individual realises his or her potential, 
       can cope with the normal stresses of life, 
       can work productively and fruitfully, 
       and is able to make a contribution to her or his community”
                            
                                           The World Health Organisation


During the road trip Ruth and I are on we will be hosted by quite a number of remarkable “positive thinkers” – people who have had the wish to make a difference to the health of their community and then dedicated their lives to that end.

Could have chosen any number to highlight, but for some reason here is Liz’s story.

Liz Schiemer retired from her nursing career to focus on a more natural approach to health and wellbeing. She studied hypnosis, NLP, Life Coaching and meditation – which is how we came to meet.

But not content “just” to develop her own new style of practice, Liz has become actively involved with the Port Stephens Complementary Health Services Association Inc. and the PS Suicide Prevention Network of which she is secretary.

At her clinic, Liz sees people privately and brings to this her professional experience with addictions, epilepsy, disability and a wide range of health issues from stress management to major illness and wellness. Liz also leads a regular meditation group that starts with Qigong, and she hosts regular meetings for Women with Cancer.

The Port Stephens Complementary Health Services Association is an Association of leading healthcare practitioners with a common vision for the ongoing education, nurture and wellbeing of their society. The group is drawn together by their dedication to the promotion of natural healing, and to enabling their community to better manage and enhance their physical, mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.

To achieve this they work on a shoe string budget with volunteers and any money they make goes back into promotions. You might like to check out their website, CLICK HERE or like their Facebook page CLICK HERE

The PS Suicide Prevention Network (you may want to Like this page too, CLICK HERE) has its main focus on public education. But Liz is also secretary of her local parks and reserves committee that is sponsored by  Council. That group are working with PS Suicide Prevention to establish a dedicated memorial park at Boat Harbour. Several local groups, including youth groups, are working together on that project which it is hoped will be opened during International Suicide Prevention week in September.

So I guess the trick with some of these exceptional “Positive Thinkers” is not to be overwhelmed or intimidated by what they do! Just writing this I marvel at how much Liz does accomplish and want to celebrate it.

However, knowing Liz I have to say how modestly and easily she carries all this. She has a natural enthusiasm – perhaps obviously! – but a natural ease as well. Things just seem to get done with a minimum of fuss and with the people involved having a good time; happy to be a part of it all.

Maybe Liz is just lucky. Maybe it is the meditation. Maybe it is the commitment to service – and the associated commitment to her own good health that is the essential ingredient in providing an ongoing service on such a scale.

Whatever it is, I know it has not been easy for Liz. There have been plenty of ups and downs like there are for most of us. What I delight in with Liz is her commitment to do all she can for the betterment of her community – and the fact that in reality she does it. A true positive thinker. More power to you Liz .

RELATED BLOG
Relaxation in daily life

NOTICEBOARD

1. THE EAST COAST TOUR 
HEALTH, HEALING and the MIND 

Our first talks in Sydney and Katoomba were well attended. Lovely to meet a man who attended the 10day cancer residential program with Ruth and myself 15 years ago due to stage 4 melanoma; yet there he was cancer free and very well. Delightful!

Saturday July 12th is the next day workshop in Pt Stephens before we continue up to Coff’s harbor Tuesday the 15th and Brisbane for 4 days of events starting Thursday 17th. Then right on up to Cairns with a few talks along the way, across to Mt Isa and Alice Springs, and down to Adelaide. A road trip with a difference.

Know someone who might benefit from attending? See you there?

For full details, CLICK HERE

Hope to see many of you along the way. There will be the chance for a refresher, to help get back on track if needed; but also exciting new information and the opportunity to meditate together and to deepen the experience of what meditation really is.

A good opportunity to share what we do with family, friends and colleagues.

FULL DETAILS – CLICK HERE  and please do share the link.


2. Meditation in the Desert : August 29 – September 7 

Still a few spaces available, so come, join Ruth and myself along with like-minded people for 7 days of meditation in the extraordinary atmosphere of the Central Australian desert, followed by several days of close contact with senior local indigenous leaders.

Secure your place with a deposit. For details CLICK HERE




Ian Gawler Blog: How to access your own inner wisdom

What do we call it? Intuition? Instinct? Gut feeling? Insight? Inner wisdom? We all have times where we seem to access some deeper, more profound aspect of our being that speaks to us with wisdom and guides us towards a good decision, a good choice; that leads us through complexity to do the right thing at the right time.

Now imagine being able to connect and communicate with that inner wisdom at will. For this is the domain of Creative Imagery as taught by Dr Nimrod Sheinman, a world authority with this technique. Ruth and I are delighted to be hosting Nimrod back in Australia in October when we will combine to teach these methods in a residential program in the Yarra Valley: Images, Words and Silence.

So this week, lets go Out on a Limb once more and examine the rationale and techniques behind inner wisdom. But first

Thought for the day
The decisive factor is not the problem, 
But the way we think about it. 
Albert Einstein

Modern neuroscience tells us that our mind’s capacity to store information is pretty well fool proof. It seems that everything we ever learnt, everything we ever saw, heard, read or experienced is actually stored in our memory banks. Storeage is not the problem; remembering it – now there is an issue!

Some people it seems do have almost perfect memories. But for most it is partial recall. We probably all have the experience of knowing we know something, having it “on the tip of our tongue”, but struggling to actually remember it.

Then again, we can all probably observe in ourselves how sometimes we seem to act with real insight, with an inner wisdom that leads us to do just the right thing in a situation where a poor choice could have led to a real mess. Then other times we may have been baffled by the poor choices we did make and the chaos that followed. Ah, the benefit of wisdom in hindsight!

So imagine being able to learn, or even teach others a technique that reliably accessed this bank of stored memory and inner wisdom. Actually, it is not so hard when you understand how the mind works and take the time to develop a simple but profound technique.

Quite simply, wisdom does not exist in the rational, thinking mind. That analytical, deductive, calculating aspect of our mind is useful for many things, but of itself, it contains no wisdom; just thoughts and thinking. No, wisdom dwells in the deeper recesses of the unconscious mind. It is in the unconscious where instinct, intuition and insights are to be found.

So if we are to access our inner wisdom, we need to access our unconscious. It is like we need to communicate between two different systems, the conscious, thinking mind, and the unconscious wisdom mind. This is where it gets easy. For what we need is an interface, a common language that both the conscious and unconscious minds can speak.

Welcome to the world of Creative Imagery. For images are something that the conscious mind can create, understand and communicate with; while images are the natural language of the unconscious.

So we can learn to create an image for our inner wisdom in a form with which we can communicate. The image becomes the bridge between these two aspects of our mind. Then we can enter into a dialogue between the conscious mind and the unconscious. We can pose questions, put problems to that deeper inner wisdom and have it speak to us in simple and clear language; a language we can understand, the language of symbols.

I have to say that having first learnt this technique from Nimrod many years ago, I have taught it to many people over the years and seen them gain major insights that made sense of symptoms of physical illness, that gave direction in life, that did solve burning questions and provided major life lessons and insights.

But given this process could work, how would you know the response you received from this inner wisdom, this inner guidance was real and could be taken seriously? Well happily that too is easy. Sometimes when we sit to contemplate and think something through, we know we are having an inner debate and the conclusions are inconclusive. Sometimes we reach a point of inner certainty.

Where Creative Imagery is so powerful, is that it commonly leads to this inner certainty. Put simply again, if one does an exercise like this and doubt remains, then doubt remains. But if as often occurs, there comes an inner knowing, a conviction; then that leads to the confidence to take the guidance received seriously.

So from October 28th, Ruth Nimrod and myself will lead a 5 day residential retreat at the Foundation’s beautiful Yarra Valley centre and teach this technique. The training is designed for those who seek to use these methods personally, as well as for health practitioners who may like to teach them. We will combine this with an overview of how to learn, teach and deepen the experience of stillness meditation, as the meditation supports accessing inner wisdom and has so many benefits in its own right.

This will be a fabulous program and Ruth and I are very pleased to be able to welcome Nimrod back to Australia and work with him again.

For full details, CLICK HERE, while to book, call the Gawler Foundation on 03 59671730.

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RESOURCES

BOOKS The Mind that Changes Everything – details on how to use Creative Imagery and many other mind techniques

CD: Mind Training – the double CD that details how the mind works and how we can use it to greater effect.

Ian Gawler Blog: Geeks turn to meditation – the three top reasons why

It is lunchtime in Google’s main office and all is profoundly quiet, bar the occasional sounding of a meditation bell. Yes, the computer whizzes have left their machines silent, taken the lead from the renowned Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh and are enjoying a moments peace; a moment of mindfulness during one of their bi-monthly “mindful lunches”.

This week we investigate why the geeks here at Google, and across the way at the Facebook and Twitter offices, are turning increasingly to mindfulness and meditation and how they are benefiting. Then what to eat to offset Alzheimer’s, while Beyond Blue features meditation against anxiety. But first

Thought for the day

Before one studies Zen,

mountains are mountains and waters are waters;


After a first glimpse into the truth of Zen,

Mountains are no longer mountains 
and waters are no longer waters;

After enlightenment,


Mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.

                                                                                    Old Zen saying

Personal peace, company productivity, community altruism. Quite a package. But it does seem that the real purpose of meditation is beginning to dawn in the major hi-tech companies. Sure it helps with inner peace. Sure there is lots of research now that confirms how significantly meditation can improve everything from raw intelligence to creativity, productivity and social behavior in the workplace. But what is the point? Is it only about making more money? Where does it all lead to?

David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University in the USA. Speaking in a recent New York Times article, he comments

“Gaining competitive advantage on exams and increasing creativity in business weren’t of the utmost concern to Buddha and other early meditation teachers. As Buddha himself said, “I teach one thing and one only: that is, suffering and the end of suffering.” For Buddha, as for many modern spiritual leaders, the goal of meditation was as simple as that. The heightened control of the mind that meditation offers was supposed to help its practitioners see the world in a new and more compassionate way.”

So in Silicon Valley, where meditation and mindfulness have become the new rage, it is not just about inner peace and getting ahead. There is the realisation that more is on  offer. Meditation is about developing compassion and altruism. It is about finding meaning and purpose at work and in life.

We can all take heart. At Google, more than a thousand staff have been through their "Search Inside Yourself" mindfulness training program developed by Chade-Meng Tan, one of their engineers. Another 400 are on a waiting list and in the meantime take classes like "Neural Self-hacking" or "Managing your Energy". A labyrinth for walking meditation, similar to the one by the river at the Foundation has also been built.

Next, the cofounders of Twitter and Facebook have incorporated contemplative exercises and meditation sessions into normal working hours. Around 1,700 people attended the Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco recently, lured by the promise that meditation "can be used to augment individual performance, leadership and productivity". Top executives from Linkedin, Cisco and Ford featured among the keynote speakers.

Examining the question of compassion, DeStano, and colleagues conducted an experiment soon to be published in the journal Psychological Science. They took first time meditators through an 8 week meditation course and found that the meditation increased the compassion response threefold.

DeSteno adds “recent findings by the neuroscientists Helen Weng, Richard Davidson and colleagues confirm that even relatively brief training in meditative techniques can alter neural functioning in brain areas associated with empathic understanding of others’ distress — areas whose responsiveness is also modulated by a person’s degree of felt associations with others”.

So perhaps meditation is coming back to its roots. Sure, all its benefits for very real day-to-day things like training the mind to be better at whatever we do makes every good sense, but there is more on offer – becoming better at who we are, and how we be!

REFERENCES

1. New York Times: 5^th July 2013, GRAY MATTER: The Morality of Meditation - Focusing the mind makes us more likely to help others in pain.

2. Wired: Enlightenment Engineer

RESEARCH NEWS

Eat smart, avoid Alzheimer’s

There is a growing body of research that suggests meditation and other mind training exercises can reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, but now a new study demonstrates that a high-fat, high-glycemic-index diet increases the risk significantly. Happily, a low-fat, low GI diet protected against the disease according to a new study published by the American Medical Association.

Researchers assigned 47 older adults, some of whom already had mild cognitive impairment, to either a high-fat, high-GI diet or a low-fat, low-GI diet.

Within four weeks, the high-fat diet increased the production of lipid-depleted Aβ, a protein linked to Alzheimer’s risk. The low-fat diet had the opposite effect. An accompanying commentary in the journal supports the finding that dietary choices can affect brain chemistry quickly and effectively.

References

1. Hanson AJ, et al. JAMA Neurol. Published ahead of print June 17, 2013.

2. Blacker D. Food for thought. JAMA Neurol. Published ahead of print June 17, 2013.

IN THE NEWS

Beyond Blue gives Meditation a plug – read the quote and smile! Times are changing, often in rather cute small steps!

Meditation: Studies show meditation can reduce stress, help put you in control of your thoughts, help you find a purpose in life and bring peace of mind. And if it doesn't work for you, at least you'll have yourself a nice nap.



REFERENCE: Beyond Blue Man Therapy: Click here and go to M for meditation

Ian Gawler Blog: How to increase creativity with meditation

If Jackson Pollock was the archetypal boozing, tortured artist, would he have painted anything worthwhile if he had found inner peace? Or would he have been an even better painter if he had indeed found inner peace.

If Steve Jobs was the super-cool Zen creator, would Apple even have come into existence if he had not meditated?

If, as Spike Milligan said “it is all in the mind”, how does sitting quietly to train your mind through meditation build creativity?

Maybe it is because of the type of mind meditation produces.

A calm and clear mind
Leave a glass of muddy water undisturbed; the mud settles and we are left with clear water. The mind is the same. Left undisturbed, it becomes calm and clear. Then comes the capacity to recognize simplicity amongst complexity. For Jobs, this led to Apple’s elegant, functional design.

The beginner’s mind
As the mind settles and becomes less agitated, there comes a certain freshness. The capacity to bring a new perspective to the commonplace. Meditation fosters curiosity, awe and wonderment.

The focused mind
But for creativity to advance from being a good idea to a manifest work, we need concentration and grounded application. Training the mind through meditation is like going to the gym to develop physical muscles. Going inwards, we develop inner strength and things get done.

Mindfulness
So often good ideas, insights, creativity, get hijacked, diluted, destroyed by the events of ordinary daily life. Trauma from the past, fear for the future, the pressures of modern living, all conspire to overwhelm creativity. Mindfulness teaches us to let go of unhelpful concerns for past and future and to function more joyfully in the present.

The wisdom mind
Science has much to offer, but is based on the intellect, which is analytical and linear, and has little to do with creativity. For true creativity, we need to go beyond the realm of the intellect. Not to become irrational, but non-rational, beyond-rational; and to access that deeper, more profound inner world of wisdom and creativity.

MEDITATION - a TECHNIQUE for CREATIVITY
There are many ways to meditate. A simple and reliable approach is to break it down into 4 east steps.

1. Preparation. This is about organizing 10 - 20 minutes once or twice a day, finding a suitable place, taking up a symmetrical, balanced posture, settling into that posture and turning your mind inwardly – away from day to day events.

2. Relaxation. Then we learn to relax the body and calm the mind. This is easily achieved by focusing the mind and concentrating on the feeling as we relax the body. Doing this frees us from the physical tension so often associated with stress, allows our body’s biochemistry to regain its natural, healthy balance and settles “the mud” in our mind.

3. Mindfulness. As we relax more, we naturally become more aware. This leads to mindfulness, where almost like an impartial observer, we can be aware of the sounds around about us, the thoughts and feelings within us, and remain undistracted and unperturbed. Calm and clear.

4. Stillness. As we progress, we notice a deeper stillness. At first a glimpse, then a deeper experience of the truth and essence of who we really are, what is in our heart’s essence.

ACCESSING MEDITATION
One convergence of modern creativity and technology with the ancient mind science of meditation is Mindbody Mastery. It combines a downloadable meditation program with an innovative support package including daily emails, weekly SMS messages, webinars etc to add to and reinforce your learning and practise.

The biggest challenge with meditation is to actually do it! Evidence tells us that the Mindbody Mastery support system actually does help people to practise regularly. The Mindbody Mastery website is in the final stages of a major upgrade that will be completed any day now.

Happy meditating and may the creativity be with you.

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NOTICEBOARD
A reminder I will be in Brisbane, Coff’s Harbor, Katoomba and then Sydney in June and July. Details on the website: CLICK HERE

NEWS
1. A Miracle in a classroom. A fabulous new film available to download Room to Breathe 

Room to Breathe is the first mainstream documentary about bringing mindfulness into education. It is an authentic representation of what it’s like to teach mindfulness in a truly challenging environment. By providing a raw and realistic look at the process, it shows how even the most difficult classrooms can be turned around with patience, teaching skill, and partnership with school staff.

Room To Breathe is a surprising and inspiring story of transformation as struggling kids in a San Francisco public middle school are introduced to the practice of mindfulness meditation.

Topping the district in disciplinary suspensions, and with overcrowded classrooms creating a nearly impossible learning environment, overwhelmed administrators are left with stark choices: repeating the cycle of trying to force tuned-out children to listen, or to experiment with timeless inner practices that may provide them with the social, emotional, and attentional skills that they need to succeed.

The first question is whether it’s already too late. Confronted by defiance, contempt for authority figures, poor discipline, and more interest in “social” than learning, can a mindfulness teacher (Megan Cowan from Mindful Schools) succeed in opening their minds and hearts?

To watch the trailer: Click here 

“This film beautifully and authentically portrays the power of mindfulness to change individuals, families, one classroom, and perhaps, one day, the world.”
 Diana Winston, Director of Mindfulness Education, UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center

Buy the film:  Click here


2. Mindfulness in a Huff
The much read Huffington Post has recognized the value of mindfulness, in 20 different ways! 

They say “Even though the academic research on mindfulness meditation isn't as robust as, say, nutrition or exercise, there is a reason why it's been around for literally thousands of years. And we're starting to get a better understanding of why it seems to be beneficial for so many aspects of life, from disease and pain management, to sleep, to control of emotions.”

To read the full article, CLICK HERE