http://blog.livingawake.co.uk/
This is where we are now, go and have a look you can get linked here.
Thanks keep reading.
Rgerads
mark harris
Thursday, 9 August 2007
Thursday, 26 July 2007
The Self Help Trap
It feels like I have read every book there is to read about self help, you name it I have read it, and in all of them the promise is the same, 'this teaching, diet, understanding, book, etc has changed my life, do, believe the same as me and you can change too'!
If I will believe it and do the things that are offered I will gain enlightenment, or a slim and lithe body or a bulging bank balance.
When I have believed and done the things told me it don't work, then it's me, not the teaching that is at fault. I am left to wallow in my introspective mud pool, knowing for sure that as usual I f**ked it up, as I 'always' do.
WAKING UP TO THE FACT that I am not obliged to believe anything anyone tells me is true no matter who they are or what they say the know, is a fantastic splash in the face with cold refreshing water.
The stuff you read on this blog, the things we talk about in the Living Awake trainings are not true and we defiantly do not want you to believe them, the things you read and choose to take on board may lead to you having an experience, like balance, that helps you begin to see the amazing capacity you have for all things.
There is much for us to ‘get’ about our capacity as human ‘beings’, and I mean ‘get’ like balance, not like a friend of mine who having read a book about riding a bike thought he ‘got’ riding a bike, well, you know what happened when he took to the road don’t you?
If I will believe it and do the things that are offered I will gain enlightenment, or a slim and lithe body or a bulging bank balance.
When I have believed and done the things told me it don't work, then it's me, not the teaching that is at fault. I am left to wallow in my introspective mud pool, knowing for sure that as usual I f**ked it up, as I 'always' do.
WAKING UP TO THE FACT that I am not obliged to believe anything anyone tells me is true no matter who they are or what they say the know, is a fantastic splash in the face with cold refreshing water.
The stuff you read on this blog, the things we talk about in the Living Awake trainings are not true and we defiantly do not want you to believe them, the things you read and choose to take on board may lead to you having an experience, like balance, that helps you begin to see the amazing capacity you have for all things.
There is much for us to ‘get’ about our capacity as human ‘beings’, and I mean ‘get’ like balance, not like a friend of mine who having read a book about riding a bike thought he ‘got’ riding a bike, well, you know what happened when he took to the road don’t you?
Monday, 23 July 2007
Dreaming Dreams While Awake
I have been wanting to write about last weekend for a week, time does indeed rush past, I wonder or is it just me, does time seem to fly as the years pass? I kind of remember a year taking for ages and ages and even a week felt like a mass of time.
Just looking at children playing , absorbed, attentive, fixated, present to what it is they are doing and then I notice my tendency to BE distracted, even while doing those things I have been looking forward too, the weekend stuff!!
My mind wonders, flits and refuses to STOP long enough for me to put all of my senses into what I am doing. Who was it who said we need to 'lose our minds and come to our SENSES'!! Wake up, even, I guess he could have said.
The weekend gone was the last time I will deliver training to a fantastic group of people on my first ever NLP practioner training, an experience which I shall enjoy reliving again and again. What a fantastic couple of days, Milton Erickson was our subject and I confess my favourite subject, loads of wickedly good experience was had by all.
One task that was set before the group left for the evening on the first day was from the book 'Turrtels All The Way Down', by Dr Grinder.
I gotta be honest i think i got the exercise wrong. I asked the group to ask their unconcious mind for a metaphor for the days training, something they could dream about, then as they were going alseep they were to ask their unconcious to anchor the memory of the dream to them looking at their hands. That was it. Below is a written account of what Liz ( a member of the prac group came up with, it is amazing, truley).
I came up with a camera with an amazing zoom function and an awesome memory card. I have to tell you that to start with I was rather disappointed … I like poetic metaphors … I’d wanted something like a dew drop covered web to show the interconnectedness of all things …
I don’t do visual do I? Cameras are about pictures (although I can hear the sound my camera makes when I use the zoom lens and sense the way it feels as the weight shifts) but mainly cameras produce things you can look at – and that’s not my thing. But as I look at my hands my dream returns and I start to see the way the metaphor works …
It’s about chunking up and chunking down. Its about association and disassociation. It’s about having the ability to examine things up close from the comfort of not being in the picture. Its about stepping back and seeing the big picture (and this camera can zoom out for miles … and miles … this camera can take me into space and across the universe … this camera can give me insights into how I see the world and my place within it and all the time I know that the map is not the territory and the picture is not the event or the person.) And I can lend this camera to other people, or talk them through how they can use their own and what they see through their lens will depend on where they are standing.
This camera is about the importance of integration of different parts. It’s about how things can seem different depending on the light. How positioning can change how you feel about an image, how the frame you put around a picture changes the meaning of the composition. What you include or leave out of a shot changes the way you feel about it.
It’s about the advice that all the great photographers give – that you have to develop good rapport with your subject and to take lots of photographs – they might not all work but one of them will.
Coming up with a metaphor that I didn’t think fitted is a message in itself. Because it does work – learning to trust my subconscious is really significant for me. The negative developed in the dark room so often reveals details that were not apparent in the day light.
The picture was upside down – it’s not 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. It’s the other way around. You can do this without sweating. It’s about the vast untapped resource of the subconscious that memorises, organises and arranges countless tasks for me everyday, recording my life in minuet detail and generating a million possibilities, standing by me, loving me, even when she’s been misunderstood and denigrated and she’s happy to hold the information however it’s going to be processed but she wants me to know – she can do pictures.
It’s about waking up to the fact that I sometimes forget to take the lens cap off.
Thanks Liz.
Just looking at children playing , absorbed, attentive, fixated, present to what it is they are doing and then I notice my tendency to BE distracted, even while doing those things I have been looking forward too, the weekend stuff!!
My mind wonders, flits and refuses to STOP long enough for me to put all of my senses into what I am doing. Who was it who said we need to 'lose our minds and come to our SENSES'!! Wake up, even, I guess he could have said.
The weekend gone was the last time I will deliver training to a fantastic group of people on my first ever NLP practioner training, an experience which I shall enjoy reliving again and again. What a fantastic couple of days, Milton Erickson was our subject and I confess my favourite subject, loads of wickedly good experience was had by all.
One task that was set before the group left for the evening on the first day was from the book 'Turrtels All The Way Down', by Dr Grinder.
I gotta be honest i think i got the exercise wrong. I asked the group to ask their unconcious mind for a metaphor for the days training, something they could dream about, then as they were going alseep they were to ask their unconcious to anchor the memory of the dream to them looking at their hands. That was it. Below is a written account of what Liz ( a member of the prac group came up with, it is amazing, truley).
I came up with a camera with an amazing zoom function and an awesome memory card. I have to tell you that to start with I was rather disappointed … I like poetic metaphors … I’d wanted something like a dew drop covered web to show the interconnectedness of all things …
I don’t do visual do I? Cameras are about pictures (although I can hear the sound my camera makes when I use the zoom lens and sense the way it feels as the weight shifts) but mainly cameras produce things you can look at – and that’s not my thing. But as I look at my hands my dream returns and I start to see the way the metaphor works …
It’s about chunking up and chunking down. Its about association and disassociation. It’s about having the ability to examine things up close from the comfort of not being in the picture. Its about stepping back and seeing the big picture (and this camera can zoom out for miles … and miles … this camera can take me into space and across the universe … this camera can give me insights into how I see the world and my place within it and all the time I know that the map is not the territory and the picture is not the event or the person.) And I can lend this camera to other people, or talk them through how they can use their own and what they see through their lens will depend on where they are standing.
This camera is about the importance of integration of different parts. It’s about how things can seem different depending on the light. How positioning can change how you feel about an image, how the frame you put around a picture changes the meaning of the composition. What you include or leave out of a shot changes the way you feel about it.
It’s about the advice that all the great photographers give – that you have to develop good rapport with your subject and to take lots of photographs – they might not all work but one of them will.
Coming up with a metaphor that I didn’t think fitted is a message in itself. Because it does work – learning to trust my subconscious is really significant for me. The negative developed in the dark room so often reveals details that were not apparent in the day light.
The picture was upside down – it’s not 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. It’s the other way around. You can do this without sweating. It’s about the vast untapped resource of the subconscious that memorises, organises and arranges countless tasks for me everyday, recording my life in minuet detail and generating a million possibilities, standing by me, loving me, even when she’s been misunderstood and denigrated and she’s happy to hold the information however it’s going to be processed but she wants me to know – she can do pictures.
It’s about waking up to the fact that I sometimes forget to take the lens cap off.
Thanks Liz.
Friday, 13 July 2007
The Mantra Of A Fat Man
I think it is possible to live your whole life and not realize that the life you have just lived has been based on an 'hallucination'. The events and the pain and the memories all seem very 'real' and are made up!
On the youth programme I am involved with, we spend at least 10 weeks chanting a mantra, 'the future does not exist' we shout. Bounding into the room I jump, sometimes rolling on the ground and ending on all fours, and ask where is the future?
When it is tomorrow I am giving away £5 notes from this blog!
Life only happens in a moment called now, yet the mind, you remember the conversation(?) is trapped in a temporal framework that clamours for our attention constantly; 'when I earn enough money, I will do the things that healthy people do, then i will be fit and healthy', as the the mantra of a fat man goes.
But, where is WHEN?
'Getting', (like balance) the futureness of 'when' in my 'conversation' wakes me up. There is no future place to get to, this 'is' all there 'is', it's not about getting anywhere or doing anything it is about 'being' HERE, Now. It is not about what I am 'doing' as much as it is about who I am 'being'.
On the youth programme I am involved with, we spend at least 10 weeks chanting a mantra, 'the future does not exist' we shout. Bounding into the room I jump, sometimes rolling on the ground and ending on all fours, and ask where is the future?
When it is tomorrow I am giving away £5 notes from this blog!
Life only happens in a moment called now, yet the mind, you remember the conversation(?) is trapped in a temporal framework that clamours for our attention constantly; 'when I earn enough money, I will do the things that healthy people do, then i will be fit and healthy', as the the mantra of a fat man goes.
But, where is WHEN?
'Getting', (like balance) the futureness of 'when' in my 'conversation' wakes me up. There is no future place to get to, this 'is' all there 'is', it's not about getting anywhere or doing anything it is about 'being' HERE, Now. It is not about what I am 'doing' as much as it is about who I am 'being'.
‘Meaning Maker’
‘Meaning Maker’
A bright spring morning, as crisp as any I have experienced, I love the early morning, quite, still, untouched and as I walk to the bus stop I am in my own world; thoughts are drifting in and out of my mind; pictures, words and feelings building a nice little map of how the day, the week and even the year might turn out.
‘Ah’! I am violently shaken from my revelry as I hit the gravel pathway with a thud! ‘Who left that there’? Some absentminded sociopath had thrown a banana skin away and on the floor it had waited for me.
Later that evening when Diane, my wife, would get upset with the mess I had made of my trousers I would have an excuse, ‘it was not my fault’, it was that ‘sociopath’ who threw the banana skin away, at a push I could just blame the banana!
Musing on that banana got me wishing, what if ‘meaning’ it’s self could just shed a skin for me to slip on. Then as I looked at ‘meaning’ I could blame ‘it’ as if it was some thing real.
In order to live in this world everybody needs ‘a map’, a map of reality that helps him or her walk ‘this path’ called life. This map in our head is not exactly the same as the territory; it only represents the road we are on, the life we lead, the meanings we attach to the things that happen to us in life.
The ‘maps in our minds’ are not real, even though they feel very real indeed; we are the meaning makers, words are the colours we use to paint the maps we live by, but words are just words, on their own they mean nothing; like ‘hooks’ we hang on them experiences, memories and feelings, these in turn drive our actions and behaviours in the ‘sense world’. Alfred Korbizicky the founder of General Semantics (1941), coined the now famous phase ‘the map is not the territory’ to highlight this ‘truth’.
We are all doing the best we can with the resources we have, always seeking the best way forward in line with our mental representations of what we think the world is all about.
As maturing people we want to generate an internal map of reality that approximates the ‘sense world’ closely enough to facilitate excellent, exuberant, fun filled, deep, thrilling, productive (etc) living; we are on a quest for multiple choices for each challenge we face! It does not really need saying that the quality of our living is dictated to by the quality of our internal mapping. Taking responsibility for the meaning that I make of the things that happen in my life is fundamental in my quest for maturity in this meaning making 'walk of faith' called life.
A bright spring morning, as crisp as any I have experienced, I love the early morning, quite, still, untouched and as I walk to the bus stop I am in my own world; thoughts are drifting in and out of my mind; pictures, words and feelings building a nice little map of how the day, the week and even the year might turn out.
‘Ah’! I am violently shaken from my revelry as I hit the gravel pathway with a thud! ‘Who left that there’? Some absentminded sociopath had thrown a banana skin away and on the floor it had waited for me.
Later that evening when Diane, my wife, would get upset with the mess I had made of my trousers I would have an excuse, ‘it was not my fault’, it was that ‘sociopath’ who threw the banana skin away, at a push I could just blame the banana!
Musing on that banana got me wishing, what if ‘meaning’ it’s self could just shed a skin for me to slip on. Then as I looked at ‘meaning’ I could blame ‘it’ as if it was some thing real.
In order to live in this world everybody needs ‘a map’, a map of reality that helps him or her walk ‘this path’ called life. This map in our head is not exactly the same as the territory; it only represents the road we are on, the life we lead, the meanings we attach to the things that happen to us in life.
The ‘maps in our minds’ are not real, even though they feel very real indeed; we are the meaning makers, words are the colours we use to paint the maps we live by, but words are just words, on their own they mean nothing; like ‘hooks’ we hang on them experiences, memories and feelings, these in turn drive our actions and behaviours in the ‘sense world’. Alfred Korbizicky the founder of General Semantics (1941), coined the now famous phase ‘the map is not the territory’ to highlight this ‘truth’.
We are all doing the best we can with the resources we have, always seeking the best way forward in line with our mental representations of what we think the world is all about.
As maturing people we want to generate an internal map of reality that approximates the ‘sense world’ closely enough to facilitate excellent, exuberant, fun filled, deep, thrilling, productive (etc) living; we are on a quest for multiple choices for each challenge we face! It does not really need saying that the quality of our living is dictated to by the quality of our internal mapping. Taking responsibility for the meaning that I make of the things that happen in my life is fundamental in my quest for maturity in this meaning making 'walk of faith' called life.
Colorless world
It’s been 7 years, although it feels like yesterday since Diane my wife, was diagnosed with breast cancer. My world turned grey, someone pulled the plug on colour and down the drain it went. We came through it and multi chromic service has resumed and I am still amazed at the power of the mind to take facts and interpret them in ways that transform my physical and mental worlds.
Hearing the news that she had cancer sent me on a journey into a morass of intense emotions, feelings that manifested as REAL physical pains, ‘running tracks’ of thought that looped and looped and looped.
In my thoughts I was already a widowed father, struggling to live and cope with 5 children under 10 years old; in a house that was falling down around my ears. I was already giving up my work to care for those I had left after ‘that’ disease had robbed me of my life mate.
The feelings of grief, loneliness and despair were over whelming…
But nothing had happened yet and none of it existed; my imagination had produced a set of internal representations, which in turn were dictating to my thinking, feeling, speaking and doing. The facts were FACTS but my interpretations of those facts did ‘not exist’, as yet the future was NOT REAL, it was just a possibility waiting to be fashioned, as I made moment-by-moment thinking choices which led to action steps, as Leonardo Da Vinci said ‘the moment has no time’.
Hearing the news that she had cancer sent me on a journey into a morass of intense emotions, feelings that manifested as REAL physical pains, ‘running tracks’ of thought that looped and looped and looped.
In my thoughts I was already a widowed father, struggling to live and cope with 5 children under 10 years old; in a house that was falling down around my ears. I was already giving up my work to care for those I had left after ‘that’ disease had robbed me of my life mate.
The feelings of grief, loneliness and despair were over whelming…
But nothing had happened yet and none of it existed; my imagination had produced a set of internal representations, which in turn were dictating to my thinking, feeling, speaking and doing. The facts were FACTS but my interpretations of those facts did ‘not exist’, as yet the future was NOT REAL, it was just a possibility waiting to be fashioned, as I made moment-by-moment thinking choices which led to action steps, as Leonardo Da Vinci said ‘the moment has no time’.
Thursday, 12 July 2007
Living Awake
I have been asleep for so long and did not realize .
That 'conversation' in my head, you know the one?
Yes that one!
That voice in your head that goes 'what conversation'?
Waking up has been like stepping back from it and seeing it, hearing, and noticing that if that voice is me who is the one now listening?
WOW, if context is everything then I am AWAKE and every now and then I drift off again into a resting state, which is not rest at all,
its kind of like being trapped in a looping 'conversation',
ENOUGH.
Day one, BEING AWAKE to the only life I have is what this blog is going to be about.
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