What's your Purpose?

Suppose we are actually here to perform a particular role in the Universal scheme of things. Are we actually fulfilling our Purpose and bringing to the world what we most have to offer? By fulfilling our Purpose we can discover more fulfillment and happiness, satisfying our deepest needs, aside of food, sleep and health.

I changed my career to satisfy my Purpose although I didn't know this was what I was doing at the time. But I made the change to satisfy my deepest desires. I wanted out of commercial marketing and to become a teacher of the Alexander Technique and help others. I'm not being altruistic. Just plain selfish in some ways, as that's what I wanted to do. I don't recommend everyone goes out and changes career, but maybe a small change in our activities can allow us to bring more of ourselves to activities, to enjoy ourselves more, be happy and share this with others.

Knowing and fulfilling your Purpose can bring many things:

It gives your life Direction.

It brings fulfilment.

It brings reassurance. Knowing we're progressing along the right path for us. It satisfies our needs and what we can offer others.

It helps us focus on what's important for us.

It may help bring new opportunities

Discovering our Purpose enhances our self knowledge

it helps us feel good and enjoy life.

One could say that our Purpose is to propagate our race and bring children into our world, and undoubtedly this would be true. We may also say that we have to run a home, clean, decorate, feed the baby, go to work, build a business, make money, run for government, perform floristry, banking, perfumery, fashion design, sell bread, and look after an invalid sister. But are these daily activities what we actually like to do, or are we just pounding a tread mill? Whilst our sense of duty may compel us to perform certain roles and complete tasks important as they may be, are we really doing what we were ‘brought here’ to do?

The idea that we may be here for a Purpose has been entertained for centuries. For instance people are said to have a ‘Calling’; a strong urge towards a particular way of life or career . I’m not referring necessarily to a religious calling, but our inner need to do something. We borrow the phrase ‘raison d’être’ from the French; a reason for being, or the most important reason for someone or something’s existence . We could also say that we have a Purpose . Whichever way we describe it, the meaning is similar. Is the life I’m experiencing what I’m really here for?

My approach to this subject is secular and I do not attach the idea of a Purpose to any religion. You may believe that your Purpose is to love and promote the word of God, and you follow this course with devotion, happiness and fulfilment. However, irrespective of any religious beliefs we hold, whether we believe in God or not, we may all have a Purpose or unique role to play in the Universal scheme of things and in society. Our Purpose defines what we bring to this world, from the vast resources that lie inside of us, the unique combination of talents, skills and personal attributes as well as our individual energy.

Our Purpose is the broadest description possible of our interests and activities. It is so wide in meaning that it allows us to perform the fullest and most varied range of roles or tasks that can be envisaged and that are consistent with its definition. It is all encompassing and inclusive. It is the umbrella under which we can function and fulfil a role in society or the natural world, where we contribute our own unique offering. Our Purpose lets us play a role in this world that resonates with our deepest interests, needs, loves and desires yet offering us scope to apply ourselves in many differing ways.

I believe that my own Purpose is to communicate health, well-being and happiness. This is the broadest umbrella description I can find for now, to describe what I seek to do...and what I actually do. Teaching the Alexander Technique, photography of a spiritual nature, writing and playing music all help me express myself in ways that allow me to fulfil my Purpose, in a small or major way. Of course there will be jobs and chores that need doing that don't fit, but I try to do activities that fit my Purpose for the greatest proportion of my time.

Have you considered what your own Purpose may be?

Continue reading "What's your Purpose?"

Semi-supine

I'm often asked what we can do if our back is aching. Maybe we've been sitting at the computer too long, our shoulders are hunched, we've got a stiff neck and tired lower back. We want to ease the pain but don't want pain killing drugs. The answer is to lie down for ten minutes or so on the floor.

This procedure is recommended by most Alexander Technique teachers as a means to help release excessive muscular tension and to allow your body to lengthen and widen. It will benefit your poise when you stand up again and any tired and tense muscles will get the chance to release.

Lie down on your back on a carpeted floor for 10 minutes with your head on 2”-3” of books and your knees bent so that your feet are drawn up towards you. This is called semi-supine position. Space your feet apart about the width of your shoulders and rest your relaxed hands on your tummy. Think of 'sinking down' into the floor so that you let go of unwanted tension in your back muscles. Let your shoulders release and ‘melt’ down into the floor. After a few minutes, think your head to go away from your shoulders and your spine to lengthen. Do not force anything and make no effort. Just think. Let gravity and your body weight do the job. Lie down like this daily. It will help calm and centre you and help your posture enormously.

If you tend to get tired sitting at a desk, try and break the session by getting up and moving around every half hour. If you have the chance to lie down like this on the floor then do so.

Posture and emotions

Head in the Clouds

Lenticular Cloud near Mt. Fuji. Dan Kenigsberg

'Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds!' This is the bold cry from the bottom of the manifesto of The Cloud Appreciation Society.

So if you know your Cirrus from your Cumulus or even just appreciate when a large cloud takes on the appearance of a crowned cat with wings, then you'll be amongst good company with Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of the society and several thousand of his members. Gavin believes that a deep association with clouds may have originated when we were babies in a pram with nothing more to do than look at these wistful shapes passing by. But for most of us, our fascination may have dwindled with growing concerns and interest in more earthly matters. It appears that Blue-sky thinking may be passe now and cloud gazing offers far more variety.

Glider pilots are even known to discuss the best music to watch clouds to, and on the society website we can find poems, works of art, photographs in the Gallery, along with Cloud Chat and a Manifesto to remind us of our 'Cause'.

When asked if Cumulus Humilis (fluffy flat-bottomed and won't cause rain) clouds are his favourite, Gavin Pretor-Pinney is likely to reply, all be it tongue in cheek, that he finds them rather too obvious for his taste and prefers the refinement of the Lenticularis species of Altocumulus that look like UFOs and hover in a stationary fashion, even in a strong breeze. Cool.

Source: The Times

How to be an expert

If you think you've missed your chance at being an expert in a particular field, then you can rethink your view, writes Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users because unless you are physical impaired, you CAN succeed in your dreams. And what's great is that it is never too late. You just need determination and perseverance.

The big difference between those of us who are simply amateurs rather than expert in a particular field is not the genetic gift that passed us by, but sheer hard work and dedication says Kathy.
If you've ever wanted to be a pianist, great golfer, dressage horse rider or linguist, it's not a natural talent that you need (although that helps) and to have started at the age of three, but the sheer determination to keep going when it gets frustratingly tough at the beginning stages. Only a very small proportion of us have a genetic gift in a field, but we can ALL achieve a high level of expertise if we just put our mind to it. And when we succeed at doing something quite well, we shouldn't just repeat that, but stretch ourselves beyond and investigate new and better ways. This is what makes the difference. Just repeating the nice bit because we feel that we can do it well doesn't make us an expert. It's working on the boring parts, the foundations and baseline fundamentals that makes the difference.

Kathy Sierra's chart shows clearly how perseverance and dedication to exploring new ways helps make experts.

Kathy also extracts from The New Brain by Richard Restak quoting Ericsson:

"For the superior performer the goal isn't just repeating the same thing again and again but achieving higher levels of control over every aspect of their performance. That's why they don't find practice boring. Each practice session they are working on doing something better than they did the last time."

Now this is the key thing that I want to pick up on. The most important thing about trying to improve by practicing is HOW we practice and not 'how much'. We need to explore new ways of doing the activity and not get stuck in the same old groove. Repetition for the sake of it in any task without thought, be it violin playing (my own passion) or swinging a golf club, will only en-grain our method (or defective method) even further. We get better at being bad. But by thinking about HOW we do things, helps us break faulty moulds and move on. So this takes thought, and by doing so we're probably using different parts of our brain and so we may fatigue quickly. When this happens we should quit for a while and do something else, otherwise we will mindlessly copy what we've been doing, and probably stiffening and fixing in a faulty method. Come back to it fresh and think as you proceed. An approach of 'little and often' will be more successful than just the occasional lengthy stint that exhausts us. It's how we practice that's important.

It's also really helpful to find an established expert who you can emulate. By watching the performance of others we can pick up so much not only consciously, but subconsciously too. This will be internalised during our sleep and will inform our next attempts. See my post on Improvement without Practice on how I improved my violin playing by watching. My favourite example is some early film footage I've got of Yehudi Menuhin in the 1930s as a young man. Incredible freedom, natural ability and ease. Don't experts make it look so easy?

You can start doing any new activity at any age. (I started playing the violin at 53 and it's my intention to perform more than proficiently.) You still have decades of time to enjoy yourself, and what more can you ask for than doing what you love most and stretching your abilities? We may not hit the concert platform, or the US Masters, but we can enjoy a high level of performance if we go about it the right way.

Adaptive mechanism - posture

While our immune system adapts to cope with the invasion of new viruses and we adjust our behaviour depending on our social situation, our posture too is constantly adapting to the forces of nature. Gravity doesn't take time off; it's unremitting effect works on us the whole time. As we move, our balance shifts and there are millions of adjustments taking place to compensate and keep us upright.

Adapting to our postural situation is an automatic process that involves the cerebellum, the vestibular mechanism, the eyes and all our proprioceptive senses. Clearly any object that's not in balance fall's over. So our body is constantly adjusting the various tensions of our muscles to maintain upright poise while moving in relation to the earth's gravitational pull. However, we all get into bad postural habits such as slouching, stooping, over-stiffening and these interfere with the natural functioning of our body.

If we're stiffening our hips, legs and back by habit, then we're preventing the subtle shifts and compensations required for healthy, free poise. As a result of our postural habits most of us are off balance....all of the time. The reason we don't fall over is because we adapt to our situation and create extra tensions, bracing muscles that are not normally required for natural poise. These habitual tensions undermine us further and it can be a downward spiral of health and well-being if not corrected.

Continue reading "Adaptive mechanism - posture"

Mirroring emotions

Kathy Sierra has some interesting things to say about how we pick up on others emotions.and mirror each other in so many ways. Happiness creates health and wellbeing. Check out her insightful blog Passionate Angry/negative people can be bad for your brain.

Monday's Child

My 90 year old neighbour decided to tell me a nursery rhyme on Easter Monday. The relevance of this I've still to discover, but it's nice anyway. You probably know it....

Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go,
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child must work for a living,
But the child that's born on the Sabbath day,
Is fair and wise and good and gay.

I was born on Good Friday. What day were you born on?

Sensation

There is an aspect of visualisation that has been eluding me, but has now dawned fully. I could have realised this ages ago, but better late than never. And maybe you already know and sussed it before. In which case you should have told me.

Visualising what we want is a real helpful thing to do. Dreams are what life is made of, and it's important to dream positively about what you want. 'What you think is what you get'. We've talked about this before. (Avoid negative thoughts as that's what you'll attract towards you.)

But I've been thinking about what my good friend Ronald Harris, the top hypnotherapist in Scotland told me years ago. He said there's a well known phrase in psychology....'The expected sensation tends to be realised'. He explained, if you believe something will happen, you'll bring about the circumstances to make it happen.

So, visualise what you want, put yourself in the picture, sense the situation, feel the texture, smell the odour and see it clearly in your mind. See yourself being successful, happy, wealthy, in love and driving that cool car. This is the technique of visualisation. But there is one key word that I've not fully related to, at least until now and that is 'SENSATION'.

'The expected sensation tends to be realised.'
When visualising, it works best if you can create the 'sensation' of how you will feel in the situation of your dreams. Create the emotional feeling that you'll have when you're holding the object you want, or experiencing the love of another, the hug, or the peace of mind, or the happiness. Sense the joy, excitement, happiness, relief, pride, or whatever. It's the emotional experience we need to create. This is not instead of the visual image, but as well as the mental image when visualising. The Sensation is a major trigger.

Like attracts like. Give away smiles and you receive smiles back. Give away love and you get love back. Give away money and you get money back. (Try it. It may not come back from the same place you gave to, but you'll get it when you need it most.) Give away what you want. Like attracts like. My friend and life teacher Terry Tillman described how he was tuning one of the guitars in his band and when he tuned the G string, the guitar next to him resonated at the same frequency. Both G strings resonated together. We need to 'resonate' what it is that we want to attract towards us. Like attracts like. Resonate the emotion (sensation) and you'll attract the situation towards you that creates that emotion for you.

'The expected sensation tends to be realised.'

Have a great day. :-)

Adaptive mechanism

Sue Cluett writes interestingly on the Science of Happiness about our adaptive mechanism. This system helps us become immune to infections, but also affects how we feel about things in general. We adapt and adjust to new surrounds and change our behavior to fit with changing social situations. Our senses also quickly adapt so unpleasant odours become less obvious to us after a few minutes and we become unaware of our clothing once we're dressed. If we didn't adapt, some things in life could become very irritating!

When we eat or experience something pleasurable, we instantly want a bit more, but the experience is rarely as good as the first. The initial pleasurable sensation wears off. This is the same with many things in life including the salary increase that no longer satisfies us after a month, or new toys for children; they soon want something different!

So to really benefit and enjoy something to the same degree as our initial experience, we should wait some time before continuing. By waiting, we help ensure that the next time is a new experience and not just an extension of the first or initial experience. If it's chocolate, the longer we wait between bites will make the exerience better for each. It could take an awful long time to eat an Easter Egg this way! But we'll enjoy every mouthful. Thanks Sue.

Move to think

Charles Darwin's 'Thinking Path'.

There are plenty of people prepared to tell us that the brain works independently of the body, and the fact that we have physio-specialists and pscho-specialists does nothing to disprove this. But from what I can see, we function as a whole; neither brain nor body can work independently. What could the body do without the brain deciding on the activity and controlling muscular movement? And what mental exercises could the brain perform without a supply of blood pumped by the heart and re-oxygenated by the lungs?

When it comes to figuring things out, making choices in life and evolving new ideas, we might decide to 'sit down and think about this'. But experience shows that the activities of the brain are helped and stimulated by physical movement. This may be for several reasons. For instance, exercise gets everything 'going. It stimulates the breathing, blood circulation and helps to blow the cobwebs off and clear our head. Also, if we go for a walk, looking at our changing surroundings frees our thinking and helps to stop us 'focusing' too acutely. There's nothing like 'focusing' on something to prevent the broad, lateral thinking that may just come up with a brilliant idea.

When I visited Charles Darwin's home Down House at the weekend, I saw his 'Sand-walk' or 'Thinking Path' as he called it. Created in 1846 in an area of land that was fenced off and planted with native trees, it was covered in sandy gravel around the edge. Darwin, walked this daily doing several laps and recording the number or circuits by piling flint stones at the beginning. It was strolling round this path where he did most of his thinking which resulted in his theory of natural selection that rocked the world in the publication of his radical book 'On the origin of species'.

If you're going to think....go for a walk. And if you are walking somewhere....have a good think. The two go together beautifully. You might also think about how you're walking and ensure you're not off balance or getting stiff in your neck. Thinking about what you're doing is also a good thing to do.

Set your sights high

"Set your sights high, the higher the better.
Expect the most wonderful things to happen,
not in the future but right now.
Realise that nothing is too good.
Allow absolutely nothing to hamper you or hold you up in any way."

Eileen Caddy, Co-founder of the Findhorn Foundation, Scotland

In Darwin's house

Charles Darwin on the porch of Down House, Kent

Over the weekend I visited Down House in Kent, the home of Charles Darwin, which is a English Heritage site and open to the public.

This large country house retains all the fascinating character of a 19th century home where Darwin and his wife Emma brought up 10 children and he worked on his theory of natural selection and evolution. He spent his days in a well ordered schedule of working in his study, walking his gravel 'thinking path' and playing with his family. An earlier 'gap year' that turned into a 5 year tour of the world with 18 months at sea, started him on a train of thought and experimenting that lasted twenty years before the publication of his radical book 'On the Origin of Species' in 1859. His study room has all the character and interesting paraphernalia of a 19th century scientist with old leather-bound books, bones, skulls and microscopes.

His book 'On the Origin of Species' introduced his concept of natural selection and how humans descended from the ape over millions of years. Interestingly, the 19th century morals and attitude, that even insisted on table legs being covered by table cloths for the sake of modesty, found his theory hard to accept. One lady apparently said 'Have you heard about Darwin's shocking book where he says we have descended from apes? Let's hope it's not true. And if it is, let's hope they don't tell anybody!'

I enjoyed walking around his house on only two feet, being reminded of our prehistoric ape connections. The experience brought to mind and related to the nature of my own work in the Alexander Technique, where I help people free themselves of posture habits and improve balance and natural poise...on two feet. It was a grand day out.

As it happens, I mentioned to my first client this morning that I'd been to Charles Darwin's house at the weekend and she quickly responded by saying that a good friend of hers is a direct descendant of Darwin and has the same surname. Sometimes the world feels very small...

Darwin's study at Down House.

Hot Cross Buns

If Easter Sunday is the day for Easter Eggs, Good Friday is for enjoying a lovely Hot Cross Bun...or two.

But these delicious buns have not always been associated with Christianity, and indeed had their origins in ancient cultures with the cross representing the four quarters of the moon. During the early medieval period, the Christian church adopted the hot cross bun and reinterpreted the icing cross. Apparently a monk named Father Thomas Rockcliffe began a tradition in 1361 of giving Hot Cross Buns to the poor of St Albans on Good Friday.

The buns have been associated with healing and protection from evil. When Roman Catholicism was banned in England in 17th century the popularity of the bun continued. Queen Elizabeth I eventually banned the consumption of Hot Cross Buns except during festivals such as Easter, Christmas and funerals!

Try a recipe or if you're lucky to have a local store that sells them, buy some for Friday 14th....or any time for that matter. They're not banned now.

Yum. Happy Easter

Always have a dream

Everyone should have a dream, something wonderful, something to look forward to. I've heard it said however, that "Daydreaming is such a waste of time", but I believe it's positively helpful.

Having a dream does several things. The dream is created in our mind and we can have complete, conscious control over it, unlike night-dreams so we can change and form it in any way we like. We can put ourselves into the scene, experiencing new joys, new habitats, new relationships, employments and sensual pleasures. If we compare the dream to a film showing on the screen in our mind, we are the director, producer, actor, cameraman and complete master of its design. So we can construct the dream any way we like. If the day-dream isn't a good one, then it's down to us to change it and make it fantastic.

It is my belief that our mental activity, thoughts and dreams, send out energy into the Universe and will manifest. "What we think is what we get." And although we may not be able to understand or see how our dream can come true, it can manifest in surprising ways. Maybe not exactly, but similar or even better. However, negative thinking and doubts must be avoided as they will undermine them. We should keep our thoughts positive.

It's a good idea to reflect on our dream every day. Give it a few moments. Give it exactly 33 seconds, then release the thought and think of something else. Having energised the idea by thinking, we need to release the energy into the Universe so that it can manifest, but if we're 'holding on' to it, the energy cannot get going. So visualise what you want, then let it go.

Dreams make us feel good. They lift our spirits, fueled by aspirations, hopes, wishes and needs. Our dream can excite us, give us an emotional lift, something to look forward to. They make us happy and happiness makes us healthy. Dreams are what life is made of. To not have a dream is to not not ignite the light that will attract wonderful things towards us.

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams!
Live the life you've imagined."
Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862 American writer

Look on the Bright Side

"It's worth a thousand pounds a year to have the habit of looking on the bright side of things."

Dr Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784 English lexicographer, critic and essayist

Happy Sunshine

As the days are getting longer in the Northern Hemisphere, it's great to have a bit more sunlight. Doesn't it make you feel good? Studies confirm that the amount of bright light we experience during the day can have a dramatic effect on our health and sense of well-being. It enhances your mood, reduces your food cravings, and gives you more energy. I know it affects me. It even increases the blood flow to your brain, improving your memory and sharpening your thinking ability. If we receive inadequate amounts of light it’s possible that we may suffer from insomnia and depression and these can then lead to other symptoms such as a loss of libido. So we want to avoid all that!

Briight light therapy has been developed as a means of helping those with seasonal affective disorders. However, we are all influenced by light. After all, over thousands of years our species has evolved mainly in the wild outdoors and not in dim offices. Think of how relaxed and happy we feel in the sun on holiday. Bright light makes us cheerful. But I feel the easiest way of getting adequate amounts is to just get outdoors for an hour a day.

Light affects us in different ways and provide many benefits. When UV light interacts with your skin, it triggers the formation of vitamin D. Vitamin D is far more than a bone builder. It has widespread influence throughout your body, including stimulating the production of feel-good brain chemicals such as serotonin and dopamine. Care must be taken as UV light, whether from the sun or from artificial light sources, also promotes skin aging and increases your risk of skin cancer. But 10 minutes of sunlight a day will provide us with all the vitamin D we need.

When light enters your eyes it has an even more immediate effect on your mood. Within 30 minutes of being in a very bright environment, you will feel more energetic and light-hearted. You will think more clearly and have a faster reaction time. And after just a few days you will be eating less and having fewer carbohydrate cravings.

Continue reading "Happy Sunshine"

stirring your drink

Which way do you stir your drink? To the left or the right?

This is likely to depend on which hand you prefer to use. If you're right handed you'll probably stir to the right, and left handed to the left.

Let me know if you experience it differently.

Be happy.

Down the drain?

There is a popular myth, owing to the rotational direction of a hurricane which is governed by the rotation of the earth, that says the water in bathtubs rotates a certain direction in the Northern Hemisphere and the opposite in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Coriolis effect, as it's called, does not determine which way the water swirls in your basin at home. The effect is too small to have any influence on the direction of such localised activity.

Water is free to swirl in either direction in basins or bath in both hemispheres. Which way it goes is determined by the geometry of a particular basin or, if things are perfectly aligned and balanced, then by chance.

Source: Space.com

Spirals in life

Do you find sometimes that your life or events have round in circles? Or you feel that you're back where you were before? Deja vu. Here we go again.

But if we look closely, we're likely to find that things are not exactly the same, although it feels like they've gone full circle. Time has moved on, and some elements or aspects of the situation have changed. So although we may experience a situation as the same, it is not exactly how it was and has now morphed into something slightly different and moved on.

Life goes in spirals, not circles. This is growth and development. Onwards and upwards.

Natural spirals of life

Trees growing in spirals

As we spend so much of our time in man-made environments, from home to office and the car, it's easy to forget that the natural world is not made of straight lines, but of curves and to be more precise spirals.

If we look at the natural world around us we can see that plants, trees and climbing creepers naturally spiral towards the sun as they grow. Antelope horns, shells of sea creatures and snails are all spiral in form, water drains away in a helical fashion. Free-falling objects fall in a spiralling motion as do rain drops on a windless day.
Spiral-nautilus

Our muscles
It's also interesting to note, in ourselves, that with our 500 or so muscles, they are not aligned in straight lines either, and that they overlap, link and work together....in a spiralling way; two spiral arrangements of muscle that mirror each other. There is indeed a double muscle spiral criss-crossing our body. The muscles co-ordinate together to move and support us.

When we develop habits of stiffening, slouching or stooping, it is extremely unlikely that we do so evenly, but with greater tendency towards one side or another. We tend to be right handed or left, so muscles become more developed on one side than the other, and the dominant side and spiral of contractions twist us over and round.

So if we have a stoop, it's likely that we're in a twist too and in order for us to 'straighten up' we will need to 'uncurl' and undo the spiral. But to actually try and do this wouldn't work in practice because we would not manage to calculate the degrees of twist. Nor is our sensory perception sufficlently finely tuned to sense what is required. The answer is to think of where you want to be. That is up tall. In other words, think of 'up' being the direction you want to go in, in order to 'straighten up'. So firstly loosen and let go of tensions that may be pulling you down, then send your head in that direction....upwards, and let your body unfurl itself. Nature will take care of the rest as we're 'designed' to function in a lengthening manner. Avoid pushing up as this will cause stiffness. Just think up and let the wonder of your body do the rest.

Chocolate happiness

With Easter approaching, there is good news for all closet chocoholics. Professsor Roger Corder reports that good quality dark chocolate is high in flavanols and can help prevent blood clotting, reduce blood pressure, and stave off heart disease and strokes. Flavanols are also to be found in red wine, tea, vegetables and fruit, but a good dose of chocolate may be more fun if your choco-tendencies verge on psychotic.

Neuroactive alkaloids may contribute to our euphoric feelings too, but be warned of dangers of over indulgence, says Tomas Herraiz, of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research in Madrid. So moderation is the key... Yum.

Smell of success?

The smell of fear can improve our alertness and intelligence, report psychologists in Rice University, Houston. And by being close to people in stressful situations heightens our own abilities.

"It is well-documented in research literature that animals experiencing stress and fear produce chemical warning signals that can lead to behavioral, endocrinological and immunological changes in their fellow animals of the same species, but we wanted to see if this applies to humans as well," said principal investigator Denise Chen, assistant professor of psychology at Rice.

Women who were exposed to chemicals from fear-induced sweat performed more accurately on word-association tasks than did women exposed to chemicals from other types of sweat or no sweat at all. The study was published this month in the journal Chemical Senses. Each participant had gauze attached to their upper lip, some of which were impregnated by the sweat collected from the armpits of people who had watched horror movies, others were neutral, while some had no sweat at all. When processing meaningfully related word pairs, the participants exposed to the fear chemicals were 85 percent accurate, six percent more accurate than those who were exposed to non-fear sweat; a statistically significant difference.

If we respond to such subtle and subconscious stimuli it's easy to see how large groups such as football or rugby supporters can affect on another. And in the office, if these chemicals tell us that a member of our own group has detected a problem or an approaching deadline, our brains go into a state of heightened awareness to deal with the challenges.

But equally so, it's my belief that we all give off smells and signals all of the time and these may relate to other emotions too, from happiness, excitement to love and kindness. Smell is only one of the means of transiting messages. The more healthy and in-tune we are with our bodies the more we are likely to pick up on people's energy, good and bad. The more centred and balanced we are, the better we will cope without taking on negative energies...

Another chance

How often we wish for another chance
to make a fresh beginning.
A chance to blot out our mistakes
And change failure into winning.
It does not take a new day
To make a brand new start,
It only takes a deep desire
To try with all our heart.
To live a little better
And to always be forgiving
And to add a little sunshine
To the world in which we're living.
So never give up in despair
And think that you are through,
For there's always a tomorrow
And the hope of starting new.

Helen Steiner Rice
www.pinkpoem.com

Occupational happiness

Dr Happy of The Happiness Institute says that 'Happiness is the ultimate goal'. And I tend to agree, but it's not an end in itself.

Happiness is what happens often when we're occupied in activities that are slightly demanding, artistic and requiring creativity and we probably only know we've happy afterwards because we've been so busy doing the thing that makes us happy. Creative pursuits and challenging activities such as gardening, sport, painting, crotchet, skiing, lampshade making and anything you like can occupy us to such an extent that we're lost in our occupation. It takes us out of ourselves, so to speak and as long as the challenge isn't so great that it's unattainable, we're likely to enjoy a sense of fulfillment during the process.

But there again, we don't need any occupation to make us happy if we just choose to be so. We can just BE happy. That's a darn sight more fundamental and wholehearted than trying to find something outside of us that will bring us happiness.

Pleasure in work

Housewife savoring the essence of dish washing

Now this is what I like to see, happiness at work, pleasure in the moment and an unadulterated sensual experience. The fact that someones made this into a stockphoto is besides the point.

How to have a great, happy day? Turn every task and chore we have to do into a pleasurable experience. And we can do that by changing our mind set, changing how we view the task. There is something to take joy in, with almost every activity. And as today is my birthday, I intend to do just that.

Ocean to Tetrapod to Ipod

The first fish finger has been discovered and surprise, surprise it's not from Captain Birdseye. Tiktaalik fossils from 383 million years ago in Arctic Canada are thought to be the missing link between ocean fish and mammals as they had scales, fins and also wrists, fingers and a neck like land animals. They bridge the gap between Sacopterygians which were lobed-fined fish and the Tetrapod or limb-ed vertebrates. And the development from the Tetrapod to the Ipod took just another 360 million years.

Looking at my own hand here as I type, it's clear that the webbing between our fingers, which is similar to between our toes is not a million leaps away from that of frogs and seabirds. Think I'll go for a swim later...

This chart shows differences in a variety of creatures that lived roughly 360 million to 410 million years ago. The sequence is arranged in a way that shows how fins might have evolved into limbs.

Happiness, a state of mind

Searching for happiness is like looking for the Holy Grail, a lifetime's pursuit and possibly without an end result. Most of us like to be happy, but to look outside of ourselves may not be the way. Acquiring possessions, buying the latest gadget are likely to produce lasting happiness as much as eating food that temporarily satisfies a hunger. We eventually need to be topped up.

Happiness isn't a quality that some of us can have and others not. It is my belief that happiness is a condition that we can all have....if we choose. It comes down to a state of mind. It comes down to making the choice to be happy.

I might say that I'm not very happy having to clean the bird droppings off my car as I did last weekend. Pigeons just eat far too much don't they? But rather than experiencing tedium and irritation, I could choose to be happy at my task and take pleasure in making my car nice and clean. It was a sunny day, the birds were singing (and dropping bombs) and it was a wonderful day. There is much to appreciate.

Happiness may not be what one might expect to experience when cleaning the car or doing any 'chore', but it can be....if we just choose. Happiness is a state of mind that we can summon at anytime, and it needs to be refreshed. But rather than trying to refresh it by seeking external stimuli, we may just find that it's there, just for the summoning. This can be tricky at first if we're not accustomed to doing so. But with practice it gets easier.

'There is no road to happiness. Happiness is the way.'
Buddha

Teach a man to fish...

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you get rid of him on weekends."

Thanks Terry.

Swimming and physical change

One of my clients who is a singer and has just cut her first disc came in today and said she'd noticed how much her shoulders had widened out as a result of her Alexander Technique lessons. As well as singing, she's a very keen swimmer and had won every cup going when she was at school and even beaten the Belgian national champion.

She said that she noticed yesterday while swimming freestyle, that her arms were articulating in the shoulder joints further apart than before and that she was wider and flatter in the upper body. She is really enjoying her new width and better poise now she's getting rid of postural habits. It's interesting how we can all perceive ourselves changing in different ways. Our posture can change generally and also filter through into all our other activities. Posture affects everything we do.

Check out the Shaw Method of Swimming based on the principles of the Alexander Technique.

Harrison's Rocks, Kent

Harrison's Rocks, Tunbridge Wells, Kent

This photograph was taken when it was pouring with rain and I was literally clinging to the rocks with my tripod and a plastic bag over the camera to keep it dry. The wind was blowing hard and it took everything I'd got to keep me and the tripod static and click the shutter.

Hasselblad with 80mm lens, yellow filter, Delta 100 exposed at 50ASA f8 at 1/4 second.

Stuttering

Tiger Woods

Marilyn Monroe

Stutter, a provocative and imaginative new book by Marc Shell shares wisdom and hope for all who suffer from this socially crippling tendency. A recovered stutterer himself, he talks freely about the social difficulties it causes and how remaining silent rather than expressing himself gave him the sense of being imprisoned. Four years ago he started on the McGuire speech-recovery programme and can now articulate by controlling his breathing and by talking more assertively in a deep and breathy tone. He now gets comments about the sexiness of his voice and although it's been described as sounding like a 'terrible old actress', he prefers to imagine it's more like a laconic Gary Cooper.

Those who have overcome stammering are in the good company of many famous people, from Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill, King George VI, Somerset Maugham, to Tiger Woods the golfer. Indeed there have been many stutterers who have used this disadvantage to their benefit. While finding great difficulty in expressing themselves in conversation, some have turned successfully to literature and become novelists, poets or writers in other fields.

The McGuire therapy is based on the principle that stuttering is a fear of stuttering. The more difficult the word is felt to be, the more fear there is that the word will not come out properly, so there is a greater tendency to stutter. The McGuire technique encourages the participant 'to come out' loudly and proudly speak with a stutter and to do so without shame so to remove the embarrassment. By facing up to the stutter and letting it exist takes away some of the pressure and fear, so they learn to get the words out more freely. By removing or reducing the fear content of stuttering, while also pausing to formulate words more clearly and speaking more deliberately, the stutterer can learn to converse more normally.

Continue reading "Stuttering"

Out of the blue...

Isn't life just full of surprises? I was going through a drawer in my desk on Friday last week and came across a photograph of the daughter of one of my clients, which she sent to me with her Christmas card. I had kept it because she looked so happy and very like her mother who lives in Texas, USA and who I haven't seen for maybe three years.

I thought of my client and wondered how she was and what she was doing. She comes to London periodically but only for a few days at a time and is so busy, she hasn't had chance to look me up. I thought how nice it would be to see her.

This morning there was an email in my Inbox from her. She's in London and wanted to fix an appointment. We've spoken on the phone and she's coming round early tomorrow morning. Isn't that great?

It's very easy to pass this type of occurrence as just co-incidence, but I choose not. There is no knowing what's round the corner, who we're going to meet or what's going to happen. The most surprising and happy events can just occur, probably as easily as sad events. But we don't need to think of those. I like to notice the small co-incidences in life, to acknowledge their existence and to sometimes act on impulse in response to wild ideas, as my subconscious may well lead me to something quite exciting and unexpected....

Continue reading "Out of the blue..."

Spring Fever

If we're feeling lively and even a bit sexy, there's a good reason why, reports The Times, as we get into spring mood. Not only are the daffodils out, but so are the primroses and violets as I discovered yesterday while walking in the Chiltern Hills. And I wasn't the only one. The air is fresh and with the longer days and brighter daylight we get an emotional and physical lift in many ways.

It seems that during the winter months we are starved of vitamin D that is naturally provided by daylight and essential for healthy bones and teeth. But as soon as the sun comes out, we make a dash for the outdoors as our body craves a top-up. Just 30 minutes of exposure to the face and arms each day between April and October (when the sun’s rays are strongest) is enough to ensure adequate levels for the rest of the year. Yet most of us receive too little from the sun and food combined. Ideally we should get several ten minute stints during the mid-day hours when the sun is at it's strongest, while taking care not get sunburn.

Our sex drive can surge when spring arrives, triggered by hormonal changes that occur as the retina, the part of the eye connected to the brain by the optic nerve, transmits the effect of more daylight. Melatonin, a hormone that affects our mood and how we sleep, reduces as a result of light changes, so lifting our mood, reducing the desire to sleep and increasing our sexual appetite. This peak of sexual activity is only beaten by the levels achieved in the late summer and early autumn when conceptions are at their highest resulting in a surge of new spring babies.

“Vitamin D deficiency is extremely common,” says Professor Michael Holick, of Boston University Medical School. Between 80 and 100 per cent of our vitamin D requirement is met by sunlight. A study he carried out in Boston found that 32 per cent of those aged 18 to 29 were deficient at the end of a typical winter.

So if you're feeling like dashing and frolicking outside this month, take care not to overdo the exercise if you're not used to it. Spring is also the period when a lot of heart attacks occur. But let's get outside and enjoy it!