Posts Tagged ‘taking responsibility’

Healing Ourselves

Mar 20th, 2010

Nothing we can do will avoid the fact that at some point our physical bodies will stop working and each one of us will die.

How you react to that will probably depend, in part, on whether you see death as an end or as a beginning. Personally I believe it’s both but I’ll only find out for sure when it comes. I react to the thought mainly with peace with some moments of fear (maybe I’m wrong, and it is only an end).

Scars On the Journey Of Life

The good news is, for now, I’m alive and well in a physical body, subject to emotional ups and downs, learning new stuff all the time and gradually connecting with a spiritual dimension to my life.

Part of this journey I call ‘life’ are the knocks and bruises we all suffer. Accidents and diseases damage my physical form, emotional traumas leave their invisible scars and my intellect gets misled by wrong thinking or factual mistakes. The other part of me – my spiritual dimension – is , as yet, unfamiliar to me and so far less tangible. Many traditions teach that even our souls can get damaged, for example, through ‘sin’, though I prefer to believe that my soul is pure and untarnished whatever happens in this life.

The quality of my life, the inner peace I strive for, is heavily influenced by my overall health.

If I’m un-healthy in some way, then my energy is used dealing with that rather than getting on with life. We’ve all experienced the need to rest after an illness – our energy goes on recuperating.

The Healing Power Within

If I fell over and broke my leg I’d probably go to the doctor to fix me up, right? She/he would align the bones, put on a cast to keep my leg rigid and after several weeks the break will be mended.

Who healed me?

Neither I nor, in this case, the doctor do anything to heal my leg. Realigning the bones, administering chemicals (natural or otherwise!), resting, paying attention to how I’m moving are not ‘healing’ but all things that support the natural healing process and allow it to work smoother and faster. The healing takes place at a deeper level from within my organism and is really quite extraordinary – the other stuff is just helping this invisible process.

For me this is vitally important.

Keeping Healers In Their Rightful Place

Doctors don’t heal our bodies.
Therapists don’t heal our hearts.
Religious leaders don’t heal our souls.

No-one can heal me, no matter how much I’m told the opposite.

Healing is what happens within each of us and not something we receive from the outside. We can receive many things from the outside that can help the healing process, and those trained and experienced in healing different wounds have a lot to offer. But doing the healing is not one of them.

I want to keep so-called ‘healers’ in their right place – as people who can offer potential support to the healing that happens within.

I want to take responsibility for my own health and not abdicate to the ‘health’ industry in its myriad forms or to anyone else, for that matter. Nobody cares as much about my health as me and that’s exactly as it should be. I know plenty of people who go running to the health centre at the first sign of illness, for example, or whole communities living their spiritual lives by rules laid down by their local priest or guru.

Doctors, therapists and priests are not gods but most of them deserve respect for their experience and expertise in particular aspects of health and healing. I want to know when and where to seek the support and guidance of others – including those from the health industry with relevant expertise – but not pass responsibility to them.

I confess I don’t yet take as much care of my health as I would like and I’m not very well informed about the support available. I need to be in order to make sensible judgements. My own apporach is to avoid the health industry wherever I can and I don’t take especially great care of my health in all its forms.

Not yet anyway!

Taking Responsibility

What this means for me is:

1. Recognise that most wounds (physical, emotional, spiritual) will heal

2. Honour and respect the remarkable capacity for my being to heal

3. Support the healing by creating the right conditions to allow the inner process to work its magic

4. Give patience and time to the healing

5. Call on those with relevant experience and never pass responsibility to them

And I want to always remember that nobody will ever care more about my health than me.

Start Here – Passion and Compassion

Dec 9th, 2009

by ianpeatey.

13 comments

There’s a lot of sickness, cold calculation, hatred and violence in the world. It’s easy to forget the opposite is also true and resign ourselves to the ills of the world. I don’t believe I can directly or easily change other people – nor do I necessarily have the ‘right’ to do so.

What I can do is start with myself and trust that it makes a difference.

There are three things I consider important:

Look after myself
Live with passion
Choose compassion and peace.

1. Look After Myself

Maybe you’ve heard the story (or similar) about the favourite uncle who lived to 105 years smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day and staying stubbornly overweight all his life. The conclusion is the secret to long life is to smoke and eat a lot.

Clearly this is false logic.

The uncle (if he indeed was real) was an exception and not the rule. Long life came despite the nicotine and excessive calories, not because of it. Just because it’s possible to live a long life no matter how I abuse myself doesn’t make it probable.

Looking after myself improves my chances I maintain the inner resources for a full, happy and meaningful life. It’s about looking after my physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health.

It’s about:

choosing to put things into my body that are healthy
keeping in shape
developing my awareness of and listening to my emotions
constantly questioning my assumptions and beliefs in the sure knowledge that I can never be certain of anything (except that I can never be certain)
seeking out new experiences, people, ways of seeing the world, ideas, bodies of learning
finding and maintaining a spiritual practice.

2. Live With Passion

Lisis over at Quest For Balance recently published an article ‘The Passion Paradox’ about passion. She writes about what she calls the modern day ‘snake oil’ salespeople promising easy riches if only you follow your passion in life. She points out the same false logic as the ‘favourite uncle’ story – if Mr/Mrs X followed their life’s passion and got rich it does not mean everyone will do the same.

There are many people in the world who have accumulated a lot of wealth – and there are far more who haven’t. Wealth, of course, doesn’t define any of us as human beings unless we allow it. Passion is much closer to defining who we are.

As Lisis writes:

we should bring our passion into anything we do, with no expectation of profit

Passion is about how I manifest myself in the world – defining what I choose to do and what I give of myself when I do it. If I’m passionate about what I do, results are secondary. I might change the world. I might get ridiculously wealthy.

I might not.

If I do something out of passion – I do it for myself, not for others. If I live with passion – with all my resources – mind, heart and soul – the results don’t matter. When the results matter to other people, when what I do is valuable to them, I might get some feedback. I might receive praise, appreciation, and yes, perhaps even money. The more people touched by what I do, the more I’ll likely receive.

It’s about:

Knowing what gets me excited, interested, motivated
Doing things that give me pride and a sense of achievement
Caring about what I do and how I do it
Eliminating as many of the things that don’t excite me and I don’t care about.

3. Choose Compassion and Peace

How I relate and treat the people around me is a choice I make.

When I choose compassion over hate I build bridges, heal wounds in me and others, bring gentleness instead of harshness.When I choose peace over violence I calm things down, I connect rather than separate and I create in place of destruction.

Most importantly when I’m compassionate and peaceful with others I’m also loving to myself. And that’s much more powerful than hate and violence. It may not be as obvious, may not be as immediate but it’s effects are far deeper and last much longer.

It’s about:

Valuing each and every human being
Reaching out when I feel like withdrawing
Holding out my hand not my fist
Taking responsibility for my life and not pretending I’m a victim of others.

Finally

Healthy living doesn’t guarantee a long happy life. Following your passion won’t necessarily make you rich. Choosing compassion and peace won’t eliminate hate and violence.

These things don’t come with any guarantees – but that’s not a good reason to choose the opposite.

Dwelling on the lighter side

Nov 15th, 2008

by ianpeatey.

13 comments

Looking back at some of my recent posts it struck me that they’re tending towards the darker side of life. It’s an old habit I’m trying to break!! Not wanting to give a false impression and unduly spread gloom, I’m going off in seach of the lighter side. There is one! Trust me! I guess you know it already.

Taking responsibility for my life firmly in my own hands my mood is my choice. Here’s some things that help me turn on the light switch.

None resolve whatever underlies the dark, but getting in a positive frame gives me inner resources to identify what’s missing and do something about it.

1 Remind myself it’s a choice

On the dark side there often seems to be little choice. There is! It takes some practice but I remind myself how I react to what’s going on around me is largely, if not entirely, my choice. I can react pretty much any way I want. I can sink into a dark pit or I can press the button and illuminate. I’m fortunately living in a stable, peaceful place with little to get gloomy about – which certainly helps. I’m inspired by others who manage to keep their humanity in the most extreme situations. Read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning if you have any doubts!

2 Music

I collect and listen to a lot of music and there’s definitely some mood changing qualities in it. I choose music to match my mood or to help change it. My current uplifting beats of choice are, for a reason that I’ve yet to fathom, My Chemical Romance and Muse.

3 Talk to someone

I don’t mean visit a therapist or seek a shoulder to cry on – just a good old fashioned conversation does it for me. I spend much time on my own and I like it that way! However, when I’m not in contact with others I have a tendency to slowly drift into the dark side. I have several shining people I can call on and I know we’ll talk about nothing in particular and with the lightest of touches.

4 Walk in the park

Works for me mainly in the Spring and Summer where there’s more life, colour and sunshine. Even in the Autumn and Winter the parks are so beautiful … and just touching the life there helps wake me up. Crunching through the snow on the ground or feeling the sun on my face always lifts my mood.

5 Read

I’m currently reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine .. now there’s a depressing read (important, but not exactly uplifting!). To get some balance I dip into something short and light (Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet works especially well)

6 Clean up

There’s nothing like cleaning the apartment and throwing out stuff to brighten the day. I recently deleted my entire Email inbox (sorry if any of you are waiting for a reply!). One press on the delete button was a real flash and throwing out everything I’ve not used recently is a real brightener. There’s nothing like a clean start!

7 Do something for someone else

I’m not so attracted to buying stuff so retail therapy (for myself or someone else) just doesn’t do it for me. Giving some time and attention does. It could be a simple phone call or mail to say ‘thanks’, sending an article I think might be interesting or offering to do something with no expectation of return. It’s a reminder that my presence in the World might mean something.

8 Escape for a while

This is a last resort and usually involves switching off for a couple of hours and any film or TV show will do. I’m currently working my way through the X-files at the moment. 45 minutes of mindlessness works wonders. Writing this blog has a similar effect!

9 Go to sleep

When I wake up to the sunrise things always look a whole lot better.

“It’s always darkest just before the dawn”

10 …..

I don’t have a tenth and I’m really curious to hear suggestions … what do you do to flip the switch?

Posts Tagged ‘taking responsibility’