In the book ‚The Myth of Normality‘ by Gabor Maté, this fantastic author describes the deleterious effects of stressors on our health. He mentions as main stressors – beside the tragic consequences of big but also small traumas – uncertainty, conflicts, lack of control, lack of information.
These stressors bring our systems to be too over-activated, creating too much agitation, tensions and many chronic conditions.
One of them is chronic anxiety that can lead to panic attack. [Weiterlesen]
We often hear that we have to be able to ‘let go’: let go of the past, a difficult situation, a break-up, a failure. You may have noticed, as I have, that despite the relevance of this advice, it’s not so easy to apply.
Thinking and talking to my clients about it , I’ve noticed that we often refer to ‘letting go’ as a synonym for not feeling what’s disturbing and unpleasant about situations we’d like to leave behind. Because it’s unpleasant, we try not to feel it. But by not feeling it, we can’t let it go.
When we accept that a situation has been important in our lives without pretending indifference or detachment, its end leads us to experience sensations such as a sense of loss, a feeling of failure, a loss of control, regardless of whether or not it corresponds to reality. Then, let it go can be difficult.
The difficulty of feeling unpleasant sensations and the reaction to protect ourselves against them so that we can continue to function in everyday life are perfectly natural. But our resistance to these experiences highlights our desire for reality, our reality, to be different, less frustrating, less difficult, less disappointing.
And through this resistance, we maintain in the present what has already happened in the past.
This leads me to think that perhaps a better concept for training our attention to let go would be ‘surrender’: accepting that the ‘battle’ has been lost and that we can therefore stop trying to change/control/modify reality. It’s a question of training ourselves to accept what is. Surrendering to what is by feeling what has happened and its consequences.
To achieve this result, our training will be to :
Personally, I find the practice of mobilising my mind towards those aspects of the experience that allow me to learn about myself – how I responded in such a situation/relationship, but also about others a particularly useful tool.
Surrendering thus becomes an important step in the process of digestion, integration and composting to create new humus for new flowers to grow.
As always, I’d be delighted to support you in your process of letting go.
Some of my clients describe, during their sessions with me, how their negative thoughts cause tensions, anxiety and even sleep problems, and how difficult this is to change.
Breathing exercises are very useful because, by paying attention to the practice, we channel the mind into the body – into the present moment – and in this way we can stop or alleviate the physical reaction. [Weiterlesen]
« We tend to suppose that energy is dissipated with use. We think that doing extra work incurs loss. But energy increases as we use it ».
Haruchika Noguchi wrote these lines in 1984 in his book ‚Order, spontaneity and the body‚. In it, he reflects on the importance of confronting what life presents us with, in order to gain more vital energy. He believes that a person does not become stronger and healthier by avoiding – as a life strategy – what is perceived as negative or difficult. [Weiterlesen]
We are at the end of March and I would like to ask you a question: do you still remember what resolutions you made at the end of 2023?
Making a resolution for the coming year has become a fairly common practice: we declare our intention to improve ourselves, to take better care of ourselves, to make our lives better, more satisfying or more exciting.
Then we give it some attention and, as soon as everyday life resumes after the festivities and holidays, we forget the fact that we wanted to bring change into our lives and we abandon our resolutions, often overwhelmed by the things we have to do.
Does this ring a bell? [Weiterlesen]
‚What is forgiveness?‘
asked the pupil to the master.
The master smiled, picked up a stone and placed it in front of him:
‚the violent man would use it as a weapon to do evil.
The builder would make it a brick on which to build a cathedral.
For the weary traveller it would be a chair where he could find rest.
The artist would sculpt the face of his muse.
The absent-minded would stumble upon it.
The child would make a game of it.
In all cases, it is not the stone that makes the difference, but the man.
With forgiveness, man chooses to transform the stones of life into love.‘ (*)