Healing Trauma

I’m not sure where I heard or read this but the idea that ‘Life would not be painful if we lived and died once, but we experience the pain of death every time there is a major trauma in our lives.’ Serious illness, redundancy, repossession of a home, end of a relationship, loss of a parent, child or other close relative are just some of those traumas. The feelings involved can be vast, ranging from explosive anger and rage at one end to deep anguish and hurt at the other. Left unexpressed the emotions don’t go away they take up space and energy as they are repressed, manifesting overtime in the body as muscular tension and even disease.

I feel so empowered as an NLP Therapist helping people in such situations, because NLP can effectively nurture deep healing even with clients for whom the recalling of the traumatic episode is unbearable, or where the memory of the event is fragmented. Giving them freedom from the past, emotionally, mentally and physically.

Food Experiment

I’m looking forward to an interesting next few days as I manage without a refrigerator. 7 days to be precise until the new one arrives, its poor predecessor having come to a sudden stop last night. I can’t quite get my head round it yet. People have been giving me lots of reassurance, especially stories about how folks forty or so years ago managed perfectly well without them. A time when milk used to be delivered to the door early each morning and the last drop went into nightcaps in the evening. When people cooked enough for one meal. A kind of now and in the moment way of cooking and eating. Reminds me of holidays abroad in India where as children if we got peckish while playing outdoors we would walk just a few metres and pull some turnips out of the soil, wash them with water from a well, peel the skin off with our teeth and gobble them up. And they were so delicious! Soil to tummy in ten minutes!

Giani Thakur Singh Ji

I caught up with Giani ji at the end of his month long U.K tour. He’s such an approachable, down-to-earth person despite his vast knowledge and international standing. We talked as if we'd known each other for years, no formality, straight into deep, fascinating conversation.

Giani has a keen interest in auras and his insight into aura shapes was amazing. He explained how with regular spiritual practice in the form of prayer and meditation a person's aura can increase in size - deeply spiritual people can sometimes have auras so big it's as if there were a giant standing behind them!

Giani is a great believer in reiki, urging me to undertake training in it and incorporate the approach into my therapeutic practice. He gave an example of a heart surgeon who gives all his patients reiki healing before commencing surgery, accounting for a 100 per cent success rate in patient recovery. Giani knows a lot about the chakras too, both from a spiritual perspective as well as for healing. He related an interesting technique, saying the energy of any chakra can be balanced by doing Mool Mantar jaap or simran while holding a hand over the affected chakra. The other way to do it is to place a hand over the chakra straight after Mool Mantar or simran has finished. The Gurbani or simran helps release the energy blockage in an underactive chakra, while calming one which is overactive.

Wary of time as we both had other appointments, we moved on to the subject of interpreting dreams and especially prophetic dreams which foretell future events. This led our conversation nicely to the future and what that might look like in terms of life here on earth.

Giani ji is constantly attending to people’s problems as they seek advice from him in person, by phone or through radio shows. Coming from a helping profession myself, I wanted to check that he wasn't absorbing this negativity in some way. He agreed he was internalising it into the muscles of his body and promised to walk at least 20 minutes everyday in order to release the negative energy. It's a routine he does have back home in Patiala but which gets overlooked when he’s on tour because of the sheer volume of people wanting to meet him. So he’s going to be doing ‘walkie talkies’ now – taking people who want to meet up with him out for a walk! So if you go to see Giani ji make sure you’re wearing comfortable shoes!

H.A.L.T

This is a great acronym for maintaining physical and emotional health. The idea is to stop whenever you experience any of these and attend to the particular need, ensuring it is satisfied in a healthy way.

Are you …

Hungry
Angry
Lonely
Tired

then Halt!

Of Men and Dogs

On the weekend I went to hear an inspirational and thought provoking talk, which left quite an impression on me. The speaker described his experience of arriving at the airport. While waiting, he happened to be looking around and saw sniffer dogs scouring the luggage. He made some poignant statements, saying that as human beings we are at the apex of the animal kingdom and yet we need dogs to keep us in line. He stressed we are only human for as long as we have ‘humanness’ in us - that capacity to understand and empathise with others. To me, this isn’t about agreement, since every person has their own unique set of values and principles, but it is about being able to perceive another persons view point, especially when it’s different from our own and to get a sense of their pain and suffering. This is what builds bridges and connects people, to do otherwise is a world of ever increasing conflict, war and famine.

Feedback versus Failure

Last weekend I spent a wonderful afternoon in the company of my nephew Harry, who is two and a half years old. He quickly transformed an empty chocolate box into a camera and peered down one end of it seeing me at the other. When we went to the park, his buggy replaced the toy cars he’d been playing with at home and he happily pushed it around the play area.

As I watched him I was amazed at how instantly he can change his thinking, it reminded me of the NLP concept of Feedback versus Failure. This is about how to see whatever results from a given situation as an opportunity, focusing on what was done really well and giving acknowledgement and praise for that, identifying areas which need to be improved, creating specific plans for making those improvements and then to prepare for the next opportunity.

Cleaning Up

I’ve been undertaking a little project at home. The strong smells and colours of ordinary detergents and cleaning products had been bugging me for a while, so I decided to investigate alternative options. And I really did have to play detective in our airport sized local superstore. The natural cleaning stuff was neatly tucked away at the end of a totally unrelated aisle. So, one by one as I’ve needed to replenish stocks, I’ve been trying out the plant derived variety and have been really impressed.

Having a strong sense of smell, the first thing that hits me is how pleasant the fragrances are, one kind of antibacterial cleaner has such an amazing smell (I think it’s the bergamot in it) that it was nearly nice to be cleaning. And they work just as well. Another surprising discovery was how cheap the natural stuff is. So it’s been a win-win all round. Amazing what happens when we explore a different route to the same destination!