Psychologist - Fresnaye Cape Town
I am 65 years old.
In the not too distant past I would have been retiring at this age.
Actually, it feels like my career is just taking off!
With thousands of hours of psychological and spiritual work under my belt, I’m still neurotic in a lot of ways – I call it my immovable block of pathology – but I have also made some significant progress.
I would like to share one piece of that progress right now and its implications for Self-Esteem.
I am having lunch with a client whom I have known for many years.
She asks me why I think intimate relationships are so difficult – she’s just ended a rather bad one.
A memory comes to mind.
A short while after moving into our new home a few years ago, some very special friends came for lunch.
They’ve been happily married for 45 years.
They got lost on the way.
Between the phone calls and the Google maps they eventually arrive about 20 minutes late.
No problem for us.
But what about them? [Read more…] about Can You Be Lost And Late And Not Need To Be Right?
For some years now I have loved quoting that magnificent Self-Esteem line from the movie Cool Runnings, the one about the Jamaican bobsled team that makes the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics.
While they are busy qualifying it’s discovered that their coach Irv Blitzer, who had two gold medals from a Winter Olympics 16 years previously, had cheated in his third Olympics and had been kicked out.
This created a major controversy in 1988 and while the controversy was raging one of the Jamaican team members comes up to the coach and says, “But coach, you already had two gold medals, why did you have to cheat to get a third one?” and the coach replies, with that magnificent line,
“A gold medal is a wonderful thing, but if you‘re not enough without it, you’ll never be enough with it.”
Now we don’t know if this was actually said in real life or it was just simply a matter of clever script writing, but it is the most fabulous truth.
Let me now tell you about Michael Phelps the greatest Olympian in history.
He has won 28 medals, 23 of them gold, way beyond the person who comes second in this rating system. His wife is a Miss California beauty pageant winner and looking at it from the outside you would have to think that the man has an idyllic life.
Until a couple of weeks ago. [Read more…] about They said you were stupid – and you believed them!
Waking up to a world of wanting and not wanting, passing through my mind and through my body.
Yet beneath and around it all there is a sense of letting everything be as it is.
No division, no trying to change everything,
No resisting everything.
No question, this is the blossoming of love on the inside.
The most ridiculous question you can ask is, “Do you believe in God?”
Why ridiculous, well it would be like asking, “Do you to believe in music?”
When I ask my clients if they believe in music, you should see the puzzled look on their face.
It would be absurd to think that you can believe in music because music is an experience it has nothing to do with what we believe or don’t believe, it has nothing to do with what’s happening in your mind.
Music and God are experiences.
But…and this is a very big but, for most us our identities, our definition of self, is created in the mind. [Read more…] about The Most Ridiculous Question You Can Ask!