Love Your Self For No Reason

Psychologist - Fresnaye Cape Town

Mark Kahn

Competition vs Magic

I’m thinking about how we are trained to be so competitive.

So much of the time, thinking win-lose, superior-inferior.

When we learn to read and write at school we are either told, “You are so clever or so stupid.”

Wouldn’t it be beautiful if they could say, “Can you feel the intrinsic magic, of reading and writing? This amazing ability we all have, to create letters and words and sentences and paragraphs and books and to read them and learn and share ideas with each other and create and communicate and express love and grow and heal and transform!?

Can you feel this beautiful resonance in your body, in your mind in your heart?”

Then perhaps all of life, of living, could be filled with wonder and magic.

Really feeling it, filling our entire being.

The joy of this, rather than the pain of, “I’m so clever-stupid.”

A Closed Heart Cannot Live!

I was reading a post from a Facebook friend, Francis Bennett, a couple of weeks ago. She was a Franciscan monk – previously being a ‘he’ who transgendered.

She is spiritually Awakened. She wrote about the suicide of a spiritually Awakened friend of hers Wayne Wirs.

The comments about his death were really fascinating, many and varied. I just loved one written by Birelle Eden. She says, “In my understanding we are born with our hearts wide open…This open, whole state is inherently joyful…But when our authentic selves are met with rejection, betrayal and abandonment, our hearts freeze to stop the overwhelming pain…this is the ONLY thing that can disrupt our basic faith in the goodness of ourselves and life.”

Over the years I have watched this closing, this freezing in myself and in my clients. [Read more…] about A Closed Heart Cannot Live!

My ‘Chef Mind’

Nothing much is happening right now. Sitting on my patio looking at the garden, the trees, the flowers, the birds hopping and flying around.

I notice my mind, looking for something to dissect, comment on. Searching for peace and meaning in this strange and uncontrollable life.

It is like a desperate chef, speedy chopping knife tearing through the vegetables.

Life was beautiful a moment ago, now it lies in pieces on the ground, like James Taylor’s Flying Machine.

I smile wryly at this incessant thing, this destroyer of the Now!

 

Guilt Creates Anger!

It’s a really fascinating thing about Self-Esteem. If you get it from approval and success, you will never feel complete.

In other words there may be areas in which it is high, but there will also be areas in which it is low.

Extremely successful people have areas of very low Self-Esteem. Over the years I’ve watched this in high profile business people, sports people and the Hollywood brigade.

They look powerful and confident as long as they’re talking about their success and then if you push a button which evokes a sense of their inadequacy in an area where they are struggling in their lives, the Self-Esteem disappears, like mist in the sun. [Read more…] about Guilt Creates Anger!

Love Is What Is Happening

I’m totally exhausted.

Stachybotrys, the mould biotoxin, has got to me.

I’m looking, searching, clawing desperately for a way to escape the pain of exhaustion, to feel better.

It’s just a fantasy. Without the fantasy I can sit with the pain.

But I don’t want to.

I give up the fight, relax and merge into what is happening.

Perhaps love isn’t in getting what I want, it is in loving what is happening.