Self Esteem

Opening into the day,

Playing at life

A smile releasing…being

Lightness dancing into the world.

 

I’ve been fascinated for decades with our cultures inability to dialogue issues of suicide and death and indeed wrote a blog about the former a couple of months ago.

Mathew O’Reilly is an emergency medical technologist. He gives this extraordinary TED talk where he describes how for years he protected critically injured people that he was assisting at the roadside, from hearing the news that they were going to die.

He did this because he felt he was being helpful to them. He believed that if he told them the truth, that they were about to die, they would die in terror and fear. Then one day when a patient asked him if he was going to die, Matthew said, “Yes.”

He was stunned by the fact that instead of the person going into shock and anxiety – which I believe is created by our society’s fear of death – they went into a state of inner peace and acceptance.

“From that moment forward” he says, “I decided it was not my place to comfort the dying with my lies.” [Read more…] about Living And Dying Without Regret.

On Friday my blog for today was complete and I sat down at my PC, cutting it from Word and pasting it into my website. I left out a piece and inadvertently deleted what I had pasted into the website and when I got back to my Word document I discovered that I had inadvertently deleted that!

I then tried a system restore on my PC to try and get back the document and failed.

My first reaction was to panic. “Oh my God” I thought to myself, “I don’t want to have to redo this again!”

And then I just sat back for a moment and watched myself panicking and resisting having to redo it and then just walked away from my PC and let the whole situation just simmer in the background.

I realised that I just wasn’t into doing the rewrite so then the question came up, “What to do next?” I didn’t have the answer and I remembered an amazing comment from Adyashanti, “If you don’t know what to do, perhaps now isn’t the time to know!” [Read more…] about Oops…Deleted!

When I first studied at university many years ago I was fascinated by the concept of free will versus determinism.

Are we in control of our lives or are forces outside of our control running us?

Are our personalities determined by nature – genetics – or the environment we grow up in – nurture?

A man with the unusual name of Burrhus Fred Skinner, the architect of behavioural psychology, was someone whom I rejected completely.

He horrified me to my core. [Read more…] about Are We In Control Of Our Lives?

I’m driving to my local farm stall earlier this week to buy the organic yoghurt that I love so much and I’m listening to an advert on the radio and the announcer has this lilting, singsong voice in the ad, much like one hears at an airport when flights are being broadcast.

I’ve always had a major judgement around that tone of voice.

I think I learned this from my mother who was very particular about how she spoke. She grew up in the Free State and went to elocution lessons as a child and so for most of her life she spoke like the Queen.

We used to jokingly call her Buckingham Palace.

What’s interesting is that despite the joke, I developed prejudice, a judgement around certain ways of speaking. [Read more…] about Letting Go Of Judgement.

I have spent many years being bemused and amused by the fantasies and nightmares created around marriage.

I am twice divorced.

Which means that on two occasions I vowed to remain committed to my partners and I betrayed these vows, which is one of the reasons why my present partner of 11 years, Suzie – once divorced – and I, have decided not to get married.

We are clearly rather good at betraying marriage vows.

A vow is stronger than a promise, yet worldwide between 50% and 60% of people break their marriage vows.

Of those remaining married, how many of them in actual fact uphold these vows?

Very few I think.

People remain married and disrespect each other monumentally, to the extent that for most, it is two estranged beings doing ‘white knuckle tolerance’ of each other.

How difficult is it for one human being to live with another one and to, just for starters, continuously love and cherish them? [Read more…] about Wedding Vows On The Scrapheap