An Experiment in Silence

Over the last few months I have found an increasing number of references to the practice of meditation; it seems everything I see or read is telling me to meditate. I have tried it a few times but so far my results have not been pleasing. Most of the advice seems to be to try to quieten your mind and this is where I have a problem - my mind never shuts up, or if it does, it is only for very brief moments.

I concluded that I needed help with this meditation thing so I have booked myself onto a weekend course at a Buddhist centre for the end of the month which I am really looking forward to. But that’s not the purpose of the post…

This morning I read the book, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra. It was a totally engaging read and I read it in one sitting though I can see that I will need to read it again and again. It resonated with me with every chapter on every level and there was a specific idea in the first chapter that really hit me. As well as the practice of meditation, Chopra also encourages the practice of silence.

What is silence? Mainly not speaking out loud but also silencing the other external noises such as the TV. It occurred to me that it is no wonder that I find it hard to quiet my mind when I can’t even quiet my body! I am not a particularly loud person - I work alone, I don’t watch much television and yet I often find that I need conversation of some form. I use a tabbed web browser and keep my email tab open at all times. I am often praised for my quick replies :-) I use Twitter and tweet on a fairly regular basis throughout the day. I even (I can’t believe I’m admitting this in public!) talk out loud to myself! Yes there I am in my office all alone, chatting away to myself!

So, whilst I wait for my meditation weekend I am going to practice some silence daily. These will be the rules:

• No Internet - I’ll shut down my browser
• No TV, radio or any kind of music
• No chatting!… to myself or anyone else :-)

I will however continue to work so it is not the same as complete stillness but it is a start. I’ll begin with perhaps 15 minutes today and then increase by 5 minutes a day and I will simply see where it takes me. I am going to leave myself completely open to the results and not expect anything, not plan any time scale other than the starting time period.

What if I get interrupted? I do not live alone and I am frequently interrupted by people bursting into my office to speak to me. I could ask not to be disturbed but this is something I want to keep private (err, with the exception of blogging about it!) I don’t expect my family to understand and wouldn’t particularly want them to. If I get disturbed I shall simply start over. If this happens a lot it will be an excellent exercise in patience :-)

As a side note, you may have noticed an unusual gap between this post and the last. Something simply - stopped. I had nothing to say. I started this blog because I felt as if I had so much to talk about, so many questions to ask and then somewhere along the way I tried to become a ‘proper’ blogger and set out schedules for myself. That’s fine for a commercial-style blog where you’re trying to build an audience or an income but that has never been my goal with this one so I simply let go, stopped writing and decided to simply do nothing and see what happened. Today I had something to say, so I wrote this post. I have no idea when the next one will be :-)

Willpower - How To Use It More Effectively

My mother used to bang on about the virtue of having lots of willpower but I never really thought I had any. Recently I started to look a little deeper about what it is and what it means.

What Exactly Is Willpower?

I’ve asked a few people what they think willpower means and there seems to be a subtle difference in the semantics used. I decided to check it out on a dictionary and even found differences there:

Dictionary.com describes it as “control of one’s impulses and actions; self-control.” . That’s how I have always seen it - more precisely, having the power to stop yourself from doing something that you feel as being bad, such as stopping smoking for example. However the American Heritage Dictionary words it in a subtly different way: “The strength of will to carry out one’s decisions, wishes, or plans.” The difference is that this time the power seems to be in pushing yourself to do something rather than stopping yourself from doing something.

Now it doesn’t really matter which definition is correct but I do want to examine both ways of defining willpower and look at the implications that can have on our lives.

Is Willpower Positive or Negative?

In the first definition we are using willpower to stop ourselves from doing something. Now I don’t know about you but I have always been astonishingly bad at doing that! Seeing as that was the definition that I was using, I have always said that I have very little willpower! I used to beat myself up about this quite a lot!

Now that I know a little about Law of Attraction this starts to make a lot more sense to me. We create more of what we push against so if we are trying to prevent ourselves from doing something we are directing our attention precisely on the behaviour we are trying to stop which is rather futile. What about people that are really good at controlling themselves in this way? Well if you’re one of them I’d love to hear from you!

Now the second definition feels a lot better - having the strength of will to carry out something you want to do - I’m very good at that. There’s no way I would be able to work from home on my own business if I didn’t have bucket loads of that kind of willpower!

So I think that the first definition is very negative, it just encourages you to focus your attention to unwanted behaviour but the second definition feels a lot more positive and keeps you focused on something that you want.

How To Use Willpower More Effectively

Let’s say you want to lose some weight, or to be more precise, lose some excess body fat. A lot of people start out by deciding all the things that they should stop eating - no more chocolate, no more alcohol, no more pizza and so on. Taking this approach rarely works because it keeps the attention on those things that are not allowed anymore so of course you just want more of them. I’ve been there, I know :-)

A far better way is to use the willpower in a more positive way. Instead of focusing on a big long list of banned foods, instead you could think about ways to incorporate more healthy foods into your diet. If you naturally eat more foods that are healthy and keep you full then you will simply crave the ‘bad’ foods less - this is a lot less effort than using willpower to try and stop yourself from eating all those foods that you have deemed to be bad and it will promote a long term change in lifestyle that can keep the fat off permanently.

This is fine for situations where you can easily replace a behaviour that you don’t want with one that you do but what about those situations in which you simply want to get rid of something altogether without replacing it with something else? For example, I tend to nibble my fingers whenever I’m watching something, reading, driving in the car - whenever I’m partially idle. The difficulty is that most of the time I’m just not aware that I’m doing it and then when I notice I curse myself and get all in a fluster which of course just ‘pushes against’ the behaviour that I don’t want.

So I’m trying to find a way to turn this around. I don’t want to just replace that habit with another one - I simply want the habit gone! What do do? I’m not sure, I haven’t figured that out yet!

I’d love to hear your feedback on this. How do you see willpower? Is it a good thing? How have you used it? Any tips for my annoying habit? :-)

The Most Horrific & Sickening Video I Have EVER Seen

A couple of nights ago I watched the most horrificly disturbing video I have ever seen. I didn’t realise at the time but it is called Earthlings, and is something of a phenomenon. It is about the animal cruelty that goes on in the production of food, leather, in entertainment and in medical experiments.

This is a full length movie running at over an hour and a half, you can watch it at Google video and I have also embedded it here:

There is also an official Earthlings website. As I watched I also wondered who narrated it - there was something calming in his voice. I was surprised to find that it was the voice of Joachin Pheonix, an actor that I like, and oddly I watched a brilliant movie of his just last week called Return to Paradise.

I consider myself to be an animal lover and I can’t watch images of animal cruelty. I found this video on a blog of a friend of mine and something compelled me to watch it. I wanted to turn it off at least a dozen times but I forced myself to watch it. It is unimaginable and yet - it is real. I wrestled with all sorts of feelings as I watched it - extreme sadness for the animals shown, anger towards the people torturing and killing them, and guilt that I eat meat.

Something Good to Lift Your Mood

After watching that video I was obviously feeling pretty bad so I watched a little video that I made last year. I always watch it when I want to feel good. I’ve now uploaded it to YouTube so you can watch it too. All the nature pictures come from a wonderful website called http://alpics.net/. Most of the animal pictures come from another video that was sent to me by a friend and I don’t know the source so unfortunately I can’t give the proper credit. The music is “I’m Alive” by Celine Dion.

What Now? (For Me)

I believe in the Law of Attraction (something I will be discussing a lot of in future posts) and as such I believe in the saying that what you resist, persists. So of course the difficulty with encountering something like this is that I want to help stop the cruelty but giving my attention to the cruelty just increases it.

However, I can simply start with myself. I have the freedom to choose what I eat. Adopting a vegetarian diet would not be an easy thing for me because I am an avid meat eater and I dislike almost all vegetables. Still, when I walk around my supermarket and see neat little packages of meat I simply don’t make the association - and I guess that’s the whole idea. In the movie they said that ignorance is largely caused by the fact that people simply don’t want to know what goes on.

This has always been true for me. I don’t watch the news, I never have done. In the UK I didn’t know that we had a new Prime Minister until some weeks after the election. I wrap myself up in my own layer of bubble wrap and shield myself from the horrors of the world. I like it that way.

I knew that watching the movie would be harrowing for me but I wanted to watch it and I’m glad I did. I have now given myself an internal conflict. I want to stop eating meat because of what I have seen (and what I have always known but chose to ignore) but my eating habits are so ingrained that I fear that it would be extremely difficult. However, since watching the video 2 days ago, I haven’t been able to touch meat! I’m hoping to maintain that state of mind…

Some thoughts that make the challenge seem a little easier:

• I love beans & pulses such as lentils, chickpeas etc
• I love all fruit
• I do actually like quite a lot of vegetables when I think about it
• There are now tons of meat alternatives such as Quorn
• There’s no end of support online eg GoVeg.com
• It gives me an excuse to eat loads of carbs like bread & pasta!
• It has the added benefit of being better for my health

Life Really IS Meant to Feel GOOD!

Hello and welcome to my new blog! My name is Caroline Middlebrook and I am a 36 year old (as of July 2008) Internet marketer based in the UK.

What is the Purpose of Life?

Like many people, I have wandered through most of my life wondering what I was supposed to do, why was I here, what was my purpose? For years I agonised over these questions and never found the answers. Then near the end of 2007 I discovered the teachings of Abraham Hicks who describe the Law of Attraction. One of the core points in their teachings is that the purpose of life is to experience joy!

Since then I have read many books by a wide variety of authors and many of them have a similar message. The Dalai Lama says that the purpose of life is to be happy. Whilst exploring the topic of happiness I noticed that being happy means something different for everybody.

What Does it Mean to Feel Good?

One simplification that Esther Hicks explains is that there are only two emotions - those that feel good and those that don’t. We give them all sorts of labels - joy, happiness, love, appreciation for the good feeling ones. Me might use anger, hatred, depression, sadness for the bad feeling ones. There are a multitude of such labels and each one will have a different meaning to each and every one of us because they are coloured by our use of language and our life experiences.

However, despite all these different words we use, I think all of us can agree that we prefer to feel good than to feel bad. It is my belief that every person inhabiting this planet has the desire and the right to feel good.

There are some people who feel as though they don’t deserve to be happy but the way in which they prevent themselves from experiencing ‘happiness’ in the traditional sense feels good to them at the time. If they allowed themselves to be happy that would feel bad.

What is the Purpose of This Blog?

This blog is one way for me to feel good. Over the last few months in particular I have been learning so much and I’ve not really had many people to talk to about it. There are insights I want to share, questions I want to ask, new topics that I want to explore.

This is a massive subject and I know that I am only just scratching the surface in my own journey and it makes me feel good to write about it. Writing about something helps me make it clearer in my own mind.

As a side benefit, I hope that by sharing my thoughts with the world, that I might be able to help others in some way. Is that a selfless act? Not really. Knowing that I can make somebody else feel good makes me feel good too :-)

I have now decided that I want to dedicate my life to the study of living a life that feels good - whatever that entails. I still need to pay the bills but I have an Internet business to do that. I am a strong believer in the law of attraction and much of what I write will be around that topic. I have also started to explore the teachings of Eckhart Tolle though much of his work goes over my head. I also have an Amazon wishlist as long as my arm!

My Personal Story

Everybody has a story. Eckhart Tolle says that we should all tell our story but no more than three times. If I post it on this blog I’m not sure how many times that counts for! My story is quite long and goes back over more than 10 years. There are many incidents, turning points, ‘aha’ moments that I want to share.

Over the next few weeks I’ll begin to document my story with one post per week. If I post it all at once you may get rather bored hearing about me and stop reading before I’ve even got started with the real content for the blog!