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I have recently completed an intensive on the ‘Law of Attraction’ which was most interesting.

Many people who have heard of the ‘Law of Attraction’ through the book ’The Secret’  may have the impression that this is all about making a million dollars just by thinking about it but I believe that this sells the concepts short.

I am delighted to report that, having completed a series of four seminars on the subject that I have found that the concepts are very much aligned with the approach that I have intuitively arrived at (and also through many years of study of various philiosophies and psychological approaches) and have presented in my books and workshops over the past decade.

 For those unfamiliar with the ‘Law of Attraction’ it can be basically defined as ‘whatever you ask for is what you’ll receive’. Now, many might argue that they have been asking to win the lottery for years and it hasn’t showed up, so this whole system must be rubbish but before you throw the baby out with the bath water, I would like to point out that there are quite a few flaws in that line of thinking.

Firstly, few people actually believe, with any confidence, that wealth will come to them. Secondly, they live in a way that denies the possibility of wealth;  i.e. they live with a focus on lack rather than the focus being on success. Many also live with a disregard or even ‘disrespect’ for money then expect it to just arrive. Money is an energy, just like anything else and if you’re seeing it as a ‘missing relative’ , it’s not likely to show up on your doorstep because you simply don’t expect it to.You see only that it is gone.

 This is a small demonstration, in the material arena of the above statement about asking and receiving. Let’s perhaps put it another way. “Whatever you expect, focus on, worry about, obsess about, give all your attention to, will show up in your life’

Which, of course, brings us to anxiety, in relation to this concept. Many believe get the idea that anxiety is something to be ‘overcome’ or ‘gotten rid of’ but  the more you focus on something you dislike or are in conflict with, the more you experience it because it now has all of your attention!

 What the L.O.A. materials approach shows is that when you’re so focussed on that which you don’t want, you actually have your back turned to that which you do want.

So, if we take anxiety as being the thing that you don’t want and relief being the thing that you do want and all of your attention is on how bad/awful/overwhelming your anxiety is, how is it even possible for you to arrive at relief from that perspective? The only way to get to relief is to start heading in the direction of relief and you do so through your thoughts and your thoughts govern how you feel. In other words, if you want to feel relief, you need to turn your thoughts in a direction that brings you that relief. It cannot come to you if you have your back turned to it! In fact, it can’t come to you at all if you’re denying it! You must turn around and start heading towards relief if you want to feel it.

Here’s an example: ‘ This anxiety is ruining my life!’ Does that statement bring any relief from the anxiety you are experiencing? Of course not! It actually makes it worse.

Reaching for a feeling of relief would mean finding a statement that brings that relief, no matter how small. For example, ‘My life needn’t revolve around anxiety. I’ve let it take over. There are other things to do besides fret about anxiety. Now, what is something else I can do today?’

Steering your thoughts into a better space helps you to line up with a feeling of relief. If you learn to do this consistently, you will find that you build skills which help you to shift your focus away from the problem and towards the solution and slowly the solution becomes your main point of focus and because you are feeding it energy, it grows.

Start small. If your statements are too ‘grandiose’ , firstly, you won’t believe them and secondly, you’ll just frustrate yourself if you’ve over-reached and it hasn’t manifested, which will only result in your returning your focus to what you don’t have and you’ll be caught in the loop again. Go for something that you can believe at the moment which soothes you.

I will write more about the L.O.A. approach in future blogs. I will also soon be offering counselling in Melbourne on a one to one basis based on these principles. Any enquiries about counselling please email itzok@netspace.net.au

Meanwhile, do check out the ‘IT Kit’ on this site. It has all of the guidance you need to help you get quickly back on track.

Have a great day!

It’s interesting that few people going through a crisis such as anxiety stop to consider where they think recovery actually comes from !

Ask yourself the same question: ‘Where does recovery come from?’

Many people seem to hold a view that they should just somehow get better and that there will be some outside agency that will bring this recovery, be that a healer, a pill, a therapist or a therapy or even divine intervention, without actually having to do anything about the problem themselves.

Picture this: Over here on your left is your problem. This where your total focus is currently directed. You can see it in full technicolour detail and the more you look at it the more you know that you really, really don’t want this, which is surprising really, because you dedicate so much of your time and energy giving it all of your attention !

But over here, on your right is recovery.It’s here and it’s accessible. But you can’t even see it because right now, you have your back turned on it while you concentrate on how bad things are.

Now what would happen if you just turned around and faced in that direction?

For a start, what would your recovery look like? How would you feel if you were recovered? And,most importantly, what would you be doing differently in your future recovery that you’re not doing now?What changes would you need to have made, especially to the way you think?

And, once you have captured a glimpse of that, you will now need to amplify it so that recovery becomes your central focus, instead of anxiety.

Wherever your focus is directed is where your energy will go and whatever you feed with your energy and attention, will get bigger.So what’s it to be? What do you want to grow?

In order to claim recovery, you will need to firmly head in that direction. It can’t come to you; you must go to it.And,even more importantly, you need to stop looking back at all that misery.

Let’s agree that yes, it feels bad but that’s all that needs to be acknowledged. You have now established that you are going through something and that you would prefer to be going through something else instead. Now you know what it is that you don’t want, you can start seeking out what you do want!

If you see this as a starting point from which to commence finally making the changes that you need to make anyway (if you wish to feel better that is) then your anxiety is a pretty good motivator, isn’t it?

One foot in front of the other. One day at a time, one hour at a time, if need be but just make sure you keep yourself turned in the direction you actually want to go ! You must reach for recovery. It is not home-delivered. Those who get there do so simply because they keep headed there.

Not long ago, I received a phone call from a man who had seen an article about my work in a local newspaper.

 

Having barely introduced himself (we’ll call him Allen), this man immediately launched into telling me his life story. Hardly pausing for breath, he told me about his childhood, how his mother had abandoned him, details of the abuse his violent father had visited upon him, how he was estranged from his siblings and later his children, that he had been injured at work and was now on a disability pension, that his wife had cheated on him and so on and so on.

 

I listened quietly for something like fifteen minutes as he laid out a banquet of misery before me, till I finally interjected (it took some doing!) and asked “What can I do for you, Allen?”

 

‘I want to write my life story and I want to know how to get it published”

 

So I proceeded to tell him the painful facts –it is extremely difficult to have a book published these days, few publishers will even look at an unsolicited manuscript without representation by an agent and publishers receive many, many manuscripts from people like Allen but very few actually end up in print.

Of course, I pointed out, it was always worth a try and, failing that but given the resources on the Internet, I suggested that Allen could perhaps look at self-publishing his memoirs, as many people have done.

 

Of course, this was not what he wanted to hear, nor, I suspect, was it the true intention behind his phone call. What I believe he really wanted to do was tell his story to whomever would listen, something I am sure he had done many times before and sure enough, he resumed his tale of woe which ran for another fifteen minutes at which point I told him I had to leave for an appointment.

 

His disappointment and annoyance at my ending the conversation was palpable but it was evident that this would have been the case even if I had let him go on for the entire day.

 

Several things occurred to me about this phone call. The first and most outstanding revelation was that even if Allen’s story were to go into print and become a best seller, nothing in his life would essentially change. He was so entrenched in the energy of loss and struggle, he would not have be able to

sustain anything that was not struggle and, as a consequence, would probably attract the very things he might hope to leave behind.

 

Because of his attachment to lack, any fortune he might amass would very likely be lost on a bad investment or, in keeping with the repeated theme of abandonment that had run through his life, he might attract someone who would steal from him and a new chapter of the same story would be written.

 

Allen was very attached to his story and in being so, he remained snared by the past. In a perverse way, he was almost proud of his struggles, not only because he had survived them or, better still, learned and grown from them (which would have been a legitimate source of pride) but because the story gave him strong ‘currency’ with others.

 

Holding onto suffering brings its own benefits: it incites pity and concern and elicits the support, interest, attention and affection that may otherwise be missing from one’s experience.

 

The trouble with this device is that struggle and suffering can become addictive as a means of gaining such emotional ‘rewards’.

 

We all do it. Ask someone how they are and invariably they come up with a list of complaints. Ask someone for their life story and they almost always trundle out a litany of loss, sorrow and pain.

 

It is at this point that the question needs to be asked. ‘Didn’t anything good ever happen?” If the answer is  ‘Of course there were some good things!’  the next logical question would be ‘Why isn’t your life story about those things?’

 

The answer ? Good things don’t incite as many ’rewards’.If you’re happy, you don’t need anyone else to validate it for you; you’re just happy ! However, if you’re ‘wounded’, you will receive much more attention. We’re pretty much children most of our lives in that we seek out comfort, support, reassurance, sympathy and understanding from others. In other words, we still want to be ‘looked after’.

 

However, holding onto such a position means that you have placed your own wellbeing into the hands of someone who may or may not have as much of a vested interest in that wellbeing as you do, given that most people are just as focussed on having their own needs met as you are.

 

 If those appointed guardians should turn out to be unreliable, cruel or neglectful caretakers of the wellbeing you have handed over to them, you are left with little to turn to.

 

Ironically, when you are focussed so strongly on the pain of the past this also means that you have your back turned on the very things that you so desire!

 If, for example, your focus is on past rejection, that is what you will expect in the present and most likely invite as a result.

 

What you experience in the present is simply a matter of where your major focus is directed. Like attracts like.

 

To demonstrate this in the context of anxiety, if you suffer from anxiety and your focus is on your past, present and even future anxiety, how can hope to find your way to peace? The way to attract peace is to turn your focus to peace and move in that direction, not to keep travelling back to anxiety.

So what are some of the ways to free yourself from the past?

 

• Stop defining yourself by your past sorrows, hurts, perceived  injustices or losses. These keep you small. Be BIG !
• Revisit your memories and do a bit of ‘positive editing’. Call up the things that were good and make them your predominant memory.
• If that’s too difficult, focus on how you have spiritually expanded or become a better person because of what you experienced
• Be honest about how much ‘sickly comfort’ you derive from remaining a victim. Embrace the choice you are free to make about how much you wish to remain in the victim role from here on
• Notice any patterns that continue to play out. These are simply telling you that you need to steer in another direction. Again, notice what you are focussing on.
• Give yourself all the love, care, nurture, kindness and attention that you feel you have been deprived of, rather than hoping that others will be the source of these things
• Stop focussing on it ! Stop talking about it, thinking about it, making a monument to it. It’s done, it’s over. The past can’t be changed…only your present view of it.
• Finally, in order to let go of the past, you need to want to enough to do so.

 

Here is an exercise that is useful for releasing the past.

Stand in the middle of a room and, facing one end of the room, picture  yourself gathering together all of the hurt, loss, grief, pain, sorrow, torment, despair, anger, pain or fear from the past into a huge, ugly, festering pile in front of you. Really see it for what it is – a toxic, poisonous, disabling and disempowering pile of rubbish that is doing nothing except weighing you down and keeping you from reaching your magnificence.

 

Now get rid of it – anyway you like. Nuke it, blast it into space, set it on fire, bury it or whatever takes you. Feel how good it feels to finally rid yourself of all that junk you have been dragging around.

 

Now turn to the other end of the room. That’s where you are headed to from here. You can go anywhere you like. You can create anything you like. What’s the first thing on your list?

Bev’s new book on releasing the past ‘Get Over It’ will appear in bookstores in June. ‘I Love Me’ her title on building self reliance was released in February and is currently available.   Both books HarperCollins Publishers RRP $20.00   The irony is not missed on Bev that at the time of writing this article, she  is putting together an expanded submission to write her autobiography “All of It’ ,the first submission having been conditionally approved. Though this of course means revisiting at times painful episodes in her past, her philosophy is to learn from the past and move on.   “I am not what happened to me. I am what I chose to become”

 

WE ARE THE WORLD

Ancient folklore has long suggested that the Earth will undergo major changes in the next few years.

In fact, both the ancient Egyptian and Mayan Calenders end at the year 2012.

Many in the realm of New Age philosophies see these next six years as ‘make or break’ time, in the sense that we either ‘get our act together’ in terms of our spiritual growth or find ourselves overwhelmed by what is to come.

Whether or not we subscribe to these predictions, it is evident that we have reached a time of crisis, not only in terms of the wellbeing of our planet but, because all is connected, our own wellbeing as well.

Recently I went to see the Al Gore film, ‘An inconvenient Truth’ which outlines stark and undeniable evidence that the environment is in serious trouble.

Giant glaciers reduced to ice cubes, polar bears drowning as they try to swim up to 60 miles to the nearest ice floe, seasons out of synch, record high temperatures, cyclones, floods and, currently closest to home, drought, to name but a few of the global changes we currently face.

Now, painting this picture of doom and gloom may seem an unusual choice to make when aimed at people suffering with anxiety, but there is ‘method in my madness’.

Indeed, I see this period of crisis as a wake up call on, not only a global but also a personal scale .It is a call to once and for all DEAL with the things that hold us and our world back from a true and perfect state of balance.

The recent epidemic rise of anxiety and depression is, in my view, not so much a malaise, but instead, an instinctive, primal, inner call to finally make the changes necessary for our wellbeing that we have been putting off attending to in the hope of external ‘rescue’.These conditions are, indeed strong motivators and they need to be, because as humans, we are notorious for dodging the issue until it reaches crisis point.

And the issue at hand is a simple yet profound concept: Love. We do not see ourselves in a loving light. We feel guilt and shame. We punish ourselves. We hold onto old hurts. We live to others’ standards then blame them for our own choices. We do not trust ourselves and thus do not trust life. We repeat old patterns that never worked in the first place. We deny our own power.

There are only two forces that govern our emotions-Love and Fear. Each cancels out the other. As a consequence of our lack of love for ourselves we likewise neglect our planet. As a species, we have so little respect for this gift, that we virtually vandalise our own home.

And so it is also on an internal level where we vandalise ourselves with negativity and fear. We forget out innate perfection. The urgent message of these times is that we can no longer assume that we can do nothing and hope that someone else will fix it.

All of this can seem overwhelming, unless one adopts a more philosophical view. It is time to think in ‘Big Picture’ terms.

The earth has undergone many changes over billions of years. It is naturally self-correcting and if pushed too far, will seek to balance itself. These shifts, both external and internal are not personal. They are part of a natural process and simply the consequences of choices we have made as human beings with free will.

And, because we are all one, the choices we make as individuals become a ripple, which becomes a wave, which becomes a tsunami.

It is time to get out of our ‘smallness’ and realise that we not only have the power to change ourselves but that each person who steps out of his or her own sense of limitation simultaneously opens the door to a world of endless possibilities.

You have the power. It begins with the next choice you make:

Love OR Fear.

I walk down the street.There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in.I am lost…I am hopeless.
It isn’t my fault. It takes forever to find a way out.

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it.

I fall in again.I can’t believe I’m in the same place. But it isn’t my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I still fall in…it’s a habit. My eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately.

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.

I walk down another street.

From: “The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying” by Sogyal Rinpoche

I fell down that hole in October 1991. I had recently taken the giant step of setting myself up as a freelance cartoonist and illustrator. This was during “the recession we had to have” and, if I harboured concerns about my own future in this somewhat precarious business, these fears were certainly reinforced daily by the solicitous warnings from those around me.

As a result, by the time I travelled to Sydney three weeks later to attend the Stanley Awards (a sort of Academy Awards for cartoonists) my initial confidence had begun to unravel considerably.

In retrospect, the ingredients of severe sleep deprivation, the worries of setting up my business and, most of all, the intimidation of sitting as an unknown amongst three hundred of Australia’s best artists were combining to form a physiological and psychological time bomb which was to explode the next day when I found myself wandering in a daze of inexplicable panic and terror amongst the throngs of bright, happy tourists taking in the sights of a beautiful spring day on Sydney Harbour.

Having experienced my first panic attack, and not knowing why, I then put myself on permanent red alert for another and as such, by the time I returned to Melbourne a few days later, the hole I had unwittingly staggered into had become a chasm so deep, so surreal and so overwhelming, I felt as if I had fallen into Hell.

Each morning, I was wrenched into wakefulness with a racing heart from a fretful and meagre four hours’ sleep. My heart rate sat constantly at around 120 beats per minute and if I tried to secure the rest I so badly needed, the palpitations were so intense, I was virtually lifted off the bed. The smallest decision sent me into turmoil and confusion, the most innocuous professional, domestic or social demand beyond my normal range, incapacitated me.

The first psychologist I consulted described me as “the most frightened person I have ever seen”( not a very helpful statement-I was thus programmed to prove her right! ) and the next practitioner wanted to hospitalise me but I feared surrendering all control and I also feared the twilight world of medication.

So that was my hole-big, deep, dark and terrifying. And, as the opening quote suggests, I believed this was”not my fault, it just happened, I just fell in” .

To say that my life was irrevocably changed by that experience is an understatement, but my opinion of that change has itself changed from those first days of feeling that I had been assigned a Danteesque punishment for a crime I had no awareness of.

My opinion now is that anxiety (and alternate bouts of depression) was not only the most positively transformative experience of my life, but also inevitable.

My recovery began when I realised that I, and no one else,had been busy digging that hole all of my life.

So, what tools had I used to dig this hole?

Rigidity, pessimism, a lack of setting clear boundaries, an overinvestment in others’ approval, dependency, perfectionism, impossibly high ideals (for myself and others) and, above all, a poisonous, punishing and self-defeating internal dialogue so savage, it surpassed anything that even my harshest critics may have doled out.

Having recognised this, another epiphany of sorts came to me-living life in such a stressful way, how could I expect not to feel anxious?

Something had to change and my anxiety proved not only to be an excellent motivator for this change, but also a barometer for what needed to change.

Suddenly, my anxiety had become an uneasy ally and with this very realisation, came another enlightenment- my anxiety was my own creation, forged from an adherence to a faulty set of beliefs about myself, my worth and life that I had never disputed and had, in fact, perpetuated and endorsed.

In other words, I may not have started this, but I had certainly kept it running! My anxiety arose from a fear that the unloved part of myself would be exposed.

I am not a Buddhist (in fact, I shy away from “isms” of any kind) but there are essential truths (along with good old common sense) within the buddhist ideology which appear to be universal and certainly apply to the process of recovery as I understand it.

With the embracing of such notions such as

Letting go (of expectations, outcomes, perfectionism, people-pleasing and resistance in general)

Living in the present (one cannot feel anxiety in the present without introducing “what ifs”about the future or hurts from the past)

Acceptance (of change, others, life’s ups and downs and self)

Detachment (from controlling attitudes and from ones’ own problems)

Right mindedness (the essential key to overcoming anxiety being to monitor and redirect the inner critic) and, above all

Peace with self (how can one expect to be loved when the relationship with oneself is at war?)

From these concepts come a new perspective and a greater peace. Life becomes less intense, less earnest, less do-or-die and, as a result, less stressful.

These were some of the ladders and life-ropes that helped me out of the hole. Of course, it took several revisits to learn these skills and, because old habits die hard, even now, I will occasionally stick my toe into the abyss.

The difference now is, I know how to get out straight away but above all, I now know that, by exercising the ability to choose that is my birthright, I can walk down an entirely different street.