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books by HR

Appropriate Present For The Holidays

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Dear Readers,

Are you thinking about a suitable present for someone you care about? Today I might just have the present for you. I have just received an offer of 30% off the retail price!!! from my publisher. The discount applies to both of the books, Driven By Kundalini and Driven By Depression. However, is ONLY VALID TODAY, that is Friday 24 Nov 2017.

To apply the offer, click on any of the links in this text and follow the button for purchase….at the checkout page type in the CODE: LULU30

Both Paperback Books Are Available for Purchase: HERE

To learn more about each book, you can either follow the links above, or click the tab ‘BOOKS’ on the top of this website.

In joy and health

 

 

Shock therapy

ECT aka Shock treatment – Barbaric or Helpful?

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Scrolling through Facebook last night I came across a blog post by Dr. Caroline Leaf, specializing in Neuropsychology, who in her blog wrote about ECT treatments for mental illnesses. Now, Dr. Leaf’s blog post was not too long to get the full story, but in essence I felt there is rather strong disagreement with the general use of Electro-Convulsive Therapy.

Please know, that I do love and appreciate the work on the neuroplasticity of the human brain of Dr. Caroline Leaf and all of her wisdom.

As an advocate for a broader mental health awareness, and also someone, who experienced ECT several times on my own brain (the latest one in Jan 2017), here is my viewpoint on this controversial subject:

My experience with Electro Shocks

Despite the fact, that the ‘ECT treatment’ I received was always administered without my, or my family’s consent while I was unwell, now I would say it had its place. Upon reflection on it, if it was not for the ECT’s (given to me during several different hospital admissions and only after all other efforts using medication failed) there was a high chance that I may have not recovered so quickly from what was very debilitating and hard to manage condition.

The shock treatment has had for a very long time, a very bad reputation. To me that is mainly due to its portraying in the media for its past administration without the use of anesthetics and relaxants. That could be the very scary bit, that nobody would like to experience. However, nowadays it is given with full body anesthetic and relaxants injected into the bloodstream of the ‘poor’ patient. One goes to sleep long before the electrodes touch the head and wakes up afterwards without any pain. Just like after other successful operation.

So the barbaric associations that this ‘treatment’ has in the society is a little bit unfair. This is also due to the “One fly over the Cuckoo’s nest” movie, that had its place in showing the bad aspects of mental institutions back in the day. Nowadays, there are still surely not a place one likes to be held in, however, it all comes down to having good doctors and nurses, who make the big difference in any hospital environment.

Side Effects of ECT

While ‘my’ first ECT had a significant effect on memory loss and some other cognitive functioning, which affected my work abilities and my confidence, I am now able to express gratitude and accept this as one of the more effective methods of the mental health industry. Overall I had several instances when it was the last resort used by the treatment team and it was actually the one thing that really worked.

So unless you had ECT on yourself, please do not spread more fear and misunderstanding about it. There is greater need for more clarity and awareness though. Thank you for reading my thoughts on this. And if you or someone you know experienced ECT personally, I would love to read your thoughts in the comment box below.

Joy and clarity

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Thank you for your response. ✨

Self Image By Design

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Let the sound of your breath guide you into the Abby’s of your internal environment. Let the mind ponder, let it jump, let it slow down, just for a brief breath, let it be still. Just for a moment. And then let it move again. Slow and fast, and slow and fast. And still again for another split moment when we experience the depth of eternity.

We are often here, breathing, yet not being present. Rarely we are being in the body, when so often the inclination of too many is to escape the prevalent discomfort through the faculty of the mind. Whether it’s the discomfort of physical feelings or uncomfortable emotions, we tend to fly away with the trickster that we have been given, our mind.

Having not yet mastered the faculty of imagination to a greater extend, we steep our mental pictures in repetitive worries, rather than enabling the creativity of new ideas.

Am I talking about you personally? If it feels that way, we have something in common.

We both have been given a gift. It’s more than a simple present. It’s not been wrapped, yet its hard to see it for what it is. Its value is greater than it’s size, yet it is rarely appreciated for what it’s worth.

At the beginning, we both received a breath of life, a body to carry us around and a mind to help us navigate the maze of life.
Now, that already makes for a gift of a lifetime! Mind you, our destiny is not preset by these gifts. The breath of life, the body to go with it and the mind to keep us occupied.

Well, what then shapes our destiny, you might ask? Though these surely are components in the universal equation, the most important particle is this. An intention. Yes, our intention.

The intention that precedes the getting up from bed every morning.  The intention to go with life or go against the flow of it. The intention to continue when the going gets tough.

And one core intention, which we make unconsciously, yet which is the most profound and most influential decision that we do make about anything. That is, the intent of ‘Who we are in each given day‘. Whether that is consistent or often changing, whether that is something we like being or who we don’t like to be.

Whether we put others on a pedestal and feel inadequate in comparison, or when we put on a pedestal our own self-image of who we NEED to be, to be good enough, we do us a disservice. The persona that is on the pedestal, is the problem that we have.

Can you relate? I certainly can. My persona on the pedestal is larger than life and so it’s seemingly impossible for me to match up to it. The problem is, that while I look up at the person that I have created as an ideal of myself, the better version of myself; the gap between who I see myself as and who stares at me from the screen is so large, that it feels absolutely impossible for me to merge the gap. Ever.

That my friend, is a huge self-d’-image issue. Are you still with me? Do you have a creeping suspicion, that what you want to become and where you are now are impossible to bridge? Welcome to my personal experience. 🙂

Now, a swap of hats….this is exactly the situation for a good Life Coach.

My personal Life Coach would be here to tell me, that it’s simple a matter of clarifying my end goal and then designing a plan to get there, step by step.

That sounds simple enough, and that is because it CAN BE just that simple. Time to re-adjust my life journey…join me if you are in the same boat.

Looking for suggestions?

  • Make a moment of silence or with soothing relaxing music.
  • Close your eyes and concentrate on your breath.
  • Stay focused on your breath. In and out, in and out….
  • After about 5 -10 minutes of breathing exercise, ask yourself a question:
    “Who do I want to be and what makes this person great?”

Take a pen and paper, if you like, and write down all that comes to you after you asked that question.

Reassess your current self-image and the answered image. Make a plan of actions to reach your ideal self. Get someone to hold you accountable.

Live your life.

How to Detox the Ego

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Are you aware, that there is a part of you, often referred to as an ego, which tries its utmost to control all aspects of your life? It is the part of you that tells you what you need to do, and what you should or should not do in any given situation.

It is also this part, which pulls the strings of your reactions to anything in your reality. It tries to control your emotional responses, as it sees fit. Why would our ego do this? The programmed function of the ego is a protection from danger. And as it tries to do its job well, it tries all the tricks it learned.

However, the ego is not who we are in our wholeness and completeness. We are a way more than our ego. We are something beyond our mental comprehension.

Many people who are searching for inner peace or blissful states of being are conscious of this part of theirs, the ego, and think, that they need to destroy its functioning completely and only then they will find peace and happiness.

I would like to share my current viewpoint. As I stated above, our ego has a programmed function of safety and survival as its core.

We didn’t come to this body with fear of life. When life ‘happened’ to us, at the early onset of our physical creation in the womb, our body were only two little cells. They orderly multiplied and life was in the process of creating our body.

When we were very little children, and before we heard the first “Don’t” from our carers, we felt freedom. The freedom of the Self, expressed through form. It was the inherent freedom of being alive and free to experience life.

Then the first perceived fear was installed into us by our carers and day by day our spontaneous joy of existence seeped away. Our psyche split into different parts, as we were introduced into the societal drill of control of our feelings and behaviors. We started to form beliefs about life and ourselves. They were not our individual beliefs. They were passed onto us from the past generations.

Now, I will say one part of our psyche split itself from the whole, into the ego part.  The learned conscious part of ourselves  took to its purpose to be the gatekeeper, the judge, the controller, the auditor, the censor of all the life experiences that we perceive through the five senses that we possess.

What then is the way out to the freedom of being?

My observation is that the first step is to form an awareness of having an ego part. The next step is to take its place of control seriously. Appreciate its function. Acknowledge that it’s been trying its hardest to protect our life from danger for the whole time we are alive.

Then the next step is to take the responsibility of the ego into broader awareness that we reach beyond more than our fears and, often, rigid beliefs.

I am not proclaiming that getting rid of the ego is the way to be. What I am saying is to befriend our ego, to shine a light onto its important historical function and to allow ‘him’ some time off from the controlling position of our life.

Detox the ego

By having awareness and focus we are well equipped to create a different reality than the one we were creating through the ego blinded eyes. Our life always reflects who we are on the inside in the given moment. When we start to unveil the frightened parts of our psyche, under the control of the ego, it challenges the ego a big time. So we need to do it with love and understanding.

Rather than blaming the ego for our current life, we need to embrace his function and replace his ways with the ways of the heart. It’s our journey in this life to learn to be real. Not realistic, but real. Be authentic means to be who we really are, with all our traits that we try to suppress under the skin. And loving the wholeness of what we are. All of it with ego or without.