Category Archives: Self Help

Language of the Heart

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Language is the bloggers weapon of choice, it is a powerful weapon, more powerful than I ever imagined, we (not just bloggers) convey thoughts, ideas, experiences, anger and love all with words. We write words, we read words, we speak words, we hear words but do we think in a word form?

The reason I ask this question is before we can use language to communicate we have to have a concept in our minds that can be described in words that in turn can be communicated in language. The concept is real but invisible to the outside world, existing only in the mind, the intention is to share that concept, so we use words to describe the concept, those words have to be heard or read, the language has to be understood and in turn, one hopes the concept is transferred to the listener’s/reader’s mind.

What has this got to do with the language of the heart? Something very powerful happened to me this week which further on I will share with you but first some more concept to give understanding to where I am going with this.

Concepts are amazingly complicated, language as a tool to convey concepts is unbelievably subtle in its nuances.

Song lyrics and poetry, in a few words convey complete concepts, understanding and a mass of feeling.

For example the lyrics Jimi Hendrix wrote for his song Castles Made of Sand.

“A little Indian brave who before he was ten

Played war games in the woods with his Indian friends

And he built up a dream that when he grew up

He would be a fearless warrior Indian Chief

Many moons past and more the dream grew strong until

Tomorrow he would sing his first war song and fight his first battle

But something went wrong, surprise attack killed him in his sleep that night

And so castles made of sand melt into the sea, eventually”

For me the above Lyrics convey many concepts about life, in fact I think I could write a short book about the concepts conveyed in this song and yet Hendrix doesn’t once use the words we would normally associate with our desire to be successful, our failure to base our goals on solid foundations, the trials of growing into adulthood and yet the truth and beauty in these words has brought a tear to my eye more than once!

Let us now look at the language of the heart using language that conveys concepts we all understand .

What do these words mean to you? Just spend a moment thinking, feeling, the complicated concepts these simple words convey,

Heartless

Warm hearted

Cold hearted

Heart felt

Broken heart

Joyful heart

The heart of the matter

Heart of stone

Brave heart

Aching heart

Loving heart

A big heart

Burning heart

Heart fire

Hearth

No the last word is not misspelt, the hearth used to be the heart of the house, people now speak of the kitchen being the heart of the home but before we had kitchens food was cooked on the hearth, while the heat of the fire warmed the house and its occupants.

Earlier this week I was reading the book ‘Druid Magic’ (Sutton and Mann. 2010)  in which they speak of the symbolism of letting one’s hearth fire go out.

Two very powerful things happened to me when I read this, first the almost simultaneous realisation that I had let my inner hearth fire die down and with this knowledge instantly my heart fire, my optimism, my dreams for my future, my confidence in achieving my goals was rekindled, the something inside that had for some time felt somewhat empty suddenly burst alight literally warming me up inside and inspiring me.

The second thing was a question, could what has just happened to me happen to someone who’s heart fire was quenched by someone or something else?

The power of language had an instant, positive effect on me, could someone with low self esteem, someone with low confidence, an abuse survivor, even someone who has just lost their source of income, could these people just hear or read the words, understand the concept and instantly re light their heart fire, fill their emptiness, inspire themselves to take their path to their future?

I don’t know the answer to this, what do you think? Do these words have power? Have you just re kindled your heart fire reading this?

Could it be that the cold hearted, the one who would put you down, the ‘Map’ influencer, literally have no fire in their heart?

The Doors. Light my Fire

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Nature vs Nurture, Environment vs Self

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Can we change? Can we really change our selves and/or our environment for the better or is our fate and the fate of the earth set in stone?

There are so many questions, are we the product of our genes?

Can our happiness and success be ruined for ever by a lack of nurture?

Can we nurture our selves back to happiness and success?

Is it too late to nurture nature back to life?

How much does our environment impact on our selves?

How much does our self impact on nature and our environment?

The WWF Living Planet Report out yesterday, (16/10/2010) key finding was -

‘Humanity’s demands exceed our planet’s capacity to sustain us. That is, we ask for more than what we have.’

http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/

If the scientists are correct the rising sea levels, destructive weather, dying out of species and loss of bio diversity are all the by products of human over consumption.

We need to change but is that possible? Let us take a closer look at the above questions.

Are we the product of our genes? Well yes we are, to survive we require certain things and our genes have within them the blueprint to create our ability to function in our environment. But that basic blueprint is the foundation on which we create ourselves, it is not ‘just’ what we are.

Can our happiness and success be ruined for ever by a lack of nurture? Yes, I believe one who has never been nurtured or has never nurtured themselves will never believe in their right for happiness and success and the destruction of their self will impact on their environment in a destructive way.

Can we nurture our selves back to happiness and success? Yes, I know we can, I believe The Map is just one of the many different methods available to open that path up. There are hundreds of free self help blogs where people have detailed their own paths back from the shadows of their demons.

Is it too late to nurture nature back to life? No, The WWF report’s one uplifting finding is that in countries that had previously destroyed much of their bio diversity, mainly the western world, that during the period their report covers there has been a 30% growth in some bio diversity.

How much does our environment impact on our selves? When I qualified as a nurse for people with learning disabilities (mentally handicapped people) it was at the time of the closing down of the institutions under the Care in the Community scheme. People who had lived in institutions all their lives who had been ‘managed’ by being tied to their bed and left in their own waste were suddenly moved to lovely houses, had their own bedrooms, received quality care, and were able to access the rest of the community, cinemas, bowling alleys, a pub lunch etc etc. So how does one take a damaged human being reduced to an existence of a caged animal, who in one case I know of had bitten off fingers of his previous Jailers/carers and return them to humanity? The answer is nurture them, teach them, value their existence, support good behaviour, withdraw support during bad behaviour (as opposed to punishment). The proof nurture works can be found in the care in the community system, in which one can also find the proof that if one can improve one’s environment one can beneficially impact one’s life.

How much does our self impact on nature and our environment? Here, in my opinion is the key to the future, understanding that each and every one of us has an impact on nature and our immediate environment, if we can learn the art of living with less consumption the more we can expand the self. Consuming stuff has become the norm to prop up who we are, but that outer show of stuff just detracts from our ‘self’, Why? Well if consuming stuff really made us happy why does one need to consume even more stuff the next day?

The art of nurturing a life consuming less is the way to expand the self and positively impact on your environment. It is doing what you can and with a little bit of luck will help to turn down the earth’s thermostat.

I believe what ever has happened in the past we can change our self and our environment for the better. It just takes the will to try.

Our fate is not set in stone, we have choice.

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Do you really have to love yourself before you can love someone else?

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water

I love the the freedom of blogging, it gives me the platform to speak my mind.

I really should have called this post ‘What pisses me off about self help advice’ because some of the advice seems to pay lip service to concepts that are really too complex to be universally applied per se.

Let us look at the much used phrase -

“ you must love yourself before you are able to love someone else.”

As a universal truth, the above statement is completely untrue, and yet it appears to be accepted as a universal truth.

I know it is untrue because I do not love myself and yet I love my children my girlfriend and my dogs.

I am totally capable of having a lovely relationship without my feelings about myself impinging on that relationship.

In fact while doing a little online research I came across a female who also felt the saying was untrue because she loved herself very much and found she was not able to love anyone else!

In practise the concept of ‘loving yourself before you can love someone else’ is universally ignored, people fall in love every day it is only when it all goes wrong that the concept arises, so one has to presume that all those relationships that work are either between people who love themselves, which is highly unlikely, or the more likely scenario is that the relationship is healthy and can cope with the participant’s failings.

So if it isn’t a universal truth, how much truth is there in the statement?

(a) There is a world of difference between not loving one’s self and relying on others for your own emotional health.

(b) Along side which there is a world of difference between being in a relationship where one gets no emotional support and blaming that fact on ourselves for having low self esteem and not loving ourselves.

The problem with scenario (b) has nothing to do with not loving one’s self, it is just not a healthy relationship, however much one learns to love one’s self, we all need emotional support at times and it can be heart breaking to find we are not getting it. The good news is that it is probably the only relationship problem that can be fixed by honest communication.

Scenario (a) is where there is some truth in the concept, not that one needs to love one’s self but if one of the partners has unresolved emotional problems that they consciously or subconsciously expect their relationship to solve, this can, but not always, drive a wedge between them and their partner.

Now I may not love myself and some times I wish some bits of me where smaller, or some bits bigger, sometimes I am not proud of what I have said or the way I acted but I do not hate myself.

If one hates oneself it is highly unlikely that one can have a successful relationship, but I can see no reason why hating your self could prevent you from falling in love with someone, falling in love is not something we can control, it just happens.

I would like to change the statement

‘you must love yourself before you can love someone else’

to

‘If they deserve your love, then so do you’

 

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Heart Success, turn failure into Success

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flood

Welcome to the last part of my ‘Success’ trilogy.

In the second post of the trilogy ‘Ego success, Heart success and Self Esteem’ I asked the question -

‘If the above theory is correct then what is normally understood as success, the drive for ego success in our western society, is actually failure! In which case could failure actually be success?’

Here I would like to answer that question , first by taking the teaching profession as an example.

When we fail, we fail by the standards of ego success, our ego rewards failure with a bad feeling which we will probably compound by punishing ourselves even further, so how could this possibly be success?

There is an ego success saying -’Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.’ We all know this saying is a way of putting someone down.

Because they were an ego success failure, the only thing left for them is to teach that which they failed to be ego successful in.

And yet, written in 1962-

‘Teaching is more than a noble profession. It is a vocation, a calling.. The teacher is the most important person in any civilization, as on him depends the molding of the nation.’

http://randallbutisingh.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/teaching-is-a-vocation/

What Randall Butsingh (the world’s oldest blogger!) was saying was not that teachers should be given fame and fortune because of their importance, to strut their ego success stuff.

He was saying that a teacher becomes a teacher because they want to be heart successful.

Yes of course they need their work to be paid for, a reasonable living is not much to ask for such an important profession but after that there is not a lot of ego success available, it is all about the heart success in the classroom.

Nine years later Randell was to write-

‘I was very dissatisfied with what was taking place in school; where political expediency ousted teaching ethics resulting in a breakdown of discipline, insubordination and the degradation of Education in the schools of Guyana’

http://randallbutisingh.wordpress.com/2008/05/15/teaching-no-longer-a-vocation/

There is no doubt now that teaching, like many other professions, has entered the realm of excess ego success, with schools now being rated by their success and parents lying about where they live or re mortgaging their homes just to get their children into a ‘better’ school.

Randall’s first comment is made in the 1962, by 1971 the disillusionment has set in,

In 1987 Margaret Thatcher was to say

“There is no such thing as Society”.

In the same year Oliver Stone’s movie ‘Wall Street’ came out with the famous line

“Greed, for lack of a better word , is good”

Excess ego success was about to take off big time.

And so the earth and it’s communities began to moan with the exploitation needed to satisfy the demand for ego success.

Until this year, 2010!

This year has seen the biggest natural and human disasters ever recorded, as I type whole towns are being washed away in China , millions of Pakistanis have lost everything in the ongoing floods. Floods, landslides, drought and fires have killed people in most of the continents of the world.

And yet still our governments give only lip service to global warming but continue to gauge wealth by the ‘success’ called growth. Continually exploiting resources, growing production in services and goods no one can any longer afford to buy.

OK so where am I going with all this?

I cannot say for sure if there is any connection between economic growth and global warming, I have no proof that global warming is man made but I am convinced there has been an explosion in the desire for ego success and this has fuelled the economic and environmental disasters we are now experiencing, ego success has failed us!

So can ego success failing be successful? Well I think it can

At the centre of most religions, and beliefs like Buddhism and Taoism are teachings about being charitable to one’s fellow human beings, this make take the form of tangible goods but also applies to having charitable thoughts.

Charitable thoughts and charitable deeds are at the centre of heart success.

It is possible that I am completely wrong, more likely I am partly right, but it is time to wake up, open your eyes and see what has happened to our world, our communities and our sense of self.

I think the beginning of the end of a human cycle is taking place, as many civilisations have done before us, often as a result of environmental change at the peak of the civilisation.

We have a choice, descend into an ego based chaos of every man for himself or grow into a new age where heart success is valued as success.

Most people want a caring society, its time to create a society that cares and it is this that can turn the failure of excess of ego success into real success, heart success.

‘

“All those who are unhappy in the world
are so as a result of their desire for their own happiness.
All those who are happy in the world
are so as a result of their desire for the happiness of others.” -Shantideva

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Do you really want to be successful ?

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Do you really want success?
Most, if not all, would answer this question with a resounding Yes.
So what can I possibly have to say? Tell you the ‘secret’ of success?
Well I have no secret to tell you, just an opinion.
There are two types of success, ego success and heart success.
Ego success is what we normally understand as success, it is the success our ego needs.
It is the part of us that continually needs to be validated, so success is perceived as having
the perfect partner,
a good job,
money in excess,
to be chosen above others by something or someone,
to have respect,
to be told we did well,
to have and hold power,
to have control
A short list of some of our ego’s needs, and though they created our communities and our sense of self, the excess of pandering to ego’s needs is now killing the planet, our communities and our sense of self.
The western social construct is built around the ideas of success and growth, it is in fact one massive great Ponzi scheme, built on growth.
I doubt a downsize to sustainable growth could even be achievable .
The run away growth that we need to sustain any kind of living in a way that has become ‘normal’ is tearing the world apart because underlying all the theorys of economics is the ego’s clawing for success after success, whatever success ego has today, when it wakes up tomorrow it needs more, bigger and better, and for every bigger and better success for the ego something or someone will need to be exploited to the same degree
There is only one reason we have massive corporations, immoral bank bonuses, crime, totalitarian governments, lying incompetent democratic governments, poverty and inequality and that is to feed the successful participating individuals egos.
So what is heart success? When I speak of heart I do not mean the romantic heart I mean the warmth felt inside for doing a good thing. An action that brings no fame, no fuss, no money, no congratulation just the knowledge that it was the right thing to do.
The anonymous charity donor,
pride in doing ones work to ones best ability,
not making judgments about others
caring for and working for the local community (for free)
respecting and taking care of animals
respecting and taking care of the environment.
Just some examples of the heart success one can feel in life that is wholesome.
So maybe the next time you look at someone not dressed as well as you, not as attractive as you, who doesn’t earn as much you, and is not as ego successful as you, try not to judge them because they may actually be far more heart successful than you could ever know.
This post is based on an idea taken from a Buddhist teaching.
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