As we face the last official week of Winter are you ready for the new beginning that Spring affords us? My motto is: clear out all the clutter and complete all the pending projects so that on September 1 I have a clean slate and a clear mind.

So how to do this is the next question…..I made a list of all the half finished jobs I had sitting taking up space in my brain. I figured out one step I could take to get me closer to finishing each task and I made sure it was an easy step so I wouldn’t feel overwhelmed. I noticed that I had not finished most of these jobs for good reasons and the most common reason was that it felt too hard for me to do the job. A good example is my photographs. I had left them for so long that it was a huge job and I had CD’s, files all over 2 computers and countless photo’s flung in a drawer. Every time I thought of doing the job I couldn’t bear the idea it was just too overwhelming, so I did something else. When I just told myself I could take the step of getting out one box of pictures and sorting them into a timeline, I found the motivation to start. I had previously been looking for a free weekend because I felt I needed so much time to get the job done and of course a free weekend never ever comes my way. Sunday morning 2 weeks ago I had a free hour and I started, well having started I am 80% finished and it feels so good! I am planning to find another hour to go through my 1 computer and sort it into dates and times and I will be 90% done! I can’t believe how easy this mammoth task has proved to be, just because I changed the way I looked at it. I have taken the same step with numerous other projects and feel like I can clear a few more stuck projects out of my way in the next week.

I feel the renewed energy coursing in my veins that has come from getting through the impasse and I feel so inspired to do more. Spring is a time for creativity and new beginnings and I want the dead wood of Winter (even if it is Winter 2 years ago) to be cut away so I can have maximum new creativity and lightness.

I recommend getting your body ready for Spring too. If something is standing between you and brilliant health, spend a few minutes focusing on it and deciding what needs to be done. Find an action that is easy to take and take it. Maybe it’s as simple as having less coffee, or more fruit and maybe it’s more about getting more in shape. Take an action and see how the rest follows. ‘You don’t have to see the whole staircase just take the first step’ Martin Luther King Jnr.

Enjoy the last week of Winter!

What do you do about relaxation? I am often confounded by the fact that people think relaxation can be boxed into a weekend away or a trip to the spar on a particular chosen day. Please don’t misunderstand me…. Trips to the health spa are very good for you, but they can not possibly produce relaxation for anything more than a few hours. The relaxation we need to introduce to ourselves is relaxation that integrates with every minute of every day. We need to become aware of how we tense up and of how we change our breathing patterns when we do. We need to try to incorporate effective, relaxed breathing and relaxation into every moment.

I constantly notice myself being tense when I am in a meeting or driving, and sometimes even when I am reading or chatting to friends too. I am holding my shoulders tight and my tongue is pulled backwards in my mouth, producing tension in my face and jaw. I also notice my left frowning muscle is in constant contraction a lot of the time. Now you can Botox the frowning muscle, which will prevent the wrinkle, but there isn’t much that Botox can do for the shoulders and tongue. So perhaps, awareness of relaxing these muscles is more effective. We need to train our mental pathways to alert us to tension when it exists so we can intervene effectively and sustainably. Conscious relaxation isn’t going to bring a lasting effect any more than a massage is.

The problem lies in the fact that the neural pathways that create this tension are associated with a certain feeling or experience. So we need to recognise the result of the pathway in order to unravel the feeling or experience. So for example, I know my left frowning muscle tenses up when I am rushed and overloaded. As long as a feeling of overload exists, I need to release it, or support myself in some way to lessen the effect it has on my body. When I do this, my frown will spontaneously lessen. I might say, “just one step at a time”, “you’ll get there, Sue, it’s all going to work out fine” “just be present and do one thing at a time and do it well”. I often stop and write down all I have to do, which usually makes me feel more in control, so it’s not all just bubbling around in my head. The minute I feel my muscles tighten, or I notice myself frowning, I know what to do.

All I can say, is I am grateful for the barometer my body always provides for me. Feeling overloaded is a recurrent stress for me and ultimately there is deeper transformation required to lessen this feeling permanently, but these strategies work well in the short term. They make me feel better and enhance my productivity, where such negative feelings would diminish it severely. 
So this week make it relaxation week, and try to bring more relaxation into every minute of every day!

I want to talk about exercising for the sheer joy of being alive…. our bodies were made to exercise and to move and movement brings joy. I often hear people say: ‘I hate exercise’. If you are one of these people I ask you to challenge yourself and ask the question: ‘ is it exercise I hate or the idea of exercise?’ Our mind can be seen as a big muscle and most of us have very undisciplined, untrained and very out of control minds and I wonder how different things would be if we actually managed our thoughts. The truth is that the body was made to move and exercise.

Exercising is as natural to us as eating. Of course people like different forms of exercise, just like different people like different types of foods or climates. However I do not think there is a body that genuinely doesn’t like any exercise. So I challenge you to think of exercise as being a source of joy and fun and ask yourself how you can have more joy and fun as you exercise. I know for me gym is a chore. I do enjoy it when I am there, but it takes energy for me to go, but running is just fun. I never have to force myself to go. I just connect with the free, relaxed feeling it brings and I long to go.

 This past weekend I was lucky enough to run the ‘South African X-trail’ trail running race in the Cape. Even though the last day was cancelled due to foul weather, it was like running in heaven to be there and the euphoria that such a run produced for me has inspired me to want to encourage more and more people to try it. Maybe if you could change your mindset you would find that exercise IS what you were born to do and you could love every minute of it. Sometimes to get to the fun and the joy, we have to work through our resistance, but even inertia is a frame of mind. It may take time to get fit too, and there is no rush. But every day that we do not exercise is a day we have wasted a chance to enjoy ourselves.

Today I went flying with my partner who is an aerobatic pilot and experienced what I sometimes take for granted with him…. the exhilaration of sending it up into the skies and leaving the world far below. He took us barrel rolling and stall turning all over the sky and I sat in the plane (an Extra) strapped in tight to assist with the G-force and to keep me still even when we were upside down and I really got what it means to push the boundaries and try the seemingly impossible.

We pointed the plane completely vertical and shot upwards and then turned and skyrocketed groundwards as if we were about to nose dive into the ground and just as I shut my eyes in panic he expertly corrected us and flew us just low enough to make out the individual blades of grass in the field we were flying over. In spite of my stomach which objects strongly and violently this was one of the most pristine experiences I have ever had. I have been many times and what I saw today is that the more I have relaxed the more I have slowed it all down so I can really take it all in and appreciate every minute slowly and individually. 

 Luckily you can’t see how pale I am! But if you could have seen you would have seen sparkling eyes!

So as I consider subtraction I wonder what this would entail and how one would go about implementing it. I have often said in stress management seminars that I have run, that we need to spend as much time on making lists of what we ‘should not do’ as we do on making lists of what we ‘should do’. So how do we decide what should go on the ‘what I should not do list?’

The answer that comes up for me when I ask this question is: we need to identify our value system and then work from there. We need to know what is critically important for us and then make sure that nothing gets in the way of that. Once we know what our top ten values are we can quite easily identify what can be subtracted and what can not. I sometimes find that my meditation time gets sacrificed and yet personal growth and wellness are top values of mine. By the same token, my relationship with my children is very high on my value system, so I have to be careful not to subtract from the time I have with them.

Sometimes I say yes to fitting a patient in to my after hours time or slotting a talk into my weekend time, and this leads to subtraction in the wrong place. So I have absolute clarity, from experience, of what not to subtract, but I still sit with the question of ‘what should I not do?’ I find that life just continues to grow and time can not grow as profusely! Long winded conversations and interactions that are not based on ‘win-win’ feel to me like the only thing I can subtract at this stage.

Sometimes my need to be polite and nice makes saying no and being assertive difficult. Conversations in my head and indecision are also time wasters and can go on the ‘what I should not do’ list. Going against my own value system is very definitely a cause of mental chatter, so this is a clear subtraction point. Please tell me what you think!

Today I set my intention on seeing clearly. Well the first thing I have seen clearly is how amazingly I have learnt over the past 20 years. I noticed how I take my ever increasing understanding and tool box so for granted. Sometimes in my life I have been so focused on learning and acquiring knowledge that I have hardly ever stopped to appreciate all I have learnt and be grateful for how every new concept has floated into my life at exactly the moment I needed it to. I have never ever thought: ‘what next?’, because the next step has just come up when I was ready. Now I look around and new ideas and opportunities are all around me as always and today I suddenly saw it so clearly. There has been synchronicity at each and every turn and even though I am often teased by my family about being a course junkie, nothing has been wasted and it has all woven together into a blanket of stuff I can relax into using.

Today was an epiphany as I experienced fully how blessed I have been. And my last learning bout…. hypnotherapy and ethno psychology has brought huge new scope to me. I have been blown away by how many different ways I can use it and how powerful it is!
I have an exam to write on Saturday and I have ideas of what is required to get prepared. I have been trying to squeeze some studying time into my life, in spite of a full schedule and loads of commitments. The time slot I have made available which is pretty late at night has created some sincere inner resistance from my body…. It has decided that I need sleep and it has warned me for several days now and I can feel the warnings getting louder each and every day. I just don’t know what to do about it except give in and either turn up to my exam unprepared or to make some other changes somewhere else.

I am actually chuckling as I write this, because Sunday I woke up literally begging for more sleep and did a run which my body consented to despite how I felt on waking. Monday I woke with puffy eyes and dark rings and felt even less like getting up. I had no vooma for even a tiny run. Tuesday was worse and today I have a headache, a running nose and can’t even concentrate, never mind run….. What will I do? I promise I will sleep early and give in allowing the tiredness, without insisting my way is best. I will see what my body says tomorrow morning. I watched my natural mindless response to pain, which was to reach for a Panado on waking. I decided not to take it, because if I haven’t listened I deserve to feel slow and sluggish and sore so I can take an easier day for myself and take care today. I really know my body is supporting me and helping me. My way is not necessarily the best way!
My way has always involved being responsible and doing the work and more required to do well in exams. It has also been to just keep on adding things to my life and never subtracting anywhere. So I add studying, but don’t take anything away to make it possible and up until now apart from moaning that I don’t have enough time, I have always got it right….. Maybe now my body thinks it is time to try a new way of operating. Maybe my next learning is to be in the field of subtraction not addition!!! Sounds scary, but if my body thinks this is where more joy lies I’ll go with it and see what happens. Let me know what this evokes for you!

The body can respond to strain in many different ways, and as a physiotherapist I get to see and touch the tissues and identify the different responses.

I had a little boy in my treatment room today, who suffered a trauma to his little back a week ago and a further trauma yesterday when he fell over the back seat into the boot of his Dad’s car. His response to the inflamed and sore tissues was profound muscle spasm and complete aversion to movement or weight bearing. His little mind decided that he should not walk on the leg and should just not load the tissue in any way. I tried to compare his body’s response to that of another person who sprained her ankle 6 weeks ago and who continued doing a trail walk she was engaged with long after her injury. Her body responded by swelling the ankle up and making her joint stiff and rigid and thereby enabling her to walk on the joint without damaging the tissues too much further. Both people had suffered spraining of the soft tissues and ligaments around the joints they damaged.

I found myself pondering the question: ‘why?’ did each person and each person’s nervous system respond the way it did. Our obvious response is to imagine that one injury was worse or that one person was more sensitive, yet I am not sure that either is true. I think that the conclusion I have come to is that the nervous system gives you the response it thinks will get the most survival enhancing result. So the little boy’s brain trusted that he would be cared for and he could just lie back until he was better to enhance his survival. The lady’s brain decided she should be facilitated to carry on at all costs never missing much of a beat, for her survival. These survival instincts are subconscious and quite primitive. In order to heal it is very helpful to understand them.

So, the little boy will need to be gently encouraged to trust his body and will need encouragement to get going, reassuring him all the time that careful note is being taken of his pain. In fact a lot of my treatment involved explaining how brilliantly his body could heal anything and how clever his body was. I assured him it was safe for him to walk with my assistance and that I would help as much as was necessary. I told him his body was talking to us both and we could listen and know how much help to give. (Obviously I had ruled out the possibility of the pain being due to serious pathology or a fracture.) With the lady with the badly sprained ankle, I took a totally different approach. I reminded her that support and help are available and are all around her. I gave her an ankle support and encouraged her to rest a little, allaying her fears of loss of control of her life with effective affirmations. I reminded her of the value of taking a rest and of being a little bit ‘weak’ every now and again in order to allow her body time to heal. Even as we talked and as I gently and supportively moved her ankle, the swelling came down and the joint loosened. It was almost as if the inner splint was no longer needed.

This is the part of working with the body that excites me the most.. every body speaks a slightly different language or dialect using a different tone or pitch and I find I get the best healing responses when I am as connected as possible to these subtle nuances and am sensitive to the body language in the most vigilant way possible.

So Easter has come and gone and I have been reading: ‘The Power of The Sub-Conscious Mind’, while at the same time doing some of the exercises in Kiki Theo’s ‘ The Alchemy of Money’. More than ever before I have realized that what we think and believe deep down in the hidden recesses of our subconscious minds is what manifests in our lives.

I had plenty of long luxurious runs in the magnificence of the Natal Midlands over Easter weekend to really examine my thoughts. One thing I noticed is that I have always trusted my physical endurance ability, implicitly. I never ever doubt my capacity or ability and have taken on some very daunting events and undertakings with unshakeable confidence. I realized that there is not quite the level of self assuredness in some of the other aspects of my life.

I do a lot of public talks and run many workshops and I often have to overcome a degree of self doubt before I stand up. I also have to survive some hectic self imposed post mortems after some of these events.

This weekend as I ran through the Autumn colored trees and feasted my eyes on the soft green rolling hills, and as I meditated on the patio of the house we were staying in, I allowed my mind to bathe in the possibility of having as much trust in all the aspects of my ability. I allowed myself to stretch my belief to encompass unlimited success in any project I chose to engage with. It felt good.
I know this needs work and if I stop now there will be no shift and I will have achieved nothing. I need to do this mind stretching for at least 30 days to really reap the results.
I am using a visual image (as an affirmation) of being like an overflowing dam, filled to the brim with abundance, knowledge, wisdom, insight, power and ability. All of this is contained in the dam and can be basked in at anytime by me or anyone else. I can trust that it is not transient and will not run away.

The more I hold this image the more quickly I will manifest what this represents in my life. Let me know if this resonates for you. Maybe you have used a similar image as an affirmation. Maybe you would like to try?