Our summer issue is out now. Regular contributor and trauma-Aware therapist Sandy Newbigging invites us to revisit life’s big question – Who am I? – through the lens of our inherent wholeness. Keep reading to enjoy the full piece!
Sandy C. Newbigging
Spring Vibes 2017: What we love this Spring!
“Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
Events, Workshops, Training, Inspiration, Treats & More for Spring 2017
Attending an event or trying a product or workshop listed here? Tweet your experience to @PositiveLifeMag
Well Read
Keep Calm and Cure On
Calm Cure is our own Sandy Newbigging’s new book on the healing powers of meditation. In it, he shares why conflict keeps us connected to what we don’t want and offers his powerful three-step technique for healing both personal and global problems.
A Cookbook That Might Just Save Your Life
Derbhla Reynolds has been leading the vanguard proclaiming the health benefits and deliciousness of fermented foods for years. Her new book, The Cultured Club: Fabulously Funky Fermentation Recipes is full of gut-friendly recipes designed to supercharge your immune system. My favourite is the vanilla kefir ice cream.
Rise and Shine
Rebecca Campbell is a light worker and a bestselling author of Light Is The New Black. Rebecca has guided thousands of women to listen to the callings of their soul and create a life that is completely aligned to them. She gave a one day workshop hosted by Positive living network in Newry on April 8th. Check her site for other dates!
What Are You Looking At?
We all know that your energy goes wherever you put your attention. In Sarah McLean’s new book, The Power of Attention, you can discover with simple mindfulness tools and meditation techniques how to reclaim spring your attention and enhance your ability to be more present, self-aware, and focused.
IT’S HAPPENING
Carpe Noctum
If the holistic world had TED talks, they would look like Positive Nights. At each event we come together in love and are treated to wonderful talks, workshops and happenings that leave us wiser, happier and more alive. It’s a movement that’s taking off. Look out for upcoming nights of tantra with Dawn Cartwright, meditation with Sandy Newbigging and loads more. It’s a magical mystery tour.
positivelife.ie/positivenights
Wilderness Wellbeing
Charles Cook famously proclaimed, “Your deepest roots are in nature, no matter who you are, where you live, or what kind of life you lead, you remain irrevocably linked with the rest of creation.” Nature Benefits offers you the chance to reconnect with the earth and sky with revitalising outdoorsy events throughout the year designed to help you reclaim those deep roots and find peace.
Spring Break
It’s so important to invest time in yourself to stay balanced and well. Amongst many other therapies, Mokshala offers a three day Holistic Detox Retreat in April that is focused on cleansing and transforming at all levels. Lead by holistic healer and life coach Arina Suld, it’s a weekend that is guaranteed to recharge your batteries.
Heroes Wanted
Laura Lynn provide palliative care and support for children with life-limiting conditions and their families. Their holistic approach to care enables them to support the whole family, allowing parents to be ‘Mum and Dad’ rather than full-time carers. They are looking for wonderful heroes to enter the Women’s Mini Marathon to raise funds for their amazing work.
GOOD STUFF
Period Drama
The Mooncup replaces tampons in a way that’s more convenient, better for your body and makes tons more sense for the environment too. The company is employee-owned and is the first sanitary protection manufacturer with Ethical
Business status.
Hemp for Health
Hemp-originating treatment is very much in the headlines these days with many claims of its medicinal qualities. Also known as cannabidiol, it is the non-psychoactive compound in hemp/ cannabis that has received a tremendous amount of positive news worldwide. Full Circle Hemp provides CBD/CBDA products from their base in Wicklow.
Home Made Goodness
April Danann is a medical intuitive. She lives a totally natural life, making all her own products and food from scratch, from toothpaste to cleaning products and beyond. We love her range of apple cider vinegars, with some super flavours: turmeric and ginger, wild elderberry and more. Get your pH in check and alkalise that body of yours.
Autism And Broccoli Sprout Juice
Vegus Juices of Co. Wexford are convinced of the health-giving properties of their broccoli sprout juice on those who are affected by autism. So much so, that they have an exclusive offer for our readers. If you or your family are affected by Autism and would like to try it, contact Mike for a free four week supply to try it out, available to first fifty applicants.
vegusjuices.com vegusvegus@aol.com
HELPING HANDS
A Problem Shared
Help is out there. Whatever life has thrown at us, it always lightens the load when we stop trying to shoulder the
whole burden by ourselves and reach out for the support that we need. The Open Minds Centre in Dun Laoghaire offers psychotherapy and clinical hypnotherapy for when the going gets tough.
That’s a Given
Human Givens therapy is sweeping the world. It holds that if a person’s organic human needs are met appropriately, it is not possible to be mentally unwell. That’s a refreshing approach. Anne-Marie Curran is a trained practitioner based in Dublin. She can help you access your inner resources and design a healthy living environment for yourself.
Anne-Marie 086 600 9019
Make Meditating Easy
4 of the easiest ways to find peace.
By Sandy C. Newbigging
Why is my mind so busy?! I know your frustration. With countless thoughts passing through my mind at a million miles per hour, I’ve tossed and turned through sleepless nights and found it near impossible to focus during work or play.
Motivated to move from mental chaos to mind calm, I’ve meditated for thousands of hours and observed the many people I’ve taught meditation to from around the world. Quite unexpectedly, I’ve discovered some of the more subtle reasons why so many people suffer from such busy minds and the ways to overcome it.
1. The Judgement Game
Making sense of life is one of the mind’s jobs. To do this, it plays what I call ‘The Judgement Game’ determining whether your life is good or bad, positive or negative, right or wrong, better or worse. If it deems something to be bad, negative, wrong or worse, you end up with a ‘problem’. There’s a direct relationship between negatively judging life and the compulsion to overthink. The mind loves to problem-solve and becomes highly active thinking about your problem(s) and coming up with solutions.
The Solution: See the judgmental thoughts in your mind but don’t be the judger.
2. The Resist Persist
Joined at the hip of the Judgement Game is resistance. The mind tends to resist whatever it judges as problematic. This often unseen habit of reactive resistance can prevent us from feeling bliss. How you feel is less to do with what happens, and more to do with whether you judge and resist what happens or not.
Naturally, the mind wants to feel good so whenever you notice ‘negative’ energy happening within the body, it feels compelled to figure out how to make the bad feelings go away – with copious amounts of thoughts becoming the by-product of the resistance and the need to feel good once again.
The Solution: Begin to remove reactive resistance and allow yourself to be in harmony with ‘what is’.
3. The Attach Catch
Attachment happens whenever you believe that being, doing or having x, y or z will make you happier, peaceful, loved, safe or successful. Being attached makes you move away from wanting things to believing that you need them to be OK. Attachment is based on the illusion that you can’t feel good now without fixing, changing or improving your body or life first.
When attached, you become caught up in your busy mind, trying to improve your life so that you can eventually feel good. But during all of that time, you’re missing the beauty and abundance already present in your life that, if focused on, can make you feel great now and even attract more good in.
The Solution: Desire things, but don’t need them to be happy.
4. The Time Trap
This final trick of the mind stems from the subtle belief that the past or future is relevant to your current levels of peace, happiness, love and well-being. If you believe that you need to change, fix or improve what’s happened in your past or what might happen in the future, then you are going to feel compelled to engage in thoughts about your past and future anytime they pass through your mind.
The Solution: Be fully attentive to now, you don’t need the future to fulfil you.
Watch a video of Sandy explaining the 4 hidden causes and what you can do to enjoy more mind calm at sandynewbigging.com/blogs. Sandy’s no.1 best-selling book called Mind Calm is out now.
Spring Sneak Peek: The Secret to Success is Stillness, Meditation with Sandy C. Newbigging
The Secret to Success is Stillness
Accessing abundance, joy and ‘isness’.
By Sandy C. Newbigging
Success appears to mean different things for different people. For some, it might be optimum health, while others associate it with financial wealth or reaching the top of their organisation or profession. Irrespective of your personal benchmark for what a successful life looks like, it is only in discovering the inner presence of stillness that you can feel a true and lasting sense of satisfaction.
Like the surface of the ocean, your thoughts, emotions, body, career, relationships, finances and all other aspects of your external world are constantly changing. That’s what they do. Thoughts and emotions happen, while the body does its thing. New people enter your life as others leave. Careers change, political parties rise and fall and economic climates change as quickly as the weather.
Subscribe here to get a copy of the Spring issue of Positive Life in the post and read the full article. Or find one at one of our stockists.
Sandy is the creator of Mind Detox therapy and Mind Calm meditation. He teaches Mind Calm Coaches via his award-winning academy. His new book, Mind Calm, published by Hay House, is out now. mindcalm.com.
The Splendour of Surrender
By Sandy C. Newbigging
Living from the wisdom within.
Surrender sits at the heart of meditation. By surrender I’m not referring to waving a white flag or giving up, but the ability to let go. It is only in being willing to let go of your pre-conceived ideas about how your mind, body and life should be, that you can fully embrace the joy and grace that continuously flows through every moment.
Let the loving hand of the universe guide you.
1. Go with the flow
Creation is occurring in its awe-inspiring glory right now. To resist life is to push away magic and miracles. Everything happens to help you to wake up, learn to love unconditionally and live your purpose. Trying to make life look how you think it should is the equivalent of trying to squeeze the universe through the eye of a needle. The universe we play in is abundant. It is trying to give you everything. Always. There isn’t a moment when what you need isn’t given to you freely. Yet, if you continue to hold onto the mind, you can only get, at best, your beliefs about what you think is possible.
Remain open to abundance by living with an accepting heart surrendered to whatever the moment brings. Be willing to receive a helping hand from the universe in ways you least expect. Be open to and expectant of unforeseen miracles.
2. From concepts to consciousness
Care less about gathering concepts and ideas and focus your attention on being consciously aware. Without learning how to be in the ‘here and now’, no new ideas will be useful because you will remain one-step removed from life. An attitude of active calm moves you from possessing knowledge to living with wisdom.
3. Live the meditation teachings and internalise the techniques
Within you is supreme consciousness, full of light, love and enlightenment. It’s yours to experience. All that’s required to inherit its riches is your attention. The more you let go, the more you will find the fullness of still, silent space.
4. Surrender to what is
Without letting this moment be, as it is, your mind will continue to be busy. Any resistance causes the mind to become highly active and remain at the forefront of your attention. Make being calm more important than being right and make peace more important than things going to plan. If something unexpected or ‘bad’ happens, gracefully deal with it without any rejection of reality. Wishing things hadn’t happened only attaches you to a past that cannot be changed. Pushing back at life tires you out and puts your peace and prosperity on hold.
5. Resistance = Stress + Struggle
Surrender = Serenity + Success
Resisting reality doesn’t change reality. It only makes you stressed and causes you unnecessary suffering. Why reject life? Isn’t it more appealing to surrender to what is, let things be, as they are, and with a calm mind and courageous heart, take whatever action is required? You can resist what is or you can let it be, as it is.
Surrender is by far the best strategy if serenity and success is what you genuinely want. Allowing reality to show up in all its glorious and unexpected ways is so much fun. You have front row seats at this phenomenal thing called ‘your life’. Surrender to what is and I guarantee that you will enjoy the boundless benefits of meditation and see with your own awakened eyes that the secret to success is stillness.
Pick up a copy of the Winter issue of Positive Life in your nearest stockist. Or subscribe and have it delivered to your door!
Sandy is the creator of the Mind Detox and Mind Calm methods of therapy and meditation. His no.1 best selling book ‘THUNK! How to Think Less for Serenity and Success’ is available on amazon.
www.mindcalm.com
Let go of your thoughts for more liberated living
By Sandy C. Newbigging
Peace of mind is possible without having to still your mind. Hard to believe, I know, but let me explain why. How many thoughts pass through your mind on a daily basis? Incredibly, it has been said that the average person has around 100,000 thoughts every day. That’s a lot of thoughts! The challenge we face however, is the number of these thoughts that are negative and thus have a potentially harmful impact on your body, your mood and your life. So how can you turn this around?
The Myth Of Positive Thinking
Now I’m a believer in, and promoter of, the benefits of being positive but the sheer quantity of thoughts makes any attempts to change your mind so that you only have ‘positive thoughts’ an almost impossible task. So if you’ve done your best to think positive, but not mastered it, be easy on yourself.
A Very Appealing Solution Indeed
Rather than attempt the task of changing or stopping all the thoughts that pass through your mind daily, I recommend that instead you do one thing: change your relationship with your thoughts. The goal: to experience a sense of serenity irrespective of the kinds of thoughts in your mind.
Stop reading, close your eyes and then, whenever you become aware of a thought, give the thought a number: one, two, three and so on. Count your thoughts for the next minute. Having done that, how many thoughts did you count?
It doesn’t matter if you counted 2 or 202 thoughts! What is important is that if you can count your thoughts, it means that you are not your thoughts. They came and went, but you didn’t! You are the conscious awareness that is aware of your thoughts. And that awareness is already still, silent and serene.
You are that which is aware of your thoughts, but you are not your thoughts! What a relief.
Stop Giving Away Power To Your Thoughts
No thought has the inherent power to negatively affect your mood or life success. The only way you can give thoughts power is by identifying with them through the act of thinking. To help you get your head around this, let me share an amazing analogy taught to me by my meditation teacher.
Imagine you are outdoors with your best friend on a nice sunny day, sitting at the side of a busy road. You have been given the simple task of counting all the red cars that drive by. As you relax at the side of the road, a few cars come by – one blue, another black and then a red one, which you count. A little more time passes and more cars drive by. You continue to sit safely at the side of the road, feeling quite serene and happy as you enjoy the scene.
Then, as a red car comes by, your friend jumps up, runs after it and, with a spectacular leap, manages to grab the car’s rear bumper, at which point they start being dragged up the road. You can see very clearly that they are getting hurt and are confused as to why they are holding on so tight. So you shout after your friend – “Let go!” – to which they shout back that the red car is hurting them. You shout back “The car isn’t hurting you; you are getting hurt because you are holding on to it. Let go! Let go!” The same is true for your thoughts.
Let Go Of Limitations for a More Liberated Life
Thoughts have no power to hurt you or hold you back from being a success in life. What hurts and limits you is holding onto them through the act of thinking. As you learn to change your relationship with your mind, you can learn to let go of your thoughts, so that they lose their power to negatively impact on your life, for good.
Sandy C. Newbigging is the creator of Mind Detox and Mind Calm, Find out more at www.mindcalm.com