Hello from Koh Samui!

My detox was effortless this year, after 10 days of fasting I now feel lighter and happier afterwards (not all the time through it I hasten to add, it does send me a little erratic on the 5^th day normally) stirring up emotions and start to look at things – one couth fresh perspective. Perhaps getting rid of the crap enabled me to see all the lovely shiny bits underneath. It also gives my organs and hormones a chance to rest and revitalize.

In this series of blogs here on Wordpress this year, I want to shine a light on ways that you can gain an insight into making that light inside you much stronger.

So this blog will be specifically about CREATING HAPPINESS =D

How do I know I’m happy or not happy? What can I do to increase on my levels of happiness, and really be consistent about FEELING happy? Why feel happy in the first place?

How about creating your own happiness? What if you could actively, on a daily basis, work on feeling more and more happy? Could a person have too much happiness? Patch Adams was told he had excessive happiness in the film with Robin Williams – would that be a problem for you

There are several people that have really inspired me on my happiness quest.

ROBERT HOLDEN – a wonderful man who runs the Happiness Project [see - http://www.happiness.co.uk/] Also have a look here on the wonderful Oprah website for a fun self-test quiz - http://www.oprah.com/spirit/The-Self-Acceptance-Scale

PATCH ADAMS-Best known for his work as a medical doctor and a clown, and he is also a social activist who has devoted 40 years to changing America’s health care system. He believes that laughter, joy and creativity are an integral part of the healing process.

DAN MILLMAN- why not have a quick peek at this excerpt from his Peaceful Warrior film that came out in 2006. http://youtu.be/9BBDexSzmMM his book is a must read!

The wise man says it’s about not starting or stopping, just doing! Maybe happiness is just like that…you have to DO! So where would you start?

PAUL McGHEE PHD-His book Humor THE LIGHTER PATH TO RESILIENCE AND HEALTH here is one of my favourite excerpts that resonates with me so much:

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, McMurphy (played by Jack Nicholson in the film) says, “When you lose your sense of humor, you lose your footing.” Another character says about McMurphy, “He knows you have to laugh at the things that hurt you, just to keep yourself in balance, just to keep the world from running you plumb crazy.” This is great wisdom from someone who lives in a psychiatric institution. Your sense of humor is one of the most potent tools you have to cope with those days when life seems determined to deal you enough stress to make you crazy. In the midst of the global economic crisis confronting us all as this book is published, most of us are finding more and more days like this showing up in our lives.

Anyone who has worked with me knows that I love a little laugh and tickle in my sessions and talk about bringing joy into your world.

What is your joy? What brings a smile to your face? A baby smiling, a field of poppies, kittens and bunny rabbits? Clowns? Sex?

Which reminds me that when is started seeing my partner he asked “do you smoke after sex? “To which I replied “I don’t know I have never looked!”

OK I stole that… but hey ….it still makes me smile…my point is it makes me smile, it might not make you smile…so what does?

FACTS ABOUT LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE

The physiological study of laughter has its own name: “gelotology.” Research has shown that laughing is more than just a person’s voice and movement. Laughter requires the coordination of many muscles throughout the body. Laughter also:

• increases blood pressure

• increases heart rate

• changes breathing

• reduces levels of certain neurochemicals (catecholamines, hormones).

• provides a boost to the immune system.

Can laughter improve health? It may be a good way for people to relax because muscle tension is reduced after laughing. There are some cases when a good deep laugh may help people with respiratory problems by clearing mucus and aiding ventilation. Perhaps laughing can also help cardiac patients by giving the heart a bit of a workout. Some hospitals even have their own “Humor Rooms,” “Comedy Carts,” and clown kids in attempts to speed a patient’s recovery and boost morale

FACT: In order to set a ball in motion it needs a gentle push just like that snowball rolling down the Hill

Have you noticed that sometimes when you are with a group of people and one person has an uncontrollable burst of giggles then you all start?

How are you going to get that ball in motion and get that happy feeling going for you in 2011?

So grab that GRATITUDE BOOK of yours and start writing down what you like and perhaps the jokes that made you laugh what will make you feel lighter and release the “LAW OF PSYCHOLOGICAL GRAVITY” a term coined several years ago by Paul McGhee who realised that our own perception can cause us stress and heaviness.

We all could do with a little more tickle factory or tapping tickle effects to produce the giggles and joy in our lives.

I would love to hear from you guys to find out what makes you smile, laugh and release the LAW OF PSYCHOLOGICAL GRAVITY for yourself or your clients.

LOVE AND GRATITUDE FROM THE CRYSTAL ISLAND OF SERENITY

CHOICES…what an inspiring word and one that western society has strived to have and guess what…we got them!!

I noticed how we are all constantly making decisions from the time we get up until the time we go to bed. These include all the material, lifestyle, food, down to which toothpaste to use. The quickest way to work, to the park, the shops, dropping kids at school and going to the gym. I’m getting tired just thinking about it and I am sure you are just reading about them! Just the other day I was at the supermarket and was practically stunned by the amount of choice in bread and pasta sauce (yes, you found me out, I don’t make my own!)

Barry Schwartz, in his best selling book “The Paradox of Choice – Why more is less”, shows how abundance and overwhelming choice reduces our happiness, and that control is a key factor in supporting our choices in the first place. Indeed he states that the decrease in general happiness (in the U.S.A.) is directly linked to ever increasing choices.
Unfortunately our emotive habits of wanting it all and actually getting it have succeeded in grinding the majority of us down. We feel overwhelmed, stressed, start functioning from that old flight, fight or freeze response that kicks in…and we end up paralysed, procrastinating, standing in front of the supermarket shelf for 20 minutes worrying if we have picked the correct pasta sauce, the right journey, the right life…All of this translates into the body and we get dis-ease. [Get tapping now if you're feeling wobbly]…
The latest statistics on symptoms of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and ME have been documented in the UK as 1 in 300 and mostly women. They show this as on the increase. Why would that be? Could it be that the overwhelm is happening on such a pervasive manner, even down to the kind of food I eat? Surely not, was life always this hard? Maybe less is truly more?

Nearly 50% of my clients bring up procrastination, fear of making the right choice yet every single self development coach/therapist is shouting at them to make more choices… SURELY A PARADOX if there was ever one

….and then the ones that are aware that life should not be so difficult come to me for guidance, and I ask them to consider the options, upside, downside, left-side and right-side. In front and behind. Which ever way is loose, we play and have a little fun with it all. Which is the best solution for them not their partner, not the tv adverts, not their parents for them.

You see, we cannot allow our errors in judgement, limiting beliefs and negative self-talk, repeated every day, to pull us away from our true path. We must keep coming back to those basics that make the biggest difference in how our life works out. And then we can make the very choices that will bring life, happiness and joy into our daily lives.
So let us be willing to clear those mistakes, stop beating ourselves up for our past mistakes and look at the real choices in our life, not just about our expectation of living in the now. Do we really need to have the best pasta sauce, must we rush through life, can we not accept that we are living the perfect life and savour and truly taste whatever we put in our mouths. Because if we make it from love then it will taste absolutely lovely. To start forgiving ourselves and letting go of past bad choices and focus on the now and what is truly important about the now!

Simply smile at everyone, on the tube in the supermarket, in the queues in the rain and at ourselves, take walks in the park, laugh, touch each other with our hearts and our skin….and choose….that which is most important to support our happiness. After all Happiness Is What You Are
Happiness is not a destination, it’s a journey. Happiness is not tomorrow, it is now. Happiness is not a dependency, it is a decision. Happiness is what you are, not what you have…Money does not give us happiness. We can always choose the worst pasta sauce however we can choose not to eat it or simply we can choose who to eat it with and that my friends is the most important choice of all. Choosing your environment of truth and love

We may look at the two differences of perception: The observable and physical and the psychological.

This can be simply identified by closing or opening our eyes. With our eyes shut we have to think or look into our memory banks for a picture or piece of data, where as with our eyes open we can see the physical evidence…..or can we?
Perception can go wrong in so many ways, an entire world may be created and mistaken for reality. The question “is a glass half empty or half full?” serves to demonstrate the way an object can be perceived in different ways.

Simple drawings that we have all seen before like the following “muller lyer” or arrow illusion demonstrates that what we physically see may not be actual reality.

The length of the lines are actually the same, however the illusion is that a is actually longer, simply by a distortation and disturbance of the information channels to our eyes. At this point i will not be too technical. However can you imagine if we painted the whole world like this? Artists for hundreds of years struggled to paint in perspective as paintings are painted in 2 dimension, however reality is 3 dimensional. (In the real world, objects seem to be smaller the farther away they are from the viewer, and parallel lines appear to converge. Perspective mimics this.). It wasn’t until the 15th century that Italian artists discovered how to do this. If the artist ignores this technique the painting will look flat.

Shadows also can change our perception…

These letters are not actually raised letters casting the shadows but actually, though we see them.
This is because the brain sometimes invents missing objects when they are highly probable.

Another drawing which should be impossible is the Penrose Triangle

or Do you see woman or horn player?

(It is however intriguing to to look at further optical illusions and also fun to work out what is actually there if it is reality or not. Check out my web site http://www.changeahead.biz on the “just for fun page” for more illusions.)

Therefore if our brain does this when it is just looking at one image, think what it does on a daily basis………. now for the technical part !

Neurons are nerve cells that process and transmit electrochemical signals. Like a little lightning bolt transmitter/receiver/processor. The human brain has about 100 billion of them.
Each neurons fires (on average) about 200 times per second. And each neuron connects to about 1,000 other neurons. So… every time each neuron fires a signal, 1,000 other neurons get that information.
20,000,000,000,000,000 bits of info transmitted per second
Think about that:

20 million billion bits of information move around your brainevery second.
It takes a lot of individual bits/neurons — could be millions… could be billions — to form a picture. (The picture of the brain above is 12kb [9,399 bytes], or 75,192 individual bits of information.)
How many bits does it take to shape a whole thought? Analyze a complex situation? Probably billions.
We still haven’t scratched the surface of how many neurons you’ve got.
Plus, consider that your brain is doing all those calculations at the same time… every moment of every day…
-processing sounds
-sights
-smells
-taste
-touch
-thoughts
… and 99+% of the work it’s doing… you never even notice.

The point is ….the brain is working so fast that it can make up a whole lot of things so now perhaps when you next look in the mirror and you think “Oh my god that spot is enormous, or i look fat, my bum looks massive, nose too small too big, i am not pretty, my hair is too curly too straight”……whatever you see, or rather think you see, remember what you have read today!
It is all an illusion…..The great thing about it is …that you can take control …..and change how you feel.. “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and if you are feeling good then you will look good to that beholder.

So now that you know that you can change, you have to decide whether you want to????