The Mickel Therapy Clinic, Auckland, Mickel Therapy - contact Kim or book a session
The more I give myself permission to live in the moment and enjoy it without feeling guilty or judgmental about any other time, the better I feel about the quality of my work."
Dr Wayne Dyer
How much pleasure do you have in your life? How much fun do you have? Are you in touch with your passions or purposes?
Isn’t it interesting that when you are unwell, especially if you have spent time in hospital, doctors and nurses will usually tell you to “take things one day at a time”. Surely life is a series of moments? We know that the way our bodies work that emotions are just a flow of energy – a transfer from outside to in. So we also know that our bodies are responding to life on a moment to moment basis. Despite the temptation to generalise over periods of time, our bodies can be generating one emotion one minute and then another the next.
The problem is that so many of us, whether in good health or not, tend to spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the future, be that the next 5 minutes or 5 years. This means that we are not attending to the now; rather we have already jumped ahead to the next activity and then the next. In fact the next 4 or 5 activities may be completed in our head so we then run on some sort of autopilot mode as we drift though our days.
We then seem to get trapped in endless cycles of drudgery, moving from one task to the next. Everything becomes about achievement and achieving the next thing. As our brain takes over and we lose the connection with our emotional-intuitive centre we lose a sense of who we are, a sense of identity.
This means endless striving, we get caught up in achievement, and the sense that we must prove ourselves constantly; this is often coupled with having a need to get newer and better ‘stuff’. Even the things we do for ourselves are often driven by this achievement-focused brain. We can become obsessed with good diet, exercising, doing yoga, regardless of whether any of these things bring joy and pleasure. Even the gurus trying to sell us better life styles, stress reduction, positive thinking etc, are all coming from this brain-achievement driven focus – all of which neglect to tap into who we really are at our e-motional core.
So how is this a problem? Well, we would argue that it provides another piece of the health puzzle as to why there is such a proliferation of Energy Disorders.
Even the most conservative physicians and doctors concede that the underpinning causes of illness or healing remain largely unknown to medicine.
Physician James McCormick, wrote in the respected journal The Lancet:
“Physicians would do better to encourage people to live lives of modified hedonism so that they may be able to enjoy, to the full, the only life that they are likely to have”.
Ultimately we all need more pleasure, joy and passion in our lives, and in order to find this we need to take a moment to allow ourselves to feel who we are. The first stage of this is to begin to allow ourself to experience life as a series of moments. Bring yourself back into the now because it is only when you are in the now that you can truly witness all you are feeling and experiencing.
As you catch your attention through the day, start by bringing it back to your breath. Allow yourself 3 deep cleansing breaths then bring your attention to your senses, what do you see, hear and feel right now. Feel life now. We like to think of this as walking meditation, where you don’t have to sit for 20 minutes to connect with yourself, rather each step you take you are feeling a connection to yourself as well as everything around you.
Why not concentrate on the now instead of hoping for better times in the future? Why not understand the now instead of forgetting it and hoping for the future? Isn’t the future just another trap?”
Anthony de Mello
“Nothing is worth more than this day. You cannot relive yesterday. Tomorrow is still beyond your reach.”
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe