watch tHe skies

Thanks for all of your emails regarding my spring cleaning article. I’m surprised by the response, particularly as I thought it was only you and I that read the site! Lots of you have emailed me with your lists of stuff that you want to clear out…

Bear with me, I am responding to your emails as quick as I can!

And for those of you just asking for a chat via messenger, I will reply personally and my comment will be “what do you want?” and “how will you know when you’ve got that?”… being able to answer these questions is the first step in making a change. Nobody can be changed until they are ready to change, then it’s easy, and being able to answer those questions means that you are ready to change…

Finally, please bear with me on finding a time to talk to you, this is a first for me and I want to make it work, so patience on your part will pay off when we talk.

Plus, I’ve got to work out how to use Skype…!

After a week of consistently bad weather, it was a relief to get some sunshine this weekend. And I certainly made the most of it, up at the crack of dawn to mow our lawns that were long overdue a haircut.

However when I tried to get the lawnmower out of the garage, I was reminded pf how messy it is. Before Ben, we spent a lot of time putting up shelves and hooks and filling it full of systems to help us keep it tidy. However, when Ben arrived everything got put on hold, and instead of carefully putting stuff back in it’s place, stuff got put on other stuff until the straw broke on saturday when I had to fight with junk just to retrieve the lawn mower and strimmer. (more…)

Ghosts, psychic phenomena, deja vu, dreams… are they all linked? The further I delve in to understanding the unconscious mind the more I wonder what it is capable of.

The common metaphor for the human mind is that of the iceberg. That is, the conscious mind is the part of the mind that you can see floating above the water. However, lurking below is a colossal mass that dwarfs the conscious, visible part… the unconscious mind. Capable of billions of concurrent operations, scientists have only begun to fathom its capabilities, and given the limitations of the conscious mind, perhaps we cannot ever consciously comprehend the capabilities of the unconscious. (more…)

Whilst I read a couple of books on the subject, have a look at this introduction on youtube…

Head over to http://www.tapping.comto find out more! Pick a negative emotion, run through the demo and notice the effect.

A while back my faith was questioned and I admitted to losing interest in wierdly addictive TV show Lost. Sky+ had accumulated some 6 episodes and I asked the missus if we should delete them.

“Just one, more, give it one more chance”

And so we did, and the answers came. And more answers to questions we hadn’t asked, so much so that now we know what’s special about the island, where The Others come from, why they are there and, so, so much more.

And now we are hooked, more hooked than ever, as the TV execs have finally rewarded us with some information for our loyalty and endurance. Thank you Lost, it looks like this year’s finale is gearing up to be a good’un.

Apparently they have now confirmed that the show will finish after 5 seasons, so we will actually get answers to the rest of the questions, and find out what happens to all of those poor people, and whether Ben will finally get the comeuppance that we all hope for!

Well we are shortly off to the Farm for Ben’s 1st birthday, which is today. Scary to think that he is already 1 year old and nearly walking.

So I just wanted to wish him Happy Birthday and now we are off to stroke pigs!

The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)

Interesting statement. I wonder if it’s true… at what point in your life do you think you will have tread the same paths enough time for the ruts to form that dictate the rest of your existence?

“Life begins at 40″ some say, I wonder if they mean that by that time you’ve learnt all you need to learn and hence have more time to mess about?

If you could start your life over tomorrow, what would you do differently?

Why not start doing that differently today? The past is just a memory, and memories are just imaginations that you think are true, so you can imagine it happened however suits you best. So you can do things differently today. Start over right now and imagine now how you’ll be different tomorrow.

So at the weekend I spoke to my first smoke-free “victim”, who I helped about a month or so ago to stop smoking.  She’s still going strong and is finding it easier every day. It seems that at the session we pretty much killed her smoking habit and her challenge has been to find new things left by the void previously occupied by the habit.

Her big challenge is in dealing with new situations “smoke free”. That is, when she thinks about something that she is going to do, she wonders whether it will be as much fun without a cigarette. Sounds daft to many and to her it is reality. I did point out that she could indeed wonder how much more fun she will have in those new situations with more money and not having to stand outside every fifteen minutes… after all it is only her internal map of the world that suggests that she needs to think about it at all.

She also noted that it’s had a knock-on effect on some of her friends. One of her friends seems to have cut back or quit completely, whilst another smoked considerably less when he was with her. This makes her feel even better about herself, which is great by me. (more…)

I read this article on the BBC website today regarding the announcement that Currys will shortly stop selling equipment with cassette decks. Frankly I’m amazed that they still sell them - where on earth can you get a cassette to put in one anyway?

Of course I have to remind myself that not everyone is in to bleeding edge technology. There must be many people for whom the eternal bluray vs HD-DVD discussion is simply double dutch. And perhaps this is a good thing - for one it is certainly cheaper to be ignorant of the latest technologies, and perhaps it doesn’t actually have that much effect on productivity - I would hate to estimate the time I have spent trying to pair bluetooth devices reliably, let alone find a handsfree set that actually survives long enough for the warranty to expire. Even my trusty Xbox360 only lasted six months before dying a painful death, whereas the good old Sega Megadrive is probably still running quietly and reliably attached to the old black and white TV in the spare bedroom.

It’s a pity that nostalgia can only be felt for past events and scenarios. I don’t feel too much of it for anything in the past as I’m a current \ future focused person. However the death of the cassette deck does indeed remind me of many evenings spent compiling mixtapes. Back then compilations could only be compiled at slightly slower than real time. That is, to compile a mixtape once you had decided on a tracklist, would take slightly longer than the 90 minutes that the good old TDK tape would run for. Longer if your compilation order didn’t split comfortably in to two 45 minute segments. I wonder how many mixtapes I did and how much time I spent lovingly crafting them for people. And the nice thing was that people appreciated the effort that went in to a mixtape. I would always listen to them when given one… because there was a little bit of who that person was recorded in to every single one of them. (more…)

Recently I’ve been reading a little about EFT - Emotional Freedom Techniques. I’m still learning what it’s all about and the basic premise as far as I see is that the body’s energy system that is treated through acupuncture can be similarly balanced by tapping meridian points in certain combinations.  MS, Asthma, allergies and phobias have all been seemingly cured through its application.

Sounds like bobbins eh? Well I’ve used a couple of techniques with some people I’ve helped to quit smoking - to help them alleviate their cravings and they certainly seem to help them, so whether it’s real or a placebo, well I don’t have enough evidence either way.

Gary Craig, the founder of EFT, has a refreshing approach to spreading the word, as a full training course is available for free on his website www.emofree.com, and there’s a good introductory video that can be found at www.emofree.com/splash/video_popup.asp, so you can make up your own mind! There’s also lots more free information and videos on how to do it, over at www.tapping.com. I’ll write more about it once I’ve read through the stuff and given it a go.