Note on Thoughts

To claim yourself is to claim your mind. To claim your mind is not to control your thoughts but to understand that you choose which thoughts to indulge - you guide your thoughts.... and the starting place is always what do you want ? More importantly, what feeling are you trying to create with that want ? If you know what it is you want to be feeling then you can start to create that with what you have right now, no longer dependant on an outcome of something you rarely control! So...what do you want to be feeling today ?

Why Meditate ?

Meditation has only one meaning, and that is going beyond the mind and becoming a witness."  Osho

For all who travel the path of spiritual growth, meditation is the one practice that seems to be consistently required. Like most people I started to incorporate 20 minutes of meditation into my day without ever understanding why, and then I stopped. I could see no benefit in those often frustrating 20 minutes when the world dragged at me, nagging at my attention. Even on those days where meditation seemed to work, I never really noticed a difference in my day to day. So I reverted to an old habit, reading, in attempt to find someone who could tell me why I needed to meditate.

A quick Google search on ‘why meditate’ did nothing to alleviate my curiosity. Instead of a practical link to my life and my experiences I got vague promises of alleviating my stress and even more interesting, the promise that meditation will enable me to control my mind, which immediately made me ask the question how ? How does twenty minutes a day achieve all that ? I tried TM (transcendental meditation), with which I had some success, and then various other meditations guided, non-guided, open eyes, closed eyes, walking, sitting...and still found that my day to day reality was no different. I still got sucked into the drama. I was still being run by hair trigger emotions. So I put meditation aside and went looking for another answer, another way to find inner peace and control of my experiences.

I found a way to change my experience and claim all those benefits that meditation so vaguely offered and in so doing I also found meditation, almost as an afterthought - turns out, meditation is something I have always done, only I called it diving.

For almost a decade underwater was one place where I found the promised peace and quiet of meditation. Once my head sank beneath the surface the real world disappeared. No matter how stressed, angry, frustrated or sad I was, the moment I was under the water all that emotion dissolved away leaving a perfect quiet where I could hear myself think. Diving was the one place where I was not distracted by the world, it was the one place where I was left with just myself.

And that is the clue, the reason why you need to meditate, to be with yourself. We live in a world where no-one has time to just sit still and gaze into nothing. We always have to be doing. So we never stop and turn inward, never get to meet ourselves. Most of us don’t want to meet ourselves, we are scared that when we finally let go and take an honest look at who is there we will not like what we find but here is the thing, if you really want to live a life of abundance and joy… if you really want to release suffering… you have to claim yourself and to do that you have to see yourself, so that you can start to choose who you want to be and to start practice being that. It takes a leap of faith to let go and enter that fear, but there is a freedom to be found there when you know that who you are is not fixed, that you can change everything you find until who you are matches the life you want to live.

So what have I learnt about meditation ? I have learnt that it is not something you can do with a tape or a cd – the point is to remove the distraction, not give your mind something to else to focus on. Guided meditations have their place, but if your aim to awaken, then you need the silence.  I have learnt that I meditate better when I am NOT meditating, so now I take long walks or sit on the lawn and watch the clouds go by and as sit doing absolutely nothing, I let my mind go. It is an art in itself allowing my mind to wander freely, to release control and so not get caught by memories, thoughts and events of my day. On the days I find myself falling back into that well entrenched practice of repeating my day and conversations, I practice taking a step back and watching, often I don’t even bother with those pesky thoughts, instead I re-centre myself with my set of affirmations, I am at peace, I am connected to the Divine, I am protected and then I remember vividly the life I am creating, I picture it in detail, and then I let it go….. and enter the space of creation that a silent meditation can bring.

It doesn’t matter how you find that space where your mind is let go, meditate, run, swim or just gaze at the clouds, it only matters that you find that time to do nothing, creating a silent space into which your true self, your soul, can finally grow.

Claiming Yourself - Who are You ?

We spend our lives trying to either finding out or avoiding who we are, as if it were something set in stone, there to discover and accept, a limit we need to get used to. Perhaps that is why some of us never really connect with ourselves, because we are afraid we will find someone who is 'less', limit, not enough, and then what ?

But what if who you are is not a fixed ‘thing’ ? What if who you are changes as you experience life and learn ? And even more importantly, what if who you are is something you can choose? A fairly radical thought to most people accustomed as we are to being told who we will be and what we can do. 


Who we are is not just what we do - there is a soul underneath it all, waiting to be visited and it is 'who' rather than the 'what' that makes all the difference. Until themoment we connect with our soul and start choosing who we want to be, who we are is nothing more than an unconscious program that our unconscious minds repeat over and over ... and over again. Until you start to consciously choose who you want to be and just like you had to practice physical skills start to practice 'being' that.

This ability to focus as much on 'who you are being' as you do on 'what you are doing' was one of the messages that jumped out of the seminar I recently did with Dr Wayne Dyer as a guest speaker. In a moment of clarity everything I had learnt from my deep dive fell into place. I can change who I am. I had already - going from normal to deepest just by letting go of who I thought I was and being who I needed to be. The question of course is how ?
One of the practices that Dr Dyer passed on addressed that all to slipper how and that was the power of the phrase ‘I am’. Just by careful use of that simple phrase you can start to reset your subconscious minds.

So.....

Who do you want to be ? How do you want to experience your life ? Now, you were already there, who would you be ? Instead of waiting for it to happen, bring it into your present with that simple phrase “I am ...”

I am powerful!

I am present!

I am at peace!

I am prosperous!

I am valuable!

The list is endless, so pick three of four and start using them as a mantra through your day. As you repeat them really feel them, feel how it would be..... and never, ever let the phrase I am NOT stay your mind!!!  You and only you are responsible for who you are. No-one else!

You are a limitless being, anything is possible when you let go of who you think you are and start to claim yourself !

The Lost Art of Creation

One of the clearest learning’s I took from Consciousness Coaching was the statement that the universe can not create a negative. The wording is not perhaps clear but the more I work on creating my own life the more entrenched this single phrase becomes.


All around me are people who are trying to give up something. We use words like ‘will power’ to do this, creating a space where the unwanted used to live…and then we never fill that space. We have no idea what we want to replace our unwanted with….and the law of empty spaces is that they will get filled. If you have nothing new to fill that space with guess what ? That unwanted and familiar thing fits right back where it belonged. My question is..why bother fighting to remove it in the first place ? Why not choose what you would like to replace it and work on creating that ? The two can not exist at the same time in the same place and so the unwanted will disappear, replaced with something positive and wanted.

The art to this is in how we talk about what we want. Think about it! When you talk about what you want how often are you really talking about what you don’t want ? Spend today reframing your words and instead of a long list of what you don’t want, take the time to work out what ‘you’ would be like if the things you don’t like are not there…. If you weren’t afraid, what would you be ? Work on creating clarity on what that state would be…and voila…

Lessons Learnt from Diving - The Art of Empowerment

The moment the euphoria started to wear off was the moment I realised that my world record was not an ending, but a beginning, one that may take my entire life to understand. When I get stuck I tend to look back at my diving to see if what I am experiencing now was something that happened back then and invariably it is. This journey to understand my real life seems to mimic my world record with uncanny familiarity, which is odd considering to become the deepest woman in the world I had to literally lay my life on the line, something a board room rarely requires.


So what is it that makes the difference between an every day diver and one who pushes her own (if not the world’s) limits? What makes a successful diver and how can I take that into my real life ?

Diving is an odd combination of obsessive preparation and then concentrated action. To do a deep dive requires planning, preparation and thought. To dive deeper than most people requires an obsessive mind that continually goes over the plan, trying to find the weak spot, that thing I have not thought of that may stop me in my tracks. Yet, the moment my head sinks under the water all the stress and worry simply stops. The time is now to dive, to trust that I have done what was required and instead to be focused on this moment, attuned to what is happening so I can react in time. The moment my head sinks underwater I feel complete freedom and total power. I have no idea what will happen, yet I don’t try and control it, instead I relax, knowing I have done what I can, it was either enough or it wasn’t. Which is an attitude I battle to find back in the real world. It is as if underwater is the only place I am able to let go and have faith, the only place where I concede that my job is to control myself, not what can happen, so I focus on myself, on having the skills and the state of mind that will allow me to cope with any situation. When I dive, I feel prepared.

Have the last seven years been about finally realising that underwater I never try and control the circumstance, instead I have faith in myself and the universe and so I work with the circumstances I get ? Do I really spend so much time trying to control everything outside of myself that I never do the work that allows me to feel in control of myself and so able to manage anything ?

Is that the lesson I have been missing all this time ? To simply let go control, have faith and focus inwards on creating myself ?

Could all Our Stress and Overwhelmed Feeling be a Symptom of being Faithless ?

After a long year I find myself reverting to one of my favourite enlightenment / empowerment) intentions, flow, or rather the lack there-of. Around me people are tired, overwhelmed and just done with the year. I feel it myself and it has started me thinking about how I experience life (a consistent theme of mine that normally unearths interesting revelations). The question I find myself asking is why are we all so stressed and overwhelmed? What are we doing ‘wrong’ ? There I sit, doing my best to manage my life, trying to work out all the possible outcomes, obsessing about which will be best for me, which worst and trying to be prepared for anything at any time, normal right ? We prize people who can ‘make things happen’, people who don’t sit back and just accept their fate, but create it. What no-one mentioned is how exhausting it is to control every aspect of life and then, just when it all seems to be working according to ‘the plan’, life throws the ever predictable curve ball.


Looking more closely at this pattern of supreme control I was struck by the sheer futility of it all. There is only so much I can do and all the extra worrying that I put in so very rarely affects the outcome of an event. Actually, now that I come to think of it, those days where I let go and relax seem to be the days that work better. It is almost as if I have the entire thing the wrong way round – as if my job is not to ‘make’ things happen but instead to set things in motion and then go with the flow. All that extra energy and stress I obsessively throw at ‘creating’ just seems to get in the way. I miss things as they don’t ‘fit’ what I am expecting or needing to create. It is almost as if I need to have some faith. And there it was, the word that was missing, faith.

Faith is not a word that sits well in my landscape. I link it to serious religious types and religion is something I walked away from a long time ago. Yet, the more I thought about it the more exhausting this faithless life became, exhausting and futile. The idea of letting go and letting someone or something else take the load became more and more appealing. I could imagine myself living with faith - no longer having to be in control of every moment of every day, trusting that the universe was on my side, trusting that events that as a human I judge to be awful (and so actively avoid) are actually there for a reason and will turn out ok. The more I thought about it (and watched my fellow faithless struggle on) the more I saw how the faithless spend their lives trying to control every moment, caught in an endless struggle to avoid what we judge to be suffering and create what we judge to be awesome and happy. We take on the entire load of creating our lives, worrying about everything thing all the time, never putting the load down or trusting anything or anyone to assist us. The end result ? Extreme stress and finally emotional or physical breakdown.

I am not advocating sitting back and letting the universe do everything! No, rather I think there is a balance to be found, similar to the balance I found in diving. To complete a dive there needed to be a time for planning and thought and then a time where you put that down and just dived, trusting that you could handle whatever came up and as importantly, accepting the consequences without judgment. To dive well you need to be able to live in the present and not be obsessed with the past or stressing about a future that may never happen. Underwater was a place of complete freedom and amazingly total empowerment, which is really bizarre considering that cave diving is one of the most dangerous environments in the world where you have no control of anything other than yourself.

Is that the lesson ? That we spend so much time trying to control everything outside of ourselves we never do the work that allows us to feel in control of ourselves and so able to manage anything ?

What would happen if I could just let go and allow the universe to take some of the load ? What would happen if I stopped insisting that the answers in my head were the only answers and became open to what was in my present ?

Who Owns Your Life ?

I was watching NatGeo, a short program on the Inuit in Greenland and how their lifestyle of subsidence hunting is being changed by the Western way of life. All well and good, but not really relevant as I sit here in my nice lounge watching DSTv, until right at the end when a former hunter finally gave up and got a job because “he could not pay his bills, his rent, his phone bill and pay for food”. That simple statement opened a door in my mind and I found myself asking the question, who owns my life ? It seemed absurd to me that people who had never been beholden to anyone all of a sudden could not carry on their old way of life because now they had rent to pay. When I look at my life I realise I don’t own it, the bank does. If I stop working I cannot survive, I don’t own my house, I don’t own my car and even if I did, I could not run it as I would need money for petrol, now horses, they can feed on the grass, for free (more or less). I have spent my entire life striving to own it and be independent, yet if the Spar shut down, how would I eat ? How would I survive without money ? I don’t think I (or anyone else) could ?