Merry Christmas!

The world can be a beautiful place if we can learn to open our eyes and see it. As it is Christmas I want to share something beautiful with you. I get tears in my eyes every time I hear it. It is especially beautiful to me because it is about family, but I hope that you enjoy it too.
Merry Christmas!

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Episode 12 – Becoming an adult.

Many of our problems are the result of a failure to realize that we are not children anymore. Many of us fail to understand the power that we gain as adults, or at least are unable or unwilling to exercise this power.
There is no such thing as personality. There are just patterns of thinking that we learnt as children. But when we become adults, we gain the power to choose different patterns, if we want to. Just as when we are adults, we can choose our hobbies or careers based on what suits us, rather than on what suited our parents, so too can we choose our personalities.
If we don’t, our happiness will be completely dependent on external circumstances and we will be setting ourselves up for an unhappy life, because a good proportion of the time bad stuff will be happening to us.

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Episode 11: Managing your Mind 101: The thought ladder.

Probably the best way to convince yourself that you have control over your own mind is to start doing it. In this episode I am going to present a simple practical tool to help you to start managing your mind today. I often warn that there are no “quick fixes” but by practicing the thought ladder you really can have an instant impact on how you feel day to day.
I learnt about this from an excellent podcast called Unf*ck Your Brain which I highly recommend you check out.

https://unfuckyourbrain.com/

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Episode 10 – An introduction to Thought Work.

Learning the origin of our thoughts does not in itself make us feel better. Understanding the root cause of my insecurities does not help me if I continue to feel insecure. If I continue to think bad thoughts about myself, I will continue to feel bad. If we want to feel better, we must think better thoughts.
Sadly, even that is not enough. Not only do we have to think better thoughts, we must also believe those thoughts. Learning how to think and believe helpful thoughts about yourself, on purpose, is the basis of managing your mind and the way to achieve this is through the practice of thought work.

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Episode 8 – The truth hurts.

Meditation works because it turns off our thoughts, many if which are negative and harmful to us. It helps us to see that the world can be a peaceful place if we stop projecting our anxieties into it.
But what if instead of simply turning off unwanted or unhelpful thoughts, we could actively replace them with welcome beneficial ones? What if we could stop believing our stories that restrict us, and harm us, and instead think and believe thoughts that allow us to thrive? What if our running commentaries could support and encourage, rather than berate and injure us?

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Episode 7 – Let’s get Cracking.

So far in this series I have explored why Western medicine has failed to make us feel better, and why we might struggle to believe that there is a better alternative.
Well, there is a better alternative, and seeing is believing.
In this episode I’m going to explain why positive change must always start with our thoughts, and to suggest some practical tools to help you start feeling better today.

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Episode 6 – A new concept of health.

In this episode I am going to explore what it means to be healthy, and how it might be possible to be healthy despite having a serious disease, and even in the face of imminent death. Despite how it feels when we experience ill health, stressful situations, or physical discomfort; our mental and emotional responses to these are not a foregone conclusion. They are merely learnt behaviors and patterns of thinking. And because they are learnt they can be unlearnt and relearnt. We can learn to consciously influence the way we respond to external stimuli, situations and circumstances. To change on purpose how we react, how we feel and what we do. We can train ourselves to feel joyful both in the sunshine and in the rain. If we can learn to do that, good health and happiness are not far behind.

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Episode 5 – Tired all the time.

A very common symptom I encounter in my day to day practice is feeling tired all the time. It is so common we have an acronym for it. TATT or Tat. To explore this with my patients I ask them to tell me about their lives. One of the great privileges I have as a GP is that I get to hear people’s stories. People are living frantic, stressful, crazy lives.
Sometimes it can feel like we are battling life, rather than living it. When we are not living life on purpose, when life is something that is happening to us, and we firefight and battle our way through from day to day, this will always lead to exhaustion. But people are sometimes reluctant to accept that the reason they feel tired is because they are exhausted. They feel like there must be more to it, that there must be some underlying disease.
In this episode we explore why this is, and how we can move beyond a diagnosis to good health.

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