Reverse Thinking

Does your body really need you?

Understanding Bodymind is the most important thing to do if you want to understand Reverse Therapy.

I confess that I don't fully understand it myself. Hence the frequent articles on the subject while I try to get to grips with your body....

Lately, I have been wondering whether conscious thinking is simply irrelevant to life. Whether its only purpose is to come up with stories about 'why' we did whatever we just did.

Meanwhile, Bodymind calmly gets on with doing it with no conscious input from us at all. We are merely the ghostly spectators at a tragedy.

Here is a list of things your Body (Brain) can do without any assistance from you provided you don't damage it with stupid Headmind ideas:

• Store and retrieve memories
  Reject and kill wandering bacteria
  Use emotions to guide you towards correct decisions
  Renew cellular tissue
  Change optical focus and recognise distant objects
  Use awe, wonder and ecstatic states to connect you to God
  Keep you on your feet and maintain your balance
  Synthesise protein
  Deliver energy to the muscles
  Catch a ball
  Initiate and complete the sexual act
  Keep your temperature stable
  Digest food
  Excrete waste products
  Use moods to tell you the state you're in
  Cue you to eat
  Trigger thought processes in the brain
  Detect poisonous substances
  Bond you to other people through hormone release
  Wake you up
  Send you to sleep
  Alert you to danger
  Conceive and give birth to a child
  Send you intuitions about other people's motives
  Control your blood sugar level
  Create passion, drive, the will-to-power

What's left for you to do except provide the commentary, the delusions, the explanations, the complaints, the appreciation and the whingeing?

A stroke of insight

These TED videos just get better and better.

Here is Jill Bolte Taylor - a Neuroanatomist - talking about her experiencing of having a stroke.

One morning she woke up with a stabbing pain through her eye. She had a blood clot the size of a golf ball in her left brain. It temporarily destroyed her ability to speak, understand letters or numbers and remember faces. She also lost the ability to distinguish between her own body and the rest of the planet, leaving her with a mystical sense of being at one with the universe.

Along the way she talks to us about the difference between left-brain serial processing and right-brain parallel processing. For Jill, the stroke destroyed what we, over here in Reverse Therapy, call Headmind functioning (although I don't agree that this is restricted to the left brain - I suspect that the stroke impaired the frontal cortex instead).

Essentially this means that human beings won't be able to follow the essential principles of Headmind reasoning:

• Why something exists
• How it can be understood
• What caused it
• What it's purpose is

Meaning that Jill was left, instead, with the speechless, in-the-moment, intuitive, wordless, child-like awareness of the universe that comes through unfiltered Bodymind.

Thanks to Marta Juni, our Reverse Therapy Ambassador in Barcelona, for drawing my attention to this YouTube tape.

 

10 best ways to stay out of depression

First, understand what depression actually is.

Depression is not an emotion like sadness. It is an empty, numbed-out sensation which comes up when Headmind despairs and gives up on experience. It then starts suppressing emotions on the grounds that they are too painful to deal with. The result is that inner feeling of emptiness that makes life seem pointless.

To avoid getting into that state, here are some things to watch out for:

1. Recognise the symptoms

1. Lethargy
2. Loss of concentration
3. Apathy
4. Loss of interest in people and activities
5. Deterioration in sleep patterns
6. Changes in eating and appetite

N.B. You need to have at least FOUR of these

2. Understand that de-pressing is something you do rather than something that happens to you. You de-press your emotions when you:

• Bury your head in the sand when difficult situations come up
• Run away instead of speaking up about your emotions
• Stay too long in dead-end jobs and relationships
• Give away your personal power to other people
• Talk like a victim
• Bury your anger or your frustration for too long instead of doing something about it
• Live a tedious, monotonous, stuck-in-a-rut lifestyle to the point where your personal Bodymind goes crazy with boredom
• Fail to forgive and move on from people who have hurt you in the past

Start reversing these patterns now.

2. Eliminate Anxiety from your life. Anxiety is the number one most common precursor of clinical depression. When the panic gets too much your Bodymind will try and numb it out by triggering chemical releases that slow the system down. Use Reverse Thinking to eliminate those Head fucks now.

3. Don't give any air time to depressive thoughts. That includes ideas like: 'I might as well die', 'Nobody cares', 'There's no point trying to...'. Don't fight these thoughts   - just ignore them. Turn your attention to full-on activities that completely absorb your attention. It takes practice, but doing this every time you notice a depressing thought eventually drives them away for good.

At this point I refer you to my previous article on Effective Thinking Skills.

4. Do the endorphin-releases.

Because it is physically impossible for someone to feel depressed while their body is full of endorphins...

5. Invest as much time as you can in your community.

Clinical depression tends to be more severe and longer-lasting in people who live alone or who are in someway isolated from the community. People who keep their friendships alive are also at lee risk.

6. Practice the art of love.

Again, research shows that many depressed people are in unhappy relationships. If you can't show more loving, or if it is not reciprocated, then it may be time to move on.

7. Keep talking

In my work as a therapist I am constantly amazed by how very few people have learnt the art of speaking up about their emotions, needs and dissatisfactions. The more you bottle things up, the more overloaded with frustration, anger, and fear you are going to get. Until there comes the point when Headmind will try and de-press them.

8. Avoid procrastinating

I see this problem very clearly in people who get depressed over work. The work-load, the problems and the deadlines build up until they get overwhelmed. Or they put off talking to the boss, the ass-hole colleague, or the lazy employee until their behavior is out of control. Eventually, they give up and start de-pressing their fears. They even give up on finding a new job.

9. Revitalise.

This essentially means making the most of your personal genius. If you are constantly elated by new directions in your life you are going to maximise your joy and excitement, not your anxieties. As well as that, you won't have time to get depressed, and, if you do get down, you will have plenty of alternatives to turn to.

10. Don't exaggerate your depressed moods.

It's a little known fact that depressed people are only in fact 'depressed' for - on average - one hour a day. The rest of the time they are sleeping, having a crap, eating, dreaming, getting annoyed at someone, reading low-rent blog sites....

The fact that you are blue for half an hour doesn't mean you have stay that way. Get working on one of the previous 9 tips right away.

'A lot of what passes for depression these days is nothing more than a body saying it needs work.'

Geoffrey Norman.