Some stories have to be shared, no matter how scared it makes you feel.
I’m literally shaking at the thought of posting this, firstly because I’m unsure of the reaction I’ll get and secondly because it’s so important to me to raise awareness for this disease that I have suffered from for the past 4 years.
To read the rest of Rachael’s story: follow this link…
Feel the fear and say it anyway.
This is Rachael’s story.
My daughter’s story.
Every now and then, you feel a sense of pride and wonder.
My daughter, Rachael, has just released her first EP ‘Paper Drum’. I know I’m biased but it is pretty damn good.
I don’t usually use this blog to promote music but there’s a nepotistic streak in us all, so I know you’ll forgive me; especially once you’ve listened. I’d love to know what you think of it & so would she.
Check out her promotional video below
The EP is available on iTunes or to stream on Spotify.
…I can’t stop smiling…
Musical Links
Click here to watch the promotional video: Devil Shoes Live
Click here to listen to Paper Drum on Spotify
Paper Drum
© Vinum 2014
There can be little doubt that helping others creates an effect that ripples outwards from both the giver and receiver. Often the opportunity turns up unannounced and there is only a split second to decide whether or not to act and allow those ripples the chance to spread….
This is my latest article in Perception Ezine and the first in my new capacity as their Random Acts of Kindness columnist. I highly recommend subscribing, not just because it increases my readership, but because I personally know some of the regular contributors. It is packed full of meaningful and workable insights into the difficulties that we humans face, thrust as we have been into modernity without giving evolution the courtesy of having time to catch up.
And so, with appetite duly whetted, read on…
Personally, I’m a big fan of Paying It Forward, a concept which has been discussed in previous issues under the Random Acts of Kindness section. To me the key difference between Paying it Forward and Random Acts of Kindness is that Paying It Forward is more deliberate and to some extent acknowledges the benefit to the giver a little more; there’s nothing wrong with a little inner glow.
For me, there’s always been something about a Random Act of Kindness that brings on an expectation of pure altruism whereby the act should be solely for the benefit of the receiver, almost as if feeling good about being a giver of kindness somehow negates its intention: were you performing the act for benefit of the receiver or simply to make yourself feel better? Surely that would be selfish, wouldn’t it?
So there I was, pondering what to write for this issue’s Random Act of Kindness section, not least because in the previous few weeks I hadn’t to my recollection, been particularly altruistic and no wonderful stories of goodness leapt out at me. Surely as a therapist, I ought to be distributing Random Acts of Kindness left, right and centre every day of the week. After all, if a therapist isn’t routinely altruistic, then who will be?
This left me with a dilemma. Do I write about something from my past? Maybe a story about someone else’s Random Act of Kindness? Or do I wait and hope that the opportunity to perform some noteworthy kindness jumps up and bites me so that I can incorporate it here and spread the word? I figured that the latter would be best as oftentimes recent personal experience carries more weight than stories from the dim & distant. As it turned out, it wasn’t that simple.
In the intervening three weeks nothing has cropped up that I would deem worthy of this section. In fact opportunities have been few and far between, so I took to actively seeking them out.
Walking back from the village post office, I dutifully offered to help an elderly lady with her wheelie-bins but was politely refused with a look of mildly confused distrust.
After a full day in London I was boarding the train home and a woman with two young children was lifting two heavy suitcases through the door. My Galahad-esque offer of help was curtly turned down with barely disguised suspicion. I walked on.
It’s as though the Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle is being applied to Random Acts of Kindness. Perhaps the very act of looking takes away the randomness and kindness. It seems that in order to work, spontaneity is key. Perhaps I’m just not especially random.
That said, I often let people through doors ahead of me; I slow down and let cars in at junctions and slip roads; I smile happily at drivers who look as though their progress depends on the ferocity of their glare, (mostly this breaks their state and they grin back); I’m having several blog-related conversations with people who live in constant pain, offering advice and guidance on pain management techniques. I’ve even gifted several of them a copy of my chronic pain relief download to try out. Perhaps they’ll spread the word, you never know. Mind you, they might not like it at all and spread entirely the wrong sort of word. To be honest, I don’t really care. That’s wasn’t the point.
In the past others have helped me and I’m now in a position where I can help in my own way. It’s enough to pass on something that just might turn out to have been of help even though I reckon I’ve long since paid it all back, or is it forwards, if you see what I mean. And I feel good about it. It’s becoming a habit.
Perhaps spontaneity and altruism aren’t key components of Random Acts of Kindness after all. Perhaps that inner glow is there for a reason, encouraging both the giver and receiver of the kindness to seek out more warmth by spreading it further. Perhaps, what I think of as Paying it Forward is someone else’s Random Act of Kindness. Two sides of the same coin?
Think about it, if you’re fortunate enough to be on the receiving end of a Random Act of Kindness and if that makes you feel good enough to want to do the same for someone else, then in essence that’s not a Random Act, you’re Paying it Forward. Or perhaps I tend to over complicate things that are really quite simple.
Anyway, here’s my next Random Act of Paying Kindness Forwards. And I feel pretty good about this one, so maybe that altruistic fire is burning after all.
On behalf of Perception I’ve set up a brand new Twitter account called ‘@RAK_UK’ which we’d love you to follow. If you’re not yet on Twitter, you might find it was worth joining in, just for this. Even Tina, our hard-working editor overcame her Twitter-phobia to become the very first follower!
You’re invited to share anything and everything you come across about Random Acts of Kindness or Paying it Forward.
Why not join in? This really is the gift that keeps on giving.
Related Links:
Perception Ezine link
@RAK_UK Twitter Link
Tony Burkinshaw Cognitive Hypnotherapy link
That’s not random
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013
I can’t thank Shaun enough for what he wrote. Hopefully this reblog will go some way towards it. Many thanks Shaun.
If you’re up for it, feel free to reblog or share Shaun’s post as well…
As you all know, sometimes I come across a post which is so good it needs to be shared.
This is one of them.
Dad
I thought I’d try that title.
Dad.
Not “My father”
Dad.
Because that’s what I have in my life. My dad.
You have no idea how hard it is to type the word. To say the word in my head. It’s like every time I do I get a little stab in my heart.
Click here to read the rest on The Moiderer
Helen & I trained at the same time and she’s already found herself featuring a couple of times in this blog. As I recall, she didn’t mind at the time and seeing as she’s happy to appear in the flesh as it were, maybe she’s still content with me periodically lobbing her into the middle of these vaguely relevant ramblings.
This is an article Helen wrote for the latest issue of the Cognitive Hypnotherapy E-zine ‘Perception’. [I’ve added a link to it at the end if you fancy reading more, (or even subscribing). It’s entirely free and written for non-therapists, so it’s brilliantly lacking in jargon. Check it out, you might find you were glad you did.]
Interestingly, (this blog is still trying to get me to use that word I tried and failed to avoid using in a recent post), the weekend she’s referring to is the very same weekend which turned out to be the spur that transformed wishful thinking into the action which became Posts of Hypnotic Suggestion.
Not only that, Helen is the protagonist who featured in that post.
So without Helen, this blog may never have existed.
Thank you.
A Therapist’s Journey
I walked into the Cognitive Hypnotherapy training room, wondering what on earth I was doing there. The previous year I had given up my job as an Assistant Head Teacher of a secondary school when I had given birth to my daughter. In the early months of being a new mother I knew I wanted to work in an area where I could enable people to move forward in their lives. It was an aspect as a teacher I had loved, whether it was helping my students reach their full potential, teachers who needed support or parents who were going through difficult times.
I had come across hypnotherapy whilst I was trying to conceive through IVF and recognised its power to reframe the stories we all tell ourselves which don’t necessarily support us in achieving our goals. Quite by chance I stumbled across the Cognitive Hypnotherapy website and really liked its approach of recognising the uniqueness behind each person’s issue and having a flexible enough approach to be able to get to the reason behind the presenting issue, rather than just deal with the concern itself.
Within fifteen minutes of hearing the founder of The Quest Institute, Trevor Silvester speak, I knew I had found the right course for me. His words were utterly inspiring, thought provoking and at times challenging. Weekend after weekend we were exposed to new concepts taken from a range of successful therapeutic approaches and slowly but surely the pieces of the jigsaw started to come together and we realised with excitement the potential for deep and significant work with future clients.
Quest is an amazing institute as it attracts likeminded people. All of us in the room were readily open to the new learning’s that we were being presented with and as the months went by we grew into a supportive group willing to give our time and energies to each other to help move our fellow students through difficulties and challenges, using the new techniques we had been taught.
I went to train to be a therapist, was pretty sure I’d make friends, but what I hadn’t bargained for was the therapeutic journey I would find myself on. One weekend we were taught how to do a specific technique and as always we had an opportunity to practice on each other. As I was shortly about to start another round of IVF I decided to be gentle with myself and not focus on anything too deep and meaningful. Instead I chose to focus in on how working as a therapist I could build in being part of a community into my working world. A fairly innocuous area of development. Or so I thought.
Unbeknown to me the strategy bypassed my conscious mind and went straight to the unconscious and revealed an issue that was so deep I had only had glimpses of it over the years and had never made any connections with a situation that happened when I was 22 months old and my inability to conceive naturally in the present day.
I was born seven years after my mother had last given birth and number three in the family. I was evidently a joyful and long awaited addition to the family. A few months later much to the delight of my parents they found they were expecting again. At 22 months old my sister was born with Downs Syndrome. The shock was enormous for my parents and sent reverberations throughout the family. This was in the late 1960’s when approaches and views about Downs was vastly different to thankfully how it is today. My mother in particular found her condition very hard to cope with and at some point after my sister’s birth suffered a breakdown.
My sister was in hospital pretty much continuously for the first two years of her life. My parents almost overnight were absent both physically and emotionally. Earlier than she had wanted she put me into nursery care as she simply didn’t have time to tend to my needs as well as my sister’s. Understandable when it would take over two hours to just to feed my sister at any given time. My parents whole focus obviously was taken up with the arrival of my sister and at 22 months old, bewildered by my parents obvious absence and lack of focus I began to internalise that I was no longer good enough, that the unit I had felt such an affinity with I no longer belonged to and perhaps I wasn’t as loved as I believed.
As the revelation of how this event impacted through the work that I did at Quest, I was able to recognise that throughout my life I had found myself always feeling as if I didn’t quite belong and that on the whole that nagging sense of not being good enough pervaded so many situations. In my adult life I didn’t feel good enough because I didn’t have a boyfriend, so I got myself a boyfriend. Then I didn’t fit in because in my mind I didn’t have a good enough job, a good enough place to live, a husband, and the icing on the cake when I achieved all that was a child.
Two rounds of IVF following ‘unexplained fertility problems’ and holding my darling daughter I had a moment of peace. I had achieved what everyone else had so surely I was now good enough, surely now I would belong. To my surprise though that feeling didn’t last long as they returned when those around me who had their babies at the same time as me were all falling pregnant with their second baby. Once again the club I belonged to felt as though they were shutting their doors to me, just as my 22 month old self felt when the family dynamic shifted so suddenly.
Trevor had taught us that with a number of issues comes a secondary gain. I wondered what my gain was at being unable to fall pregnant naturally. When I asked myself the question I realised that my inability at falling pregnant kept me separate from others, it created a division which although I didn’t want was so terribly familiar. When we are driven by a negative emotion we tend to create exactly what we don’t want.
The impact was hugely significant and a few months on and now a qualified Cognitive Hypnotherapist myself I continue on my journey of self-discovery using the techniques we were taught, as well as having regular therapy with another Cognitive Hypnotherapist to help me move into my preferred future world that I want to live in. I am learning to recognise my limiting beliefs and more importantly learn how to recognise that these are borne out of thoughts that simply aren’t true. I also recognise that now I have found this path my road to peace is much shorter than my 43 year old journey to realisation.
My future is filled with a hope and exuberance which is spilling over into my present day. It’s a wondrous feeling. I have no idea whether my shifts in perception and beliefs will result in me having another baby. Whether it does or it doesn’t almost doesn’t matter because I have a growing sense of confidence that with a significant shift in how I view myself in my world I can only be a happier person, secure in who I am and what I have. With this realisation and knowledge I can see what a gift I can pass onto my daughter when she too faces her own limiting beliefs.
Having done this remarkable course, as well as experienced first-hand the powerful impact this work can have I now know what I didn’t know when I walked into that room almost a year ago. That Cognitive Hypnotherapy can and indeed does successfully help treat a wide number of issues by truly getting to the heart of the underlying issue and gradually and gently making the changes needed for people to let go of their limiting beliefs that have caused them so many difficulties in the past. I can only say that there is a whole host of therapeutic approached out here for people to choose from.
For me there is now only one choice. Cognitive Hypnotherapy has given me a future in so many ways I couldn’t even have imagined before I embarked on this incredible voyage and I thank each and every individual who has been part of it.
Helen Day
That’s better
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013
What a day that was!
What a surprise when I opened up WordPress this morning
324 views yesterday!
That’s two best ever days in a row!
AND
80 new followers in the last 48 hours
VERY MANY THANKS
For some reason, society expects that we learn from hardship. That we grow in some deep and meaningful way.
And when have learned and grown, we are expected to make a virtue of our growth and add to the pressure on everyone else to do the same. Maybe it’s society’s way of feeling better about other people’s suffering. In some magical way, if it’s making them a better person then it must be OK. We can look the other way until the butterfly emerges.
But if you don’t learn and grow or if your own journey hasn’t let you achieve it yet, you’re supposed to keep your head down. Keep quiet. Don’t rock the mythical boat.
All this does is add to the hardship. Not only are you going through a massively tough time, you’re supposed to be undergoing a deep and meaningful transformation leading to peace and enlightenment or some such. And if you’re not, then you begin to feel it must be your own fault for not making the most of the opportunity. Opportunity? I think not.
For those who have grown, who have achieved remarkable things despite and in many cases because of their personal hardship, very well done indeed. I’m very happy for you. Genuinely.
Sometimes though, what is really needed is compassion and understanding. An acceptance that not everyone can excel. Just think about it, if everyone did excel, then it wouldn’t be excelling would it? It would be ordinary.
Sometimes, just dealing with it and struggling to hold yourself together is all you can do.
Katherine finds herself in just such a position. Read her blog. You’ll see what I mean.
Sometimes, it’s important to let the world know that what it expects isn’t fair.
And maybe just be there in case you can help.
Click here to read Katherine’s blog
It isn’t easy
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013
What a great surprise this morning!
WordPress have just told me that my blog has had over 500 ‘likes’ since it started in September last year.
Thanks everyone. I really appreciate it.
…and if you’ve not read it before, why not check it out? People seem to like what I’m talking about…
Well this is historic.
When I started this blog in August, I was part way through my Cognitive Hypnotherapy training and I began blogging because I was so keen to share the weird and wonderful way my thoughts were flying through my head, (note the AD tendencies – no mention of emotions) and I wasn’t at all sure that I’d carry on writing this blog once I had qualified.
As it happens, I did qualify and am now a practising Cognitive Hypnotherapist. It’s fantastic. Not only that, here I am still blogging. (Hooray! I hear you shout – if I listen hard enough).
I’ll be specialising in chronic pain management and fertility issues as, for a variety of reasons, it just seems like the right thing to do and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last year, it’s to follow when the right thing calls.
Unsurprisingly, I’ve read many posts by other bloggers about fertility and pain management as well as writing my own. This one grabbed my attention and I figured you’d be interested enough to read it. It has a properly attention gabbing title as I suppose you’d realise as it did that very thing to me.
So sit back, read on and enjoy Thomasina Marshall’s Diary:
it gets everywhere
© Tony Burkinshaw 2013
The Best of the visual Web, sifted, sorted and summarized
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Desperate Scratchings to Professionalism
Kindness Changes Everything
I'm poetically disastrous
Living Mental Health Rehab in Israel
Poetry, Musings and Memoirs - True Tales of My Life
Posts of Hypnotic Suggestion 