These are big unexplored areas that define how we are. Just how much power we have to recover from disease depends on how much we recognise disharmony between what we think consciously and what we know in the core of our being. To look beyond the surface takes great courage. Most people have developed brittle and seemingly essential egos to protect a very vulnerable place inside. Going into that vulnerable place and realising that it has been unfed, unwatered and stunted during many years, is a shame that is often too great to face.

Our medical culture encourages us, fundamentally, to view illness as defects of the functioning of the body. But what if illness is just nature’s intelligent way to protect us from something, to send a message to us that we need to take notice, that there is something we can do about our disharmony if we did but understand nature’s messages? What if illnesses are not ’senseless’ disorders but meaningful biological processes that are meant to save the organism not destroy it? What if illness were completely a natural response to an emotional crisis in the body?

“The differentiation between the psyche, the brain, and the body is purely academic. In reality they are one. One without the other is inconceivable.” Ryke Geerd Hamer

Looking at illness in its entirety, are we not fools to hive off the physical from the mental, emotional or indeed spiritual? How have we come to split human experience off into so many opposing categories? Could the shame of it being, by necessity into today’s culture, an either/or scenario actually contribute to the stress that we suffer at a time when the body is doing its’ best to alert us to a disharmony we need to address within?

This is the endless trap that people with ME/CFS find themselves in. The split could never be more complete than the endless search for physical cures with the ME/CFS community. Outwardly directed by our medical culture, by our superficial way of living our lives: out of harmony with ourselves and our environment: what chance do we have of helping people with ME/CFS?

Be one of the first to understand how integral the mind-body connection is to our humanity. I find even the language I have to use, is only transitional: ie: mind-body connection. We are first and foremost biologically intelligent organisims that comprise all aspects of existence: not just the physical.

For more on this amazing perspective on health: go to http://learninggnm.com/documents/understanding_genetic_diseases.html

Or go to my therapists site by clicking here and find out how to buy your treatment manual for CFS.

Perhaps you’ve been celebrating some of those firsts? First christmas with new partner, first christmas with new baby, first christmas with children’s partners, first christmas with grandchildren. They’re all potentially exciting times for those who cherish family and friends. The problem is, however, not everyone has been blessed with good fortune and a happy family.

Many people wait for christmas to pass before they revamp their lives and do some personal development. Do you want to end a relationship, shed a few pounds, get fit, stop smoking, get well, move house, change your business; just do something radical because you’re fed up with what life has brought you so far? Then you need to face the fear and in the words of Susan Jeffers, do it anyway!

When we make decisions to change things, we need to take the fallout that will comes with that. The reactions to our newfound resolutions, the feelings of fear of the unknown, the loss or sadness, and we need to focus on what we want, not on what we no longer want. Working through the fallout takes time. And there is a strong chance you’ll not make it unless your resolve is very strong or you have found someone who can support you through your changes.

So give yourself every chance and call me on 01371 859994. I’ll help you through those personal development changes so you can be clear about what you want and how to get there. And if you’re not local, no worries. We can connect on skype which is the next best thing to being here in person. Go to my therapy site and see if there’s anything I can help you with.

And don’t forget your friends. YOU know who’s going through those changes and may need help. Do them a favour and forward them this message. See the refer a friend link below.  It could be the best thing you ever did.

And if in the meantime, you feel like reading some self help books, I have a page on my site with several dozen books I have read and personally recommend. Take a look http://www.openmindtherapy.co.uk/jennysbooks.html

Use your Christmas money to buy yourself the gift of relaxation

My meditations to Inspire CD will help you re-centre and find your core stability. Once you’ve listened to all 5 tracks, find one that particularly moved you, and stay with it. You could trigger the relaxation response in just a few minutes by getting familiar with your favourite track.

The tracks are varying lengths but once you’ve listened to them a few times, and allowed yourself to relax with them, you’ll find one that inspires you more than any other. That’ll be your shortcut to getting the full benefit of the CD. Give it a go. Just click here to get your copy.
Best wishes
Jenny Lynn
www.openmindtherapy.co.uk
www.theopenmindguide.com/products/featured/meditations-to-inspire-cd/
www.hypnotherapistsupervision.com
www.twitter.com/jennyalynn

Jenny has been working with people on their personal development for 9 years. Due to her multi-layered approach, whatever people present with, there is something she can help with. From Anxiety to Relationships, from bereavement to depression, from building confidence to improving communication skills, Jenny can help you get your life on track. For more information just call 01371 859994.

In actual fact, Christmas is a fantastic opportunity to ‘do’ personal growth. It’s often only when you’re faced with your own strong prejudices and upsets that you get the opportunity to resolve things. It’s amazing how many of you come back to me at Christmas time to seek advice, support and guidance to be able to manage challenging situations.

I, for one, often find I do some of my deepest personal work in the gap between Christmas and New Year: the shedding of the old in time for the advent of the New Year. And New Year is particularly important for Buddhists as we redetermine and refocus our energies on what we’d like to achieve over the coming 12 months.

So whether it’s learning to relax more and work less, to stop smoking, to move into a new venture, move house, end a relationship, pursue a new one, Christmas is a good time to meditate and reflect on who you are and what you want. And of course, I can help you do that with my Meditations to Inspire CD.

The 5 tracks on the CD take you through relaxation, shedding of old beliefs, establishing calm, and reaffirming who you are and who you want to be. Because in this busy life of many distractions, it is often easy to forget who you are and what makes you peaceful: so eager are we generally to fit into a society that is driven by materialism, and image. So eager are we to keep everyone else happy except ourselves……who are you thinking of right now? Then do yourself or them a favour!

The tracks are varying lengths but once you’ve listened to them a few times, and allowed yourself to relax with them, you’ll find one that inspires you more than any other. That’ll be your shortcut to getting the full benefit of the CD. Give it a go. Just click here to get your copy. And if you want to send one as a present, give me the address and I’ll package it and post it for you direct.

An Opportunity for Personal Development

I’ve already told you how Christmas is a great time for personal development. With all those boring hours in front of the TV a really great gift idea is to buy a personal development book for someone. I’ve read some life changing books at Christmas and determined in the New Year to completely revamp my life, thanks only to books.

That’s why I’ve now set up an Amazon shop on my website. Every book barring one or two on my site are books I have read. They have, in some way or another over the years, changed my life. I am eternally grateful to all those people who are driven enough to write their thoughts down to share with us. What amazing insight some people have developed. Take a look.

And remember, buying a book as a gift for Christmas, could be the life changing moment for one of your closest friends or family members. Have a browse and see which one you think might suit them. Click here to be taken to the shop.

 You know, people would have laughed at me if I’d said I wanted to go on a confidence and assertiveness development course! 

You know? People don’t turn up to therapy because they’ve got a little something they’d like to improve.  They show up because they’re desperate and their lives are in turmoil.  So usually, when we eventually realise that we can’t continue being a door mat or feeling wretched all the time, that’s when we’ll be looking for someone to help us with our confidence levels.  And even then, many won’t want to consult anyone in person.  They’ll look on amazon or on the internet for some hints and tips, which you’ll find copious amounts of.  But no one is going to give you their full attention for nothing.  You’ll trawl through the internet and read through countless books looking for that little bit of wisdom that’ll help you ’snap out of it’.  How many more months, years or decades are you going to spend looking for the right person, for the answers, before you find yourself either in deep personal crisis or ground down so low that you can’t get up?

I hate to paint a miserable picture, but take it from someone who knows what it’s like to have been there.  I spent years and years in unhappy circumstances lurching from one crisis to the next, and while externally I looked totally confident, internally I was feeling very unconfident, undermined and somewhere quite anxious.  You know, people would have laughed at me if I’d said I wanted to go on a confidence and assertiveness development course!

Strangely now though, socially my over exhuberance has turned to quiet confidence. I’m calm.  I don’t try too hard.  In fact, sometimes I don’t try at all!  I don’t always need to.  I don’t have to be the life and soul of the party filling in the empty gaps and making everyone happy! No. I can relax now and not feel so key to everyone else’s enjoyment.  But guess what? Now I know how to enjoy myself without all that effervescent activity unless I choose to.  What a relief!

 There is nothing more powerful than being able to write down and work through some of your limiting beliefs. 

Why not join me on my Masterclass in Assertiveness and Confidence and I’ll talk you through how to do the same.  My Audio course in Confidence and Assertiveness is packed full of insights that will prompt your own awakening to what is really important and not important for you.  The 4 hours crammed full with material for your personal growth you can download directly onto your Ipod or MP3 player and start listening today!  I also give you worksheets to complement the audio so that you process in writing what you’re learning in audio. There is nothing more powerful than being able to write down and work through some of your limiting beliefs.  It is a much underrated form of personal development and one that I encourage you to turn to.

Now, if you have a friend or family member who you know so desperately needs a boost or some way of accessing personal development without the humiliation of making a phone call to actually talk about it, why not encourage them to download this product too!  It is really just a fraction of what going to a live course would cost or embarking on therapy.  And if it opens them up to finding some answers for themselves, perhaps they’ll be more inclined to make that wretched phone call and choose someone to work with!

Click here to read more and to buy your course!  You’ll be so glad you did.

And why might people stifle those feelings? Because the last time they expressed a difficult feeling freely, they were probably socialised to believe that it was wrong, ignorant or just plain selfish. And women very likely get those messages alot more frequently than men. Women are meant to be kind, compassionate, caring, considerate: the nurturers that are expected to look after others. Looking after others is diametrically opposed to being selfish. Get my drift?

Once in a marriage or a long term relationship, many women carry on stifling all those unacceptable feelings, pushing them down right into their boots till they’re no longer recognisable. Anxious people usually have a big social conscience and a sense of fairness that excludes themselves. That means they’ll put up with bad behaviour from their partners or put their partners first to the exclusion of themselves. And all those feelings that they just wished their partners would just be able to guess without them having to tell them get ignored. But that doesn’t mean they’re not there.

No, they’re there ok. Unacceptable feelings threatening to burst out at any stage and ruin the idea we have about ourselves. Ruin our idea of fairness and justice. No wonder we’re terrified of them. This is our anxiety.

Do something about it today. Go and download my Open Mind guide to Dealing with your Anxiety and the MP3’s that go with it. Alternatively, if you just fancy listening to the audios they’re still available on their own at £1.50 a track. Or if you’re quick you can have one of my 6 CD’s leftover for someone’s christmas present! Start early.

Separating from someone leaves a huge gap in our lives and whether we are happy or not to be apart, at some stage it’ll feel like we have been through a bereavement.   All our routines change, our homes change, our relationships change with other people, sometimes for the worst as they only knew us as part of a couple, and even our looks change as we either smarten up or dumb ourselves down.

Separation and divorce can be seen as an opportunity however.  It is an opportunity, after the initial shock or change, to assess what we really want from life and whether the way we’ve been going about it, is actually creating what we want.  If your relationship was tired, how were you contributing to it?  If your relationship was one sided, what did you need to add or take to balance it out?  If your relationship was lacking intimacy, what did you need to do or not do to get your needs met?  You may find that your partner in life was as much responding to what you were giving out as they were contributing to the impasse.  Perhaps you have both learned the steps to a dance that only you two knew how to do, and to change that dance routine is going to take you to step back and each learn new, more intricate and adventurous steps.  Do you have the courage to do that?

Because to have courage means to admit that perhaps you were partly responsible.  To have courage means to back down and be prepared to look at what you brought.  And you may do that within your tired old relationship, or in a new one.  But before you completely scrap any idea that your old relationship is salvageable, take an inventory of what you brought and ask yourself if, whatever you had at the beginning, is worth the hard work of relearning your dance steps together.

And I’ll tell you why I’m writing this today.  My ex partner and I are back together again after nearly a year’s separation.  We have been with other, what we thought would be more exciting or caring people, only to find that we really wanted to work on what was going wrong with us.  And both of us have taken an inventory of what we brought to our tired old relationship, and we are working on relearning our steps and challenging what used to make us unhappy.  That means all those times we used to just not say how we felt, or bite down our frustrations, or sacrifice this or that aspect of our relationship for a quiet life, are now being discussed and, amazingly, resolved!  The journey is bringing us closer together in a way that was completely unimaginable in the past.

So I now have a blueprint for working on a relationship that has gone wrong and knowing, in practice, not just in theory,  that it can be put right again.  But it really does take both parties to have the courage to look at their own failings and to resolve to admit to and work on them - together.

If you want to do something about that, you know where I am.  Just reply to this email or call me on 01371 859994.

And of course, if mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing were all as separate from the body as modern medical science would have us believe then you’d think my remit stopped at the mind. But often it is the mind that’s subconsciously in charge of our bodies. The subconscious, that has been programmed and socialised into us from our earliest days, becomes so ingrained and so unconscious that we don’t even stop to think whether we might treat conditions such as ME/CFS, IBS, Skin Conditions, Asthma, infertility, and even cancer by working with the mind. But we can. And we do. And we do it successfully in many cases.

So I’d like you to forward this email to someone you know who you think might benefit from knowing me. And that ‘knowing’ may simply take the form of signing up for my newsletter and reading some of the articles I make available. They can do that by going to the home page of www.openmindtherapy.co.uk and entering their details and downloading their free report on choosing the right therapist. And in return, if you have any interest in networking, I can introduce you to a number of networking groups. If you want to receive my free report and bitesized course in “keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs” - how to stay focussed in the recession, go to http://www.openmindtherapy.co.uk/7waystokeepyourhead/html and fill in your details.

Looking forward to connecting with you.  Find me on Linked in, ecademy, facebook and twitter.

http://www.twitter.com/jennyalynn

Tim runs a cookery school with a difference. He offers a range of courses and themes which could be of use to anyone who is newly single. And I’ll tell you why. Blokes. Yes. Apparently, pulling power comes in a saucepan! Knowing you can cook is apparently very attractive to women. Looking for a new partner on the internet? Tell them you can cook! So if I notice whilst surfing one day men who say they can cook, I’ll assume you they got it from this newsletter!

I love cooking. There’s something very rewarding about being able to provide beautiful food to my lover, friends and family. And there’s also something very attractive for me, about men turning out beautifully cooked and presented food. I feel nurtured, cared for, appreciated, loved. All those things that make women feel valued and important. Tim’s philosophy is a hands on one! (This email is loaded with innuendo. Apologies!) We learn by doing. Which is precisely what I was saying just the other day. You may think you know things, but it’s not until you do things that you really understand.

According to Tim’s business card, he quotes “Not knowing hot to cook is like not knowing how to make love; You’ve got to eat for the rest of your life so you might as well know how”. Hmmm…. I can think of a few of my past loves who have definitely not known how to cook! Go to http://www.just-cook.com. You’ll notice on there too that it’s not just for blokes! Just-Cook offers courses for ladies, and for those who are given to entertaining alot as well as courses on regional cooking including Thai cuisine and Spanish tapas. And all based in Newport, Essex!

There’s a tapas course running on 13th August, and a ‘basics for blokes’ course on the 27th August. Book on now and tell him I told you about it!

Susan Sarandon in her role says “Why do we need a partner ? To act as witness to our lives. To say we existed and who reflected who we were.” That set me off reflecting on my life and my philosophy and has left me feeling deeply pensive and reflective about the nature of partnership. How many people isolate themselves from partnership, leading solitary lives and frightened lives just in case someone hurts them - again? How many people leap into partnership and, repeatedly, in their desperation to have a witness to their lives, choose the wrong person for them? And how many people live in quiet desperation, needing a witness, any witness, just to assure them that they exist? Lives of quiet desperation where the heart cannot sing nor the mind be free to express itself.

Are you suitably pensive at this stage? Can you see yourself in any of the descriptions? I’ve seen dozens of people who fit any one of these descriptions. Marriages that have worn out and yet survive in familiarity and complacency - just waiting for one or the other partner to find excitement with someone new. Partnerships that are so volatile that they burn out and die out like the final display at a fireworks show. And people who are so scared or stagnated at the prospect of having any kind of involvement because they have got used to nothing moving or changing in their lives. How have we, as a human race, become so inflexible and unprepared to change and learn and move with our hearts? Has our nuclear society really placed so much routine and responsibility on us that we can no longer find our own hearts? What would we be doing if we listened to our hearts desire and had the courage to follow it?

Big questions. Ones that may take our lifetime to fully answer. But questions none the less that we will be foolish to ignore. If we want to feel deep fulfilment in our lives, and avoid living a life of quiet desperation, like lady Havisham’s Dickens ‘Great Expectations’, we need to pull off the veils and cobwebs draped over our hearts and minds, and allow ourselves to step into the new. And stepping into the new shouldn’t be so difficult for us….but it is. Courage, tenacity and preparedness to face the unfamiliar will give us the tools to open our hearts and minds to new learning, new experiences, and new ways.

And we need others in our journey to help us open those hearts and minds. We need the encouragement and the belief of others that we can, after all these years, still grow and become who we want to be. And we need to make sure that the people we have around us are people who can help in that way. See if there’s anything by clicking here that might help you along that journey.

Being overweight can have many very valuable functions for someone that they are just not aware of. One of those functions is, to manage feelings they’d rather not have to deal with. And many of these feelings are so deeply buried, it’s hard to find them. For example, I might want to lose weight, but what if I just can’t see myself as someone who deserves to feel good about themselves? I might know academically how to feel good about myself. I may even treat myself to beautiful clothes and stylish hairdos. But if I’m in denial about how I REALLY feel, then I’m going to subconsciously sabotage myself all of the time. And I’m going to use food to comfort myself like the alcoholic turns to alcohol to blot out distressing feelings.

Now let’s assume, a clever hypnotherapist has helped me identify the conflict of the real feeling underneath and the superficial presentation on the surface. There’s still something only I can do and no one can help me. I have to change the way I feel about myself to feel more empowered and more confident. Now, that, you imagine, might be easy. A couple of sessions of hypnotherapy might sort that out. But what if our whole lifestyle and circumstances come from our poor former self image?

• What if we’re married to someone who feeds off our lack of self esteem?
• What if we’re married to someone who needs us to be strong all the time, and we resent it?
• What if our parents need us to be the whipping boy in the family?
• What if our friends want to be seen with us because it makes them look good?
• What if we don’t have the inner calm and confidence to be able to find a partner?

You know, the work we did on changing how we feel about ourselves and our body image had to be pretty good indeed to change all these other circumstances around us. We may need to make some real physical changes in certain areas of our lives if we really want to feel more confident about losing weight. Losing weight and keeping it off is a journey of self discovery.  However, unless we make that journey, the truth is, we are very likely to backslide. And we may go back to our former eating habits, helplessly, miserably, reconfirming to ourselves that we are just meant to be fat and overweight and nothing can change that. And so the self fulfilling prophecy continues.

Changing our deeper feelings, once we’ve found them, needs to be accompanied by changing our language patterns, our ability to defend ourselves calmly, to find the self confidence to know what is right for us and what isn’t. And sometimes we need to be reminded of that again and again. So what better way to do just that than to listen to my 4 hour audio course that you can download today with all the handouts to help you realign yourself with a more positive self image with all the language tools and strategies that will help you stand tall and be counted. Click here for more information.