Category: psychotherapy

Heaven and hell

A Japanese warrior approached a Zen master searching for an answer to a question that was troubling him.

“Tell me master” asked the warrior, “are there heaven and hell?”

“Ha!” snorted the master in what seemed to be scorn for the warrior.

“What makes you think you could understand such things?” “You are only an uneducated soldier who is wasting my time.”

The warrior immediately froze in shock, no one, but no one, ever spoke to a warrior like this. It meant instant death.

“You are still here” said the master. “Are you too stupid to understand what I said?”

Despite describing a natural part of what it means to be human, these three words seem to trigger discomfort and shame. How did it happen that we have isolated these experiences and made them unwanted?

Competition. Being competitive has got a bad name, the underlying message is that competitive equals aggressive. But mixed messages are rife, just look around. You need to be bigger, thinner, younger, fitter, happier or just more of this and less of that. We

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Resilience continued: false resources

Emotional resilience is a good quality to have, most people would agree. Bouncing back means we can risk new behaviours accepting that if anything goes wrong, somehow we will know what to do.

After having written about the four resources that can help increase resilience, I started thinking about the things we do to decrease our resilience. Not that we do it on purpose, I doubt many people walk around thinking about how they are going

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Resilience: a fourth resource

In my previous post I suggested three resources to increase resilience. I am adding a fourth resource following numerous conversations about how bouncing back has different qualities to it, that is, it is not just about whether we bounce back from setbacks life throws at us or not, but also about how we do it and feeling we are left with. The ‘how’ is important because it offers a learning for the future. We can feel as if we

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Three resources to increase everyday resilience

Resilience is often defined as the ability to bounce back from setbacks. Setbacks can be part of any activity we are involved in and if we can harness anxiety and stress constructively we can make better progress.

The problem starts already with the words setback and progress. I’ll start with progress, it suggests movement towards improvement or the advancement towards a better stage. If the starting point of whatever project is improvement rather than adjustment to a changing reality, we have already labelled our current activity as inadequate and we might be ignoring what we are doing well

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The Self: an alternative view

We are strongly attached to the idea that there is a true, single, core self which remains constant throughout life. In reality, we extrapolate a sense of constancy from our memories. We have many subselves which come to the fore depending on the situation we are in. Thus, we have a subself dedicated to friends, another to family, another dedicated to self-protection and yet another dedicated to status and professional success, as many subsleves as the number of settings that modern life requires us to be involved in. We may assume a new identity in each new role

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