trusting the bladder to do its job

Life sure takes funny turns...

My life, to be sure, does. I have taken a break from blogging for a while, as many things have been happening quick and fast in this world of mine.

Lets not go into details about what they are - but do lets discuss the lessons learnt from this experience of 'living the fast life' - literally hahaha!

Once again, I, like many other people, tried to take control of my life recently. For eg, I stressed about lack of money, I stressed about how to get more money, I stressed about how to control others so that I could reach my own personal goals...

Control freak that I am, or was, now i read back on my prior posts and realise that I missed one thing these past few months in my life - trust. Some people may call it trust of God, some people call it trust of oneself or of others. I dont know. Trust - funny word.

Lets take an example from our own bodies - I know for now i have a full bladder. I need to go to the toilet - that will my MY own way of controlling this uncomfortable feeling of a full bladder. what if i dont indulge in this controlling behaviour - ie bring myself physically to the toilet? Bingo.
You may view the wetting of my pants the "bad" effect of no control - having an acciddent in my pants - eeew! gross! in the daily sense of 'control', if i lose my control over, say, my need to have money, the result? maybe i go broke. maybe i live on the streets. HOKAY.

But You may ALSO view the wetting of the pants as a "good"effect of this so-called "no control". How? Well, it is a release of a very natural bodily function. it is the release of the discomfort of controlling one's bladder. in the daily sense of 'control', it will be the culmination of the universe' way of establishing equilibrium again... if you can look at it that way. 'equilibrium' might mean 'going broke', but it IS equilibrium, a sense of balance before things start to function again.

Back to 'trust', though... what has it got to do? well, obviously, in this case, it is trusting that equilibrium will happen no matter how hard you try to control. whether one ends up peeing in the loo, or in one's pants, equilibrium happened.

As i said earlier, my trust was dodgy for a while there. and i became a major control freak. but that did not stop equilibrium from happening. The lesson in this? it is to trust. when one loses trust and starts to feel as though it is them against the elements, then the journey to reach equilibrium becomes an unnecessary struggle, instead of the wondrous joyful self discovering journey that it could have been.

finally, for all that i've said so far, this picture puts it all into perspective!

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Such random things I write

As my lovely friend Su puts it often - I had an "Ai carumba!" moment just twenty minutes ago taking my walk in the lovely cool night through the suburbs.

Hi people:)

I was listening to a smashing song on the radio, and it went something like, "I don't know what to do with myself *amazing instrumental* I don't know what to do with myself *amazing instrumental*" etc... of course, it made me think of my favourite topic - myself.

But before I get to myself, let me share with you what I heard in the distant night air immediately after that. I heard some crazy dog barking. But before I elucidate on said barking, I wanna say that i then turned my gaze on a beautiful house that I wish I owned.

ADHD tendencies aside, I just want to say that it made me think how wonderful this brain of ours is, that it can make connections between seemingly unrelated things. But that is not my point (it is anyone's guess how i made connections between Myself, Barking Dog and Beautiful House and no, it does not entail images of the Stafford Wives and domestic violence...)



My point is that it made me also think more deeply of this person called Me, Myself. I. I read in my awesome book that there are 3 basic senses of self. The first is the Conceptualized Self, which basically pertains to how you would describe yourself if asked to write an essay on yourself. It would go something like "I am kind, I am lovable, I am nice, I am blah". There is a sense of evaluation towards this "I".

The second is the so-called Self as a Process of Ongoing Self-Awareness. This is the self that goes "Now I am feeling this. Now I am remembering that. Now I am seeing this." This sense of self is important for healthy psychological functioning.

The third sense of self is actually quite mind-blowing to think about. It is the Observing Self. It is what I thought of when I heard the barking dog, then turned my gaze on the spotlight of the beautiful house. The Observing Self, I think, can best be illustrated by asking yourself these questions: "What is an early fond/painful memory of yours? When you relive this memory, who is that sense of self looking out from behind your eyes? And then, who was it who ate your breakfast this morning? And who is reading this blog right now?" When I saw that spotlight and heard that barking dog, I thought of that 'Self', so-called looking out from behind my eyes, out into the darkness and towards the light.

The transcendent Observing Self gives us a lot of leeway to overcome our mental pain and anguish when we experience them. You can choose to not "buy into your thought" or put another way, not "look FROM your thoughts" but rather "look AT your thoughts".

When the next painful thought comes into mind, why don't you just say "Oh thanks for the input, mind" and look AT it instead of looking and living FROM it.


I really do want to elaborate and go into detail about the observing self, but my time is limited as I've got sweet potatoes baking in the oven and my landlady does not like us to waste electricity. So get them out I must, but I think, just to succinctly drive it home that MY unwavering sense of observing self is starting to weaken due to the smells wafting from the kitchen, I will totally deviate from this topic and share a YouTube video of my favourite belly dancer with you all. In a way, there IS something of a connection there. Deepak Chopra and Demi Moore narrating to the music - hmm one's super spiritual and other's super Hollywood. There you go - mind and body. Mind Over Body.

Enjoy!!!

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buttery pineapple tarts - who has the last laugh?

Hi people!

A while ago i blogged about how my landlady was a cleaning freak and that behind my closed door in my messy room i snigger and laugh all-knowingly... hehehe. well this here is an update on my room - during my last visit home two weeks ago, she had jumped at the opportunity to enter (yes enter!) my room and take EVERYTHING apart and clean it from top to bottom, including my thousand and one knick knacks and acessories on my dresser. hah! who's having the last laugh now???

who HAS the last laugh in our lives? is it us? back to that later.

I recently acquired a penchant for eating pineapple tarts for dinner. this is because i had brought many back from my travels home and it was the season to be eating them then. which means that, ahem, my waist line has been quite on the receiving end of the buttery tarts.

let's get to the point of today's blog - weight loss, mind control, blah. i heard about a person who had been trying to lose weight for years and years, and never had any success. this got in the way of her relationship with significant others, of course. to me, the secret to weight loss lies in this: eating and liking to eat is actually a very emotional thing. there is 'emotional eating' and there is simply eating. if you think of someone being under local anesthetic, they feel no pain even when the surgeon is cutting away at their insides. all they feel is a neutral 'sensation'. with eating, the pleasure we feel from the senses/taste etc is the emotion linked to eating, much like the emotion of 'pain' linked to getting our insides cut when we are NOT on local anasthetic. wheh we detach the emotion from the actual act, much like applying anaesthetic on our eating, we realise that we can control our urge and 'greediness' to eat and only eat when we are hungry.

That, of course, is the stuff of saints. and emaciacted yogis from India who derive pleasure only from the 'higher things in life'.

I, on the other hand, choose to h0ver between sainthood and The Matrix, ie our everyday life that i have to be in to help others. which means, sometimes i binge on pineapple tarts for dinner, and sometimes i exercise mind control and do not eat dinner because i feel emotionally full :)

back to the last laugh - i guess the autopsy person will have the last laugh on me when he splits open my guts to find it filled with buttery tarts...

i am thinking of home now, so i will leave you with the tough decision we malaysians face each day about whether to exercise mind control or not. i think not.

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My Unconditional Love

My lovely silkworm friend Rachel(as i call her fondly) made a special request for me to blog about love today. Not ANY love, nooo not any old love. Unconditional love!

*falling off chair, stumped by the magnitude of this topic*

ok, i'll try... here goes. *wink wink*

When we were all students staying in the student hostel back in 1993, lovely rachel was pursued by this boy we nicknamed 'Egg Guy'. Rachel reminded me during our online chat today that he was given this special name cos he borrowed an egg from us in the kitchen one day (and b****y did not return it dammit!!!)

But... unconditional love.... as we know it in everyday life, mainly pertains to the love a parent has for his/her child. So i thought about Egg Guy, and how maybe he is happily married by now with happy little egg children!

goosebumps yet, rachel? :P

Jokes aside, hmmm. In counselling there is a concept that shrinks need to follow called 'unconditional positive regard'. Basically, it means not imposing your own personal values onto your client, even though he may be a mass murderer! rachel and i agreed that this kind of positive regard is similar to the unconditional love a parent has for his/her child.

That got me to think about other kinds of love. ah.... lovelorn me! but again, that aside, I got to thinking about what i described to Rachel as God-given values and human values. the relationship this has to love? Rachel and i agreed that, regardless of one's faith, in a man/woman relationship, a God-given (or universal, if you like) value is that the man, because he is made physically stronger, is meant to protect the woman. and the woman, because the universe/God made her softer and more in touch with her emotions, is meant to be in a supporting/submissive role to the man, substituting her emotional strength what she does not have in physical strength. What about human made values then? well one could say they include all the other rubbish that unreasonable couples expect of each other in order to have a 'happy relationship.' like, for eg, the man must make good money, the woman must wear Chanel, the kids must go to selective schools and become doctors and lawyers, etc etc etc.

But what ABOUT unconditional love then? my interpretation of that is that we owe ourselves the God/universe-given value of loving ourselves unconditionally. simple and sweet. if our interactions with others are a reflection of what we truly are and truly feel (which indeed it is), then for us to show others unconditional love would mean that we need to reflect our own unconditional love to ourselves. to me, without one, the other cannot manifest. trust me, i have seen one too many self-loathing parent who hates their life who proclaim that they 'love' their child and push them to do all sorts of crazy feats like... becoming a doctor or a lawyer. it is sort of like, erm... without the egg, there will be no chicken, and vice versa.

I ended our conversation by teasing lovely silkworm rachel about the bouquet of flowers which the infatuated Egg Guy gave her once. From memory, it had given her major goose bumps, and it did again when i brought it up after more than 15 years!

My teaseful suggestion to rachel prompted her to say goodbye and log off from the chat... because she had said that she hated those flowers, and that she thinks guys who give flowers to girls are so cliched anyway, i suggested that what if... guys giving girls flowers is also a God-given value? because, face it, most girls swoon for flowers? which would mean that she was not in tune with God-values???

*Rachel is now offline*

Adieu my God-given blog fans!!!

"An egg in a second, goosebumps for a lifetime"

~emo-me~

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A Matter of Spock

Today, i was surfing around being my usual voyeur self on facebook, when i came across this coolzzz picture! and i thought to myself, now surely that is a sign that i must blog today? and blog about the brain and the mind? and sound like i am totally in touch with all that brain/mindovermatter/etc etc etc debate that is going on? (i THINK there is some debate going on on this topic, there almost always is some clever observation to make about our brain, no? cos then it shows that the observer's brain is indeed smart and clever - a win-win!)

anyway, here is the picture!

it shows, as you can tell, a strong brain doing strength training!


what makes a strong brain? hmmm maybe i will leave that question to the neuropsychologists, and rephrase that to: "What makes a strong mind?"

i saw someone today whom i think was very strong. but yet, she was oh so weak. in the midst of her upbeat, unaware cheer in spite of her terrible life experiences, i sensed that this aura of cheer she exuded came from being, i am sorry to say, a little bit naive about life. she did not truly see the severity of the injustices that had been done to her, by her husband, by the law enforcers who wrongly accused her, by her scheming lawyers and by the govt authorities who failed to protect her. and there i was, crying silently for her in my heart all the time i was nodding and acknowledging her story.


Did i know too much? or did she know too little? is simple minded good or is ruminating a positive thing? is my writing starting to sound a tad like carrie bradshaw's clever lines? i think my point is this: there IS no point. no point in trying to 'get the better of'. or in thinking 'what if?' she, my client, in all her naivete, is no better or no worse. in other words, she couldn't ever be anything other than herself. which means, when applied to our own situation, whatever we do, whatever happens to us, whatEVER choice we make or dont make, it is ALWAYS meant to be, it is always 'right'. WE are the writers of our own life-books, and WE feature in them. we do not want to be featured in someone else's story, our roles and scripts cast by them.


a friend of mine told me recently that everything can eventually be traced back to patterns in nature. what i mentioned above is sort of like a young seedling, starting to sprout its leaves, stems, tendrils and roots. there are a kazillion million different ways these can sprout, but eventually the plant chooses only one. and whatever it chooses eventually, THAT makes the plant. that determines how much sunlight it gets, how able it is to reach water, and how vulnerable it is to grazing animals.

I will sign off now with a picture of Mr Spock from Star Trek. Simply because...
a) i just heard him mentioned on my faithful radio

b) and Mr Spock is a nice symbol of how when one is rigid and pre-emptive of things in life like him, and decides what IS right and what IS wrong, then eventually one's heart gets broken...


Pic of Mr Spock taking his chances in life...

"I am what I am, Leila, and if there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them. Mine can be no worse than someone else's." ~Spock in 'This Side of Paradise'~




Ta to all!!!

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makeup, dress ups, yoga, and meditation

Hi Friends!

This is a glimpse into my train of thought the past 10 mins as i sat there trying to think of what to blog about today:

clever point no 1 --> analysis no 1 --> follow-on thought --> further padding of follow-on thought --> (frustration starting to creep in as i began to realise it was all very 'staged') --> thought of Sascha Baron Cohen and his staged humour in Bruno --> eyes wandered to the open FB page in front of me --> decided to update status that i am having zero inspiration --> abandoned idea of blogging tonite --> looked at people's posts --> funny! --> played internet voyeur for a bit --> more funny bits --> saw my update again --> INSPIRATION CAME!!!

now i am rocking and waving my arms in the air to the friday nite music celebrating the rebirth of freedom, acceptance, relaxation, non-trying and just-being :)))

my client yesterday had an insomnia problem. of course the more she tried to sleep, the more she was awake. then she berated herself for not sleeping, upping her level of stress hormones, again less likely to sleep.

Now if only she could lobotomise me and look at my thought associations just mentioned. hehe, but lobotomy is so passe and we all know it only works when people can promise that they wont get depressed from managing the pain after getting cut up, otherwise it is a lost cause.

now makeup and playing dress ups. we've all heard of 'effortless chic' and looking nice without looking like you had spent a lot of time on dressing up. And how when women wear makeup they strive to look like they are actually NOT wearing makeup :) 'Being' without trying (but in my case re makeup, hehehe well that will be another post :D)

in meditation, as i understand it, the more you try to clear your mind, the more thoughts come flooding in.

This pose below in yoga is called the Non-trying pose. note that it is quite difficult, and you need help from a more experienced person ;)

Similarly, with my striving for inspiration just now, i didnt get it, and it only came when i did other things and became relaxed.

what am i rambling on about? i think the word i am thinking of is 'by-product'... happiness, love, money and many other things in life come when you dont look for it, when you dont strive for it. like you can't actively LOOK for money but if you do your job properly it is the result/by-product at the end of the month when your salary comes. these things, they pop up when you go about doing the daily necessities, living and enjoying your life in spite of, and simply relaxing and accepting your life.

Thus, I think my slogan for the day will be:

-------->"Why try, when you can simply get by?!"<--------

and to prove my point that I am not trying too hard here, i will simply insert a random doraemon video here for your viewing pleasure :)


Cheers and happy Friday nite everyone!!!

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the strongest man

My lovely friend Rachel remarked to me recently about how she was miffed by a friend of hers who said something without much thinking. We also chatted online today about people, and how it was so tough for her in the corporate world as she felt her soft personality was misaligned with her manager role.

Yesterday I blogged about the 'tough' century egg. today i thought about a coconut tree and how its 'softness' ie bending along with the wind and storm weathers it through the toughest weather, as compared to a stiff and 'strong' oak tree, and how its trunk would easily break in a bad storm.

I then had an inspiring conversation with Rachel about different levels of empathy, with regards to her friend who miffed her. According to Rogers' model,

Level 1 empathy: Friend says "I feel anxious" Your reply "You feel anxious? what the hell for? you have a great life!" You are self centred in your own view and are not really listening to him.

Level 2 empathy: Friend say "I feel anxious" Your reply "Oh you feel anxious? That sucks, but try to get out of it! Let's go shopping!" You try to make him feel better, but are still stuck in your own interpretation.

Level 3 empathy: Friend says "I feel anxious" Your reply "Oh you feel anxious? That must be hard. Tell me more about it." You are doing the most basic active listening and trying to take his view.

Level 4 empathy: Friend says "I feel anxious" Your reply "Oh you feel anxious? That must be hard, especially when you've got to work. I wonder if it is related to the fight you had with Jane this morning?" You not only start to take his view, but also inject your own analysis of the situation which he may not be aware of.

Level 5 empathy: Friend says "I feel anxious" Your reply "Oh you feel anxious? That must be so hard when you've got to work too. But you know, I have seen you being very resilient in the past, and I know it is hard now but i believe in you. What do you say we sit down and brainstorm about some things that can help you?" You actually start to INSPIRE him to help himself.

Now we all need to really walk in the other person's shoes, like the Level 5 empathy shown below.

Click here for more information on great radical (i think) psychologist Carl Rogers. He even supports my idea on the coconut tree! wow!

Which led me to think, often people think that being strong means being set/sure in your opinions, and not showing your emotions. Rachel's friend had miffed her by using Level 1 empathy, imposing her own views on her problems, instead of really listening. And i wonder how many managers out there are like this, thinking if they 'soften', they are being vulnerable to their subordinates and thus will not earn respect.

Then I thought of the most powerful and great people we have known - people like Jesus, Buddha, and all the great saints (incidentally i did not think of the President of the United States!). And i realised that the greatest strength, the greatest leadership, is portrayed by people who are gentle and soft, and who are not afraid to admit their own vulnerability. in other words, a person who is stuck to their own opinions, indicates they are not confident enough to admit their mistakes. which means it is a false sense of strength, much like the dictators of our time.

Their own weaknesses are hard for some people to admit, but this is exactly the point. Seems to be so obvious, yet it remains elusive to most people! We all think of a strong oak tree when told to think of a sturdy tree, but in actual fact, the coconut tree is much stronger. I think our society needs a paradigm shift in terms of what we actually mean when we tell people "Be Strong!"

I will finish with the part of the lyrics from a song i am listening to now on the radio. It reminds me of how we tend to perceive a 'weak, crying, vulnerable person' and how we really should be perceiving him!

"Some people think I'm bonkers, But I think I am free!
Some people think I'm bonkers, But I think I am free!"
~heard on triple J radio hottest 100 this fine Australia Day of 2010~

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