4 Jan 2012
Dip-In Therapy
One of the dysfunctional drawbacks of the new technology is the habit of scanning not reading, texting not calling and dipping instead of committing.
The quick fix generation demands twitter like answers when a paragraph takes time to yawn. When it comes to therapy, healing or transition it’s not so ‘how much?’ but . . . ‘how long?’ The result of the ‘money rich, time poor’ society we have created.
Commitment in itself has become a dirty word.
Commit to a lifelong relationship and people coo codependent, behind backs. Commit to a 3 year training and the response is ‘why bother’ when we don’t know what’s going to happen next week, let alone next year. As we herald in 2012, the year of imminent collapse in some predictive quarters, and certainly financial collapse already here, the much written about *celestial speedup* ( unless you scanned ), is about to test seat belts on a rocky ride into an uncertain world future. I have to say that if I’d known it would take me 14 years of therapy, counselling, trust, faith and nut case therapies to sero-convert a life threatening virus that was killing me, I doubt whether I would have even started, so the lesson learn’t is : it’s best NOT to know, or the ego will kill you stone dead.
But I DID lose incurable chronic-active Hepatitis B Virus, with Rebirthing Breathwork after 14 years of constant personal development, because I committed myself to the process of staying alive, no matter what. How many of you do that? Most people are carrying round a body from pillar to post, deeply unsatisfied with what life offers while leaving their arse on the sofa of procrastination, blaming and complaining. Then only the ego – the king of fear – smiles back. Not a good look in attracting change, emotional prosperity and gratitude, as any Coach will tell you.
Who would have guessed that the reason I have been invited to share my work around the world these past decades is through troubles overcome, not through good times, theory or philosophy, but via pragmatic application, spiritual guidance and karma yoga. The idea of quick fix, dip-in therapy never occurred to me in the way that people nowadays expect results. When I began to attend 12 Step Programme meetings in 1982 I did 5 a week for 3 years, then 3 a week for 5 years, just to get a handle on living clean & sober, not how to find a new relationship, career or friendship circle. It was hard work. Even in my 30th year of recovery it can be testing. How people think that club guest list – coffee shop recovery is enough to stay clean is beyond my experience. Without sponsorship and outside professional help, it’s gonna be a tough road and those unwilling to walk it by other means, often return to previous tracks and companions, and without commitment the relationship of mind, body and spirit is fractured.
People think, in early daze, that dipping into a meeting twice a week will encourage and manifest recovery. It doesn’t, it only encourages what most addicts delve daily into – getting away with it. Having short term therapy like CBT is hugely successful for many and their first expose into someone offering direction and listening to them without judgement, but if work is not followed up you may as well stay on the profiterole diet and stay fat.
Try to observe personal development as a pension that you pay into and it pays out long term. I’ve spent thousands over the years, instead of having holidays, as well as weekends on trainings that consumed my social life, and now I can’t fit all the holidays in. It’s HOW IT WORKS. Happiness has nothing to do with money, possession or partners but everything to do with soul. Why demand passion from life when you can’t commit to trusting a passionette process of discovery. Why wait for a drama to wake you up? You could wake up NOW, this month, today, this minute.
So don’t scan it. Read it. Study it. Attend it. Do it.
For as long as it takes.
It is this broken promise that causes everything about addiction in our society, from the proliferation of drug rehabs to the high divorce rate. Weddings are often ceremonies built around one of the most public and important promises many of us will make in our lifetimes. Some addictive substances are more benign than others. I sometimes stay up until two or three in the morning reading a book when I have to be up by seven. I want to stop and sleep because without enough sleep my day doesn’t go well. At the end of each chapter I promise myself that I will only read one more. The seriousness of the promise that is broken may be one way to define an addiction. When I promise myself to stop reading at midnight, I know that I don’t really mean it."
His writings are based on teachings from A Course In Miracles ( ACIM ). He writes " I believe that most of us, to some degree, have pockets of addiction in our lives. The extent to which we are stuck in our addictive patterns is the extent to which we inhibit our potential to love. If you have become tired of attempting to find hiding places from the world, long for relief from running faster on the treadmill. or realise that more does not equal happier, then this book is for you ". Although published over 20 years ago, it’s content still bares testimony that most of us still rely upon the ego to guide us into a supposed heavenly place with the addictive mind as companion. 
In the 1950′s when colour came back in vogue after the darkness of World War 2, women fashioned themselves on movie heroines including home perms and colouring. The image makeover had begun. Radio Luxembourg, a european short wave radio station playing pop music, followed the American radio tradition of product sponsorship and jingles, which explains why Friday Night was always ‘AMARMI Night’. Amarmi was the L’Oreal of the day, a hair dye you could use at home rather than use the expertise of expensive hair salons. But you could always tell a home job and it was noted with glee by some women in particular, eager to pounce and point the finger that that woman was a ‘suicide blonde’. Dyed by her own hand.
With security scares, hackers fears and serious stalkers most people using facebook provide fake information somewhere to protect themselves, so lying about age, birthdate or even work details are commonplace. Most of us don’t really care if someone calls themselves 
Within the urban dictionary *facebook suicide* refers to deleting and disappearing identity from cyberspace, via overwhelm, information overload, a serious stalking presence or an act of attention like a teenager sulking in his room. Until we learn to face the world on it’s terms, we will always attract rejection.
He glanced sideways, then a spring of pity bounced off his zitty forehead as if to say "how do you manage ?" I then went on to explain that I DO have a mobile but I don’t give out the number, I only use it as a £25 a month alarm clock and for transferring my landline calls to it when I go out, should I want to. His face screwed up like a well used hankie in disbelief. 
The Way We Were, the 1973 romantic comedy staring Redford and Streisand, flash-backing over a 30 year relationship stained my emotional psyche, confirming romance as a bag of brown. 