REWIRING THE SOUL with Gabriella Kortsch, Ph.D.: June 2017

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Thursday, June 29, 2017

Dealing With Illness

Being diagnosed with a life-threatening illness yourself, or having it happen to a person you are close to can be devastating. Adding more negativity to the picture, it is also very frightening and downright paralyzing, in great part due to the rapidly escalating thoughts and feelings that may overwhelm you once you hear the doctor's words.

It's exactly at this point - which probably happens quite quickly and in rapid succession after having received the diagnosis - that you must step in and be prepared to do something. Stepping in means you must take charge, instead of allowing all those thoughts and feelings you are experiencing to be the ones who are in charge. If they remain in charge, they literally affect your energetic frequency, which means they affect your cells. Imagine a rose you have planted that has been doing well and finally you notice it has some strange sticky bugs on the leaves. Apart from consulting with an expert, you would probably now do your utmost to ensure that the soil in which the plant lives is clean. You would perhaps spray it with something that might help clear out those bugs. You would probably give it health- and growth-enhancing fertilizer, changing as well its position vis-à-vis the sun, watering more or perhaps less, and thus doing, in other words, everything you could to improve the 'environment' of the rose. You must do the same with yourself.

That requires awareness. We've looked at that topic many times over the course of these 10 years that I've been writing this monthly newsletter, so suffice it to say that awareness means you need to be able to recognize your own thoughts and be able to bring them to a less tumultuous state than the one they may currently be in. Here's a past article to refresh your memory: Consciousness is a Full-time Job.

Your thoughts and feelings can be dealt with - gently - by following a daily practice of mindfulness which will literally train your mind and form new neural pathways in your brain, in order to be able to take greater cognizance - to be more aware - at all times of your thoughts and hence your feelings, and above all, to recognize that you are capable of making choices about all of this, and hence literally influence and improve your well-being.

Many people who in fact know all these things I've been discussing, nevertheless lose sight of them when they receive a diagnosis that frightens them, and it all flies out of the window, and they give in to their most dire thoughts and feelings, thus creating an even more unhealthy environment for their body.

Think of it like this: imagine you have just had the cast removed after a multiple fracture of your tibia. You are so frightened that you'll never walk properly again. The orthopedic surgeon tells you that you'll need about two months of serious physiotherapy and then will still require further time after that until you are back up to speed. Again, your thoughts and fears take over, and all you can concentrate on is the fear that it won't ever happen; that you'll never walk without a limp again. Then, instead of going to those sessions of physiotherapy, you stay at home. As time passes, the lack of mobility in your leg becomes more and more pronounced and in the end, you truly do not recover your motor skills. Now I realize that almost no one would do this, but take it as an analogy of what happens to most people who receive a poor health diagnosis. They focus on the problem. They freeze. They may accept conventional treatment (and this article is not at all about refusing such treatment), but their thoughts and feelings remain stuck in one specific place - a very negative place, or a fear-filled place.

If at that moment in time you are able to implement the above ideas into your life, as follows, you will be doing all that is possible in order to improve the state of your health:

by taking as good care as possible of your body, but not necessarily by racing off to the latest surgeon/healer/shaman/alternative treatment, as much as giving your body an inner and outer environment that is conducive to healing, and that has the capacity to affect your very genes
by consulting the best physicians/healers possible (but without making an obsession of it, because if you do, you will probably contribute to a lowering of your energetic frequency). Remember, the physicians and healers are only part of the answer. YOU are just as large a part of that answer. You.
by doing your own research, because after all, it is your body, and to some degree, you should make yourself responsible for how you progress from this point forward (but again, not by obsessing, for the same reasons as mentioned above). Self-responsibility is one of the most freeing actions you can take for your life and inner well-being.
by surrounding yourself with those of your friends and family who are capable of giving you good - not pitying or sad or worried - energy, and studiously avoiding those people, situations, films, conversations, books, talks, etc., who are not doing this for you, and hence are lowering your energy (which, as said, affects your cells)
by gently working on all those issues that continue to persist in your life. Is there resentment, pain, anger, frustration over people and events in your past? Do you need to learn how to forgive, create better boundaries, understand and eliminate patterns that you have been reliving over and over again, or begin to love yourself better, etc.?
by seeking gratitude, beauty, and inner harmony at all times, which in turn will also affect your energy, but on very positive levels
by furthermore reading, viewing, and listening to material that also contributes to this raising of your energetic frequency, ensuring that the tools you consistently use throughout the course of your day - every day - further this quest for continually either raising your energetic frequency, or maintaining it in a good place, assuming you are already there
by realizing, as you do all this, that you are working more and more towards that most excellent and life-giving goal of loving yourself in the healthiest way possible, recognizing that self-love is totally up to you, and finally
by continually taking stock of your thoughts and feelings in such a way that you move them in directions that are energy-raising as opposed to energy-depleting, positive as opposed to negative, but recognizing that your responsibility in this diagnosis of illness of yours is not to figure out how to cure yourself, but to maintain yourself, or bring yourself to a place inside of you where your inner state of energetic frequency and your inner state of well-being is - by your choice, not by external circumstances - always as good as you can possibly make it (knowing that it truly is up to you), in order to bathe your being and your body in the most excellent and nourishing climate you are able to. This - all of this - is a choice.

Note: All underlined words in today's article can be used as searchable key words on this blog for other articles and posts offering further explanations - scroll down and click on the labels.

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Si hablas español:

Hace poco di una charla en Marbella sobre el tema

"Basta con la tortura de tus pensamientos"

Se filmó y se puede ver en YouTube aquí:

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Also visit my book website: www.gabriellakortsch.com where you may download excerpts or read quotations from any of my books (also in Spanish & German). My latest book Emotional Unavailability & Neediness: Two Sides of the Same Coin is available globally on Amazon in print & Kindle. You can also obtain it (or any of my other books) via Barnes & Noble.

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DEINE SEELE UND DU

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Thursday, June 22, 2017

Thoughts on Mindfulness: Do It This Way Sometimes

Mindfulness is a topic that most people are familiar with by now, although I know for a fact that few truly practice it. To do that it would mean that you spend all your waking moments being mindful ... a bit as it is explained in this rather marvelous conversation between Oprah & Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who literally brought mindfulness to the west via Jon Kabat-Zinn and later founded a retreat center in France called Plum Village. Listen particularly to the short section on "compassionate listening"

However, what I wanted to mention today is a perhaps simplistic way of entering mindfulness, if you are a newcomer. There are so many ways. But this one is truly simple. I've done it several mornings just out of curiosity, and was rather pleased with the result.

Out walking (and I suggest you walk where there are not throngs of people nor endless raucous traffic), simply attempt to notice how many different sounds you can tangle out of whatever it is that your ears perceive. Normally we pay little attention unless it's a startling or very loud noise, because we're either lost in thought, or talking, or listening to something on our earbuds.

So in a 15 minute section of my walk, I found yesterday that I was able to differentiate 20 different sounds, yet today that number was almost triple at 56. Was I more present? More mindful? More attuned to my surroundings? It was the same walk at more or less the same time.

I should add that car noise only counted as one, although I distinguished between cars, trucks, buses, motorbikes, etc. people talking also only as one, although I distinguished between adults and children or babies, or laughter. Birds I counted separately: there were seagulls, parakeets, sparrows, and several others that had another kind of song, but I don't know what they were. I heard a leaf dropping to the ground, I heard the marvelously peace-inducing sound of insects, I heard lawnmowers (only counted once), buzz saws, and palm frond cutting equipment shaving off the dried ones from the top. I heard the rustle of the wind through palm fronds, and the sighing of the wind through eucalyptus leaves. I heard water ejecting noisily from a hose, and I heard water dancing joyfully in a decorative fountain, and I heard water running gustily from a public tap to satiate a thirsty dog. I heard a dog's claws on the pavement, another dog's excited breathing as he strained at his leash to catch up with yet another dog, the gentle, and to me - surprising - singing of two elderly ladies out for a stroll, the heavy breathing of a jogger, and the slap of a mother's sandals as she led her small toddler to the beach. I heard the same toddler laugh that magnificent laughter of children, and I heard stacked chairs being placed on the pavement outside a beach restaurant in readiness for early morning coffee drinkers. I heard a chubby baby babble in delight at the faces his grandfather was making, and I heard music (although I only counted it once), and I heard a helicopter in the distance over the water, and a small motorboat going out to sea.

It was a marvelous sensation to be able to distinguish so many sounds and furthermore to find ever more, the more I remained mindful.

Try it some day. Do only this. Don't be distracted by anything at all, other than disentangling those myriad sounds that are out there. This might just be your way of training yourself to become mindful.