One of the key messages I try to get across to students on my courses is that stories are more important than facts. The stories you tell yourself, the mental dramas you participate in, have more of an impact on your emotional state and what happens subsequently in your life, than actual events.
For example, you could have two people who are made redundant. One person says to himself, Well, I never liked that job anyhow, with the redundancy money, this could be my opportunity to train for something else. They feel upbeat and motivated to look for new opportunities. The second, roughly the same age, situation etc says to himself, after all the years I have given them , this is the way they treat me! At my age, I will never get another job. They feel angry, hard done by, not motivated to look for new opportunities.
So there you have it: the same “fact” but very different stories, resulting in different emotional states and different behaviour.
I started the Take the Steps courses in 2008, the year when everything in Ireland was falling apart, the media was full of doom and gloom. In fact, I actually started them as a reaction to the recession- I had previously been running meditation courses, but when the recession hit, I added in more positive psychology to the mix, explicitly mentioning it in my promotional material. The result was overwhelming, people just showing up saying thank God there is someone saying there is hope, that there is something positive somewhere.
Besides the Mindfulness aspect, I had one single message “it may be raining outside, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be raining in your heart”.
The courses have been running continuously since then, with thousands of people training their minds to focus on the good and to be more present in their lives. There is a training involved in both of these domains-in my experience very few people can do either straight off.
Accepting where you are, allowing yourself to be, is a key concept in mindfulness. False positivity, telling yourself everything is great, when it quite obviously isn’t, simply does not work, and is not sustainable.
Which is why I devised my step by step approach, which involves the heart, the emotions, the conscious and the unconscious mind, and your own internal storytelling. The courses are based on the latest research in neuroscience and psychology. The term positive psychology, by the way, was invented by that great believer in human potential, Abraham Maslow.
As a long time practitioner of yoga and meditation, I am a great believer in the power within, with the love and goodness at the core of each human being. Of course, if the mind is agitated and scurrying backwards and forwards, it is near impossible to reach that power, much less harness it.
In my view, meditation and mind training support each other. You need the right mental environment to access your spirit.
If you are interested in any of this, you can explore these topics more deeply in either of the courses starting shortly, one on Zoom and one in person in Dublin.