Change is Hard, But You Can Learn to Embrace it

Image by Chris Lawton

How are you with change? Do you love it, hate it, or somewhere in between? I must be honest – I’m not the biggest fan. My friends and family often tease me about my strong liking for things that are comfortable and familiar. Change can be unsettling for me – or rather, parts of me.

And I’m going through a somewhat turbulent period of change at the moment. Having decided to move out of my office and take my therapy practice online, I am having to negotiate a lot of logistical and other changes around that. We are also using the opportunity to do some much-needed work on our flat, so the builders arrived today – cue huge amounts of dust, noise and general chaos for a while!

As if to rub salt into the wound, my beloved gym did a big refurb last week – not very well, in my opinion – and has become a much less inviting space for me. So I’m looking to change gym too – which may not sound like much, but that place has been my haven for years. It’s a key resource for self-care and stress relief, so it’s a bit of a wrench to find somewhere else.

Although parts of me are excited about all of this, other parts are freaking out! And that’s how it is for most of us, no? I am always intrigued by the fact that lists of top-10 stressors feature a number of apparently positive events, like moving house, retiring or getting married. Although in many ways we enjoy change, finding it exciting, stimulating or rejuvenating, it can also be disorientating, uncomfortable and downright stressful.

The Buddha’s great insight

One of the Buddha’s profound insights was that humans naturally resist change. We don’t like it, fight against it and want things to stay the same. And we cling on to the idea that things can be permanent, unchanging and settled, especially if that helps us feel comfortable – like my gym. But the Buddha taught us that this idea of permanence is an illusion. In fact, everything is impermanent – constantly changing, evolving, breaking down and being reconfigured.

Take my body, for example. It’s made up of atoms, up to half of which were formed when giant stars reached the end of their lifetime and exploded in unimaginably vast supernovae, millions of light years from Earth. When I die, those atoms will become parts of other life forms, like a tree or snail shell. This is the way of life, constantly shifting, changing, evolving – because everything is impermanent, as the Buddha so brilliantly understood, over 2,000 years before modern science proved his theory to be true.

So I may not love change, or find it entirely comfortable, but I cannot resist it. That is futile – and a bit silly, really, because the Buddha also taught that this is how we create much of our suffering. We want things to be different, all the time. We’re all getting older, but want to stay young. We don’t like our job, but think we will be happy with that job, or this much money, or that pretty/handsome new partner.

Instead of this constant yearning for something else, the key to happiness lies in accepting that all we really have is this moment of existence. Everything else is like trying to grab smoke with our fingers, because the future is unknowable.

Learning to embrace change

So your challenge is to help the (young, anxious) parts of you that struggle with change. They need understanding and validation, as well as teaching that change can be tough, but it’s a core part of life. Change will happen whether we want it to or not, so we need to accept and embrace it, as much as possible. If you would like some concrete help with this, try this practice I developed for Insight Timer, Calming Your Parts: IFS Meditation.

It gives you a step-by-step guide to understanding and gently speaking to any parts of you that might be anxious, stressed or worried about change (or anything else you might be struggling with). I hope you find it helpful – and that you, like me, can learn to embrace change, bit by bit.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Would You Like to Live to 100? The Secrets to a Long, Healthy Life

Image by Huynh Nguyen

I often wonder how long my life will be. I’m 55 now, so hope to have at least another 30 years, if not more. My beloved grandfather lived to 104, so that bodes well, genetically! But perhaps more important than how long I live is how well I live – staying healthy, active and mentally sharp for as long as possible.

This intriguing question was answered in a fascinating Netflix documentary series I watched recently – Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones. It’s presented by author Dan Buettner, who travels around the world to different ‘blue zones’ – places where there is an unusually high concentration of centenarians – to find out why people live longer there. Buettner visits Okinawa, Sardinia, the Greek island of Ikaria, Nicoya in Costa Rica, Loma Linda in California and ends up in Singapore.

In each of these blue zones people do not just live longer, they live well too. And some live remarkably well – in Costa Rica, he meets a 100-year-old cowboy who looks about 60, but is still working from dawn to dusk. He is so remarkable that the Costa Rican researcher Buettner is working with doesn’t believe him and checks his age on the national register! He is, indeed, 100 – and miraculously young, fit and healthy.

The secrets to living long – and well

In each of these blue zones, there are slightly different factors that help people thrive into old age. In Sardinia, the steepness of your village is key, because it means you are walking up and down steep hills every day of your life. But this is also a theme, because although in Singapore people are strongly encouraged to take daily exercise like walking, cycling and working out by the government, it’s generally the constant, low-level exercise that marks these places out.

Gardening, walking instead of driving, dancing, chopping wood, doing things by hand around the house – this kind of activity is key for longevity. Diet is another theme, even though the particular things people eat vary from place to place. The religious community in California (who are also mad about exercise) are mostly vegetarian. In Costa Rica they eat lots of black beans, in Okinawa it’s a particularly nutritious purple sweet potato, murasaki.

But along with diet and exercise, the most powerful learning for me was that having a sense of meaning, or purpose in their lives was key. Alongside this was the quality of their relationships. In every village, town or city Buettner visits, people live in warm, interconnected webs of relationship. These elderly people are not put in care homes, but kept in their families’ homes, or visited often by people in their community.

Love is the magic ingredient

If I’m honest, this doesn’t surprise me. I have written often in these posts about the importance of (good) relationships for our health. Evolutionarily, this makes sense, because we evolved from a common ancestor with apes like chimpanzees and bonobos. Apes don’t live alone. They live in large, social groups, as did every species of human, including homo sapiens.

This began to change just 10,000 years ago, with the agricultural revolution – and accelerated a few hundred years ago with the industrial revolution. Workers moved away from their traditional rural communities (where they lived in villages full of extended families, much like the blue-zone inhabitants) to live in towns and cities, doing back-breaking shifts in factories before going home to their small, nuclear family, or living alone.

Research increasingly shows us that living alone is not good for us, especially if we are often lonely. So perhaps the most important thing you could do, today and for the rest of your life, is to invest in and improve the quality of your closest relationships. If your family of origin was not a happy one, think about creating a ‘chosen family’ – perhaps your partner and children, friends and neighbours.

The blue zones teach us that eating well, exercising often, maintaining our interests, hobbies and even work well into old age are all crucial ingredients of a long, happy life. But even more important is the quality of our relationships – loving and being loved is the magic ingredient to a rich and fulfilling life.

I hope you find that useful – and do watch the documentary series, it’s fascinating.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Why You May Have Experienced Trauma, Even if You Had a ‘Normal’ Childhood

Image by Jessica Voong

‘He didn’t see his childhood as unusual – it was the only one he had ever had.’ I read this line in a coffee shop earlier and it has really stayed with me. It was in a brilliant book, Why Therapy Works: Using Our Minds to Change Our Brains, by Louis Cozolino. It’s a bit dense, so probably more for the mental-health professionals reading this (or anyone else who enjoys dense psychology books!). But that line is so good – and speaks to something I see with my clients over and over again.

Because it doesn’t matter how bad your childhood was, what kinds of terrible things were happening – to you it’s normal, because that is all you know. Especially when you are young, before you have attended school, your house and family is your whole world. You might go to the park, or to other kids’ houses to play, but basically everything important that ever happens to you happens inside your family.

So even if your dad is drinking heavily, then shouting aggressively at your mum every night, that’s normal. Or if you grow up in poverty, feeling scared and hungry every day, that’s normal. If your parents clearly favour your sister over you and you know, in your bones, that they love her more than you, well that’s normal too.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that any of those things are OK, or right, or even normal by the standards of many other families. But it is normal for you, because that was all you knew then – and may still be normal for you now, until we work to reframe that story and help you realise it was neither good nor normal to grow up in that environment.

What children need to flourish

One of the central ideas in schema therapy is that of core needs. These are the developmental needs that all children have, whatever the culture or country they grow up in. These five needs are:

1. Love and a secure atachment

2. Safety and protection

3. Being valued as a unique human being

4. The ability to be spontaneous, play and express your emotions

5. Having boundaries and being taught right from wrong

It’s easy to see that the kids who are unlucky enough to grow up in traumatic, neglectful or abusive families are not getting these fundamental needs met. They probably don’t feel loved, safe or valued. Their emotions might be seen as ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’. And – a problem I see in many families today – they might have what we see as too much of a good thing. Meaning they are spoilt, allowed to say and do whatever they like without consequences. This is also a kind of neglect, because it produces unhappy children who will struggle to fit into society when they are older.

So, however ‘normal’ your childhood was, if these basic needs were not being met, it will have caused you problems as you became an adult. And it may well have been traumatic, even if it seemed normal on the outside, because being shouted at, bullied, devalued or ignored can all be traumatic for kids.

If any of this resonates for you, I’m very sorry you had a tough time growing up. But you may find this talk helpful, which I recorded for Insight Timer to help people tell a different, more compassionate story about their lives: The Story of You: How to Build Self-Compassion.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Why I am Moving My Therapy Practice Online

Image by Andrew Neel

After eight-and-a-half happy years, I have decided to move out of my office in north London and see all of my clients online. This decision has been a few years in the making, as after the pandemic I realised I could easily run my practice exclusively via Zoom. And the vast majority of my sessions are now online anyway, so it should be a smooth transition.

Of course, I didn’t start working online during the pandemic – I have offered online sessions for well over a decade. But during the lockdowns I realised that the kind of therapy I offer – integrating schema therapy, internal family systems and other trauma-informed models – worked really well online. I also have clients all over the UK and have worked with people across the globe, so switching fully to online work opens the world up even more, for me and my clients/supervisees.

I am also increasingly focusing on other areas of work, such as supervision (which has always been online), writing my blog and an upcoming self-help book, and being a meditation teacher for Insight Timer and elsewhere.

If you would like to see me for therapy, our sessions will be via Zoom, which works very well for most people. My only request is that you have a fast and stable wifi connection, as the only drawback to meeting online is when people don’t have good wifi and the Zoom video/audio keeps breaking up. This can usually be solved by sitting as close to your router as possible, but please do bear this in mind before getting in touch.

If you would like to see me for online therapy or supervision, email me at dan@danroberts.com or use my contact form to get in touch.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Warm, Loving, Calm… What Self-Energy Feels Like

Image by Zain Bhatti

Internal Family Systems therapy is definitely having a moment. If you have tried to find an IFS therapist or supervisor recently, you will know exactly what I mean. And if you want to train in IFS, you will actually need to enter a lottery, as the courses are so popular right now! So what is IFS – and why is it surging from a little-known, slightly out-there model to the mainstream of psychotherapy?

IFS was founded by Dr Richard Schwartz (who prefers to be called Dick) in the 80s. Dick says that he learned the model from his clients, because they kept saying ‘A part of me thinks this, but another part thinks that…’ or ‘One part wants me to binge on cake, but another part really doesn’t want me to and is berating me about it.’

As a systemic family therapist, Dick was trained to think systemically, because rather than working with an individual client his sessions featured their whole family. And he began to see these families existing not just in his clients’ external worlds but inside their heads, too. This, for me, is probably the biggest revolution to have occurred in the therapy world for decades – the idea that we are not just one, unified self (Dan) but we have a brain that creates what we think of as ‘us’ in a system of parts (the many parts of Dan).

What is the Self in IFS?

I won’t go into detail about these parts here, as I have explained them in many other posts, webinars and talks for Insight Timer. Instead, I would like to focus on what Dick calls, ‘Who you really are, deep down’. Because all of these parts, as lovable and well-intentioned as they are, often develop to help us deal with trauma or other painful incidents in our lives. So they are stuck in somewhat rigid roles, either holding painful memories or helping us cope with them. And the way they do that can, unintentionally, be deeply unhelpful – like the bingeing or berating in the example above.

One of the many lovely ideas in the IFS model is that there is another you, at your core, which isn’t a part. That you is warm, loving, kind, compassionate, strong, calm and deeply healing, if we can access its nourishing energy. And this is your Self.

Again, if this sounds a bit out there, just think about it from a biological perspective. Every second of every day of your life, your body is healing, repairing and replenishing itself. This happens on a cellular level constantly, without you having any awareness of it. We know this is true, because you’re alive to read this post!

If this constant cycle of repair was not happening, you wouldn’t be here. For example, if you broke your leg playing football, the doctors would set the bone and put a cast on your leg, but all the healing would come from within. Your body would heal itself.

The same is true of your mind, brain and nervous system – where all the wounds from childhood, or other painful parts of your life, need to be healed – and in IFS, it’s the Self that does that healing, especially for the wounded parts who live inside you. As a critical thinker, whose initial training was in evidence-based therapy models like CBT, this explanation helps me understand what Self is and why it is real. It’s just the psychological version of the same forces that heal your broken leg.

What does Self-energy feel like?

If you have never experienced IFS, this may still seem a bit weird or hard to grasp, which is fine. Dick says that until you experience this stuff, it’s all just words. But one metaphor that is often used for Self is that of the Sun. So if you imagine you are on that plane in the photo, when you took off and before you flew through the clouds, you would know the Sun was above them, intellectually, but you wouldn’t be able to feel it.

And then that magical moment would happen where you burst through the clouds and there, in all its glory, was the beautiful, life-giving Sun. You could see it, feel its warmth through the plane window – even if you shut your eyes its bright, powerful light would shine through your eyelids. There would be no doubting or questioning it, because you were experiencing this delicious energy, not just imagining it.

Here are some other times you may have felt Self-energy, without being aware of it:

• When you looked at your partner’s face, thought of all the years you had spent together, all the times they had helped you when you were sick, or down, or struggling and your heart just filled with love

• Sitting with a friend as they tearfully told you a sad story from their life and you just listened, calmly and patiently, before giving them a big hug and they collapsed in your arms, sobbing until the anguish left their body and they felt soothed and restored

• Holding your newborn baby in your arms for the first time and feeling the kind of overwhelming, all-consuming love you didn’t know until that moment was even possible

• Being in such a deep flow state while doing something utterly engrossing that time slipped away, your mind went quiet and all that existed was you, the moment and the task

• Holding your ground with a rude co-worker when they crossed a line and feeling completely calm, strong and sturdy – unshakeable in your conviction

• Seeing a photo of an impoverished child in your newspaper and feeling such sadness, such compassion for that little person that you immediately made a big donation to a charity working in their part of the world, which helped you feel hopeful and determined to relieve suffering in your human family

I hope that gives you a little taste of Self-energy, especially if you are struggling right now. Remember that, whatever you have been through in your life, it’s never too much and never too late to heal. And the magic ingredient in that healing is, of course, Self-energy.

And here is a practice I recorded for Insight Timer – Accessing Healing Self-Energy – which you might enjoy.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Could You Start a Ripple of Kindness Today?

Image by Vonecia Carswell

I think we can all agree that we need more kindness in the world. We live in an age when a small, noisy minority dominate both mainstream and social media, as well as our political systems. We see this with the ‘othering’ of refugees and asylum-seekers, portraying them as somehow less important and even less human than us. Instead of welcoming these poor, traumatised people with kindness and compassion, many news outlets and governments around the world treat them with suspicion and outright hostility.

But these actions are those of a tiny minority, who unfortunately are skilled at gaining positions of power and influence. It may surprise you, but study after study finds that most people don’t actually think like this. Most of us are socially liberal, kind, tolerant, altruistic and generous. One survey, published this week, found that Europeans have actually become more welcoming to people fleeing humanitarian crises, such as the heartbreaking one unfolding in Ukraine, in recent years. Happily, negative media stories don’t change the way that most people think, feel or act as much as you might expect.

Time and again research shows that most of us treat our fellow humans with love and respect. Please remember that, if the news is getting you down, humans can be selfish and cruel, but they can also be kind, warm, loving and open-hearted. It’s just that everyday stories of people being nice to each other don’t make the news, especially in today’s clickbait-driven media environment.

We are all inherently good

If you would like to know more about the goodness inherent in all of us, I strongly recommend reading Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Dutch historian Rutger Bregman. He makes a strong case that, despite all the tales of our ancestors’ warring and bad behaviour, throughout human history we have lived in ways that are far more prosocial, cooperative and altruistic than historians and anthropologists often depict.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that we are so much better, as a species, than the media makes out, it’s clear we are still facing some major challenges right now. As my last post argued, by far the biggest of these is climate change, which does require urgent and decisive action by every member of the human family, but especially those of us with the most power, both spending and political. We also face linked challenges of income inequality, with far too many people still living in poverty, lacking basic facilities like clean water and sanitation, the degradation of Nature and much more.

We also see increasingly polarised political and social debates in countries like the US, into us and them, right and wrong, liberals versus conservatives. And all these problems could be solved, or at least drastically improved, with a little more kindness. Drawing on newer, more highly evolved parts of the brain like the cortical layer – the uniquely human region of the brain involved in rational thought, science, mindfulness, compassion and other high-level cognitive abilities – we can learn to treat each other with kindness, civility and respect, even if we disagree.

Less us and them and more just us, because we are all human, many of us have trauma histories or other difficult experiences in our childhoods. We all want to be happy, for our loved ones to be safe, healthy and lead meaningful, flourishing lives.

Start a ripple of kindness

So, what can we all do to make the world a kinder place? I like to think about starting ripples of kindness as I move through the world. Of course, I try to do this in every therapy session I offer, every blog post I write, every webinar I teach or guided meditation I record. My guiding principles as a psychotherapist are to treat every person I meet or teach with love, kindness and compassion.

But I also try to do this in my daily life. Every time I hold the door open for someone, buy a homeless person a sandwich, or let another car out at a junction, I hope that this little moment of connection, of humanity, will make the other person feel as good as I do. And my hope is that they will pay this forward, holding doors or smiling at the next person they meet, and so on. And this creates ripples of kindness, of warmth, of mutually experienced pleasure at our shared humanity.

It may sound a bit far-fetched, but at worst it can’t do any harm, right? And the more we treat each other with kindness, the less division, antagonism and conflict we will have in our world. Plus research shows that being kind is good for your mental health, so it’s a win-win!

Here’s your homework for the week: think about how could you start a ripple of kindness today. Trust me, this is one piece of homework you will enjoy.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Are You Anxious About Climate Change? Taking Compassionate Action Will Help

Image by Ronan Furuta

My mission in life is to help people feel calmer, safer and more at peace. That’s what I do, all day, in my therapy practice. It’s what I try to do in my teaching and writing, including these posts for my blog. The last thing I would ever want is to make you, my lovely reader, feel more anxious.

But if there is one thing we should all feel anxious about right now, it’s climate change. That’s because the science overwhelmingly tells us that climate change is real, humans are causing it, it’s here right now and will only get worse, unless we take drastic action to minimise the damage. After a summer in which most of southern Europe seemed to be on fire, today’s news brings another terrible wildfire, fanned by hurricane-strength winds.

This time it’s in Hawaii and has caused devastation, as well as a tragic number of fatalities, on the island of Maui. Let’s all take a moment to pause, close our eyes, and send our love and strength to those affected by this awful fire, as well as the many other climate change-linked tragedies around the world.

At the same time as we watch these disasters unfold with increasing regularity, most of our leaders seem unable to grasp the scale of the problem. There are notable exceptions, like President Biden, who may not have a perfect record on climate change, but does recognise that we face a climate emergency and has invested vast sums into transitioning the US economy to clean energy (which has boosted the economy, reduced inflation and created jobs). He deserves far more praise and gratitude from the public than he gets.

Climate crisis = mental-health crisis

I’m sorry if this is reading more like an impassioned opinion piece than a mental-health blog post/newsletter – I am very passionate about this subject, as I think we all need to be right now. But I also think it is a mental-health issue, because so many people – especially the young, who understand climate change best and will be most affected by it – are incredibly anxious, stressed and depressed about our deteriorating climate, as well as the threat to wildlife and our natural world that climate change is causing.

And the real point of this post is to say: please don’t let climate-change anxiety overwhelm and paralyse you. That’s not good for you, but it’s also exactly what the fossil fuel industry wants. They want us to be so freaked out that we think, what can I do? This problem is far too big for me to change, so I will let the politicians work it out and keep flying multiple times a year, eating meat every day and driving my SUV.

In fact, things are far more optimistic than that, because small actions we all take can make a real difference to this big problem. We also know that taking compassionate action like this is hugely beneficial for our mental health, helping with problems like anxiety and depression, so it’s a win-win. I really don’t want to lecture or patronise you, because I’m sure you already do plenty and are trying your best, but a few suggestions would be:

• Eat less meat, especially beef and pork, which not only contribute to climate change but also Amazon deforestation (a key driver of deforestation is for industrial agriculture, using the land to grow soy beans to feed cattle)

• Swap your petrol or diesel car for a hybrid or, even better, electric car. Using more public transport, cycling and walking would also be great (and get you fitter too!)

• Fly less – perhaps once a year, for your family holiday. The vast majority of flights are taken by a small minority of people, so we can all make a difference by choosing a staycation or taking the train on holiday (which is also a far more enjoyable way to travel than flying)

• Use your vote to support the greenest party or politician wherever you live. And pester your politicians and government to do much more – like transitioning to net zero as quickly as possible

• Use your consumer power (something I think we massively underestimate) to pressure corporations into using less plastic, not buying meat or timber products sourced from the Amazon, and much more. Sadly, many CEOs only care about profit margins, so let’s hit them where it hurts, by boycotting the worst offenders and letting them know why we won’t shop with them until they improve

• And try supporting some of the many charities and pressure groups driving the green revolution, like Earthed, Possible, Avaaz, the WWF, 350.org, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and Greenpeace, who you can donate to using the button below

As I said earlier, please don’t let climate-change anxiety overwhelm you. This is a solvable crisis and we have all the solutions we need, right now. We, as the global human family, just need to act on them. Let’s do so today to make this beautiful, miraculous planet a safe, green paradise for our children and every generation that follows them.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

How to Generate Feelings of Gratitude, Even When You’re Struggling

Image by Taylor Deas-Melesh

I must confess, I have a complicated relationship with social media. In some ways, I like platforms like Instagram and the newly-launched Threads because they offer an unparalleled way to communicate with millions of people, all over the world. If you’re someone like me, who combines trying to help people with having lots of ideas and wanting to share them, social media is great. I also like how powerful it has been at de-stigmatising mental-health issues like chronic anxiety and depression. That’s a wonderful thing.

But I don’t like how addictive it is. I struggle to manage my screen time and social media consumption – and of course, neither of those things is an accident. Read Johann Hari’s brilliant Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention if you want to understand the way Big Tech has knowingly and systematically made us all addicted to tech. Having given up my other vices, this is one I still struggle with, which is kind of frustrating given how much I know about addiction and how to overcome it.

I also don’t like being bombarded with well-meaning but saccharine messages all the time, especially on Instagram. When I see yet another post telling me to ‘Think positive!’ or ‘Smile! It’s another beautiful day!’ I think to myself, That’s all very well, but have you ever been depressed? Do you know how hard it is to stop ruminating, beating yourself up or seeing nothing but bad in the world when you’re down?

If you have ever been depressed, you will know exactly what I mean. It’s like your mind is stuck in an endless loop of negativity, hopelessness and gloom. Someone telling you to ‘Think positive!’ is like telling an angry person to ‘Just calm down.’ Neither helpful nor possible.

Why gratitude helps, even when it’s hard

But that doesn’t mean we should forget about trying to be grateful, even if those feelings are really hard to generate. Why? Because extensive research shows how helpful gratitude can be for a whole host of mental-health problems, including depression. And, as I often say in these posts, our newfound discoveries in Western psychology are not exactly new. Generating gratitude has been a cornerstone Buddhist practice for 2,500 years, along with fostering other positive mental states such as compassion, loving-kindness, equanimity and happiness.

Again, I am not underestimating how hard it can be to generate gratitude for your life, especially if you are struggling with depression. I have been there myself and know how tough that can be. But I also know how helpful gratitude is for me, day to day, especially if I’m feeling a bit low or struggling to find reasons for optimism.

To make this a bit more concrete, here are some simple steps you can try if you would like to generate some gratitude…

The practice: finding reasons to be grateful

1. Remember that nothing is too small. If we are struggling to generate gratitude, we may be trying too hard and thinking we have to grateful for big, shiny things like a gorgeous new girlfriend or landing our dream job. These things don’t happen to most of us, most of the time, so it’s better to focus on small, everyday things.

   Sometimes, when I’m walking to the office and feeling a bit down, I work on feeling grateful for the things we mostly take for granted. I am so grateful for having enough nutritious food to eat today, unlike billions of people in the world, I think. I feel gratitude for living in a country that is not at war. No bombs fell on my street in the night. My family is safe and can go about their lives in peace. I’m grateful to have a warm, dry place to live, clothes to wear, just being able to walk along this pavement and spend my day mostly healthy and free from pain.

   There is so much to be grateful for if we just stop, look around at our lives and notice all the small, wonderful things we mostly ignore.

2. Keep a gratitude journal. This is a key positive-psychology technique that research consistently finds to be helpful for our mental health and wellbeing. At the end of each day, write in your journal, finding up to five things to be grateful for from your day. It could be small things, like eating a delicious peach. Or big things, like getting good grades for an exam, having a family member recover from surgery, or watching your baby take their first steps. Big stuff gives us more of a dopamine hit, of course, but small things work just fine.

   Here’s a step-by-step guide from the excellent Greater Good Science Center.

3. Give voice to the good stuff too. How often do we end our day grumbling to our partner or family member about all the bad stuff that’s happened to us? (Guilty as charged – sorry Laura). And that’s fine, of course – we need to vent and get stuff off our chests, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that our version of the day can be skewed to the negative. Because our brains have an in-built negativity bias, we tend to be laser-focused on things that are hurtful, upsetting, scary or worrying. That’s just how your brain has evolved, to keep you safe by scanning for bad stuff all the time.

   Once you have vented, try to find five things you are grateful about, as in step 2. Tell your partner, friend, family member or therapist all about them. If you’re speaking to a partner, it’s extremely helpful if you can find at least one thing about them you are grateful for. This is an important tip from renowned relationship expert John Gottman, who says the magic ratio with your partner is five to one of positive/negative feelings and actions.

Give these steps a try for one month and I am confident they will have a beneficial impact on your mood, outlook and sense of wellbeing.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Why Your Inner Teenager Needs Some Love

Image by Norbu Gyachung

The idea of an inner child is not a new one. This notion has been around, in personal-growth circles, since the 60s. In fact, the term ‘inner child’ was first coined by Carl Jung in the 19th century. What is different now is we have a number of psychotherapy models based on the idea that we all have different parts of our personality, the inner child being just one of them.

Schema therapy, internal family systems (IFS), compassion-focused therapy, trauma-informed stabilisation treatment and the structural dissociation model all operate from this foundational idea that we are not a single, unitary self but are made up of a kaleidoscope of inner parts. This is especially true if you have experienced trauma, because your brain helps you cope with traumatic experiences by creating some parts to hold traumatic memories and experiences, while others form to help you cope with the trauma. The jargony term for this is ‘multiplicity of self’, which I think IFS understands and explains best.

So, most of us are familiar with the idea that we have an inner child, who is young, hurt and needs our love, warmth, reassurance and healing to help all of us feel calmer, happier and more at peace. But you are probably less familiar with your inner teenager, who is just as important. This is one of the many things I love about IFS – Dick Schwartz, its founder, believes that we have a whole bunch of young parts inside, ranging from infancy right through to young adulthood.

And if you think about it, that makes a great deal of sense. Just compare a child at three and 13 – they are like different people. Or think about pivotal moments in your childhood and adolescence, especially painful or traumatic ones. If you get the idea of parts (which is now strongly backed up by neuroscientific research and theory) then it’s a logical step to say that there is a four-year-old, holding key memories from age four, a seven-year-old holding key memories from age seven, and so on.

Getting to know my inner teenager

In my personal IFS therapy – which has been a wonderful, transformative experience – we have done a lot of work with my teenage parts. And that’s because my teenage years were tumultuous, to put it mildly. Especially from 17-19, when I was smoking weed every day, getting into all sorts of trouble and driving my parents – especially my poor mum – crazy.

Like many teenagers, I was also unhappy. I remember feeling so insecure about everything – my appearance, which I really disliked; whether I was cool enough (no); whether girls liked me (rarely); essentially every aspect of my personality, my body, the way I spoke and behaved with others was internally analysed, criticised and found wanting. Hence, I now understand, all the weed-smoking and general bad behaviour. I was really struggling and so acted out, with a vengeance.

Almost 40 years on, my life could not be more different. I live a (mostly) calm, mindful, sober existence. My wild years are long gone and the strongest drug I enjoy day to day is caffeine! Thanks to many years of personal work, surrounding myself with loving, supportive friends, colleagues and family, as well as living according to Buddhist principles, life today is mostly good.

I used to be ashamed of those wild times, but the more I understood about my teenage years and how unhappy I was, the more I also understood why I behaved that way. So I love and forgive him, that painfully self-conscious boy. He had a good heart, but was struggling, as so many teenagers do.

The Practice: rewrite your life story

I hope you are starting to resonate with the idea that you have an inner teenager living inside you, carrying all the painful thoughts, feelings, memories and experiences of adolescence and your later teenage years. And just knowing this is a good start, because these parts often feel lost and left behind before we find and start to connect with/care for them.

• This period of your life may be especially important to reframe, telling a different story to yourself about how you acted and why. Creating a new, more understanding and compassionate story for myself about why I acted out the way I did has been hugely helpful for me. You may also need to forgive yourself for some pretty wild stuff

  Or you might just have felt deeply insecure, like I did, as this is a developmental stage when we are acutely aware of what others think of us and whether we fit in, our rampaging hormones also making us suddenly, painfully aware of boys or girls and whether they are attracted to us

• Try journalling about this period of your life, trying to make sense of any behaviour you might have felt ashamed of through the lens of child development, trauma, neglect and any painful family dynamics that may have impacted on you as a child and teenager. Understand that whatever you thought, felt, said or did was not your fault

  If you have teens in your life now, think about what makes them anxious, angry, upset, lonely, hurt or depressed. And think about why they feel that way as they cope with the emotional and hormonal maelstrom of teenage-hood

• Think about what you would say to them to try and explain all of that, or how you would help them feel calm, safe and loved. Then try saying those things to your teenage self, through journalling, in your mind or out loud

  Know that this inner teen deserves love, compassion and understanding as much as any other young person on this planet. And that you can give them all the love, now, that you didn’t get at that age – through journalling, reframing painful memories and perhaps help from a skilled therapist, who understands how to identify and work with your inner system of parts. I have found this process deeply healing, so I hope you do too

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Why I Have Decided to Wind Up My Heal Your Trauma Project

I have made the difficult decision to wind up my Heal Your Trauma project this month. It’s very sad, but is something I have been thinking about for a long time, as it has become increasingly difficult to juggle all of my commitments. I loved running Heal Your Trauma – especially hearing from and meeting so many of you at my webinars and workshops. That was such a pleasure and I’m sure we will stay in touch.

When I started the project in May 2021, I wanted to help as many people as possible with their mental health – especially those who couldn’t afford private therapy or were on long waiting lists for NHS treatment. I hope all of the many resources we offered over the past two years helped you in some way. I am particularly passionate about helping people overcome the legacy of trauma and will keep doing that for the rest of my career.

Free resources for you

In some ways, not much will change. My website offers a great deal of free resources, especially my blog, which offers hundreds of posts about all aspects of mental health and wellbeing. Please sign up for my newsletter, using the form below, if you would like to be the first to read my new posts every week.

I will also keep recording new guided meditations, most of which are available for free on Insight Timer. I intend to design and teach courses for this excellent app in the future, so again, sign up below to get the latest news about that.

All of my Heal Your Trauma webinars are available on vimeo.com – you can purchase access for just £10, to download or stream whenever you like. Just click on the button below to watch them now.

Of course, I will keep helping people through my busy therapy practice and offering trauma-informed supervision to mental-health professionals. I also intend to write a self-help book in the next few years, so watch this space for news about that.

I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to the wonderful people who have provided invaluable help and support these past two years: Laura Roberts; Sophie Akbar, Anna Rys, Claire van den Bosch, Gina Finegan and Farrah Whitsed.

And my special thanks to you if you have read my posts, come to our events or supported us in any way.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Are You a Perfectionist? Here’s Why That is Not Your Fault

Image by Mohamed Hassan

I read a lot of self-help books – and I mean, a lot of self-help books. I do this for various reasons. First, I enjoy them – I am fascinated by psychology and can’t get enough of new ideas, research and theories about why we all do what we do. Second, it’s my job – as a therapist, I am always looking for new and helpful techniques, innovative ways of thinking or changing entrenched habits. And third, I aim to write my own self-help book in the next few years, so I need a deep understanding of what has already been written, what is good about these books and what is not so good, as a reader.

If I’m honest, I stop reading most of these books halfway through, because often they have a great idea, tell you all about it in chapters one to three and then, well, repeat it in various ways until I get bored and give up. So the mark of a great book for me is that it holds my attention from first page to last. Not many books manage that, so I’m always delighted when I find one that does.

I am currently on page 211 of 253 of my latest book, so I’m pretty confident this wins the Hold Dan’s Attention award! It’s The Perfection Trap: The Power of Good Enough in a World That Always Wants More, by Thomas Curran, a professor of psychology at the prestigious London School of Economics. And it’s great – strongly recommended holiday reading, if you’re about to hit the beach.

Are you a perfectionist?

Let’s start here, because you may well think you’re not that perfectionistic. And you might not be, of course, or you might just not recognise this trait in yourself. Full disclosure time – until reading this book, I didn’t realise quite how perfectionistic I was! In fact, when I got annoyed with the book after a few chapters and said, huffily, ‘Why are so many of these damn books so bad?’ my long-suffering wife, Laura, laughed and said, ‘Oh my god. I can’t believe you’re being perfectionistic about a book on perfectionism!’

Crap, I thought, she’s right. My high standards for books (and music, movies, meditations, workshops, newspaper articles and much more) were always a badge of honour for me. I thought it meant I had good taste and high standards, not just accepting any old rubbish.

But I now see this is all part of my perfectionsim, what Curran calls Other-Oriented Perfectionism (this is one of three kinds, along with the Self-Oriented and Socially-Prescribed versions). My standards, it turns out, are way too high, both for myself and others. Sheepishly, I started reading again…

Where does perfectionism come from?

Another wake-up call in reading this book was just how much of my perfectionism – and yours, I’m guessing – comes from existing in a culture that intentionally creates it in us. Curran argues, convincingly, that the ‘supply-side’ economics of capitalism mean industrialised economies like those of the UK or US must continually grow to survive. And to keep growing, we all have to keep consuming – more TVs, iPhones, anti-ageing cream, high heels, washing machines, laptops and the rest – all the time.

What makes us buy all this stuff? A fiendishly clever advertising industry that makes us all feel insecure, on purpose, to then tell us, ‘What you need to feel happy is this holiday, or that new watch.’ With the advent of social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok, this manufactured insecurity has reached new heights – which is why, says Curran, so many young people are so unhappy now. They are constantly told they are not thin, pretty, athletic, smart, muscular, popular or cool enough.

They feel a profound sense of not being good enough, so aspire to perfection to try and feel better. Work harder, hustle, grind your way through school, university and the increasingly insecure, gig-economy-dominated world of work and one day you will make it! Just not today – so go and buy yourself a £4 Frappuccino from Starbucks to make yourself feel better.

You are enough, just as you are

Something I am always telling my clients (and myself) is that you are enough, right now. Just as you are. You are beautiful whether you’re skinny or not, perma-tanned or not, short or tall, young or old, wealthy or broke. You are a glorious, miraculous living being, with a body that is made of stardust; and a brain that is the most complex object in the known universe.

You, I hope, have people you love and who love you. As I have written before in these posts, that is the most important thing about your life – the relationships that support and nurture you as you move through it. Not money. Not fancy degrees. Not living like some Instagram influencer. The real purpose of life is to love and be loved.

So please don’t waste your life in a frantic scramble for something that is not real and certainly not achievable. Take it from me – perfectionism is a sure road to unhappiness. Instead, go for a good enough life filled with joy, richness, meaning and, above all, love.

Sending you love and warm thoughts,

Dan

You Need to Watch Dele Alli’s Powerful Interview About Trauma & Addiction

Following on from my last post, about men’s mental health, this is such a powerful interview. As a Spurs fan I have a lot of love for Dele – such a great player and obviously a guy with a very traumatic past. He was adopted and was in all sorts of trouble as a teenager, so this interview is about that and his recent struggles with addiction as the trauma resurfaced.

Please watch and share with any of your male clients/friends/family members who struggle to open up and keep their feelings locked away inside.

And big love to Dele. It took such courage to open up like this.

Dan

Why Men Are Struggling and Need Our Help

Image by Christian Erfurt

Let me start this post by saying that I am a proud, card-carrying feminist. I was raised a feminist by my fiercely intelligent and formidable mum – who was an unstinting champion for women’s rights in her decades of work as an academic and with the Labour Party. She taught me to respect women and women’s rights as a child and young man. And those values have stayed with me as part of my liberal, social-justice-loving, anti-discrimination outlook on life.

It’s clear that women still have a long way to go in their struggle to be treated with respect and as equals. To be paid fairly, feel/be safe both inside and outside their homes, as well as being represented as actual people in the media – not just idealised as skinny teenage girls and ignored/vilified once they turn 40. There has been a great deal of progress for women in some areas, but there is still a long way to go in others.

So this is in no way a pro-men/anti-women post, because that’s not who I am or what I believe. It is, though, a post that recognises a serious and under-reported problem: men are in big trouble too. As a psychotherapist, one of the biggest problems I see is that men are still much less likely to seek help when they are struggling than women. They are less likely to see their GP, for mental or physical health problems, and are reluctant to see someone like me if they feel stressed, anxious or depressed.

Just look at these sobering facts from the Mental Health Foundation, about men in the UK:

• Three times as many men as women die by suicide

• Men aged 40 to 49 have the highest suicide rates in the UK

• Men report lower levels of life satisfaction than women, according to the Government’s national wellbeing survey

• Men are less likely to access psychological therapies than women: only 36 per cent of referrals to NHS talking therapies are for men

Why do men suffer in silence?

Having grown up in the 70s, I think I get this problem from the inside. When I was a boy and young man, talking about your feelings would have been labelled as ‘weak’ or ‘soft’, or even ‘gay’ (the ultimate insult in those rather homophobic days). I never did it. None of my friends did it. It just wasn’t a thing.

And none of us had even heard of anxiety or depression. You were either like most people (sane and ‘normal’) or you were mad and would end up in the loony bin. Madness was scary – something you saw in horror movies or read about in the tabloids. So that, for us, wasn’t a thing either.

But – and this is the crucial point – it wasn’t that we didn’t struggle with those problems, we just couldn’t talk about it. And probably wouldn’t have known what to say, even if we could. I and many of my friends had traumatic childhoods. One of my friends had a father who was a heroin addict, with all the ensuing chaos for him and his family you would imagine. And one of my classmates at secondary school was one of three brothers – his older brother was also a heroin addict and this guy clearly, with hindsight, suffered from depression as a teenager and eventually committed suicide.

So it’s not like mental-health problems have somehow emerged in the last decade, just because we are all talking about them on social media. I and my male friends struggled with exactly the same things as teenage boys do today, we just didn’t have the language to describe them or get any help from adults.

What can we do for men?

We live in a very different world today. Not only do we understand and talk about mental health so much more, we now have highly effective treatments for every kind of psychological problem, from chronic stress to complex trauma. So I think the most important thing we can all do is to encourage the men in our lives to talk openly about their struggles.

That includes feeling depressed and especially having suicidal thoughts and impulses, because the worst thing we can do is ignore it, with the misguided belief that we will make it worse or more likely to happen. Ask your brother, son, dad, grandpa, uncle, nephew, cousin, friend, colleague, boyfriend or husband how they’re doing today. If they say something like, ‘A bit down,’ or ‘Been better,’ know that this is man-speak for depressed. They are likely to underplay their symptoms for fear of seeming weak or moaning too much.

If you do think they are depressed, ask directly, ‘Are you having suicidal thoughts?’. Use the s-word, don’t feel like you’re treading on eggshells. And be persistent, especially if you’re concerned about them – one discussion is not enough, either to find out how they are or get them some help.

If you are worried about this boy or man in your life, get them to see their GP. And if it’s financially viable, encourage them to see a counsellor or therapist. Just talking about this stuff, with someone kind and skilled, can really help. If they are struggling with more serious problems – like PTSD after a traumatic incident – make sure they see a trauma-informed therapist offering schema therapy, trauma-focused CBT, sensorimotor psychotherapy, EMDR or another model proven to help.

Let’s all put our arms around the men in our lives, because they (we) are going through a tough time. And loving, kind, patient conversations are a great place to start.

Sending you love and warm thoughts,

Dan

What Can Buddhism Teach Us About How to Live a Good Life?

Image by Jamie Street

Many of us in the West assume that Buddhism is mostly about mindfulness. That’s because, in the 1970s, mindfulness entered the Western medical mainstream as an eight-week programme: mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR). From there, interest in mindfulness snowballed until, today, we have mindfulness programmes in schools, prisons, hospitals, corporations – even the House of Commons!

And this is a wonderful thing – mindfulness has a host of benefits for our mental and physical health, so the more people incorporating it into their daily lives the better. It’s just that mindfulness, and meditation more widely, is just a tiny fraction of Buddhist teaching, practice and psychology. In fact, Buddhist teaching is mostly about how to live your life, rather than how to sit on a cushion.

As someone who has long been fascinated by Buddhism, I was intrigued by this idea – that there might be a set of guidelines about how to live a good life. And not just for monks and nuns – who have incredibly complex guidelines about how to live – but for a layperson like me.

I try to live my life according to these Buddhist ‘precepts’, which are very much guidelines, rather than strict rules. That speaks to me, because I don’t much like organised religion, the idea that this or that action is sinful and will be punished, or virtuous and will be rewarded by everlasting heavenly bliss.

Remember that the Buddha was primarily a teacher and psychologist, who offered his insights into how to free ourselves from suffering. And living by these precepts is a key part of that – so here they are…

The five precepts

1. To abstain from taking life

2. To abstain from taking what is not given

3. To abstain from sensuous misconduct

4. To abstain from false speech

5. To abstain from intoxicants as tending to cloud the mind

Let’s break these down, one by one. First, the Buddha taught that we should avoid taking life – in fact, we should not kill any ‘sentient’ being. This obviously means not killing any other human, but there is a great deal of debate about what sentient means and how far we should take it. Personally, this precept is a big part of my being vegetarian, because I don’t like to kill any other being – not cows, pigs, sheep or fish, but also ants, wasps and other pesky creatures. How you interpret this one is up to you, but given the climate emergency and ecological crisis, it certainly seems helpful to avoid harming living things wherever possible.

The second precept seems fairly simple – it basically means don’t steal. But it also means not cheating on your taxes, or exploiting other people’s generosity. If it’s not given to you freely, it’s best not to take it.

Precept three is all about sex – sensuous meaning sexual. So of course we should never assault, harass or harm anyone sexually. But I think this also speaks to not having affairs, using pornography, or otherwise letting your sexual desire lead you into taking unkind or un-compassionate action.

The fourth precept essentially means don’t lie. But this is more subtle, as it also means speaking the truth wherever possible – unless it means hurting another person. Sometimes it’s best to stay silent, or hold information back until someone is ready for it. So, as with all the precepts, it takes a bit of thought and is subtle and sophisticated, rather than a black-and-white ‘do this’ and ‘don’t do that’. You kind of have to figure it out for yourself.

Finally, precept five is all about drugs and alcohol – don’t misuse them, of course, but also don’t ingest anything that will make you mindless, as opposed to mindful. Remember that the Buddha taught we should aspire to being mindful all the time. When walking, eating, drinking, talking, thinking, using the toilet, working, watching a movie, and so on. All the time. So ingesting a substance that interferes with that ability is not helpful.

Advice for non-Buddhists

Let me be clear here – I’m not trying to convert you to Buddhism! These precepts are just as helpful for Christians, Muslims and atheists as they are for Buddhists. They are simply suggestions about how to live a good life, which causes you and other living beings as little suffering as possible. Feel free to follow all of them, or none. And if you do follow them, remember they are not strict rules, but guidelines that you can adapt to suit yourself and your situation.

For example, you may love meat as part of your diet. If so, perhaps you could reduce the amount of meat you eat and buy organic chicken, say, instead of battery-farmed chicken. That will cause a great deal less suffering to the chicken you’re about to stick in your oven!

You don’t need to be a monk, or live a perfect life. Just do as much good as you can and that will make a huge difference, to you and the rest of the world.

And I hope you find these ideas as helpful as I have.

May you be well

May you be happy

May you be free from suffering

Dan

What Our Cat Has Taught Me About Mindfulness

Juno the cat

If you follow me on social media, you will have seen a fair few photos of our gorgeous little cat, Juno. We re-homed her from a less-than-ideal environment over a year ago – and, despite being a bit stressed out when she arrived, she is becoming a calmer, happier, more affectionate creature day by day.

As well as being absurdly cute and strokeable (when she’s in the mood), she has taught me a great deal about how to be more mindful. Why? Because animals, like small children, are completely, utterly, 100% mindful, all the time. They exist entirely in the moment, with no worries about the future or rumination about the past.

Juno loves our garden, which we have rewilded and so, especially at this time of year, is like a jungle – with a tangle of grasses, wildflowers, trees and shrubs. This makes it cat heaven. She stalks through the undergrowth, pursuing her prey (mostly flies, thankfully – I am dreading the day she catches something bigger).

And I watch her in this wild, verdant world – ears and nostrils twitching, sensitive to the slightest movement and most subtle sound. This is mindfulness at its most rich, raw and vibrant – a profound sensory experience, with no distraction from a pesky human brain, reminding you to send that email or worry about the unfunny comment you made on FaceBook.

How animal brains differ from ours

One reason Juno can be so mindful is because her brain is very different from mine. The region of my brain that allows me to write this post, be a psychotherapist, read books, and so on, is the ‘cortical layer’ of the brain, especially the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the large frontal lobes just behind my forehead. The PFC makes my brain and yours a supercomputer, which is good (writing, being a therapist) and bad (worrying, ruminating, panicking about things that will never happen).

Cats – as far as we know – can neither worry about the future, nor ruminate about the past. That’s why their life is a never-ending stream of now-ness, with a total absorption in the present moment. Buddhist monks spend decades meditating in chilly Himalayan monasteries to achieve this level of mindfulness! That’s because it’s not easy for us, with our highly evolved brains that enable us to develop complex language, build cities and fly spaceships to Mars, but make it exceedingly difficult to stay quietly present in the present moment.

What we can learn from cats

So we have a lot to learn from creatures with more ‘primitive’ brains. First, try introducing more mindfulness into your day. A simple teaching that might help with this is, as far as possible, do just one thing at a time. If you are reading this right now, just read it. Don’t listen to the radio, or grab your phone every few seconds. When you’re reading, just read.

If you listen to music, try switching your phone to Airplane mode and just listen. When you’re having a family dinner, try getting everyone to put their devices, switched to silent, in a kitchen draw. Try really listening to your partner, or kids. I mean really listening. Not just waiting for them to finish so you can say the thing you think they need to hear. Just listen, deeply and attentively – they will love it.

And we know, of course, that developing these mindful muscles in the brain offers a whole host of benefits for our physical and mental health. Mindfulness, whether formal meditation or informal, listening-to-music practices, has been proven to reduce depression, anxiety and stress. It can also help to lower blood pressure and improve sleep.

And, perhaps most importantly, being more mindful helps us be fully present in the moment-to-moment unfolding of our lives. As far as we know, this is the only life we get, so I think we should squeeze every drop of joy, meaning, richness and experience from it, don’t you?

Be more Juno – your mindfulness teacher and mine.

Sending you love and warm thoughts,

Dan

Now Available: Download or Stream My Webinars on Vimeo

Image by Sara Kurfeb

If you missed any of my Heal Your Trauma webinars in 2022 or 2023, don’t worry – you can now stream or download them whenever suits you. All of my past webinars are now available on Vimeo – the world’s leading video-hosting site.

For just £10, you will get exclusive lifetime access to these powerful and highly informative 90-minute webinars, which are packed full of trauma-informed teaching and experiential exercises such as breathwork, guided meditations and imagery techniques.

We consistently get extremely positive feedback for our webinars, which you can read here.

Choose from the following highly popular webinars:

1. What is Trauma and Can it Be Healed?

2. The Healing Power of Self-Compassion (2022)

3. The Healing Power of Self-Compassion (2023)

4. Not Just Mindfulness, But Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness

5. How to Manage Your Inner Critic

6. Overcoming Depression: How to Lift Your Mood & Feel Calmer, Happier & More Hopeful

Don’t miss out – gain lifetime access now, for just £10 per webinar, using the button below.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Do You Struggle with Meditation?

Image by Medienstürmer

For many years, I really struggled to establish a daily meditation practice. I tried and tried, sticking to it for brief periods before losing the habit again. Then, finally, around 14 years ago I did an eight-week mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) course, which involved so much practice that it became second nature – and so part of my daily routine.

And I have never looked back. Today, meditation forms the foundation of my day – I practice every morning, which has a subtle but important effect on the rest of my day. That morning meditation definitely helps me feel calmer, more centred and grounded, with a greater sense of balance, whatever the day might throw at me.

But, having struggled to establish my own practice for so long, I understand that it’s not easy. Many of my clients also struggle to establish a daily routine, so I help them problem-solve that. Here are three things I suggest to them, which you may find helpful if you’re in that want-to-meditate-but-am-struggling-to-start place yourself.

1. Just sit. There is a wonderful – and typically pithy – saying from Zen Buddhism: Just sit. Meaning, meditation going ‘well’ or ‘badly’, just sit. Enjoyable or not, just sit. Noticing a benefit afterwards or not, just sit. Feel like meditating that morning or not, just sit.

   This is crucial because to develop a regular practice takes effort, discipline and determination. It’s not easy. Sometimes it’s enjoyable and you feel calm, grounded and quiet of mind. Other times your mind is so busy, minutes go by before you wake up and think, ‘Wait! Wasn’t I supposed to be meditating?’

   Doesn’t matter. There is a reason it’s called a meditation practice, or a yoga practice. That’s because meditating once might be nice, but won’t make any difference to your overall mood, wellbeing or mental health. Whereas meditating every day for years definitely will. So the first step in developing a regular practice is just to show up every day, no matter what, and meditate.

2. Thinking isn’t wrong. This is especially important for beginner mediators, because a common misunderstanding is that ‘good’ meditation means being calm, serene (probably in a perfect lotus position) and with a peaceful, empty mind. Let me tell you, after many years of meditating, that rarely happens! Minds are busy, busy, busy – it’s just what minds do.

   So let go of the idea that thinking while meditating is somehow bad or wrong, it’s really not. In fact, the primary purpose of meditation – especially in the Buddhist tradition – is to gain insight into the nature of your mind. So when you sit and, say, focus on the breath, you quickly notice how hard this is! Your mind is full of thoughts, worries, plans, fantasies, daydreams.

   Jon Kabat-Zinn calls this the ‘thought stream’, which is exactly how it feels. A constant, swirling stream of thoughts, which we spend most of our lives swimming in, happily or often not. Just taking a step back and starting to observe this stream is a huge shift, because then we can start to question its truth – and its helpfulness.

   So the oft-repeated teaching goes that you focus on the breath, notice your mind has wandered, gently bring it back, off it goes again, bring it back – 10, 20 or 100 times each time you practice. It doesn’t matter how often this happens, just keep gently bringing your attention back. This is like a push-up for your brain – and especially the prefrontal cortex (PFC), in which meditation helps build neural connections. And this is a good thing, because the PFC helps with your concentration, regulating your moods and emotions, having a sense of perspective, and a whole host of other good stuff.

3. Try different practices for different things. There are so many types of meditation and traditions, both secular and religious, that it can be bewildering. So a few simple tips. I would advise making mindfulness meditation your core practice. And mindfulness of breath is the simplest and most helpful mindfulness practice – you can try my guided meditation on Insight Timer, or choose another teacher you prefer. But start here, with a short (probably five-minute) practice and build up over time.

   If you are really struggling, a guided meditation will be easier, because sitting in silence when you feel awful is tough. Try one of Kristin Neff’s wonderful self-compassion practices, or Richard Schwartz’s internal family systems meditations. Find teachers whose voice and guiding style feels good for you.

   So mix it up, with silent practice forming the bulk of your sitting, but guided meditations when you are struggling or just feel like a change. That will also keep your practice fresh and maintain your interest over time.

I hope that helps. You may also be interested in my Insight Timer collection, which offers a large and ever-growing range of practices including breathwork, guided imagery and meditation practices drawn from various traditions.

Sending you love and warm thoughts,

Dan

How to Take Compassionate Action for Ukraine

Image by Christopher Beloch

As I read my newspaper this morning, my heart was full of pain about Russia’s latest atrocity against the Ukrainian people – blowing up the Kakhovka dam, which has caused massive floods around Kherson. These floods will (intentionally) kill many people, drive many more from their homes and is forecast to be the worst environmental disaster in the country since Chernobyl.

My first feeling was overwhelming sadness and a kind of mental/emotional exhaustion about the latest example of how cruel humans can be. I often feel overwhelmed by stories like this, because it can seem as if psychopaths like Putin, or narcissists like Trump and Boris Johnson, continue to gain power around the world and dominate our lives.

Why do we put these terrible people in positions of power? Why hasn’t humanity evolved beyond this by now? Why do the bad guys always seem to win?

The loving majority

And then I remember that the news is deliberately filtered through a negative, catastrophic lens to highlight the worst of humanity, the most scary and upsetting stories. There is so much good in the world, so much kindness, compassion, altruism and basic decency. I passionately believe that most humans are kind and treat each other with respect.

But we live in an age when the Putins, Trumps and Erdogans of this world cleverly manipulate the media (both mainstream and social) to trigger evolutionarily ancient parts of our brain, making us scared and angry, firing up our threat systems so we lose access to the rational parts of the brain and respond with hostility and mistrust. We are manipulated into blaming outsiders, ‘the others’, who may be refugees, people of colour – or Jews, like my own ancestors, who have been scapegoated and persecuted for millennia.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We – the kind, loving, determined majority – have so much power, if we know how to use it. And one way to exercise that power, today, is to take compassionate action to help the people of Ukraine. I see one small example of that in the Ukrainian family living downstairs from us, rent-free, in an expensive flat generously offered to them when they escaped the horrors in their own country.

My wonderful community

My local community has rallied round this family and other refugees in the area, giving them money, food, clothes, furniture, help and support in a thousand small but meaningful ways. I am so proud to live where I do – East Finchley, a tight-knit community in North London – and with neighbours who deeply care for each other, whatever the colour of their skin and wherever they are from in the world.

So, as you read about Putin’s latest act of madness, please don’t be discouraged. Never give up. As Martin Luther King reminds us, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’.

And if you would like to help people – and especially children – on the ground in Kherson, please donate to Unicef using the button below.

Sending you love and warm thoughts,

Dan

Missed My Recent Webinars? No Problem – Watch the Recordings Now

Image by Andres Ayrton

If you missed any of my recent webinars, you can now gain exclusive lifetime access to them for just £10. We record all of our webinars and upload them to YouTube – if you attend live, you will automatically get access to the private video, but we have also made these recordings available to anyone who might benefit from them.

All of my Heal Your Trauma webinars last 90 minutes and are packed with teaching about the latest theory, research and key take-home learning about each subject, as well as powerful and effective breathing techniques, guided imagery and a 15-minute Q&A, where participants get to ask me anything they want about trauma, mental health and wellbeing.

We get consistently positive feedback for all of our Heal Your Trauma webinars and workshops – you can read it here.

Highlights from 2022-23, now available to watch, include:

• The Healing Power of Self-Compassion

• How to Manage Your Inner Critic

• Trauma Healing with Internal Family Systems

• Overcoming Depression: How to Lift Your Mood & Feel Calmer, Happier & More Hopeful

• Not Just Mindfulness, But Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness

Don’t miss out on this highly experiential and transformative teaching – gain lifetime access to each recording for just £10, using the button below.

Sending you love and warm thoughts,

Dan

Where is Our Compassion for Refugees?

Image by Ahmed Akacha

This is a little different from my usual posts. It’s not about mental health – well, not about your mental health, or mine. But it is about compassion which, as regular readers know, is very dear to my heart.

Living in the UK, I have watched with increasing anguish as our right-wing government demonises and persecutes people arriving on our shores, frightened and desperate for help. Many of these ‘migrants’ are in fact asylum seekers, with perfectly legitimate claims for asylum. They are fleeing war, torture and persecution in troubled countries like Afghanistan, Eritrea or Sudan.

They increasingly arrive in small boats, making the perilous crossing from France because this government has made it very difficult for people to use safe and legal routes to enter the UK. Those of us who believe in a thriving, multicultural society, with a flow of migration in and out of the UK (which benefits the economy, by the way), have watched with dismay as our former prime minister, Theresa May, created a ‘hostile environment’ to deter immigrants. Later, the self-inflicted disaster of Brexit legitimised the racist, xenophobic rhetoric our right-wing media has been trumpeting for decades.

These poor, traumatised people arriving in boats often take great risks, putting their own lives and those of their family in danger, travelling vast distances in the desperate hope of finding safety, sanctuary and welcome in this country. Instead, they are treated as less-than-human, as things – to be feared and treated with disdain.

My refugee family

This demonising of refugees is a deeply personal issue for me, because I am the descendant of Russian Jews, who fled to Britain in the early 20th century to escape the violence and persecution of ‘pogroms’. My maternal grandfather was the first-born in this country when his family settled in London’s East End – where wave after wave of immigrants have made their home.

My wonderful, wise, warm-hearted grandfather later worked for a charity, the Jewish Board of Guardians, which worked tirelessly to help Jewish refugees living in the UK, including those fleeing persecution by the Nazis. My grandparents lived in terror of a German invasion – which came perilously close during World War II – for obvious reasons.

So when I see politicians talking about an ‘invasion’ of immigrants and using language not dissimilar to that of the Nazis, it fills me with horror. Have we learned nothing from history? Have we no compassion, no humanity, no basic decency?

Compassion for all of humanity

I think it’s crucial for those of us who embark on journeys of personal growth and healing from our own trauma to remember that compassion is not just for ourselves, or those close to us – the Buddha taught us that compassion must be for all sentient beings. That means all of humanity, not just those we like, or who share our skin colour, who are part of our tribe. All humanity, without exception.

I’m sure you agree. And I’m sure you are a kind, decent person, who may already do a great deal to help others. If I could ask you to do one small thing today, it’s to take compassionate action by donating to Refugee Action, a wonderful charity helping people who arrive on our shores, desperate for help. The button below will take you straight to their donation page.

Thank you – sending you love and warm thoughts,

Dan