My mother has dementia and lives in a care home and because of a rift in the family I only started visiting her when my father died suddenly in April 2009.  Because my family are so scattered the staff at the care home have become my family, and every week when I visit my mother we all have a lovely time.  One of the carers in particular has become a dear friend because the psoriasis on her arms, legs and body is the worse I have ever seen, although she is always covered so you would never know.  Her name is Carol and she is always so happy and when they arrange entertainment for the residents she is like the built-in warm-up act.

For the past year I have been doing some research on dementia and am very surprised at the benefits of Coconut oil.  My sister, who lives in Australia and who is retired so has more time, sent me this link and after watching it bought a job-lot and have been making cakes to take to my mother, and although her dementia is a lot worse that the man in the video, it has reduced the violent outbursts she has so she is more manageable.

Watch and see what you think.  I would be really interested in your views.

http://www.cbn.com/media/player/index.aspx?s=/mp4/LJO190v1_WS

I had a meal with my accountant who is also my friend and she was telling me that her friend who has severe psoriasis has been using coconut oil as a last resort and after three weeks her skin is so much better.  So on the Bank Holiday weekend I took some of my job-lot down to Carol so she could try it on her skin.  She put some on immediately and she said the hot, dry itching stopped immediately, which she was over the moon about.

When Carols husband came to collect her I was so shocked to see that he was a man I had worked with in 1976 when I worked at the Bank of England.  What a small world we live in!  I just couldn’t believe it.

I saw Carol this weekend and she says that all the areas of broken skin on her rump (good word) have healed over.  The inflammation has reduced slightly and it does not itch unless she gets very hot which sometimes happens as it is very hot in the care home.

Let me know if you are interested and I will keep you posted.

Coconut oil is very odd looking stuff.  It looks like soft candle wax.

Powerful quote

“In the practice of tolerance, one’s enemy is the best teacher.”

- The Dalai Lama, Head of State and Spiritual Leader of Tibet.

A few years ago I used to find it really difficult doing the gardening because I was very overweight and I suffered with severe arthritis pain.  I find it hard to believe the difference that loosing the weight has made to my life.  For me, when I was gaining weight, my mind was definitely not noticing the limitations the extra weight was having on my life.  I was eating for comfort, so I suppose you could say that my fat was my comfort blanket and all food was a ‘comforter.’

I can look back to the old ‘me’ and see that I was trying to dull the pain of the ‘trauma’ that had happened in my life.  None of the ‘trauma’ was of the earth shattering kind; it was more of the sharp intake of breath kind.  In the EFT world these two different types of trauma are referred to ‘Big T’ and ‘little t’, which describes it perfectly.  A ‘little t’ experience could be something like, a look that says ‘get out of my sight’.  Or you could be accused of something that you didn’t do.  You may witness an incident that shocks you, and causes you to take a ‘sharp intake of breath.’  If these experiences affect us, we could easily tell ourselves that we are being stupid and to forget it.  However if they have affected us, we really should deal with them because unless we do, they will always be there, like something we have brushed under the carpet, and we all know what happens if there is too much under the carpet, don’t we?  (It trips us up!)

I had a lot of ‘stuff’ under my carpet, and when I was doing my course we would practice on each other and my ‘stuff’ started to change as I was dealing with it, bit-by-bit.  As my ‘stuff’ became less painful, my view to food changed.  Food even tasted differently.

I remember the very first time I noticed this.  I was driving on the M11, coming back from a course weekend in London and I fancied an apple.  This may not sound odd to you but I had not eaten an apple or any fruit for about nine years.  The nearer I got home, the stronger this craving got.  I got off the motorway at junction 7, drove like a bat out of hell to get home as fast as I could, and the second I got in I grabbed an apple, cut off a chunk and put it in my mouth.  It tasted like pure nectar and I was in heaven.  I remember seeing the look on my sons face as he asked me if I was alright, he looked puzzled and shocked.  It was so funny!  Since then I think I can honestly say that ALL foods have changed their flavour for me.

It did not happen all together and it has not stopped happening, but without a doubt food has changed.  It is not the thing that is always in my mind, no-matter what I am doing.  It seems to have found its place as an enjoyable part of my life.  It is something that I manage and don’t think about in the same way.  It is easy!!!

From my heaviest I have lost about 10 stone (about 64kg), and I still have about 3 (about 19kg) to go.  I have lost all this without being on a diet or counting calories.  I do feel I am now on a plateau and that I may need to be a little more conscious of what I am doing to lose the last bit, but I feel it is something that I can easily do.

I now realise that unless we deal with the cause of our problem, losing weight will always be hard work, and I definitely think things should be done the easy way, if at all possible!

Quote

“Out past the barrier of your comfort zone lies everything your Heart desires – get out there!”

- Jackson Kiddard, author & polymath.

 I would love to hear your comments so please let me know!

Speak soon.  Barbara.

Sorry for the delay.  Life just seems to get in the way sometimes, doesn’t it?

I promised that I would tell you how the whole family benefit if one member works on their issues.

Let us imagine that we are invisible and we can go into a family home and watch how they interact with each other.  Let us imagine that there are four people, a mum and dad, and two children of say 10 and 14, and let us imagine that they are what we call an average family (whatever that is) where the father works full time, the children go to school and the mother has a job outside the home, either full or part-time.

Look at the different personality traits in these four individuals.  They have different life requirement pressures, different personal requirements, different toleration levels and different understanding of the others.  The communication between them is influenced by all these different factors, so if one of the family members has something in particular that is affecting them, or on their mind, this will influence how they interact with the others and also outsiders they interact with during the day.  This in turn has implications as to how the others interact with them, and how the others may interact with outsiders that they interact with.  This could cause normal communications to be less ‘smooth or easy’ than they could be.

If the person with the issue got help and changed how they felt about their issue, that would change how they felt which would change how they communicated and that would also change how others would communicate with them.

So when I think about working with an individual, I imagine that the work I am doing is like a drip of change in a pond of unrest and eventually a molecule of my change will be a part of the each part of the pond.

See you next time.

Barbara.

I have been thinking about how the skills I have learnt, have helped and changed me.

In my old life I was a mess.  I had no confidence or self-esteem and was the size of a house.  I managed to trip from one hick-up to another, just managing to cope.  I was, most definitely, a victim.

I think the most powerful thing I have learnt, and the thing I work hard to put across to my clients is, ‘OWN YOUR LIFE’.  Don’t be taken along with it – TAKE CONTROL.

This can’t be done overnight!  There are many aspects of you that make you unique and they are important and valuable.  Deal with each one and you will get there.

We are all a ‘WORK IN PROGRESS’

Next time:  How investing in one member of the family, helps and changes all the members.

Consciously we are able to give out the message and signals that we decide is appropriate, but unconsciously, or subconsciously as some refer to it, it is a totally different thing.

There is no precise percentage of conscious or unconscious areas of the brain, but the figures are around 2-7% conscious and 93-98% unconscious, so whichever figure you choose to go with, the unconscious mind is huge in comparison to the conscious.  So how exactly do we know what messages we are sending out?  The answer is, we don’t.  If you have some knowledge in ‘Body Language’ or ‘NLP’ you have a little more chance of understanding some of it.

Let me give you an analogy

Imagine you and I are standing in a corridor and we are by some double doors.  On the other side of these double doors, there is a hall which, for the past 30 minutes has contained 100 people, who before today had never met.  There are no chairs in this hall, so the people have been milling around chatting, finding people they feel comfortable to talk to.

You and I walk in and notice that these people are standing in small groups.  As we look around we have thoughts like, ‘I could talk to you’, ‘You look OK’, ‘Oh no, I couldn’t talk to you’, and as we look round the room we are unconsciously deciding who we would feel happy to talk to.  How do we do that, and how do we do it so quickly?

We do it quickly because Neurons travel quickly.   What our unconscious mind is doing is noticing body language that consciously we are unaware of, and running that past a ‘blueprint’ of behaviour we are familiar with.  When it finds behaviour that is familiar to what we have been exposed to in the past, it becomes comfortable with it and we feel that we could talk to these people.  Our unconscious mind does not filter for good, bad, positive or negative, it just knows familiar.

So that is how we are automatically drawn to ‘what we already have’.

I would love to hear your comments.

It is a place where you can change from feeling one way about something to feeling another way, a way you would prefer to feel and the way you choose to feel.

Feelings are a product of a thought. These thoughts can either be conscious or unconscious, either way, you can change them and the feelings linked to them.

When you decide to work with an Equinox Life Coach, you will learn many things that will release the power within you, enabling you to become the controller of your world.

You will learn how your body works and that symptoms are communications which can be changed and even stopped.

You will learn the advantage of seeing things form a different perspective, and how this gives you the choice of how to respond, so you can decide how to deal with it in a more ‘YOU’ friendly way.

How changing what you think about yourself, changes how others see and treat you.

When you feel that you are not important and your needs are irrelevant, this is the message you are putting out to the world, and others pick up on. You are constantly trying to please everyone; you spend the day running around trying to fit everything in. You could start your day earlier than others and still be working after everyone has finished. If you are unable to get everything done, you then feel guilty about letting them down. Does this sound familiar?

Let us look at this from a different perspective? When others see you running around trying to ‘people please’, what is their impression of you? Would they think that you respect yourself? Are they picking up the impression that what YOU want is important? If the answer to these two questions is ‘NO’ then the probability is that they will treat you the way you expect to be treated, so you will get more of the same.

The only way you can change others is by changing you!

Now let us say that you start to value who you are and what you do, so therefore you feel you deserve to be treated with respect. At first this could create difficulties but eventually, as long as you hold strong to your new beliefs, others will notice the change and become aware that if they want to interact with you, they need to do it your way, or not at all. Before long, when they have dealings with you they will automatically deal with you in the respectful way that you feel you deserve.

Remember: A door mat is used, not respected.