Tag: <span>tapping</span>

Positve thinking Uncategorized • • • • • • • By Brad Mace 0 Comments

How positive thinking improves your life!

A sign saying negative think positive but the negative is crossed out.

 

So what are the amazing benefits of embracing positive thinking? Thinking with a positive mindset gives you freedom! But what exactly does it free you from? By developing a positive mindset you get freedom from all the negativity inhabiting your mind. When you have negative thoughts it corrupts your mind and then gradually pollutes your emotions. It also has a detrimental affect on your behaviour and attitude. Any thoughts that instil fear in you and make you succumb to your fears are also negative thoughts. Thoughts such as ‘I am incapable of doing that’, ‘I am not good enough’,  ‘I am a failure’ and ‘what if something goes wrong’ and similar thoughts are all negative and it is this that prevents you taking a step forward because these thoughts make you feel incapable of doing something. If you surrender to these thoughts each time, and never consider going against them, then you get stuck in a cocoon of negativity, and you are never able to live freely.

BUT there is good news. By learning to develop a positive mindset, you learn to battle the negative thoughts emerging inside you. Positive thinking helps you realise that your negative thoughts, feelings and emotions are nothing but a corruption of normal thoughts. There isn’t anything that you cannot do! Really it is just a matter of trying. By retraining your mind it helps you to be liberated from the negativity rooted inside of you. This makes you stronger standing on your own and putting an end to pessimism. Once you can do this you will learn that life is much more beautiful and much simpler than you have been making it. It is wonderful to be free from negativity and break down those barriers that stop you from chasing your dreams and goals.

In addition to freeing you from your negative thoughts positive thinking helps you become free by helping you see the many different possibilities in life. Research shows that a negative mindset pushes you to only behave in a specified manner. When you have negative thoughts you become frightened of certain outcomes and prevents you from taking any action against that possible outcome. So you can’t get beyond that to get a chance to see the other side of the coin. Sometimes our minds are conditioned to see the bleak things only but with a combination of hypnotherapy, Psychotherapy and Emotional Freedom Technique then our minds can easily be deconditioned as long as there is willingness for that to happen.

By developing a positive attitude and mindset you become more open to things instead of being restricted by your negativity, you start considering different ideas and seeing so many other possibilities in life.

Positive thinking is also very empowering as it helps you to build your own unique skill set. We are all gifted in different ways and negative thinking often stops us from being able to access those skills through a lack of self-confidence. The lack of self-belief, which feeds a lack of confidence can keep us in a terrible job that we don’t like or makes us dependant on others financially. By developing your positive thinking you become open to the thought that there might be something special about you as well! You might have a hidden talent that could help you towards your dreams and goals. This type of positive thinking will boost your self-confidence which makes you dig deeper in yourself to find your true potential thus enriching your life and opening up those opportunities you thought were just dreams!

For more information about positive thinking and overcoming barriers visit www.positivelycalm.com. Change your way of thinking now because YOU deserve it! You will find you have much more energy and will be so much happier!

Completing your therapy • • • • • • • • • • • • • • By Brad Mace 0 Comments

Therapy is a journey – AND the rewards are SO worth it!

A man climbing up the side of a rock with the words "never give up on youself"

Therapy is a journey – AND the rewards are SO worth it!

Hello there everyone. I really hope that you are enjoying the summer! It’s so nice to get outside more often, have longer days and some nice healthy walks in the fresh air. I do apologise that I haven’t blogged for a few weeks but things here at Positivelycalm therapy have been busy busy busy!!

I’ve chosen to speak this week about the importance of sticking with therapy. One of the most disappointing aspects of any therapy practice is when a client quits therapy before it is complete. Although this doesn’t happen often there can be several reasons for this but the most common, especially when a client is going through analysis, is when a client is having difficulty coping with discharging negative feelings. Of course there are some problems that can be treated just with one or two sessions such as quit smoking but many symptoms require  full analysis. Every therapist would love to be able  wave a magic wand and make those negative feelings disappear straight away and if we could do it that quick I’m sure we would all be millionaires. The truth of the matter is that we do have to face up to these negative feelings before we can release them. To do this we have to relive or re-feel them in order for our subconscious and conscious adult minds to make sense of them to let them go. Therapy guides us to face up to those negative feelings buried in our subconscious but facing up to them and re living them as an adult is the most sure fire way of having an understanding of them and letting them go. During your therapy, over the weeks, there are moments when you can feel really good and this is an indication of how you shall feel once therapy had been completed. Not everyone’s therapy experience is the same and no one should be treated as a text book case as we are certainly all individuals. Some people start feeling better straightaway or after one or two sessions. Some people take longer and sometimes people are just very up and down throughout their therapy experience. These feelings are quite natural and all I can advise is not to give up and just ride the wave until the end. Therapy is very much a journey. It has its ups and downs but the destination is fantastic!

Another reason people may give up on therapy is that they just don’t believe that they are getting anywhere quick enough. They may have known someone who has had therapy and been better in two sessions yet they have had six sessions and are not yet anywhere near where they want to be feeling. Again we are all different. Our mind-sets and the way we all see things are different and our reactions to things are not all the same. Also some people’s problems are much more deep rooted than others. Any therapist would not be seeing you if they didn’t think that they would be able to help you and that is why I offer a free initial consultation so that I can ascertain wether I can be the best help for the particular problem  and the route of therapy to go down. If I don’t believe that I would be the best possible therapist for the particular problem then it is my duty to point you in the right direction and maybe towards a therapist who specialises in the particular area that you may need help. So, a therapist wouldn’t be seeing you if he/she didn’t think there could be an improvement. Some people just take longer than others. Some people take longer to subconsciously process things depending on how deep rooted the particular problem is and there are people that just need different therapy strategies and coping mechanism where there are some that alleviate their problem with one therapy which could also be alleviated in fewer sessions. SO DON’T GIVE UP!  Everyone deserves to feel good and not to carry around negativity. Don’t accept that’s just the way you are. We were not born negative. We can all change and we all deserve to change it’s just some people improve quicker than others. Please don’t give up because YOU ARE WORTH IT! 😉

positivity Uncategorized • • • • • • • • By Brad Mace 0 Comments

Keeping on that positive vibe……..

Keeping on that positive vibe

Everyone has bad days from time to time. Although we all tend to want to be positive there are often over riding factors. We are all human after all and there is no such thing as a perfect life. For whatever reason challenges are often sent our way but it is how we choose to react to those challenges that determines our mindset. I’m often asked what we can do to keep our energy positive so here are a few ideas.

Express gratitude – When negative events or people have an effect on your life it is always important to remember all the good things that you do have to balance this out. Try at least once a week to reflect on what you are grateful for and why. You may want to write down all the positive things about your career, your love or family and friends that support you. Remember a really good or positive event from your life and concentrate on how that makes you feel.

Meditation – Sometimes we need to let go of over whelming thoughts and clear our minds of clutter. Deep breathing exercise and relaxing music can help with this. Also repeating positive affirmations can be a great help as this can help train your mind to believe the affirmation and guide you towards your positive goal. Click here to see my blog on meditation.

Challenge your negative thoughts – Whenever negative thoughts come into our minds we can choose how we respond to them. It’s easy for our minds to tend to dwell on negative events which can end up magnifying things far bigger than they really are. Try interpreting these things differently. For example your car won’t start in the morning. Instead of thinking ‘I’m rubbish, everything goes wrong for me’ try thinking ‘It’s good that this has happened now and I haven’t been left stranded on a motorway.’ Anyone that has had cognitive behavioural therapy will know that this involves keeping a thought and feelings diary. This helps to bring negativity into a real perspective and we are able to reframe these thoughts and feeling much more positively. This is all about re-training the mind and although it might not happen overnight this is something that with practice will start coming to you more naturally.

Emotional Freedom Technique – EFT is a really good tool for confronting our negative feelings until we can bring the feeling down and then re-framing positively. This is done by tapping on acupuncture points alongside affirmation like suggestion. For more about emotional freedom technique please click here.

Meditation Uncategorized • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • By Brad Mace 0 Comments

Improve your life through Meditation

Improve your life through Meditation

A person sitting in the lotus meditation position meditating

Hello everyone and I hope that you have all had a positive week since my last blog and as you can see from the title of this weeks blog I have decided to talk to you about how you can improve your life through meditation as I believe that meditation is beneficial to each and every one of us. It is a natural mind state that many of us have become detached from. Everything has become so fast in our lives now that people find it hard to switch off. In fact we could all benefit from learning to LITERALLY SWITCH OFF! That’s switch off your mobile phones, your ipads, your wifi and all this other electrical equipment that is putting different radio waves and electric ions into our surrounding atmosphere. It is a good idea to first switch these things off before we can relax our minds and go into our own meditative state and SWITCH OFF our own minds. Our minds definitely need much more rest than they are currently getting.

I learned meditation myself at quite a young age. I did have some trauma in my life and I now believe that meditation saved me from quite a lot of psychological damage. Of course at a very young age I didn’t even really realise I was meditating and I certainly didn’t realise that meditation was a form of self- hypnosis. So, for me, at that time it was escapism, turning my mind off to the real world. This used to be more in the form of reading fictional books or pretending I was someone else. It was all a coping mechanism I naturally used to help me through some harder times. It was later on when I was in my teens that I discovered what meditation, as we know it now, really was. I believe everything that happens to us happens for a reason and I was lent a book on meditation and astral projection that I found fascinating. I found that, with some practice, I could learn to shut down my conscious mind and enter a state of extreme relaxation. I say with some practice because it’s not something that you can learn to do it one sitting. Like everything worth having you really have to practice and train yourself as it is a discipline. It is a fantastic practice to learn though for your own physical and mental health.

To begin with it was just a case of sitting down quietly somewhere I wouldn’t be disturbed and trying to switch off my thoughts. This wasn’t always an easy task so I often used my imagination to focus on something. I remember imagining a flickering candle in my mind and concentrating on that until I felt my mind and body relaxing. Sometimes I would put relaxing music on (with no words) and I would focus on this, again, until I felt my mind and body quietening down. The more I practiced this, the easier it got, until I was finding myself in deep meditative states. I didn’t realise it at the time but when I became trained as a professional Hypnotherapist I realised that I was putting myself into self -hypnosis where I could often find answers to questions and solutions to problems that would naturally come to me. I believe that this is our natural way of being. How we should be much more of the time than we currently are.

So, what are the benefits of meditation?

Calmness – Letting go of negative thoughts so that the mind doesn’t dwell on them until they are blown completely out of proportion causing anxiety. The act of the deep breathing exercise also helps to slow and calm our bodies down.

Anti-Inflammatory – Stress cause inflammation which has been linked to heart disease and asthma and skin conditions such as psoriasis. Relaxation through meditation helps switch off this stress response. This is also very good for Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

Lower blood pressure – A study at Harvard Medical School found that meditation lowered blood pressure by making the body less responsive to stress hormones, in a similar way to blood pressure-lowering medication. Meanwhile a British Medical Journal report found that patients trained how to relax had significantly lower blood pressure.

Increased Fertility – Studies at the University of Western Australia have revealed that women are more likely to conceive when they are relaxed and men have a boost of sperm count through relaxation.

Helps cure neurosis – Helps to find emotional balance and cure neurosis and un healthy emotional states. It helps cleanses emotionally soaked memories.

Boosts Immunity – Relaxation has been shown to help boost the immune system making it very beneficial to recovering cancer patients. A study at the Ohio State University found that progressive muscular relaxation, when practised daily, reduced the risk of breast cancer recurrence. In another study at Ohio State, a month of relaxation exercises boosted natural killer cells in the elderly, giving them a greater resistance to tumours and to viruses.

Aside from the regular sitting still and closing your eyes and trying to clear your mind there are many other ways to meditate from using guided imagery to breath focus, yoga, saying mantras and guided imagery. I find the most beneficial meditation for me is a tapping meditation using Emotional Freedom Technique. An introduction video to EFT can be found here. And a video showing me demonstrating the basic recipe for tapping can be found here. If you would like a guided imagery relaxation audio you are welcome to download my relaxation mp3 FREE OF CHARGE here.

You may want to try some different forms of meditation to see what works for you. The important thing is to find the time to do it, even if it is just twenty minutes a day. We all deserve at least that. Give it a try and see how much more positive your life becomes. GO ON! YOU ARE WORTH IT!

HAPPY MEDITATING!

 

Brad Mace, Dhp, MAPHP (acc).

Anxiety coping mechanisms EFT fear of flying Hypnosis Hypnotherapy Motivation positivity Self-improvement Therapy • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • By Brad Mace 2 Comments

Fear of flying. Plane stupid?

A man flying in the clouds with an ipad attached to his chest looking panicked.

Fear of flying. Plane stupid?

Hello again everyone. Welcome to my latest blog about fear of flying. I apologise for there not being a blog for the last couple of weeks but this is due to me taking a much needed holiday. I always choose to go away somewhere nice and warm as it is coming to the end of winter here. It’s nice to soak up the sun after the many months of early darkness and dreary grey days knowing that on my return home that it is nearly spring and the days are getting longer and the sun is beginning to shine much more warming us both physically and mentally. Sometimes it’s not until you actually go away that you realise how much the rest is needed. While I was away it got me thinking about people that have a phobia of flying (aviophobia) and how awful it must be not to be able to just escape to another country when they feel like it. The interesting concept of phobias is that there is not normally a rational fear behind them. Even if the fear doesn’t actually prevent a person from travelling anywhere it can greatly impair their enjoyment of the journey. We all know that flying is actually one of the safest forms of transport but many still hold a fear which is out of their control. So, what can they do about it?  After all there is far greater risk, statistically, of being kicked to death by a donkey than dying in a plane crash.

I have had a very high success rate with fear of flying using a combination of Hypnotherapy and Emotional Freedom Technique. EFT is a great self-help tool that can be used to bring down any anxiety about flying and the beneficial aspect of this therapy is that, once learned, it can be used anywhere. On the way to the airport, at the airport or sitting on a plane. That is the wonder of emotional freedom technique. I would, however, look deeper into the root cause of the problem to help clear the phobia using hypnotherapy. In my experience the majority of the time it’s because of one issue – CONTROL. People feel out of control in a plane. The average person does not have is a great understanding of how planes work and what the noises are that they hear and where there is a lack of understanding people feel out of control with many not able to put their trust in a pilot that they don’t know and a machine that they don’t understand. If a client feels out of control in their life then this problem will just be exacerbated. This may not  necessarily mean that the client is feeling out of control presently but using hypno-analysis we can look into the past and find out the originating cause of the phobia. This may not necessarily even have anything to do with flying or planes but may just simply be a control issue or a deeper set condition.

I once had a client, many years ago, that had never flown and even if she saw a plane flying overhead she would duck in panic! Hypnosis regressed her to eight years old where she remembered watching a news report about a plane that crashed onto a motorway. This had made the news as it was such a rare occurrence but the fear of seeing that at her young age was repressed into the subconscious causing her phobia. Reliving this event as an adult helped release the negative emotion stuck in the subconscious and we used some suggestion therapy for another couple of sessions re-framing any negative thoughts related to flying. She wrote to me after, happily informing me she had taken a short flight and actually enjoyed it and had booked a much longer flight for her honeymoon.

So, what should you do and not do should you suffer from fear of flying?

  • Don’t avoid flying. It is a treatable problem. Fears and phobias have one of the highest success rates for treatment of psychological problems. We tend to make ourselves feel safer by avoiding things but we truly grow by stepping outside our comfort zone.
  • Think about the destination you are going to. Really focus on all the positive things about being there.
  • Challenge any negative thoughts. There is a big difference between discomfort and danger. Think about your triggers. If turbulence is a trigger, for example, think about it logically. ‘Ok I might spill my drink but the plane isn’t going to fall apart.”
  • Learn some relaxation techniques. Deep breathing exercises, meditation and of course emotional freedom technique will all help. Reading is also a very good distraction or listening to music.
  • Keep hydrated. Try to avoid alcohol and drugs. Before and during the flight, it’s important to keep blood sugar levels up. Stick to water and juices to keep hydrated and remember to eat little and often to maintain your energy, which can help control anxiety levels. Rest if you can, though sleep is not essential.

To learn more and for further support with any of these issues please contact me for a free initial consultation.

Happy Holidays! 😉

Hypnotherapy discount for emergency service and care workers

In the fast-paced and high-stakes world of emergency services, the mental and emotional well-being of personnel is often …

Revolutionising Mental Health: BWRT – The Therapy World’s Storming Solution

  In recent years, the world of therapy and mental health has witnessed a paradigm shift in the way we approach and …

Breaking the Silence: The Celebrity Shield in Sexual Abuse Cases

In recent years, the world has witnessed a growing wave of movements and campaigns aimed at raising awareness about sexual …