Monthly check-in: September – The “meditation is an extreme sport” edition

It’s that time again…

Oh my god. Where do I start? This last month has been a roller-coaster ride, and I have no idea how all of this happened. It began, oddly enough, with a pair of headphones.

A few days into the month, I discovered that for the last two or three months, I’ve been using the wrong headphones to listen to Holosync every day. This heralded a search through all the cheapest stores in town, and learning all about frequency response and exactly what frequency I needed my headphones to be capable of producing, even if I couldn’t hear it.

That, though, was just the start of it. Once I’d bought the right headphones from an empty Argos store that appeared to employ zombies, I discovered just exactly what I’d been missing using my old headphones.

Now, any sensible person would probably decide that it would be a wise move to go back to the first disc of Awakening Level 4, and start again. But that just wouldn’t be me, would it? I carried straight on, and found myself going through the most profound growth and internal change that I’d ever experienced in all the two and a bit years I’ve been using Holosync.

I dipped in and out of ‘depressive episodes’, and after each one I found myself improving, changing. By the end of the month, I’d given up Pepsi Max – to which I’ve been addicted for most of my life – and become a tea drinker. Not only is this healthier, but I also feel more genuinely British as a result. I didn’t even have side-effects from quitting.

By the middle of the month, I knew I needed help, so I took off to the doctor and was given a short term course of dothiepin to get me through the rough bits.

I never realised meditation was an extreme sport, but I do now.

This month, I also took up yoga, being taught by a small man who appears to have been cloned from Woody Allen, and continued my favourite class, Body Pump, which is now being taught by a very tall man mostly composed of limbs.

The rest of my life seemed like an after thought. I have been busy building a new business, doing research, visiting the agency that’s been providing me with support to do this, and getting the government (via the Job Centre) to give me the special financial benefit they give people setting up their own business.

This is going well; I’ll be the first of my group to be put forward for the City Council’s award for financial support. More details when I’m ready to talk about it.

Amnar: The Inheritance, meanwhile, was launched on Podiobooks. The second book, that is. I haven’t been writing – the depression has made it almost impossible. Other things have rather taken over my life this month.

Finally, I had the chance to appear on TV. Unfortunately, I’ve signed a waiver so I can’t tell you what I was doing, where, or with whom. You’ll just have to wait and see.

Monthly check-in: August – The needles edition

My God, is it September already? How did that happen?

Let’s look back at what happened in August, since it went by so rapidly that I can’t quite believe it.

Pins and needles

I have to hand in my qualified skeptic card and my Bachelors of Science. Back in July, I went to see my GP because my neck didn’t work anymore. My shoulders were so stiff that I was in constant pain. I was sent away with a list of complementary therapists. I’ve had everything else on the list, so I decided to try acupuncture.

It worked.

I walked in a skeptic, doubtful that it would work but curious. I have to say I don’t enjoy having my tongue looked at in quite so much detail and much of the performance was baffling, but it works. It really works.

It started healing emotional pain, too. The result is that after several months of feeling struggle, and what a friend of mine calls a ‘motivational vacuum’, I’m finally starting to get my feet on the ground in a way I never have before.

Not only did I get into acupuncture, but began writing my new blog dedicated to Holosync experiences and all that lovely woo and experimented with both Big Mind and Fabeku Futanmise’s Sacred Sound with impressive results.

The business end

This sudden change in my emotional life brought me to an organisation that would offer me business advice. Having jumped in at the deep end head first a few months ago, I realised I needed help to make this work. I took my brain to see a business adviser, dumped everything on his desk and in all that he found a workable idea.

I am still working on the deep emotional stuff that’s holding me back from doing what I want to do with my life. At the same time, however, I seem to be gradually making the right moves. The government may provide me with financial backing, as may a couple of banks. I already have prospective clients keen to get on the books.

And at last, Amnar

I still haven’t finished Amnar: The Inheritance. I put this down to relating so much with Io I’m intimidated by the idea of being Guardian Defender. There’s a few chapters left to go, which will probably be written this coming weekend.

In terms of growth, well, what can I say? Amnar: The Awakening reached no.1 on the Podiobooks top ten and is still doing very well at around 6th position. The downloads since it went live in July are around the 40,000 mark and still rising.

Also, I’ve had fan mail! This is exciting, and very new. I’ve had a lot of support from people who’ve been behind Amnar from something like the beginning but new people have been arriving on the scene. Very exciting indeed.

I confess to not providing a podcast last Friday due to being exhausted but this week’s will go out as usual as the work has been done.

Still, Amnar has provided me with something to give me a sense of balance and contribution, something to hang on while my whole life has been turned upside down and inside out.

Emotional movement

It’s hard to admit that six years ago, I may have recovered from anorexia by making myself eat, but I hadn’t even started the hard work of recovering from what had happened psychologically. It’s happening now, and it’s strange, wonderful and scary.

Monthly Check-in: July – The total collapse and rebuild edition

A day late, I’m writing my review of July. When I went back to look over my last few entries in this series, the update for June was missing. That doesn’t surprise me.

By the time I hit June, things were very dire indeed. There may be a lot of people out there saying it’s possible to ignore the recession, but I was unfortunately, not one of them. The job market here has been dreadful, and it’s reached the point where public sector services post up jobs for senior level analysts paying less per hour than an advert I saw in the local shop for somebody to do the ironing.

On top of that, I fell into some very dark thinking. June was horrible mostly because I felt as though I was banging my head against so many brick walls. Most of those were emotional.

It’s so easy to get completely bogged down in dark thoughts. And once you do that, you can’t even be bothered to do the things you need to do to make things better. I started off both June and July with visits to the doctor for stress-related problems.

And then something suddenly shifted.

Nothing was going to get better if I kept trying to do things that didn’t work, so I started looking for new options. I could see that the way I thought about the problem wasn’t giving me enough solutions.

In the middle of a crisis like this, you need really inventive, dynamic thinking. All the obvious solutions weren’t working, so I had to start doing something that might stand a better chance of working. And I needed to do something that would give me a sense that I was actually working, achieving, and doing.

The Amnar Tweet-Up at Sweet Mandarin

I did a tour of financial advice centres. The unanswered requests for more and more information about my business and finances were responded to with all the documentation I could find.

Fear of the situation had made it impossible to act. I had been completely bogged down in thinking that made it impossible to even want to do anything. And that, of course, made everything worse.

After the second trip to the doctor at the beginning of July, everything started to change. I went because I’d spent four days in bed in agonising physical pain and could hardly move my head. I was told this was tension. I explained the breakdown, the financial situation, my general feeling that my life had hit a wall.

I left with a list of very cheap or free complementary therapists and a recommendation to meditate. I came home and decided I needed to do something. There had to be something I could do that would at least make me feel more productive, more positive, would keep those vile thoughts at bay.

I’d already had conversations with Lisa and Helen at Sweet Mandarin about doing a Tweet-up for Amnar, so I set balls rolling. I called the guy who’s been volunteering to do a bit of PR for me, and after a series of email and tweet exchanges, we set up a date.

Then I needed promotion, so we designed a flier, and I began to put the word out as much as I could. I went into the Apple Store for some training, and started focusing on finding any kind of opportunity I could that might help.

This led to the interview with Jonathan Fields. It also led me to focus in on getting Amnar: The Awakening all ready for the Podiobooks.com release. Despite being held up by LibsynPro updates, we went live two weeks later.

In the space of a week or so, I did a few interviews with different people to promote Amnar, met up with a recruiter who had an eye for my particular talent in “hearts and minds” change management, and generally asked for help where I could. The tweet-up attendance filled the bar at Sweet Mandarin. It was a great success.

Then Amnar: The Awakening went live on Podiobooks.com and stormed the charts. I kept working because, to be honest, it was the first time in my life when I could sit back and say that I was thoroughly happy.

No money, the job market here being highly unstable, I was pumping every single hour I was awake into doing this one thing.

There’s something very interesting about this story. I suppose the sensible thing would have been to get my CV out more and more, but I’ve been doing that for three months and nothing has happened. Recruiters I know, who have a great deal of experience in the market, have let me know the reasons why.

I needed, really needed, to do something that would help me shift my thinking. And as I acted to shift my thinking, so my thinking started creating new actions. I noticed things I’d never seen before: a leaflet in the Job Centre about self-employment led me to BusinessLink, connections with friends to MDDA.

I had my CV professionally re-written. On top of all the business work experience, I could now add that I had put together a successful social media campaign, released a podcast that reached a thousand or so people a week and despite being a newbie, was standing up to competition with big names in the podiobooks world.

By the end of July, we had scored over 10,000 downloads in just a couple of weeks across the Podiobooks and my own Amnar site. Besides doing promotion, writing the new book, releasing the weekly podcast and stripping the old one, I’ve been dealing with the complexities of working with a very, very tight budget and the painful negotiations that go on around that.

At the beginning of June, a few people had suggested I make the most of the time. If you’re looking for work, it can be a soul-destroying occupation. After months without any success in a market that seems to be almost extinct, I found that suddenly, taking action in an area that I truly loved gave me back the passion and determination to make my life work.

I feel like I’m still rebuilding after the really dark and painful months of May through June, when I felt deeply depressed. A couple of things have emerged from it, though.

The first is that thinking is absolutely everything. I’ve made concerted efforts to shift how I think, to look at places where my thinking stops me getting things done and making life work. For example, if you keep telling yourself you have limiting beliefs, it’s very easy to spend all your time trying to ‘fix’ them, thinking you can’t get on with life because you’ve got them. In fact, it’s the assumption that you have the beliefs, not the beliefs themselves, that get in the way.

According to Richard Wiseman, most attempts to change our lives fail because we ‘revert to type’. We can make a concerted effort for a bit, but deeper conditioning sets us back again. It’s this conditioning that I’ve been looking at changing – because it can be changed.

It’s often hard to see conditioning because if you’re not challenging it, you won’t see it. The combined effect of Holosync and the drastic economic situation pushed me very hard into a situation where my conditioning had no answers. The solutions were basically to hide under the duvet and let my life collapse, or to change.

Adyashanti and many others advise that it’s often in times of greatest adversity, of the most intense suffering, that we find the keys to real liberation. And that’s the second thing that emerged from it. It became an opportunity. Constantly being unable to find work, I had to start really engaging all my strategies and developing new strategies, that would help me. My thinking underwent radical and rapid shifts because it had to adapt to circumstances.

In a sense I feel grateful that all of this happened. Had I simply walked into another job a few months ago I’d never have been placed in such a challenging situation that really made me focus on what did and didn’t work in my life. I probably wouldn’t have taken the time to seek out opportunities like BusinessLink, MDDA, Salford Venture, Blue Orchid and all the other agencies I’m currently speaking with.

I’d never have had the chance to really see what I was capable of doing when I really tried. Of course, I want financial stability (who doesn’t, especially right now?) but this is what I’ve been given to work with, and since I’m a follower of the Sam Vimes Methodology of Living – you do the job that’s in front of you – I’m just getting on with what’s in front of me, and what I can do right now.

So I’m ending this month with Amnar: The Awakening sitting in both the daily download and the monthly subscription charts, rapidly rising download rates, a whole bunch of new fans I didn’t know I had, opening networks and new opportunities arising, another speaking gig and an Amnar-focused even under my belt. I might not have done the “right thing” to many people, but I’m definitely glad I’ve done the things I have done, and now I’m wondering what’s going to happen this month.

Monthly check-in: May – the silent edition

Time for a review of the last month.

To be absolutely honest, I’m not really sure what to write here for last month. In many ways, it was a turn-around for me, but it all happened on the quiet, and for a while I didn’t post at all.

Growth, fast and painful

I don’t generally think pain is necessary for growth, but last month seemed to require it. It felt as though I was falling apart for much of it, and the middle two weeks were a complete write-off.

The thing is, I don’t really want to write about it, or talk about it. I’ve spent a lifetime talking about Everything That’s Wrong With My Life and I’m bored of it. Really bored. I know that many people have written to say they felt they were helped by reading about what I’d been through, but I have come to a point where going over “what’s wrong” has become unhelpful.

Transforming thinking first

It was obvious, and I knew it, but I didn’t act on it. It’s hard to acknowledge, but I really did want to stay wrapped up in my stories, my pain and my past. I realised I had fallen into a trap I’ve seen and tried to avoid—making my life about “healing” but never actually being “healed” because it’s easier to keep working on the pain rather than moving on from it.

The key lies in thinking. I grew to a point where I just could not carry on the way I was. I think when it gets boring, that’s when you start to shift everything. Not that it’s been particularly easy so far, but I have been given the most incredible support from friends to get through this.

Writing again

The joy is that I’ve been able to start writing again. After I finished Zoriel, I stopped writing. I’ve found it really difficult to connect with Amnar and be creative again, what with everything that’s happened. My thinking started getting in the way of doing what I do.

However, I’ve finally started on the book that follows The Awakening and have three and a half chapters finished. I’m finally beginning to feel stronger and more positive after what feels like the longest few months of my life.

Monthly check-in: April – all fall down

Time for the monthly check-in, since May has crept up on me and surprised me at the end of the week with a shock. This is where I run through what has happened during the month just gone, and look ahead to the month coming.

This was the month of collapse and rebirth. Not just because Easter came along and with it all those happy metaphors about resurrection, zombie religious figures and chocolate. After surviving on wits and frustration for about five months, my financial life temporarily fell apart. I discovered exactly how much friendship and support I had in the world, and in a sense, started a whole new life.

Sometimes you have to break down before you can build back up. It was a very strange day, when I completely ran out of money in the morning, and by the end of the day had been commissioned to write a book. I’m still intensely grateful to Secret Wormy, who was there on the end of the phone that day, and to everybody else who sent emails or donations or cards.

It’s been very shaky since then. Not the kind of rebirth where I stride out of the cave feeling ready to take on the world, but a quieter, more gradual one. This was also the month when Grace Judson introduced me to the work of Adyashanti. Finally, after what seemed like a lifetime of self-work, I’d found something that really made a difference.

She also introduced me to my coach, Jon Hansen. In finding the right person to work with there are so many factors to consider. Timing, for one, but also personal approach and the nature of the relationship. This has been incredibly helpful to me already.

I feel as though I’ve been pretty much stripped bare by what’s happened over the last couple of months and finally knowing there’s somebody who will know what to say in reply when I email is perhaps the biggest comfort it’s possible to have. This is, I’ll admit, the first time I’ve actually trusted somebody else to understand what I’m experiencing and to let go enough to work with him to work it out.

Although I don’t write about patterns and beliefs anymore, I thought it worth sharing that there was a sudden dropping away of much of it at the beginning of this week. I’d been getting so bored of it, and aware of how irrelevant much of it is. I find myself thinking, “So what is the issue here again?” as though I can’t remember what it was I was so worked up about.

That was the point when it became useless writing about patterns and beliefs and self-work. There are patterns, yes, but underneath something else, something much deeper. So I decided to shift my emphasis to writing and Amnar, in particular, especially since so many people were keen for me to post more of that.

So it’s been hard, and it’s still quite hard. There are lots of things that haven’t yet been sorted out, from a practical standpoint if nothing else. Nothing ever seems to stay the same here for more than a few weeks, so I have no idea what to expect coming up in May.

Monthly check-in: March – the great speech edition

This is where I go over what happened over the month that’s just ended, the good and the bad, and then move into the new month and what to expect. You can share all your own great stuff from the last month in the comments.

Great stuff

This is turning into the most incredible year. I don’t think a month has gone by so far when I didn’t find something outrageously fantastic to talk about when I round up the month.

So, if you remember last month I decided to start coaching writers in making writing wonderful for them. I have some amazing clients, but it did remind me that my primary focus right now is split between Amnar itself (my own writing), and my own healing and spiritual process (whatever that might be). It is theoretically possible to work with me, but I’m being very careful about the clients I take on.

The biggest event of this month was that I was invited to do a talk at Manchester University’s Flying Start rally, an event that encourages young students to consider entrepreneurship rather than the more conventional careers they previously had in mind. The talk was recorded, and if you missed it, you can hear me talking about my life there.

After the talk, I was invited to become an ambassador for enterprise with the national non-profit, Make Your Mark, which was a great honour. It feels quite astounding that my path so far, which has led me to write seventeen books, deal with both anorexia and depression, addiction, recovery, bullying, abuse, love, travelling and setting up two businesses, should be of value to youngsters.

On top of everything else, I attended a Tweet-up at Sweet Mandarin in Manchester, and James the Dancing Geek came over for a weekend of Shiva Nata and intense discussions. It was a very social, very powerful month.

Transformations

While my weekdays were taken up with producing podcasts, doing talks and working on Amnar, I made a conscious effort to change the way I spent my weekends. I felt as though March was a month meant for emotional transformation, but even I couldn’t have imagined what happened.

I started to spend the weekends in a semi-Vipassana retreat from the internet and doing a great deal of internal work. I focused in on Holosync, Shiva Nata and other forms of deep meditation. Nothing could have really prepared me for the results of this, which meant that much of the time I was either feeling incredible after letting go of some old material from my past, or in the process of letting go.

Thanks to Grace Judson, I discovered Adayshanti, who has quickly become one of my favourite thinkers, along with Pema Chodron and Byron Katie (amongst others). I’ve discovered a group of friends with whom I share almost daily chats to discuss how we’re doing, how our process of both self-discovery and success is proceeding.

It’s very intense. This last weekend was the most intense so far, but it has brought me to a much calmer, much more liberated place. I’m prepared for this journey to take some time, but it has turned out to be something amazing.

What’s next?

Right now, I have no idea what’s next for me. I can’t do that kind of prediction at the moment. In the meantime, I’m going to carry on in my personal Groundhog Day, turning my attention to getting recording going out for the Amnar podcasts and preparing for anything.

Monthly check-in: February – the “how much change can you handle” edition

This is where I go over what happened over the month that’s just ended, the good and the bad, and then move into the new month and what to expect. You can share all your own great stuff from the last month in the comments.

Kaboom!

It feels like everything there is to talk about in February happened in the last week. A short summary:

• I started flailing around to Shiva Nata
• I became a writing coach, thus radically changing my life
• Amnar went places, such as the States

For most of February, I was wrapped up in thinking I should be going back into a contract and unable to decide whether I preferred being homeless and unable to eat or being miserable at a desk in a corporation. That was actually a very tough one.

I kept feeling as though there was something else out there for me but couldn’t work out what it was. It was a bunch of people I’d been helping over Skype convincing me that I could do it that made me realise that the answer was to transfer my business from analytics to helping writers feel the way I do about writing.

You’re a whatnow? And how damned fast?

I do work fast. I could have suddenly put a post up saying I was off to work at some such place doing some such thing last week. There was a sense of change in the air, and I opened up to the possibility of success, of happiness, of really enjoying life instead of feeling guilty over it.

I initially said I would do it right here, and the response was wonderful. And of course, because I was open to it, and had been babbling about how much I love writing and find it exciting, people actually wanted to feel that way and would pay me to show them how. So before I knew it, I had clients.

This is fantastic because it feels right, and it has that kind of feeling of allowing me to do something I love at the same time as balancing time with Amnar. Suddenly, it feels like I’m stepping out of the confusion and uncertainty and feeling of wrongness I’d had for the last few years, and brought me back to ‘my path.’

Guest posts, and other stories of general embiggenation

About a million years ago (or a couple of weeks ago), Alex Fayle announced he wanted new lab rats. I initially put myself forward for that. He got back to me and said instead of doing that, would I like to have a regular spot on his blog writing about what I’m doing with my life. I instantly agreed.

Last week was therefore also the week when those first posts went up onto the web, and the reaction has been incredible. I’ve had offers to write on other blogs as well now and those posts will be appearing over the course of March.

And Amnar?

Various things are happening to Amnar, including visits to the States. To be honest, based on what’s happened over the last week or so, anything could happen in the next four.

Monthly check-in: January – the “it almost snowed” edition

I’m instituting a new thing: a monthly review of what I’ve done over the month, and what I’m expecting for the next month. Because keeping track of my life, my activities and my general nonsense is really grounding.

Busy, busy, busy

Everything happened at once. I had no money, then I had money. I decided to give my year a theme, ‘Prosperity’, rather than setting specific goals around which I would promptly get stuck and irritated.

A few basic, fundamental changes happened early on:

• I took over doing the Amnar podcasts all by myself.
• I decided to change the website and build a new one all by myself.
• I started developing some cover art work for the series.

This has gone rather well. People really like that I’m doing the podcasts. People love the story. People love Zoriel, in particular. Well done, Zoriel, you accidentally managed to make a really good impression whilst hiding under a table. Not many people can do that.

The website isn’t ready to go up until the end of this week, but I’ve finally come unstuck from all my fears around writing the copy and it’s starting to happen.

I sign up to big changes, get stuck and unstuck, emotional and all the rest

I finally outed myself as really wanting to get a publishing deal for Amnar. And at the same time not wanting to admit that I wanted it, or wanted it at all, just in case I didn’t get it and got all disappointed.

A great deal of work has been done around that, and it’s still going on.

I signed up to Mark Silver’s Remembrance Challenge, which is still ongoing. I started reading books about putting myself out there rather than hiding in the shadows.

It’s been an extremely emotional month. Full of emotional change. Full of change in terms of what I do, how I act, how I feel.

The work goes on…

Work developing a good pitch for Amnar goes on. Work dealing with my stuckness goes on.

I’ve been shattered. The end of this week left me shattered, and I’ve also been dealing with a great sadness from my past. It turns out to be a deep and long-standing guilt, with a dose of shame in there to match.

I had the courage to start asking for help. A big deal for me.

And next month?

It’s going to get scary. The savings that have supported me since the economy decided it didn’t like functioning properly anymore are running out. I’ve been on the hunt for new contracts for two months now. The situation is shaky.

I feel like I’m “actually doing it” in terms of Amnar, despite all the fear and the doubt and the hard that comes up around it. I’m in a state of keeping on keeping on, dealing with each thing as it comes up and then moving forward, step by step.