Restoring Helpful Thinking - How to Cultivate Beliefs that Heal

Each week in May I've been holding an online class entitled 'Midweek Mindful Restorative'. This week's title, 'Story and Release', was to do with how we can know ourselves as thinking, story-making beings, learn to recognise how we hold beliefs that harm us and beliefs that heal us, and how we can go beneath this to know a different relationship to ourselves and to life. It’s a valuable exploration as the nervous system and all bodily processes respond to what we think and how we move as thinking beings in relationship to the world around us. Clearing the way for what lies underneath is essential for all round health and good feeling, and also as a collective in this world that we share together. 

How to Cultivate Healing Beliefs

Beliefs can be micro or macro in their expression and influence. A helpful belief that I hold, and that makes me happy, is that we are offered what we need when we most need it. Whether we are receptive enough to receive it is another thing altogether, but either way, this makes many things, including secondhand book shopping, quite exciting. 

My favourite bookstore in the world is Barts Books in Ojai, California, an outdoor treasure that greets you immediately you with the loving smell of old books, caramel scented trees, and of the nearby mountains resting into warm air. There are many nooks and crannies filled with old words to explore, but it’s the central area, open to the sky and with places to sit and contemplate words in the sun that I love the most. 

When I visit, I trust that something will grab my attention and pull me in. Something just for me, that whenever I pick it up to read, will be just the right time to hear what it has to say. 

So happily the book that found me the last time I was there was a 1970 edition of The Gospel According to Zen, edited by Robert Sohl and Audrey Carr. It contains commentaries from some of my favourite teachers - D.T Suzuki, Alan Watts, J. Krishnamurti and many others. Something about this little book captivated me, not just for it’s subject, but the delightful and evocative combination of thoughts, ideas and beautiful illustrations that it contains. 

And I've delved into it from time to time, always receiving something that on that day I anticipate as being helpful in some way. This morning a passage by J. Krishnamurti especially spoke to me as I was contemplating writing this email.

Letting Go Of Accumulation to find what's underneath

In these times, and in amongst what we go through personally, just though the nature of being a human being in this world, we can long for transformation. Often longing for difference somewhere out there. But this passage by J. Krishnamurti points us in a different direction. I wonder if it resonates with you in some way as it resonated with me?

“In order to transform the world about us, with its misery, wars, unemployment, starvation, class divisions, and utter confusion, there must be a transformation in ourselves. The revolution must begin within oneself- but not according to any belief or ideology, because revolution based on an idea or in conformity to a particular pattern, is obviously no revolution at all. To bring about a fundamental revolution in oneself, one must understand the whole process of one’s thoughts and feelings in relationship. That is the only solution to all our problems - not to have more disciplines, more beliefs, more ideologies, and more teachers. If we can understand ourselves as we are from moment to moment without the process of accumulation, then we shall see how there comes a tranquillity that is not a product of the mind, a tranquillity that is neither imagined, not cultivated; and only in that state of tranquillity can there be creativeness.”

The idea of being without the “process of accumulation” is a powerful exploration. What needs to be dropped, what can be released - and what remains? 

I shall pause there, but please feel free to drop me a note via the contact page on my website to let me know your reflections, insights and questions on this topic. You can also join the mailing list to receive news of future online in in-person classes, workshops and available one-to-ones. The links are below. 

With love,

Kirsty

Kirsty Macdonald

Transformational Coach, Therapist and Embodiment Teacher

www.KirstyMacdonald.co.uk

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