Category: – Conscious Awareness

I Treat Myself With Love

by Anne Malatt, Australia

I have always loved to treat myself, to reward myself for working hard, to give myself something to make up for what I felt I was lacking, to substitute for love.

What were these treats?

  • When I was little, they were sweets. We were allowed one ice cream every Sunday morning, and that was our weekly treat. That was my religion – I looked forward to and savoured that moment of the week!
  • On birthdays, we had parties with sweet treats – fairy bread, blancmange, cake. I used to save some of my birthday cake to have for breakfast the next day ­– it was my favourite part of my birthday – a sweet treat to make up for the fact that it was no longer my special day.
  • As I grew older, the nature of the sugar changed – tiramisu, pavlova, champagne, chocolate, liqueurs – but in essence it remained the same.

Why the need for these treats? Continue reading “I Treat Myself With Love” →

Making Decisions: The Body is the Key

By Christoph Schnelle, Australia

I talked to a professor of statistics about PhDs and he told me about one of his PhD students who wants to find out how people make decisions. This student puts people into a FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machine and records their brain activity while they make decisions.

Might there be a simpler way to investigate how we make decisions? Continue reading “Making Decisions: The Body is the Key” →

Choices and the Power of Now

By Anne Malatt, Australia

I woke this morning feeling out of sorts; a consequence of how I had lived the day before. I had made some choices in how I had used my free time and in what I had chosen to eat that were not truly loving for me, and now I was feeling those choices in my body.

I was about to start giving myself a hard time, as usual, but stopped for a moment and thought “Why not just go for a swim?”. So I did. Continue reading “Choices and the Power of Now” →

Putting Cod before God

by Vanessa Hawthorne, London, UK

I recently had the privilege of working in the kitchen to support the English retreat for Universal  Medicine. It was a lot of fun, and a wonderful learning experience. I remember reading Victoria Lister’s experience being very similar to mine in the same kitchen at the last year’s retreat, where around 250 participants were catered for 3 meals a day.

Many a time has a practitioner said to me that they put their connection to themselves first, always. I kind of got this ‘idea’ but I couldn’t explain what that meant as it wasn’t something I had lived. Continue reading “Putting Cod before God” →

Stress & Work: Learning to Trust Myself As a Woman

by Victoria Lister, Brisbane, Australia

Lately, as I’ve been reflecting on my motives for choosing the roles I’ve had throughout my working life, I’ve realised these had little to do with the real me, and everything to do with mind-created ideals and beliefs. I’ve also examined my propensity to choose industries and jobs that have been challenging to the point of debilitation, with no consideration for myself… again the result of the ideals and beliefs I held.

But the revelations haven’t stopped there: in the course of my explorations, I’ve come to see there is a third, equally important element to consider in the work equation: how I’ve gone about the business of work itself. Continue reading “Stress & Work: Learning to Trust Myself As a Woman” →

From Ideals and Beliefs to Making Loving Work Choices

by Victoria Lister, Brisbane, Australia

In the last couple of months I’ve been exploring the option of setting aside my role as a self-employed consultant to return to regular employment, and have been looking at various jobs. My work had slowed down over the last six months and I was starting to feel the next step would need to be a practical one, to bring in more income.

I’ve changed jobs – and careers – many times before, but I’ve never brought to the process the kind of honesty I’m bringing to it now. In fact I’ve used this time to reflect on my working life as a whole, a chapter of which I’ve already written about in Celebrity Chef or Self-loving Chef:Where is the Love in the Work that We Do?. Continue reading “From Ideals and Beliefs to Making Loving Work Choices” →