Paul Garrigan's Blog, page 10

Walk and Talk Videos

I have started putting up videos on YouTube where I walk and
talk about stuff that is on my mind, and I hope may be of interest to at least
some of you. In some videos I talk a lot, in some only a little bit, and there
will likely be some where I won’t talk at all. I will label the ones where I
talk a lot as ‘walk and talk’.

I think one of the nice things about this content is I get
to share a bit of Thailand with you guys. There are some lovely walks near to
where I live, and I travel around the country a fair bit. So, even if you get
fed up with me babbling on, you still get to see some nice scenery.

Growing up, I used to go for long walks with my dad, and he
would share his wisdom with me. This time with my father had a huge influence
on my life, and I’m just drawn to the idea of making videos this way. I love watching
walking videos by other people on YouTube, and I spend far more time looking at
these than I do stuff like Netflix or TV.  I see it almost as a type of meditation and opportunity
to practice appreciation for this wonderful world we live in.

Here is the latest video I’ve made which is all about the
importance of appreciation.

If you do like these videos, you could help a lot by given them a ‘like’, leaving a comment, and/or subscribing.

Thanks

Walk and Talk Videos
How Imaginal Practices Made it Possible for me to Adore Life
Becoming Comfortable in My Own Skin Using Friendliness Practices
Using Insight Practices to Escape Worry and Negative Thinking
New Video Series – How I Stopped Being an Alcoholic

How Imaginal Practices Made it Possible for me to Adore Life

One of the things that initially attracted me to alcohol was how it changed my perception in a way that reenchanted my life. This magical quality was something that I deeply yearned for, and it was only by finding a better way to enjoy this relationship with life that I could break free of alcohol for good. It was imaginal practices that made this possible.

This is part 4 in a series of videos on ‘How I Stopped Being an Alcoholic’. If you haven’t yet seen the previous episodes, you might want to start here.

How Imaginal Practices Made it Possible for me to Adore Life
Becoming Comfortable in My Own Skin Using Friendliness Practices
Using Insight Practices to Escape Worry and Negative Thinking
New Video Series – How I Stopped Being an Alcoholic
Guided Meditation for Developing Friendly Curiosity

Becoming Comfortable in My Own Skin Using Friendliness Practices

This is part three in my video series on ‘How I stopped Being an Alcoholic”.  If you haven’t seen the previous videos, you might want to first check these out (begin here).

Here I talk about how friendliness practices can change the way we perceive reality. It can be a sense of not feeling comfortable in our own skin that makes drugs so appealing, but I found this approach offered a far superior solution.

Some of the topics covered in this video include:

How does our perception determine our reality?What is ‘ill-will’?How can insight practices free us to perceive in new ways?What are friendliness practices? How do friendliness practices help us to escape ill-will?What is the difference between ‘being friendly’ and ‘acting friendly’?

If you think this video series is helpful, you can support me by sharing it with others.

Recent posts

Becoming Comfortable in My Own Skin Using Friendliness Practices
Using Insight Practices to Escape Worry and Negative Thinking
New Video Series – How I Stopped Being an Alcoholic
Guided Meditation for Developing Friendly Curiosity
A New Relationship with Reality

Using Insight Practices to Escape Worry and Negative Thinking

Developing a New Relationship with Thinking

Worry and obsessive thinking almost destroyed me. One of the
things that needed to happen for me to achieve a more permanent state of
well-being for me was to escape the clutches of my inner demons. In this video,
I share my experience of using insight practices to develop a new relationship
with thinking.

This episode continues on from my last video How I Stopped Being an Alcoholic – if you haven’t seen it, you may want to check that one out first.

Some of the topics covered in this video include:

How does habitual thinking create our reality? How do our assumptions about life lead to unnecessary suffering? Do we need to stop thinking? Is thinking useful and necessary? What are insight practices?How can mindfulness help us deal with worry and negative thinking?How does insight into impermanence, non-self, and the nature of suffering help us to change our relationship with thinking?

If you think this video series is helpful, you can support me by sharing it with others.

Using Insight Practices to Escape Worry and Negative Thinking
New Video Series – How I Stopped Being an Alcoholic
Guided Meditation for Developing Friendly Curiosity
A New Relationship with Reality
Seeing the Peace Within

New Video Series – How I Stopped Being an Alcoholic

Greeting all,

I am beginning a new project that involves creating short videos containing animation to share some of my ideas about escaping alcohol (as well as other types) addiction. I’ve spent the last five years sharing what I know with people in rehab here in Thailand, and this has helped me develop a clearer message. I also like the idea of creating short videos, as this forces me to be succinct and precise.

In this first video, I provide some background about where I’m coming from, and I explain what it was that allowed me to finally break free of addiction in 2006. I talk about the importance of achieving well-being because it was the lack of this that made me vulnerable to alcohol addiction in the first place. In future videos, I will go into much more detail about the steps I took to achieve this well-being.

I would be delighted to answer any questions you have about this series, and you would help me a lot if you were able to share these videos on social media or recommend them to friends in the real world.

New Video Series – How I Stopped Being an Alcoholic
Guided Meditation for Developing Friendly Curiosity
A New Relationship with Reality
Seeing the Peace Within
Judgement

Guided Meditation for Developing Friendly Curiosity

This meditation guides us to a state of friendly curiosity towards our experience. It begins with a body-scan, followed by a friendliness practice, which then leads us to a state where we can allow everything to be just as it as. This is the same meditation that I use when guiding clients at Hope Rehab Thailand.

Spending time in a state of friendly-curiosity nourishes us,
and it is also a useful space for developing insight. By encountering this
perspective of friendly-curiosity in meditation, we are then able to transfer
this way of looking to our daily life.

Guided Meditation for Developing Friendly Curiosity
A New Relationship with Reality
Seeing the Peace Within
Judgement
Silence

A New Relationship with Reality

A New Relationship with Reality

My aim when working with people is to help them develop a new relationship with reality. These are usually individuals with an addiction issues who have already worked out that their problem is their perception of life rather than life itself. After all, ingesting a drug doesn’t actually change our world, it just changes how we view our world. So, on some level, we’ve already decided the problem is our relationship with life.

My own enthusiasm for alcohol began in my early-teens because drinking helped me feel comfortable in my own skin. Drinking didn’t change my world, but it certainly changed how I felt about things.

Drugs do change our perception of reality in a way that some of us find highly desirable.  Over time though, these substances create an increased sense of disconnection, dissatisfaction, and mistrust of life. We end up in a worse position than before we found our ‘chemical answer’.

Changing Our Perception is the Answer

Our method may have been a failure, but our insight that the problem was our perception of life, rather than life itself, was a good one. The good news is we can change our way of perceiving so that we no longer mistrust life, no longer feel disconnected, and feel so satisfied with our life that drugs (or any other form of avoiding reality) no longer have the slightest appeal to us.

This is a way of perceiving reality that doesn’t involve ingesting dangerous chemicals, costs nothing, has no negative side-effects, and lasts forever.

The Three Aspects of a New Relationship with Reality

There are three aspects to this new relationship with reality:

Wonder
Intimacy
Trust

We can begin to get a taste for each of these through meditation and other practices. It is my goal when working with clients to direct them towards these qualities. I do so because it was allowing these three qualities to reveal themselves that brought an end to my own seeking for something better – and all the trouble that entailed.

So, let’s take a brief at each of these – I will go into much more detail in future posts.

Wonder

Much of our dissatisfaction with life occurs because we think we know that is going on. Our head is full of stories about how things ‘should be’ rather than noticing how things actually are. Instead of being fascinated by the mysterious and ever-changing world around us, we prefer to focus on what we know. This leads to a life that feels stale, limited, and where taking drugs to feel better makes perfect sense.

Wonder means meeting life from a place of curiosity. It involves letting go of our ideas about how things are, and actually looking to see what’s there. When we do this, something amazing happens. Everything we took for granted suddenly appears new, mysterious, and full of possibilities. Most of us are flabbergasted by how we could have missed such a wonder that was always right in front of us.

Intimacy

Our sense of disconnection from the world is arises due to the fact that we have become mesmerized by thinking. It is like becoming so engrossed while reading a horror story that we began to believe it is real. This relationship with thinking creates an imaginary barrier between us and everything else. As we pay more attention to our life, we begin to see how ridiculous this belief was – there is no part of us that doesn’t belong to life, so how could we be separate from it?

Once the sense of disconnection disappears, we discover a sense of intimacy with life that our heart yearns for. This sense of connection does not depend in anyway on life behaving a certain way or other people behaving a certain way. We discover that intimacy is not something that we have to earn, but is what exists when we lower our thought-generated barriers.

Trust

Trust is the recognition that right now is the only way it ever could be. It is what it is – always. It is the ridiculous belief that we are somehow getting ‘now’ wrong that triggers anxiety, self-loathing and an inability to relax. Practices like Vipassana can help us to see that we have no choice as to what is arising – all that matters for our peace of mind is how we are relating to what happens. The Christian mystic Anthony de Mello summed up trust best with the words ‘absolute cooperation with the inevitable’.

Seeing the Peace Within

I always judged my experiences based on the thoughts, sensations, and feelings these experiences produced. This made it difficult to discover the infinite peace already inside of me. I looked inside expecting to discover positive feelings, sensations, and deep ideas, so I missed the unconditioned peace that was always there. It was my thoughts about what this peace should look like that stopped me from seeing it. These same thoughts also prevented me from understanding that this peace was with me always – – it was the looking for it that prevented me from seeing it.

Judgement

How could I stop other people judging me when I couldn’t even stop me judging myself?

Silence

The answer to all our problems is to be found in silence. We need to enter a space of innocence and receptivity so we can see beyond the confusion created by our thinking mind. We need silence so we can start to see how our thoughts have led us astray.