Less unwanted thoughts anyone?

I'm working on some stuff for my internet course, which doesn't have a proper name yet, but is about getting less unwanted thoughts. You can read a bit more about it here. It's very exciting and a bit hard too.
If you would like to take part, I have a new course starting around October, so give me a shout on mynewbravelife@gmail.com. It will not be free next time, I haven't worked out the price yet, but I assure you it will be reasonable.

Not a happy bunny

I'm home sick from work, which, unless I am practically dead always gives me a bad consciousness, like I am bunking off, but am I not, I assure you (and me). On top of that it is a lovely sunny day. And on top of that I was going to meet a friend for coffee after work and when I texted her this morning and said I wouldn't be able to make it, she said that she had made me a cake! So, sick, no cake and a sunny day, what a great combination. Oh, and Little A is out and about with daddy and I really miss him. I think it is time to remember this:

Hmhm...aha....right....what happened?

I had such a great day today. I was getting somewhere at work and I had lunch with (one of) my mothers' groups. It was great to see everybody and I really felt like I belonged (a rare feeling for me). After work I picked up my new bike and cycled home. Oh and a very cute guy flirted with me, hasn't happened in ages. When I got home Little A was happy to see me and we played with a pear, some blocks and a storage box. At dinner he had a laughing fit when I said "god". Seriously. It started with me saying "Oh my god" to something my husband said and Little A started laughing. Now, he is not easily entertained so his laughter is like a drug, we just want more. So I said "god" again and again and he was laughing his head off. Me too.
Little A fell asleep early and I watched a great documentary about a village in Yorkshire where half the population has learning difficulties or a mental illness. It was very interesting indeed.
And now I'm sat here and don't know what to do with myself. I'm feeling a bit sad I think. It's like sometimes I can get too happy. It's like my system gets overstimulated and afterwards I just fall down.
Hmh...but maybe I'll just won't care about that and just get on with things. There's laundry to fold, packed lunch to be packed and I'm sure something more.

New bike!!!

My old bike was stolen weeks ago. It been such a pain to find a new one, it's a jungle out there! I have been to five different shops and after that and some internet research, I decided to get this one, a Batavus London. I found out that a shop close to work sells it, so I popped down today, took it for a test drive and then I bought it! Just like that! The guy convinced me to get an extra large basket in the front and some extra fancy bike lights. The bike is actually a thank-you-for-being pregnant-and-giving-birth-to-our-son present, so I thought I could splash out on the extra stuff (which I'll pay for myself of course). I'm picking it up tomorrow! Can't wait!

Day 7 and 8

What the heck is wrong with me?!? I can't seem to do anything nice nowadays!
Day 7; I was on a packed train where nobody wanted to move or get up from the spaces reserved for pushchairs, wheelchairs etc. I got a spot for me and Little A by asking a person to move. Really..? You're sitting where you shouldn't be and I have to ask you to move? What's wrong with people? But it gets worse, a women gets on with a her daughter in a wheelchair. Nobody moves, they were all looking at them though. So I asked a man who looked quite capable to stand, to do just that. He then has the audacity to say "But where will I stand?" I said that he could find a spot and that there should be room for all of us.
Day 8; nothing....I got nothing....

Day 7 bugs me. I didn't do it without effort and it makes me mad just thinking about the situation, but I guess the woman and the child got the benefit even though it wasn't done smoothly...

Day 3, 4, 5 and 6

Well, this is harder than one would think. Okay, here we go and I don't even know if they qualify as good deads, but maybe just "nice things"
Day 3; I wrote an email to a person, whose article I had read and found really helpful. She wrote back the next day saying that was pleased to hear from me as it was the first academic piece she had ever written.
Day 4; I don't think I did anything....
Day 5; I bought my husband some flowers and a gift (a new water bottle for when he works out) because this was the first proper week where he and Little A were alone and I am amazed how well he has handled it.
Day 6; hmh....well the day is not over yet.
I think I have to crank it up a notch...

Something, something karma- Day 1 and 2

I am on a mission! I want to do at least one good dead every day for a month. I just got the idea yesterday and if my brain wasn't mush after being woken up a 4 am and then working for a full day where people expect you to say something clever, I would tell you about how this relates to yoga and karma. But I can't right now anyway, so I will just tell you what I did.
Day 1; On my way to work coming up from the underground, I saw a woman with a stroller heading down. I kept walking and then remembered that I had seen that the lift was out of order, so I turned around to she what she was doing. She was trying to get the stroller down the stairs with the toddler walking next to her. People passed by and nobody offered to help. So I turned around, walked back and asked her if she needed a hand and helped her down with the stroller.
Day 2; I offered a pregnant women my seat on the train. She declined but said thank you several times.

Another era is ended

I'm no longer on maternity leave. I went back to work last Wednesday so this is my second week. I happy to be back. I will get new things to do, which is really nice. It's like starting a new job without all the insecurities that come with not knowing people. I have great plans for my work, how I want to evolve and do differently than before and I hope that I can remember that when things get hectic and people are talking behind each other's backs.
I do miss Little A though. Not so much in the mornings, but after lunch it gets quite bad. Luckily I don't work full time so my days are pretty short. I also don't have a long commute to and from work, so that helps too. But when I call home to check how things are going (my husband is on paternity leave now) and I can hear him in the background, I really miss him.
I wish I could structure my work differently and I am might be able to soon. I just have to figure some things out.
This was a pretty boring post, innit?

A small Down Dog

Little A doing his first Downward facing dog! And he is only 7 months! Mummy Yoga Teacher is very proud.

The best thing with not being pregnant anymore is...

...that I can now fit my onesie from Odd Molly again. It is so nice to have on but it's really not very nice looking. I got it for half price on sale, but I really don't understand Odd Molly's concept. It's just odd, I think. But the onesie is comfy.

Weekend

So, first weekend after I've started work again. It was an extremely short week. I was there Wednesday and Thursday but didn't go in on Friday. Instead we went to the hospital with Little A. He was having some kind of fits Thursday evening. We called the doctor out and he said that although it was important to examine him further, we could wait until the morning. We were sent home after a few hours and he will have EEG in a few weeks time to find out what it was. Right now I am not too worried as he is fine now and it hasn't come back. It is of course scary as hell but I don't make it better by worrying about it.

first day at work

This is how happy Little A was to see me when I got home after work. He was kissing me all over my face and he's never done that before. He pulled my face towards himself and starting kissing me. And with kissing I mean with open mouth and licking, he can't pout yet. Very cute.

What I did this weekend

I painted Little A's high chair and put fabric on his support pillow so that it matches our chairs. I found those sitting in a skip about two years ago. I took them home and brushed them up. Meaning that I cleaned them 5 times and painted them about the same amount of times and then put new fabric on them.

I also made a sleeping area for Little A. He is sleeping in our room because we don't have more than one bedroom. His bed has just been standing next to ours but I thought it was time to make it a bit cosier.

Would you like to have less unwanted thoughts?

I am in the process of being brave enough to start my own company. It scares the shit out of me and I don't really know why. Or well I do, the risk of failure of course. But it's not like I'll quit my job and put all my eggs in one basket. I will do it in my spare time and keep my job(s).

What I want to do is to combine my two occupations, psychologist and yoga teacher. I have given it a lot of thought and gradually things are becoming clearer. My first project is going to be a course based on the thoughts in previous post, How to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. It will be about how to become aware of your thoughts and how to address the ones you wish you had less of. Right now I am still working on the format, but I am thinking posts by me on the blog and individual email correspondence between me and the participants. But I also want to create some kind of place where the participants can meet each other and support each other. The course will be internet based, run for 4-5 weeks, the main language will be English, but the individual correspondence can also be in Swedish or Danish if you so wish. It will be free of charge, however I would appreciate that you at the end of the course give me a lot of feedback so that I can get some ideas on how to improve and move on. If you already now have ideas on what you would like, please let me know.

The first course will have a limited number of places, at the moment I am thinking no more than 5 participants. If you are interested, I would like you to email me on mybravenewlife@gmail.com. I will then keep you updated as to when we will begin (I am thinking in about a month's time) and I will present myself a bit more, with my CV and so on, so you'll know who you are dealing with. If there are more than 5 people interested, I will start a new course about a month after the first one.

I look forward to hearing from you!

How to not throw the baby out with the bathwater- or how to change your thinking

Reading a post by Duktiga Tjejen about thoughts about eating and often feeling that one is eating too much or wrong in some way, I felt inspired to write about this topic. I made a comment on Duktiga Tjejen's post about how to focus on what you want more of and not focusing on what you are not doing. Duktiga Tjejen replied that she tried to do that but it doesn't work, and she asked HOW does one begin to think like that?

How to change one's way of thinking is indeed very simple and very hard at the same time. It is simple because the method, which I will explain shortly, is very simple, but it is hard as there are no shortcuts and no other ways of doing it that are faster.

So, what is the secret then? Well, it is to think the way you want to think. It is really as simple as that, but since it does not come natural to anybody I have met so far, I'll explain it a bit closer. Staying on the subject of eating let me make an example. Say that you are of the opinion that you eat too much sugar. Now, the first thing to do is to examine if that opinion holds true or if you're wrong about it. Evaluate it by examining your view on "too much sugar" compared to how much you really eat. If you eat three chocolate bars, 5 biscuits and use three teaspoons of sugar in your coffee, of which you drink 6 cups a day, every day then yes, I would say that you eat too much sugar. But if you have one slice of cake every week, then I would say no. However, the issue of what is too much or too little is really another subject, so for now let's just say that you have a reasonable goal.

Nobody is perfect so even though you don't want to eat sweet things, you will probably end up doing it anyway. This is where you have a choice. You can choose to beat yourself up about it and tell yourself that you are weak, useless and incapable of sticking to anything. Or you can choose to think "ah well, granted that was not what I intended to happen, but it did and next time temptation arises, I will try resist it" and then you move on. You move on. You don't dwell on it, unless you're thinking about strategies that could help you (like not keeping sweets in the house), otherwise you let go and move on.

This is where I am pretty sure people will say that they can see my point but claim that they can't think the other way. The thing is that you can. You can choose your thoughts. Chew on that for a bit.

Even though we all have millions of automatic thoughts that just pop up without us asking for them, you can choose the next thought. And if there is a new automatic thought, then choose the next one or the next one or the next one, until you find yourself in control and actively choosing what you are thinking. You haven't failed just because you didn't get the first thought. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. You just try again. And again.

The easy part of this technique is that all you have to do is to notice how you think and if it is a thought that you don't like, you replace it with one that you would rather be thinking. The difficult part is to not expect that this will change your life over night. Because good people, it will not. It will change your life, but it will take a long time. How long depends on how much effort you put in. It is all about practise. The first part of the practice is to become aware of your thoughts and for some this means becoming aware of that you are thinking at all, meaning that whatever twirls around in your head are actually thoughts and nothing else. Depending on how attached you are to your thoughts this can take a long time, maybe months, maybe years even. The second part, which you sort of do at the same time as the first part, is to change the unwanted thoughts to wanted thoughts. This part can also take a long time to implement. Maybe you are aware of your thoughts but you just can't stop them. Do you know what you do then? You try and you try again. It is that annoyingly simple. Once you have both things going for you, you might be so lucky that you have replaced the unwanted automatic thought with a wanted automatic thought, but that will take time. Just as you can't possible loose 25 kilos in a week, you cannot, I repeat, cannot change your thinking in a week or even a year. Seriously, if you want to think differently you have to work for it.

I practice what I preach and have done so for perhaps about 7 years and it is only now that I really can see the fruits of my labour. I especially notice it when I read stuff like the post by Duktiga Tjejen because it then becomes clear to me that I used to think like that about food and exercise but I don't any longer. Almost anyway. I do of course sometimes slip back into my old ways. Today, for example I didn't give myself enough credit for getting up at 6.20 am to practise yoga outside in the cold for 40 minutes. Instead I focused on that I didn't practice yesterday and that I should have practiced for longer. Luckily I caught myself and had time to focus on what I was actually doing, which was something great for myself, i.e. yoga on a rooftop while the sun was rising.

As a sidetrack I also want to point out a mistake that we all too often make (in my opinion), which is that we think that when somebody else is doing something that we want to do but find hard, we think that it comes easy to them. Sometimes it does perhaps, but I believe that most of the time those people work really hard for it. But is much easier to think that whatever they are doing comes natural or easy to them and that they don't have to try so hard.

I will end here although I have much more to say on the subject. Please feel free to ask questions if what I have written doesn't make sense to you.