Wednesday 28 October 2020

Welcome to My Mindfulness: Join Me

Welcome to the first phase of the MINDFUL IMAGINATION EXPERIENCE story. Let's have some fun.



Introducing my BRAND NEW online course available for you to buy. What's it all about? I hear you ask, well, you know, I didn't actually hear it but I did sort of hear something in my mind, perhaps it was you my dear reader; perhaps it was my imagination.

But that is exactly the point.

Sing:
Step One - a FREE pdf outline of me and what I offer, available to download by subscribing to my mail list.
Step Two - pay just $56 (roughly £43)) and you will get a whole course made up of 4 parts from 6 documents. You have an intro, then you have a meditation, then you have a hero, then you have a painting, then you have a framework and then you have a farewell. 
Step Three - tell your friends that you can put your life in order and step towards success by using mindfulness to access and build your imagination. 
Step Four - also tell them that inspiration is all around you, you see it at bus stops, on walls, on the television and in magazines. 
Step Five - believe in yourself and make your dreams come true.

2020 has been a bit shit, so I have spent a good few months re-designing my live show into an online course in order to kick off this idea that you have the power in your hands to change your life. 


The power is truly in your hands. We are told of our limitations in order to limit us; but we truly have an enormous amount of energy and imagination if we step back and believe in what we can do. The truth is, you already do a lot of it instinctively. 

My course is about Mindful Meditation, and I have made that modern and relevant to our techno-driven and busy lives. It is about giving yourself some time to just be YOU, and filter out all the distractions just for a small amount of time.

Many years ago I used to smoke cigarettes. During that time I would stop whatever I was doing and sit down, or find a place to stand quietly, and smoke. It took about five minutes to smoke a cigarette. I allowed myself that time to stop and smoke.

Yet, when I stopped smoking, rightly so I should say, I also stopped giving myself a break. 

It is important not to smoke, I am not advocating lighting up at all; but it is important to give yourself a window of time to stop and re-focus. Now I use music, and in my course I will show you how it can benefit you and how it works. You cancel out distractions and give yourself a little break when you need it. It is wonderful!

My mental health has seriously suffered over the years, in part due to my lack of understanding of it; mindfulness has given me a far deeper and more balanced understanding of who I am. In recent months, as Covid has driven the news and our lives, mental health has suffered again both personally and around the globe. I want to share what I have learned and how it has helped me, and I honestly believe that my health would be worse this year had it not been that I studied mindfulness prior to the lockdown experience. 

So I present to you: 



Here's what I would like you to do. Click on this link PDF FREEBIE IS HERE and then sign up to my mailing list. You are then part of this revolution. Welcome. 

Stay tuned. Here's some messages. The following are affiliated links and I will be paid should you click; it's just stuff that I like. 




The current political chaos in the Western world has really highlighted to me how out of control we are when it comes to making decisions in our lives. Yet I want to remind you all how it works:

If you don't agree with your voted leader, vote against them; rally against them; shout from the rooftops; enter into discussions and don't be afraid to make a stand for what you believe in. This world has enough hate in it, so don't add anymore. Hate is not destabilised by adding more hate but it is dissipated by adding love. Just as you would add a dash of fresh water to a dry cup of sand. Hate is dry, it is born of fear and a barren mind; by reminding them how barren their world is just adds further hate, it adds more heat and that makes it drier. Instead, add love, add some water and some freshness to the scenario. Add a balanced antidote to each cracked part and let the water sink in silently, allow it to flow through each crack and reach deep into the wound. Love is the answer just as water is the answer. 

Finally for this episode I would like to add a sprinkling of nonsense in  the form of a poem I have written. I am a member of the Mid Kent Stanza group, which is run in the UK by The Poetry Society. We regularly meet, currently online of course, and offer ideas and tips on each others work. It is because of this wonderful group of poets that I have been published in magazines and on websites. Check out some of mine at The Ekphrastic Review

I consider myself an okay poet and humbled to have been published. I also write shows and plays and books and the art of writing is what I love doing; I love writing these blogs as much as I love making my videos on Youtube. So I gift you a poem, followed by a link to me being weird on film. Call it a calling card, because my new course is not about being just mindful, it is about you being the true you that you are in your heart and if that person is a little weird, then aren't we all?
Enjoy; peace; love.

My voice is like a marked deer

A rabid hound my tongue

When i cry no-one notices

When i scream it is the shot of a gun

I am done



Twitter = @28thraves - - - - Instagram = @28zacthrav


Zac Thraves is a writer and performer from the UK.

Wednesday 14 October 2020

Why Do We Misreport Our Emotions?

 Disclaimer - this blog contains affiliated links for which I will receive a small sum; call it supporting an artist who needs to fund his imagination




I will soon be sharing with you some very cool stuff, a brand new course designed to help you meditate and come to terms with your emotions in our noisy and modern world. 

The world is still noisy, it was even when we were in lockdown; we still had rolling news and updates and social media and negative reporting and it was, still is, too much.

My course will help you to deal with all of that and give you some great tips on using arts to meditate and to listen to your emotions. Listening to them helps you react to them which ultimately helps you to deal with them in a positive way, regardless of the emotion. 

What I don't do is lock them up; ignore them or wish to slay them. My emotions are not a monster or a dark serpent or anything like that. Yes, they are sometimes bad, but they are not criminal and I do not hide from that part of me anymore.

If you want to find out more please follow me on Twitter @28thraves or on Insta, @28zacthrav. I am keeping my course entirely personal and it will be for you. It will also be fun, and you will come away from it feeling ready to stand tall and recognise that you are unique, and you can boss your world. 

We are all heroes. 


So why do we misreport our emotions? It's a question I have pondered for some time now and one that I can't say I have a real handle on. I try to think of us as this:

  • a collection of thoughts and feelings
  • whizzing about our psyche at lightening speed
  • some good and some bad
  • some judgemental and some pure love
  • clashing and bashing like atoms
  • some may explode 
  • and all this, our unique personal universe, encased in a body

And then once we filter all of this through our mind and sort it like the postal service sorts letters we place a selection of thoughts into an order, analyse them, and decide which ones to issue out of the body and which ones to leave, store or discard.

We are reporters of our minds.

It's actually quite weird when you break it down, but at the same time it makes sense. Our minds are a bit like that sentence, a sequence of words that sound odd but right. 

We become our own censors; like Trump's censorship code for the internet or back in old Hollywood when they tried to convict so-called Communists. In the UK we had censorship on TV and definitely no sex. You can't have sex that's disgusting!
The trouble with that is the ideas of the censorship distributes throughout our society and into our psyches and then it becomes something that we do to ourselves. We are actively censoring our thoughts and becoming our own thought-police. That is what leads us to misreport our emotions because we decide which of our emotions are right and which are wrong.

What if I told you that all of your thoughts are right, how would that make you feel?

Sex? What's wrong with sex, I mean we need to do for the human race to survive, why are we so prudish?
Suicide? What's wrong with thinking about suicide? 
Self-harm? What's wrong with thinking about self-harm?

Thinking about those are not an issue nor are they wrong; even the act of doing is not wrong. What is wrong is society's reaction to those acts and to people who have done it. We collectively make it wrong which then pushes them deeper into our minds where it can grow into a snarling monster; like Medusa in a lair or the Kraken from the deep. These monsters of myth are our monsters...our emotions, made large.

For example, when a thought comes to our minds about harming it is instantly pushed away and the language used to push it away is that we are bad, that we shouldn't think that, it's disgusting; all those people you would hurt, that's so ungrateful; guilt.
All those hateful words are actually worse than the thought of self-harm; and could lead to the act happening with more force, or worse, with fatal results.

Here's one that gets me (after the harming and suicide thoughts):

I want to make $3000 per month doing something I love.

Now, when I write that or say it to myself I feel bad, because then I think that's greedy; I'm not worth that; I don't have anything to offer; who would listen to me; you should be ashamed of yourself. Rich people are monsters, that is so selfish.

?

It is exactly the same thought process for me to want to succeed as it is to want to die. That is true for me anyway. You can argue that success is great, it gives drive, it's a target. Yet those monsters still appear for me when I think of making money. Because I have been conditioned to think like that in the same way I have been conditioned to thinking that self-harm, or just having depression in general, is a bad thing. 
The conditioning is there from childhood, through school and into working life. And the silly thing is that it is not the fault of parents or teachers, because they too have been conditioned to think like that. It's a problem in parts of society. 

Someone has to change the thinking of the greater society and that someone could be you and I. We can all start to take that step to thinking differently by changing our language, understanding that we are emotional and that we have powerful imaginations that change the world and give us enough to sustain a life. There's nothing wrong for me to want to survive and the only way to survive our current world is through earning money. I chose to survive, and my survival story is in my current book (ad above), and with that I want to survive having a life where I can reduce the stress and succeed by producing something that I feel passionate about. 

Is this not right?

You can do that too. Start to think outside the box, because the box is not of your design. There is only one person who can change your world, and that is you. By each of us doing this individually we can shape a new way of thinking. If you think about changing all of society you may go...WOAH, that's too big!
But actually, if we just focus on ourselves and change our thinking, and share and talk and open up, then gradually it can all change. All of it, forever. 

Just a thought.

I hope you enjoy my fortnightly blogs. Please do follow me on social media and keep a look out for my course which will be downloadable worldwide soon. I want to help us all take a step to a better world.



I recently finished reading this book by Dr Pippa Grange and found it incredibly helpful in giving tips on how to overcome fear. We can all be trapped by fear, mainly for me it is failure and self-worth. Her words and the stories she told of real people overcoming their fears were inspirational, and I do recommend a read of her book. The link is a UK one, I am sure it is also on Amazon.com. Search it out. 


Saturday 3 October 2020

Covid, Mindfulness and Depression; a Personal Story



The following stemmed from a recent conversation over Skype with my father. He lives in South Africa, and we were discussing the pandemic, you know, moaning about the state of his government and the UK government, and the differences between the two. We came to a conclusion that South Africa seem to be responding with more urgency and confidence than the bumbling lot who currently sit in Number 10, Downing Street. However, with all the fear and worry, we sort of fell on a notion:

Can Covid-19 be a friend?

It is a serious illness and sadly many people have died; yet my father and I sort of felt that this is something we are going to have to learn to adapt to and live with, like we do now with the Flu. So I made a list: 

Good things that have come out of the Covid-19 pandemic:

  • natures re-set
  • no more kissing and hugging everyone you meet
  • less traffic
  • people avoid you in the street
  • internet has no borders
  • we are all in this together
  • I get to look like Zorro!


Of all those, the one I have not missed is the hugging and kissing everyone; why we had to do this in the first place has always been questionable. Personally it has always been awkward, and thankfully now not socially acceptable. If this ever comes back then I will consider becoming a recluse because I never know if it one on the cheek or two or three and, frankly, I don't care. I don't need to hug every old friend or family member, let's just say hello to each other and get on with it.

What do you think? Is there anything about the pandemic that you think has been good or am I just delusional?

By the way, I do not intend to offend anyone who has lost friends and family to this horrible illness, I send you my thoughts and wishes. By trying to find some positive in an awful situation, I think we can better honour the memory of those who have died. 





Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us. Marianne Williamson


 The statement above is perfect for the message I am continuing to put out there. Our light is our fear, our darkness is what keeps us in fear. My book, The Self-Harming Pacifist, is my account of an episode in my life where I was going through serious depression and harm. Yet I concluded with myself that I was sick of feeling guilt and shame over having these emotions. Why should I feel guilt and shame as that only exacerbates the whole thing and makes it worse?

Society does not accept depression, anxiety or any other kind of behaviour that is not seen as normal. Is that right? I harmed myself on countless occasions and I was seen as weird, crazy, mad, at crisis level. I dd not hurt anyone else, only me, just me, I was not beating anyone up or aiming a gun at anyone. Yet I was the mad one. Apparently its fine to start a fight in a pub or fire a pistol at passers-by. 

I am convinced that we can change how we view depression by changing our culture and our reaction to those who have depression. The fact that cases of depression and anxiety are increasing is down to our culture, and not to a 'snow-flake' generation. We are all unique and emotional individuals who react in different ways to different scenarios...and that is exactly how it should be.

Being sad is not wrong; just as being happy is not wrong. The more serious sadness is not wrong, and the fact that we see it as wrong and have to diagnose people with drugs to get over it means that when you feel it, you also feel the guilt, the shame and the fear. Which makes it all worse.

We need to re-think this. I am not a doctor, or a psychologist, but I come from experience and the experience I had was not good; the drugs I had were not good; the mindfulness I learnt and became involved in has shown me a new way of thinking and finally given me an acceptance that I am good. Even when I feel depressed, I am good and that removes some of the depressions power. 



I have a course, coming online soon, that uses the arts to make you feel better about your emotions and anxieties. There is a really cool meditation technique and some ideas to get your life on track and make a positive step forward. It is called The Mindful Imagination Experience, and it will soon be available.

Watch this space. Be kind to yourself and to each other. We can change the world with love.

Benefits of Being Mad - MIE

  Along with existence I received a way of existing, or a style. All my actions and thoughts are related to this structure, even a philosoph...