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Is Meditation Hard Work?

5/2/2015

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Victoria Cottam hugging a tree
Quite often we associate meditation with sitting in silence and trying to get rid of our thoughts or trying not to think of anything while chanting "ommm..." this is a misconception.


Meditation comes in all forms and it is easier than you believe.

If sitting or laying still does not appeal to you then try listening to guided meditation or binaural beats.
Clearing one's mind takes practice that is achievable with persistence. But it does not have to be hard work.
That's why people refer to meditation as a practice as there is no right or wrong way to do it.

Try different forms and see what works for you, there are even meditation practices that teach you to move and shake your body whilst stood in an upright position with eyes open...conscious open eyed meditation is very effective and very easy to learn. Especially if you are the kind of person who finds it hard to sit still. One form of this is called Bio-energy shaking meditation.

I was one of those many people who thought I would never be able to mediate and quiet my mind. I was always too busy doing something or thinking about thousands different things all the time my head was spinning...and it was not a nice feeling.
I decided to try different forms of meditation to feel which was best for me and found that in a very short space of time I was relaxed and calmer, clear headed and more focused than ever before.
At first I tried to fight all my thoughts and believe me trying to think of nothing when you're used to thinking about everything seemed impossible. The thing is you cannot get away from yourself. So make friends with yourself and your thoughts, after all you created them.

When you judge or try to fight your thoughts they seem to increase in intensity or spiral out of control.
When you learn to observe or accept your thoughts they quite often dissipate or reveal great insights.

I started with the word 'focus' and I repeated it over and over again until that was the only word I could think of. That worked for me in the beginning. But you could use any word, for example 'love' or 'peace' or 'calm'.

I also tried guided meditation which I enjoyed and still listen to on occasion.
Binaural beats are a fav of mine as you can listen to them anytime whether you are cleaning the house or walking to shops or relaxing in a bath.
There is something for everybody and there are lots of free videos on YouTube or free downloads on iTunes or App Store.


Here is some interesting info on brainwaves and how all forms meditation from binaural to silent can have such a positive effect on you and increase your wellbeing.

All of the information you are about to read has been extensively researched and has been proven scientifically. But if in doubt please feel free to do your own research.
It is important to know that all humans display five different types of electrical patterns or “brain waves” across the cortex. The brain waves can be observed with an EEG (or an “electroencephalograph”) – a tool that allows researchers to note brainwave patterns. Each brain wave has a purpose and helps serve us in optimal mental functioning.

Our brain’s ability to become flexible and/or transition through various brain wave frequencies plays a large role in how successful we are at managing stress, focusing on tasks, and getting a good night’s sleep. If one of the five types of brain waves is either overproduced and/or under produced in our brain, it can cause problems. For this reason, it is important to understand that there is no single brain wave that is “better” or more “optimal” than the others.

Each serves a purpose to help us cope with various situations – whether it is to help us process and learn new information or help us calm down after a long stressful day. The five brain waves in order of highest frequency (lowest amplitude) to lowest frequency (highest amplitude) are as follows: gamma, beta, alpha, theta, and delta.

5 Brain Waves: Frequencies To Understand
Before I get into specifics, it is important to realize that when I refer to a certain brainwave, I am implying that a particular brain wave is “dominant.” Throughout the day in your waking state, your EEG will display all 5 types of brain waves at the same time.  However, one particular brain wave will be dominant depending on the state of consciousness that you are in.

For example, if you are awake, but have really bad ADHD, you may have more slow wave (alpha and/or theta) activity than beta waves. During sleep usually there are combinations of the slower frequencies, but even gamma has been found to be involved in rapid-eye movement (REM).

Gamma Waves
These are involved in higher processing tasks as well as cognitive functioning. Gamma waves are important for learning, memory and information processing. It is thought that the 40 Hz gamma wave is important for the binding of our senses in regards to perception and are involved in learning new material. It has been found that individuals who are mentally challenged and have learning disabilities tend to have lower gamma activity than average.

Frequency range: 40 Hz to 100Hz (Highest)
Too much: Anxiety, high arousal, stress
Too little: ADHD, depression, learning disabilities
Optimal: Binding senses, cognition, information processing, learning, perception, REM sleep
Meditation increases gamma waves.

Beta Waves
These are known as high frequency low amplitude brain waves that are commonly observed while we are awake. They are involved in conscious thought, logical thinking, and tend to have a stimulating effect. Having the right amount of beta waves allows us to focus and complete school or work-based tasks easily. Having too much beta may lead to us experiencing excessive stress and/or anxiety. The higher beta frequencies are associated with high levels of arousal. When you drink caffeine or have another stimulant, your beta activity will naturally increase. Think of these as being very fast brain waves that most people exhibit throughout the day in order to complete conscious tasks such as: critical thinking, writing, reading, and socialization.

Frequency range: 12 Hz to 40 Hz (High)
Too much: Adrenaline, anxiety, high arousal, inability to relax, stress
Too little: ADHD, daydreaming, depression, poor cognition
Optimal: Conscious focus, memory, problem solving.

Alpha Waves
This frequency range bridges the gap between our conscious thinking and subconscious mind. In other words, alpha is the frequency range between beta and theta. It helps us calm down when necessary and promotes feelings of deep relaxation. If we become stressed, a phenomenon called “alpha blocking” may occur which involves excessive beta activity and very little alpha. Essentially the beta waves “block” out the production of alpha because we become too aroused.

Frequency range: 8 Hz to 12 Hz (Moderate)
Too much: Daydreaming, inability to focus, too relaxed
Too little: Anxiety, high stress, insomnia, OCD
Optimal: Relaxation.

Theta Waves
This particular frequency range is involved in daydreaming and sleep. Theta waves are connected to us experiencing and feeling deep and raw emotions. Too much theta activity may make people prone to bouts of depression and may make them “highly suggestible” based on the fact that they are in a deeply relaxed, semi-hypnotic state. Theta has its benefits of helping improve our intuition, creativity, and makes us feel more natural. It is also involved in restorative sleep. As long as theta isn’t produced in excess during our waking hours, it is a very helpful brainwave range.

Frequency range: 4 Hz to 8 Hz (Slow)
Too much: ADHD, depression, hyperactivity, impulsivity, inattentiveness
Too little: Anxiety, poor emotional awareness, stress
Optimal: Creativity, emotional connection, intuition, relaxation

Delta Waves
These are the slowest recorded brain waves in human beings. They are found most often in infants as well as young children. As we age, we tend to produce less delta even during deep sleep. They are associated with the deepest levels of relaxation and restorative, healing sleep. They have also been found to be involved in unconscious bodily functions such as regulating heartbeat and digestion. Adequate production of delta waves helps us feel completely rejuvenated after we wake up from a good night’s sleep. If there is abnormal delta activity, an individual may experience learning disabilities or have difficulties maintaining conscious awareness (such as in cases of brain injuries).

Frequency range: 0 Hz to 4 Hz (Slowest)
Too much: Brain injuries, learning problems, inability to think, severe ADHD
Too little: Inability to rejuvenate body, inability to revitalize the brain, poor sleep
Optimal: Immune system, natural healing, restorative / deep sleep.



I appreciate you joining me and hope you've enjoyed reading my blogs please come visit me again. And remember to enjoy and embrace new experiences, stay curious, be experimental...and above all love yourself with all your heart. PEACE

Author: Victoria Cottam


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Smoke free with FasterEFT

28/1/2015

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I've been talking about writing a book about my life for many years, seeing as how it has always been a little bit different from other people's I've met I thought it would make good reading, but something was stopping me.

I kept thinking 'one day I will write this book’ but when the time is right I will know, turns out last year I got a clear sign that the time was right. I awoke from a terrible nightmare but as I've studied dreams and the metaphoric mind I wrote this dream down which led me to writing about other traumatic experiences I had been through.


I was also working on my fear of public speaking which then led me to a meditation which was profound I had a clear message within this meditation that I must start writing this book as it would help a lot of people.

This message came to me last year which was around late summertime 2014. I have been making notes from then until now, and had a feeling I would start writing in the new year.

So here I am in January 2015 a fresh year...so no more excuses, I am doing it I am sharing my world with you and if my words help just one person then I have done what I set out to do.


I have been working on myself using FasterEFT (Emotional Freedom Technique). For almost 3 years to date, I started slow to say the least, I tapped on whatever was there but I was not consistent...it most certainly helped me at the time but I still felt lost, empty like something was missing inside of me. I was about to find out what that was, I asked the universe please help me I want to feel better. The universe answered.


I was on the FasterEFT Facebook group when I saw a message from a practitioner named Jamie asking does anyone feel like partying, being a bit of a party girl back then in 2012 I replied saying "yes I'm up for it where do you live?" he replied "Northampton" I checked on google maps & realised it was two and half hours drive from me so we chatted briefly and said maybe next time.

It was a year later before we chatted again I had done my best to fill in the void I felt in 2012, I traveled, I drank and partied, I always kept my diet clean and super healthy, kept up with my yoga regime regular exercise at the gym, my reiki healing I practiced on myself regular helped as did my weekly massage appointment, (I will note I had my own practice which specialised in all forms of massage, reiki and holistic healing), but nothing was filling that void.

Jamie & I happened to get chatting again on Facebook in 2013 and decided to Skype...we had similar ideas about business and our own healing and we decided to meet in person, it was quite bizarre but felt like something was drawing us together...it was a feeling that I have felt before a inner knowing that we could really help each other.

August the the 8th 2013 the day I met Jamie in person. I will never forgot travelling down to Northampton as I'm based in the north to his south, I was very nervous but it was more excitement like something good was about to happen. I remember he was late because he had fell asleep and also he was meeting me at a service station on the M1 and he had gone to the north side instead of the South (he was very scatter brain back then and this was a normal occurrence). Anyway we arrived at his shared house and I felt comfortable right away as we talked ate and drank some wine relaxed and had a laugh we was getting to know each other as the next day was to be our first tapping session.

I was feeling nervous and not confident enough to tap on Jamie so he decided to tap on me, I was not a heavy smoker but I had smoked on & off since I was 13...I wanted to quit for a while and had success then started again etccc.

That first session in Jamie's front room was long, exhausting and after a few rounds of tapping as with all smokers I've worked with the subject changed because the root cause it's never what you think it is. The reasons for smoking for me soon turned out to be issues I had with my family (who I love dearly) but I had some major issues and was unaware of most, that's a whole other story in itself!!...but one of my distraction techniques...symptom...stress relievers whatever you want to call it was smoking.

We tapped on several things and for most of the session I felt dizzy and faint and sick, oh my goodness the sickness was horrendous at one point I felt like I was going to pass out..but just when you feel like it can't get any worse something shifts and clears. Afterwards I felt so much better. I had a feeling of inner peace rather just a taste of peace I had not experienced before, I felt lighter and happier, my smoking was not cured...not yet, but I knew something big had happened that day..it was the start of a journey, a journey within myself that deep dark place I had not dared to go. There seemed like there was a flicker of light and I wanted to find out more and wanted another taste of this inner peace I felt without the aid of drugs drink or cigarettes.

I started tapping on myself at every opportunity on anything negative that I felt and had opened the floodgates.

I wanted to let go of everything that was not serving anymore, sometimes I would wake from a nightmare and be tapping and crying for hours..with the help of my friend Jamie who was always there on the other end of the phone when I called for help and were tapping on each other and clearing stuff up at a rapid speed.

I was always processing something, crying or screaming or being sick I did not know before I started this journey that I had so much pain and suffering I had not dealt with I was quite oblivious to it and had done a great job at suppressing it, so good in fact that if you had asked anyone I knew I'm sure they would described me as a happy, confident, carefree person, that's what I truly had convinced myself to believe too.

I was in for the ride of my life when I decided to quit smoking that day and had my first in depth session with Jamie (I had been tapping on myself with success but never had I allowed myself to go that deep) and as I now know that was to be the start of something amazing.


P.s. I have been smoke free for 15 months

Author: Victoria Cottam

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Getting help and keeping your thoughts and memories private

11/7/2014

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When it comes to dealing with chalenges in our life that we are unable to deal with ourselves one of the first things people consider is counselling. There are various counselling types out there with some counsellors working in a way where they say virtually nothing to you while others will have an active input into your time together.

Talking about a problem or something that we want to deal is a natural route that a lot of people feel they want to do, whereas others will avoid getting help even from friends because of maybe embarrassment or the fear of re-living the experiences the've spend so long working at keeping under control.

Would it be easier to get assistance if you didn't have to tell anyone else the details of your thoughts and experiences?
When I tell people they don't have to share their experiences if they don't want to I get different responses and have even been asked "Do you work like a spiritual medium?". Well no I don't but to answer the question, we first have to start with a some simple understandings:

Firstly: I work from the premise that the body and brain work together, sometimes correcting something in the body can have a major impact on mental health. |Making peace with experiences and thoughts in the brain will effect problems in the body and often
positively impact serious health conditions.

Secondly: whatever is going on in the brain, the body follows.

Thirdly
: you know why you came to see me. 
Only you know what it feels like to be you and you already have access to those feelings.

The brain sends signals into the body in a lot of cases to alert you because it believes there is a potential threat. In some cases the event will have to be triggered, such as in a phobia of snakes when something comes into awareness that has association to snakes. In other scenarios such as in someone with Post traumatic symptoms these triggers are happening continuously. No matter what the scenario is it's not simply a rational logical thought, it is an automatic response to make the body feel something and affect organs such as to increase heart rate and release adrenalin.

The amygdala is the part of the brain that links emotional content to thoughts and memories. The skills I apply work directly with the way that your brain is still experiencing past events and therefore creating thoughts of the future. Because of this what you think about and the response you get are actually two separate things and are only linked because the amygdala hasn't been trained that the response that it's creating is actually causing a problem rather than keeping you safe.

With the way I work, all you have to do is simply feel the feelings and therefore keep the details of what you are thinking about to yourself. If you choose to that is !

This can be a hard concept to understand if you have not experienced anything similar before so if you would like to know more, ask questions or book a session contact us.

Author: Jamie Edkins
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What exactly is Free Will?

2/6/2014

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Religion. It is Free WIll?
Free will us a much debated subject but what does it mean?

This is a subject we could talk about for days because there are so many different perceptions and everybody you meet will probably have a different perception on the subject, which is within itself free will :-)

Some will say that it's simply is the ability to make choices, those choices could be the same as or different to what others believe. If we take this way of looking at it, consider our unconscious mind. When we make a choice that has any emotional factor then we are not coming from a place of complete impartiality, we are coming from a place of our own internal programming and perspective. This programming will be based on everything in our past so we are not making an impartial choice; we are being directed from what we already believe to be true.

I like to refer to the philosophical concept of Plato's Cave so if you don't know of it take a look at this easy explanation. Philosophyzer's explanation of Platos cave

We believe there are 2 things you can chose to listen to within yourself: Ego & higher self (true self). Ego comes from the voice within but will sound or feel more like a desperate need whereas higher self will come from a place of desire (which feels natural, Not urgent).
Also we look at like this. It's the ability to challenge your own beliefs no matter how strongly you believe them to be true. This can be one of the hardest things to do because as you probably have experienced, it can get very emotional and fearful. Just think of a time when you got annoyed when someone has challenged a belief you held.
There is no right and there is no wrong.

If you say you don't have free will, is that like saying you are a victim of your own life? Everything just happens to me and controls me. Boo hooh hooh, poor me, lol
I (Jamie) used to come be in this place for most of my life but now of course I help others to make peace with memories of those kind of experiences.

One thought to leave you with is this. When we get angry or annoyed it's because something is not going our way. The next time you get angry or annoyed by someone else's opinion does this mean you believe they should not be allowed to use free will and should just agree with your way?


Authors: Jamie Edkins & Victoria Cottam
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Biochemist claims she has totally removed her daughters autism symptoms by removing MSG from her diet

2/5/2014

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Unblind My Mind is a nonprofit organization raising awareness of the link between the food we eat and the growing health ailments, from allergies to the growing brain disorder epidemic.

Dr. Katherine Reid claimed she removed MSG from her daughter Brooke's diet (even found in toothpaste), and says the autism symptoms have been "completely removed." Three years after removing MSG Brooke has been taken out of her special needs school and gets on very well in mainstream education.

Dr. Reid says she has so far worked with 75 children and 74 of them saw dramatic improvements within 5 weeks so they they carried on with the diet.

Her journey to discover the impact of MSG began by adding nutritional supplements such as Omega 3, magnesium, Vitamin D3, and B-Complex vitamins.  Dr. Reid said “I observed eye contact coming back, and minor improvements, but still autistic, still special needs, not functioning very well in the mainstream environment,”
Next was to remove gluten and casein which made some improvements again. this finally lead to the removal of MSG and amazingly Brooke’s seizures, sensory distortions and extreme sensitivity to light and sound, were completely gone.


Dr Reid said: “I was shocked. It’s all over the place in our foods, and it’s not being labeled as monosodium glutamate, it’s being labeled as almost healthy things, as natural flavors, for instance. So you can have a food labeled 100% organic, all natural, no MSG added and still, that food item contain a significant amount of MSG,”
Sources:
[1]: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2014/03/20/chemist-claims-reversed-daughter-autism/
http://www.santacruz.com/2013/03/06/biochemist_pushes_for_new_approach_to_autism/
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