Noetic Nomad in search of … nothing

Noetic Nomad in search of … nothing

For everything there is a season, and a season for everything. We live in a place where the very thought of doing absolutely nothing for any length of time is beyond our imagination, but also perhaps a dream come true. There is a great deal of life available in the nothingness that we too often overlook. Thoughts can heal our hearts. Silence can soothe our soul. Listening to the sound of our own breathing is now understood more widely to bring us back to our core. Unknowing We don’t have to describe it, and often can’t describe it fully. To me, the nothingness in the most profound times have a smell, a color, a sound that can’t be explained to others. The seeds of ancestry are but a whisper in our genetic ear for example. But, we’ve learned how we carry the memories and emotions of our ancestors in our DNA. We don’t have to fully know the science behind that knowledge in order to feel a connection to it. In that void of the unknown, knowledge quietly sits, in waiting for us to discover it for ourselves. Quiet We learn the most about ourselves in our quietest hours. Right before falling asleep. Upon awakening. What thoughts run through your mind? What honest truth whispers in your ear? Those thoughts or emotions you’d never reveal to the world. Do you worry that someone will know something about you that you wanted to keep private? What you think about most, owns you. What you can’t stop thinking about controls you. Are you scared of those thoughts or feelings? Is that...
Noetic Nomad in search of … nothing

Noetic Nomad in search of … darkness

A nyctophilia is someone who loves darkness or night. They find relaxation or comfort in the darkness. The silence that comes with being the only one awake in the middle of the night can be the most comforting feeling in the world. I waited to publish my noetic nomad until it was nighttime for me. I imagine that my hosts at Positive Psychology Learning, and Buckinghamshire University in Great Britain are fast asleep right now. The world is an ever increasingly small place. I can travel from a conversation with a child who has never left the small rural area I live in to having a conversation with someone from Portugal, someone from Australia, someone from the UK and yet another someone from Hawaii all at the same time. Time and hour are irrelevant to those of us on social media. There’s a peace in knowing that day and night are all a part of our never ending quest for healing our world, nurturing our souls, and awakening to a better place to live. Shakespeare wrote of the peace of nighttime. “I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night” There’s a beauty in the sounds and sights of the night. We know that the human eye can see the light of a single burning candle at 30 miles away if there is no obstacle in our way while also in the darkness. Meditation This is also true of our sense of peace. The quiet calm is an ultimate goal for those of us seeking thoughtful calmness in our soul. When we meditate with our...
The Practice Of Resilience

The Practice Of Resilience

Much research on resilience to date has focused on the notion that there must be some sort of ‘significant adversity’ present before resilience can occur. However, with the constant pressures of the modern age, longer working hours and the added pressure social media puts on our desire to ‘have it all’ there is an increasing need for resilience skills in day-to-day life. But what happens if you know these skills but fail to practice them? And how can you improve your resilience once more? A Personal Story In May I finished the first year of my MSc feeling triumphant. Not only had I managed to pass year one with better grades that I had anticipated, but, despite the demands on my schedule, I was thriving on the challenges I was facing and thoroughly enjoying myself. I don’t remember being more resilient at any other stage of my life, despite much in my future remaining uncertain. Fast forward a few months, however, and that resilience has dwindled with my health, both mental and physical, suffering as a consequence. Despite being on a break from my academic career between May and September, demands in my personal life have slowly been on the rise and with the added pressure of maintaining a full time job I have not been coping as well as one might expect of someone whose most recent academic paper was a report on her own personal experiences with resilience. During this assignment I learned a great deal about resilience and, using ‘The Resilience Factor’ by Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte, I learned to use Cognitive Behavioural Techniques to...
Noetic Nomad in search of … nothing

Noetic nomad searching for peace

Peace begins with people being at content with themselves. For some, that concept is as elusive as a winning lottery ticket. We spend so much time making our lives look like what society tells us we we need to look like, that we aren’t aware of our own thoughts. We distance ourselves from having peace because we spend so much time seeking it outside of ourselves. We become afraid to be different, to want less, to live without tangible ease. We forge a life of having, rather than being. Our happiness becomes conditional. Peace seeking? To seek it is a guaranteed way to never be at peace. To be content is our first and only responsibility. Our entire existence is to wake up to the reality of being part of the world, not to dominate over it. The need to be better, faster, wealthier, stronger, morally superior is one of our animal instincts. It’s a base feeling associated with the survivor skills of our origins. We put a label on it. We rationalize it. We compare ourselves with others as part of how we exist. But it doesn’t lead to peace. It never will. Money can buy us safety and comfort. It can’t buy us happiness. It certainly doesn’t buy us tranquility. Are we all nomads, searching for peace? I’ve seen it in how people go about being peaceful. We do what humans always do. We flock to the one with the perceived highest level of status. That very act of seeking the calm in others yields an invisible barricade of never finding it. We’re competing for something that...
Falling in Love with Yourself is Good for You

Falling in Love with Yourself is Good for You

“Don’t Forget to Fall In Love With Yourself First”  Before I started this course, I began to brainstorm and had quite the collage of thoughts going through my head. Can you teach an old dog new tricks? If so, how? With so many different predictions, I didn’t really have a clue on what I will be learning or steps to train my brain into another thought process and a constant positive one at that. I was excited, yet curious of this subject as I have never really looked outside or stepped over the boundary I unknowingly set for myself. I was anxious to learn how I could possibly change my attitude which could in-turn change someone else’s. Although this may sound corny since this was a positive psychology class, I was actually positive about taking this class. Filling the Empty Space with Self-love An Ah-Ha moment for me was learning about self-love and everything that goes along with it that puts you in the forefront. With so much going on in my daily life, I always tend to put myself on the back burner while I make everyone else happy. Although, I do make feel good about myself to see others smile (family, friends and coworkers), I kind of have that little empty space of myself.  I sometimes felt that it would be selfish of me to think I needed anything, but in reality, I was only suffocating myself without even knowing.  This had led to more negative things, added stress, less patience just to name a few. So to think about myself in a different light with the...