Ian Gawler Blog: Colour therapy and New Zealand

This week some extra-ordinary colour therapy courtesy of a flourishing garden, along with details of the meditation retreat in, and tour of New Zealand Ruth and I will embark upon in November and December. Plus reminders of impending talks in Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, along with a small request and a treat!

If you do know anyone for whom these events may be useful, please do share this post with them. I am still convinced that helping someone else to learn or deepen their meditation is one of the most useful things we can do.

But first
Thought for the Day
It takes dedication, hard disciplined work, and intensive training
Before a dancer can move with unearthly grace
And perform feats that are impossible for an untrained body.
In the same, way, people have found when they practice compassion assiduously,
All day and everyday,
They achieve new capacities of mind and heart
                   Karen Armstrong

Ruth and I love going to New Zealand. Great country, great people, great reception. There seems to be a real openness and enthusiasm for Mind-Body Medicine, Complimentary therapies and Lifestyle Medicine. My sense of this is that both the public and the professions, including the doctors, are more open and embracing than in Australia.

It would be interesting to get comments/impressions from any of you who do move back and forth across “the ditch”; what is your experience of this?

We have been invited to present a range of programs – from retreats to a free public workshop in Christchurch for those affected by all the devastation that has come to that city.

So we hope to be able meet up again with those we have met on previous visits, and to continue to make new friends along the way. The events begin in

AUCKLAND: Evening Public Lecture: Medicine of the Mind - Thursday November 14th.
Here the conversation will be around how to let go of stress, activate healing and maximise performance in all you do. The latest research findings will be presented, along with how they can be applied. The power of the mind at work in everyday life. Time to relax and meditate together as well! There will also be a weekend workshop in Auckland Nov 30, Dec1 - see below.
Full details, CLICK HERE

Next comes
ROTORUA: Health, Healing and Wellbeing - November 16th
Here the focus will be more on the prevention and recovery from illness. I will aim to present the essence of what I have found most helpful over the 30 plus years I have worked in this field. Given we have a full day together, there will be plenty of mindfulness and meditation practice interspersed throughout. Full details, CLICK HERE

WANAKA RETREAT – Cancer and Beyond -  November 18 – 22
This five day follow-up cancer program is specifically for people who have attended a CanLive program in NZ, or Gawler Foundation program. This program is currently fully booked, but there may be a cancellation. Full details, CLICK HERE

CHRISTCHURCH Inner peace, Outer health. Sunday November 24th.
A free day workshop made possible by CanLive. An offering to all those affected by the traumas that have beset Christchurch and surrounds in recent times. I will speak of stress management in the conventional sense, as well as what I find to be the more profound possibilities with mindfulness and meditation. We will discuss recovery from major trauma and how it may be possible to find peace and clarity amidst troubled times. Full details, CLICK HERE

NELSON: Mind-Body Medicine in daily Life - Evening of November 26th.
Ah, Nelson. Now there is a place! And the chance to speak about relaxation, meditation and creative imagery for health, business, healing and wellbeing, with a focus on how to deepen the experience of meditation – and some practice together.
Full details, CLICK HERE

AUCKLAND: Weekend workshop: A New Way of Living
A way of living that generates good health, profound healing and long-term wellbeing.
Saturday November 30th: Meditation and the power of the mind
Meditation has a long history at the heart of spiritual practice. Then there is a more recent and rapidly evolving modern, scientific history.

Currently, astute leaders in all fields are recognizing that the mind is pivotal in whatever field of expertise you care to examine. In sport, business, relationships, health, healing, wellbeing; the mind decides what we do, how proficient we become and how much enjoyment we experience. Train the mind and everything gets better.

Meditation provides the key to training the mind and as such is the key to the future. Support it with the practices of relaxation, mindfulness, imagery and contemplation, and we can directly and reliably tap into the incredible power of the mind.

This day will gently blend facts and experience, knowledge and wisdom. I love it!
Full details, CLICK HERE

Sunday December 1st: Living Well, Being Well –
We all want to be healthy and happy. Many people have heard stories of people who have recovered against the odds from cancer and other major illnesses. Many know of, or are dealing themselves with major illness. Carers and Health Professionals are always thinking of how they can be most useful.

What to do? What works best? How do complementary and natural therapies work with conventional medicine? And what about prevention? What is best to eat – for good health and for recovery? How can we be really well and experience long-term good health and happiness?

Today the focus is on presenting the evidence, sharing years of experiences and providing practical answers. Learn how our lifestyle can powerfully affect our health and our capacity to heal – and how to get the best from our own potential.
Full details, CLICK HERE

MANA RETREAT CENTRE on the COROMANDEL PENNINSULA
Meditation Under the Long White Cloud. December 2nd – 8th.
This seven day meditation retreat will be the first Ruth and I will have presented in New Zealand. We love these retreats. A wonderful time to be amidst like-minded people, to assist with deepening your understanding and experience of relaxation, mindfulness and meditation; and then guiding you into the direct experience of inner peace.

Some may join us from Australia and places further afield, but if you are thinking of coming, it will make sense to book soon as all our retreats of late have been fully booked.
Full details, CLICK HERE

THE REQUEST
The organisers for the Auckland talks have requested me to help them set up a public Facebook page that they can use to help promote the events there. As time goes on, I will be able to use this to send out other interesting info and event news and all the things people do on Facebook – God help me!!! – but it seems “Liking “ the page is helpful.

So, if you care to, please pause for a moment, smile, and like me! Now you are laughing a little, please do the liking by CLICKING HERE! Then please send it on to anyone who may be interested.
Many thanks!




Here is the blank canvas 
The veggie garden
prepared over winter
awaiting the Spring planting




NOTICEBOARD
i) MELBOURNE: Mind-Body Medicine in daily life - Sunday October 20th, 10 – 4.30pm
Day seminar with Ian Gawler and Dr Nimrod Sheinman
Be inspired, be informed, deepen your experience of mindfulness, creative imagery and meditation.

Nimrod is a world authority in Mind-Body medicine and an expert with creative imagery and mindfulness. A healthy lunch is included in the modest fee for the day.
Full details, CLICK HERE

ii) BRISBANE November 4,5 and PERTH November 7,8
The famous Happiness and its Causes conference is going on the road and I will be presenting keynote addresses and half day workshops at both venues. My keynote topic is dealing with stress and anxiety; the workshops are on meditation.

Full details,  BRISBANE CLICK HERE  ,  PERTH CLICK HERE

NOW FOR THE BONUS TREAT
Try clicking on this: The pause that refreshes - the wildest way yet to encourage people to meditate!

Ian Gawler Blog: How to access your own inner wisdom

What do we call it? Intuition? Instinct? Gut feeling? Insight? Inner wisdom? We all have times where we seem to access some deeper, more profound aspect of our being that speaks to us with wisdom and guides us towards a good decision, a good choice; that leads us through complexity to do the right thing at the right time.

Now imagine being able to connect and communicate with that inner wisdom at will. For this is the domain of Creative Imagery as taught by Dr Nimrod Sheinman, a world authority with this technique. Ruth and I are delighted to be hosting Nimrod back in Australia in October when we will combine to teach these methods in a residential program in the Yarra Valley: Images, Words and Silence.

So this week, lets go Out on a Limb once more and examine the rationale and techniques behind inner wisdom. But first

Thought for the day
The decisive factor is not the problem, 
But the way we think about it. 
Albert Einstein

Modern neuroscience tells us that our mind’s capacity to store information is pretty well fool proof. It seems that everything we ever learnt, everything we ever saw, heard, read or experienced is actually stored in our memory banks. Storeage is not the problem; remembering it – now there is an issue!

Some people it seems do have almost perfect memories. But for most it is partial recall. We probably all have the experience of knowing we know something, having it “on the tip of our tongue”, but struggling to actually remember it.

Then again, we can all probably observe in ourselves how sometimes we seem to act with real insight, with an inner wisdom that leads us to do just the right thing in a situation where a poor choice could have led to a real mess. Then other times we may have been baffled by the poor choices we did make and the chaos that followed. Ah, the benefit of wisdom in hindsight!

So imagine being able to learn, or even teach others a technique that reliably accessed this bank of stored memory and inner wisdom. Actually, it is not so hard when you understand how the mind works and take the time to develop a simple but profound technique.

Quite simply, wisdom does not exist in the rational, thinking mind. That analytical, deductive, calculating aspect of our mind is useful for many things, but of itself, it contains no wisdom; just thoughts and thinking. No, wisdom dwells in the deeper recesses of the unconscious mind. It is in the unconscious where instinct, intuition and insights are to be found.

So if we are to access our inner wisdom, we need to access our unconscious. It is like we need to communicate between two different systems, the conscious, thinking mind, and the unconscious wisdom mind. This is where it gets easy. For what we need is an interface, a common language that both the conscious and unconscious minds can speak.

Welcome to the world of Creative Imagery. For images are something that the conscious mind can create, understand and communicate with; while images are the natural language of the unconscious.

So we can learn to create an image for our inner wisdom in a form with which we can communicate. The image becomes the bridge between these two aspects of our mind. Then we can enter into a dialogue between the conscious mind and the unconscious. We can pose questions, put problems to that deeper inner wisdom and have it speak to us in simple and clear language; a language we can understand, the language of symbols.

I have to say that having first learnt this technique from Nimrod many years ago, I have taught it to many people over the years and seen them gain major insights that made sense of symptoms of physical illness, that gave direction in life, that did solve burning questions and provided major life lessons and insights.

But given this process could work, how would you know the response you received from this inner wisdom, this inner guidance was real and could be taken seriously? Well happily that too is easy. Sometimes when we sit to contemplate and think something through, we know we are having an inner debate and the conclusions are inconclusive. Sometimes we reach a point of inner certainty.

Where Creative Imagery is so powerful, is that it commonly leads to this inner certainty. Put simply again, if one does an exercise like this and doubt remains, then doubt remains. But if as often occurs, there comes an inner knowing, a conviction; then that leads to the confidence to take the guidance received seriously.

So from October 28th, Ruth Nimrod and myself will lead a 5 day residential retreat at the Foundation’s beautiful Yarra Valley centre and teach this technique. The training is designed for those who seek to use these methods personally, as well as for health practitioners who may like to teach them. We will combine this with an overview of how to learn, teach and deepen the experience of stillness meditation, as the meditation supports accessing inner wisdom and has so many benefits in its own right.

This will be a fabulous program and Ruth and I are very pleased to be able to welcome Nimrod back to Australia and work with him again.

For full details, CLICK HERE, while to book, call the Gawler Foundation on 03 59671730.

RELATED BLOGS

The 3 most powerful tools for personal transformation

RESOURCES

BOOKS The Mind that Changes Everything – details on how to use Creative Imagery and many other mind techniques

CD: Mind Training – the double CD that details how the mind works and how we can use it to greater effect.

Ian Gawler Blog:The 3 most powerful tools for personal transformation

Announcing an exciting training for health professionals and keen individuals that focuses on the clinical application of therapeutic language, imagery and meditation.

It is with real enthusiasm that I write to tell you that Dr. Nimrod Sheinman is coming again to Australia in October, to join Ruth and myself in a 5-Day residential training that will focus on the use of imagery, meditation and language for inner transformation, personal and professional development.

In this special guest blog, Nimrod describes how he became involved in this aspect of his work, what is on offer (a huge potential for major insights, personal breakthroughs and transformation!), and a little of the program we have put together.

It has been my good fortune to get to know Nimrod well over the last 25 years, and to host several of his previous trainings. He is an excellent teacher, great communicator, highly experienced, compassionate and passionate!

Who will attend?
This training is primarily intended for clinicians, but individuals keen to learn and apply these principles and techniques in their own lives, and who have a good grounding in meditation and imagery already, are encouraged to attend.

It is a special feature of the style of this training that we encourage clinicians and clients to interact and learn with each other as well as from each other.

NOTE: 30 Category 2 CPD Points applied for from the RACGP, and this training/program would qualify as training hours for those applying for registration with ATMA.

To download the flier, CLICK HERE                               For further enquiries call 03 59666130


But first
Thought for the day
Light will someday split you open

Even if your life is now a cage.

For a divine seed,

the crown of destiny,

Is hidden and sown on 
an ancient, fertile plain

You hold the title to.
                           Hafiz

Dr Nimrod Sheinman on Images, Words and Silence




It was 1986. I was an Israeli naturopathic physician who had trained for four years in the US, and now I was visiting Melbourne to meet my brother, who later became the founder of the wonderful organic Himalaya Bakery and Café in Daylesford.









As I was standing in front of my brother's library, a blue book caught my eyes. I pulled it out. The photo on the front cover reminded me of a Rene Magritte painting (the famous European surrealist painter), showing a man in black suit with blue sea and blue sky in the background.










The book's photo showed a tall man standing in front of a blue fence, beyond which is a blue sea and blue sky. The man wears a long blue robe, from which only one leg is seen underneath. The cover extolls "You Can Conquer Cancer". As I opened and began to read the book I became excited. "I have to meet this man", I said to myself.







Back then in the summer or ’86, I was on my way back to the US for a one year Mind-Body Residency at Bastyr University in Seattle, Washington. My area of expertise was mainly Mind-Body Medicine. Although I was well trained in clinical nutrition, manipulation therapy, nutritional supplements, herbal medicine and homeopathic prescribing, "Healing, Consciousness and Transformation" (the name of a course I was co-teaching) was "my thing".

I was very inspired by the then new Mind-Body Medicine findings. I had been lucky to be in the US during the '80s, the years during which psycho-neuro-immunology was discovered, Mind-Body Medicine evolved and holistic medicine organized. I met leading mind-body innovators and thinkers, heard the best holistic experts and learned first-hand from great mind-body pioneers.

I was most interested in the practical application of these exciting new developments, and from amongst the various mind-body tools, Interactive Guided Imagery stood out. I went on to learn skills in this area from Martin Rossman MD and David Bresler PhD, experts, pioneers, authors and later the founders of the American Academy for Guided (Interactive) Imagery.

The forte of Interactive Guided Imagery is the unique guided dialogue between the patient and his or her images or inner metaphors, and the skills needed by the clinician to direct this communication process. Interactive imagery beautifully integrates Mind-Body Medicine principles, along with the Jungian perspective, Mindfulness-based approaches, Empathic Dialogue and lots of "trust the process".

It was my last day in Australia, so all I could accomplish at the time was to find Ian's phone number and call him. We spoke and agreed to meet next year. This became the first time I visited one of Ian's support groups, participated and taught in a 10 day cancer retreat and gave a seminar to his staff.





In 1990, we presented Medicine of the Mind, a two day conference, which as our brochure said, was devoted to presenting "up-to-date information on the theoretical research and clinical data that could well change the face of health, healing and medicine".


My connection and friendship with Ian is now over 25 years old!





In these 25 years, much has been discovered on the mind-body connection, the complementary aspects of imagery and meditation, the power of the mind to heal and the roles of the patient and clinician. A huge body of research is now available to us, as well as experience gained in numerous mind-body and integrative medicine institutes.

Interactive Imagery combined with mind-body and mindfulness-based approaches is a "must have" for clinicians. As a technique, it is a great ally to meditation, because it enables people (with the therapist as a guide) to contact inner feelings, processes, struggles and moods; to look at them differently, to explore them as possible positive guides, to learn from them and reduce their hold.

During the last 25 years, I have been fortunate to teach Interactive Imagery training seminars in Europe, USA, Australia and Israel, and to explore its unique value with physicians, psychologists, social workers, nurses and complementary medicine practitioners.

We have witnessed its usefulness in diverse situations, such as in extreme life events, chronic stress disorders, oncology care, trauma work, pain control, and more. Here is what some practitioners have had to say:

"The Interactive Imagery training helped me to connect with my patient's woundedness and their strength, and to empower clients in their healing process", said one psychotherapist.

"Interactive Imagery is a wonderful technique", said one physician, "because it enables me to guide my patients towards their deeper Self, and to harness its healing potential".

Or a social worker’s statement: "Integrating Interactive Imagery with mindfulness enables me to reach the patient's unconscious mind, in order to identify its hidden messages".

All of which will be translated into our coming training in October where those who join us will be experiencing and learning how to:

• Integrate the latest research findings and insights of Mind-Body Medicine with Imagery-based Therapy and Mindfulness-based Meditation  

• Use language, imagery and silence therapeutically, and how best to combine them synergistically to generate healing and wellbeing

• Guide Dialogue between the Person and the Image– the step-by-step approach of communicating with symbols and metaphors 

• Use Interactive Imagery and meditation to transform troublesome "symptom makers" into unique and interesting allies  

• Bring imagery exploration into loaded clinical situations, mobilize personal resources and fortify resilience

This will be a highly experiential, interactive and practical training, uniquely suited to practitioners and informed people keen to work on their own health, healing and wellbeing.


To download the flier, CLICK HERE

For further enquiries call 03 59666130

HOW TO REGISTER

NOTE: 30 Category 2 CPD Points applied for from the RACGP, and this training/program would qualify as training hours for those applying for registration with ATMA.


RELATED BLOG
The Mind that Changes everything

RESOURCES

BOOK: The Mind that Changes Everything

CDs: Mind Training

Mind-Body Medicine

RESEARCH ARTICLE
Bowel cancer? Get off your backside!!!

Associations of recreational physical activity and leisure time spent sitting with colorectal cancer survival.               Campbell PT et al, J Clin Oncol.  2013; 31(7):876-85 

Little is known about the association of recreational physical activity or leisure time spent sitting with survival after colorectal cancer diagnosis. This study examined the associations of prediagnosis and postdiagnosis recreational physical activity and leisure time spent sitting with mortality among patients with colorectal cancer.

CONCLUSION of the Study?: More recreational physical activity before and after colorectal cancer diagnosis was associated with lower mortality, whereas longer leisure time spent sitting was associated with higher risk of death.