Please also see our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/conscientium/

5th August - Don't be Patient be Present

When we realise that our own impatience is caused by our over attachment to future outcome, we can start to see the futility of believing we can control what happens. When we make a plan we make an intention. We do not know how the intention will materialise but we do know the intention has been declared. Impatience is just another form of suffering when we believe we can control what happens next. By making our intention and then letting it go, we can return to the present and enjoy the moment in the knowledge that this is one step toward our intention. By releasing our desire for control, we give space to a greater power than ourselves. All we have to do is keep our attention on each present moment as it emerges and trust that our intention is slowly unfolding regardless of what our unconscious mind tries to tell us.

"We stand at the base of the rock face and look up to the top and we declare our intention to stand on the summit. We then start our climb, one careful step at a time, we don't look up to the top and we don't look below us. We focus on each present foothold. We are conscious and present with each joyous step and before we know it the summit comes upon us" 

BMN

19th September - Moving from Control to Reality

For many of us, letting go or truly relaxing has far bigger connotations than just surrendering to gravity. Letting go is often interpreted as letting go of 'control'. For those of us whose way of life has been underpinned by regular meditation for many years, the idea of having or needing to have control is opposed to our experience of reality. However, for those who are learning the practice for the first time, the idea of surrendering control challenges the very state of being on which their existence in society has depended. This experience of needing to be 'in control' has two dimensions:

First the mind, which pushes out repetitive unconscious fearful thoughts drawn from past experience when 'letting go' resulted in some form of recrimination or emotional pain. Second the body, which at the time, responded quite naturally by tensing up in flight or fright mode. However, this tension continues to be fueled by the mind's repetitive thinking, day after day, year after year as we mature into 'so called' responsible members of society. This perpetual state of tension becomes the security we need, to feel 'in control'.

One should not underestimate the challenge for newcomers to meditation when invited to disengage with unconscious thoughts that have supported their everyday existence for as long as they can remember. This is more often than not, a slow process of moving from belief to experience or moving from distrust to trust. In this case, the purpose of meditation is, little by little, to offer an experience of being where our peace and well-being is not dependent on any control whatsoever. In time we begin to realise that 'control' itself is just another mental construct, that has no purpose or meaning in present reality. As a result, our powers of self-compassion, acceptance and creativity are enhanced as we are released from the restraints that the belief in control once imposed.

14th September - Acceptance

We cannot change the present moment, it is simply impossible. So, if we want to act constructively we need to be in alignment with 'what is', not with what our mind would like it, or not like it to be. There is no good news or bad news, there is just news. What determines good or bad is our state of present consciousness from which our consequential actions arise.

We cannot stop our unconscious thinking. When we accept our thoughts for what they are - just thoughts - we align ourselves with the present moment, which is the only place where life exists. So when we practice acceptance of what is, we are truly in alignment with life itself.

When we meditate we are practicing our innate ability not to be dragged into 'past present' thinking but remain in the present moment. When we go about our daily lives we retain this present moment awareness through acceptance of what is. Acceptance is the key to present awareness.

1st August - Great testimonials from our Guided Meditation Sessions in Livingston, Howden Park Centre and Linlithgow Mackinnon Hall.

"I've been looking forward to it all week! I feel a difference already, I'm trying to stay mindful and present and it's already having a positive effect....would recommend this group to everyone."

"Fantastic class feeling more focused and mindful in my everyday life! Thank you, I can't recommend this enough...😊"

1st July - Interview with Conscientium featured in Konect magazine

27th May - Corporate well-being sessions

"The company I work for knows it is very demanding and puts on pressure to employees. But being conscious of that, they also try to offer alternatives for the employees to manage stress, have a better nutrition, improve family relationships, etc. Under the Well-being programme, on behalf of Conscientium, Bernd gladly accepted the invitation to come along to talk about Mindfulness Meditation and the relationship between the body and the mind. He is a natural talented speaker and the audience really got the message, as they never thought about awareness before this talk. So good, we invited him a second time for a Quiet Time Session of guided meditation at lunch time. His session has been the most successful and well attended so far."

Associate 2, State Street Global Services 

15th December - Stop thinking, feel great and lose weight

Eating too much and eating badly is NOT the cause of increased weight and obesity, it’s just part of the symptom.

Professor Sally Davies, England’s first female Chief Medical Officer was recently quoted: "Obesity has to be a national priority. Action is required across all of society to prevent obesity and its associated problems from shortening women's lives and affecting their quality of life. We need to address the educational and environmental factors that cause obesity and empower women and their families to live healthier lives."

So how does one go about empowering women and their families to live healthier lives? There is more media attention and scrutiny of food-fat content and sugar imbalance than ever in recorded history. Everywhere one goes, there are more people jogging in the streets. Cycling has never been more popular and aerobic classes of all forms are well subscribed across the country.

I can assure you, that in the 60s, 70s and early 80s cycling was most definitely ‘uncool’ and as for running around the streets in shorts, that was just asking for trouble. Natural fat content in milk, meat, butter, cheese and bread, in fact in all basic foods was higher than today because we didn’t feel the need to take it out. I can remember a famous Kellogg’s Special K advert which uncontroversially announced that if you could ‘pinch an inch’ on the side of your waste you were probably overweight! Today, that would include pretty much everyone!

Yet, more than ever before we are a nation obsessed with appearance and what does the ideal appearance normally mean? Well it doesn’t mean healthy looking, in fact health doesn’t seem to matter so much. No, ideal means fashionable and skinney. In fact for women in particular, the aesthetic ideal dictated by the fashion industry and the media, is completely unobtainable.

And there we have the ‘rub’, like never before we are all trying desperately to obtain things which we believe we don’t have; better bodies, more money, faster cars, bigger houses, more status etc etc. Ironically a belief is not real, it’s just a thought, an idea that doesn’t exist. So, based on an idea which is neither real nor true we believe that we have to be something else in order to feel good about ourselves. We look to the opinion of others such as media and fashion icons, piers and partners for our well-being. In fact our appearance obsessed society gets us started on this road to discontentment and general unhappiness from the moment we start school! It’s hardly surprising that women gaining maturity in years are prone to consuming more food. It’s a basic fact that when we are unhappy and discontent we eat more. It’s not gluttony, it’s the incorrect believe that we are losing our looks, becoming less desirable and having to give more of ourselves and getting less in return. Over eating is the symptom of believing that we are just not good enough.

So who is telling us that we are not good enough? The television, newspapers and magazines? Sure they might be the source and in any event, we can’t stop society’s obsession with youth or youth culture. So who is it? Well it’s us, each one of our over active brains pushes thoughts of ‘not good enough’ in some guise through our continuous stream of unconscious uninvited thinking from the moment we wake to the moment we sleep and sometimes even during sleep. We pick up comments and ideas from our multi-media entrenched lives; the brain stores them whether we want it or not and it delivers it back to us in an endless stream of over 100,000 unwanted thoughts every day of our lives.

Unfortunately we can’t stop our brain functioning in this way but we can learn to distance ourselves from this unconscious thinking by becoming aware or mindful of negative thoughts as they arise and simply ignoring them by focussing on what is important; whatever we are doing and enjoying in the present moment. Although this awareness does need to be taught, it is not new, it is an innate faculty which we have all possessed since birth.In time, we come to realise that we are all perfect just the way we are and that realisation is truly enough to bring about a sense of joyous well-being.

So how can we empower women and their families to live healthier lives? Let’s teach them how to cultivate a positive sense of self by recognising that they are not their negative thoughts but something much more perfect in every way and that their happiness is purely a symptom of their inner health and well-being.

7th December - Changing our institutions and changing our societies starts with changing ourselves.

At a recent conference in Edinburgh held to kick off a local government initiative, a senior government executive stood on stage and suggested that most onlookers would be forgiven for thinking that each day he went to work with the express intention of further ‘harming the environment’ and doing his best to ‘increase the poverty gap’. However, this was not the case, but everything he and his colleagues actually did, did exactly that. His conclusion was that government was broken.

After pondering on this quite surprising piece of publicly declared honesty, I concluded that it’s not government that is broken but our individual and collective inability to define and assert what we truly want as a human electorate and what our society structure should really look like. If government is to respond to the needs of the people it governs, what are those needs? What kind of society do people want to live in? What do people want for themselves and their community? Does sustainability of their desires play a part in their thinking or not? When we observe the media driven culture of today it would appear that freedom and the attainment of wealth through growth, are the corner stones of our collective desires. But is this really the case?

When we talk about freedom today, what do we mean? Freedom of expression, freedom of will, freedom of movement? Who sets the parameters of our freedom and how much constraint is truly government lead and how much is self-imposed? The aspiration to improve our standard of living for ourselves and our immediate family is completely natural. But at what point do our ambitions for more wealth become detrimental to our well-being and those around us? If as suggested, government is broken, at what point did our society start to generate more misery than happiness and what are the forces that have kept us on this path regardless of outcome and regardless what government happens to be in power?

These basic questions have been asked for centuries and yet regardless of the answers and corresponding strategies, many of which have been implemented, collectively we have continued on our path of misery and destruction and as individuals, maintained lives of stress, disease and general discontentment.

So what is keeping us on this track? Concepts such as freedom and caring for others still appear to be high on our agenda and yet collectively we continue to inflict extreme cruelty on ourselves and other living creatures, imprison our children, invest in organisations that knowingly destroy our habitat, look to the manufacture of poisonous chemicals for our wellbeing and are in danger of making ourselves genetically extinct in the name of progress. How can this be? Out of all the human species, of which we know there were several, we, that is homo sapiens, have been around for the shortest length of time and as well as probably destroying all our fellow and longer surviving species, we are about to do the same to ourselves! Can we honestly lay the blame for this with our respective governments or with forces beyond our control?

If we accept that we cannot, we have only one place left to look and that’s to ourselves. Yet we all give birth to perfect children. Regardless of sex, health and sexual orientation we are all perfect beings when we come into this world. So what happens to us individually to generate so much discontentment and collectively follow our fellow species steadily toward self-destruction?

As simple as it sounds, the answer is all in our minds and in the way we as humans think. So how can thinking be a problem? Well, there are two types of thought; conscious thought and unconscious thought. Conscious thought is what we do when we purposefully need to communicate, to remember something, to solve a problem, to create and conceptualise etc. Unconscious thought is very different, as we have no control of it and the thoughts are more numerous and repetitive than our conscious thoughts. On average we experience about 130,000 unconscious thoughts per day and each thought draws our attention away from our present moment activity from the moment we wake up to when we go to sleep. Most people on the planet live the majority of their lives lost in unconscious thinking. You may of experienced driving home from work in your car and not remembering anything about the journey on your arrival. Or, simply day dreaming at your desk as the mind takes you off on a journey of its own making, only to become conscious suddenly of what you were supposed to be doing. Or, waking up at four in the morning thinking about something that just won’t go away whatever you try to do.

This is all innocent enough, but what we need to understand individually and as a society, is that our unconscious minds store and regurgitate all our emotional responses to our appearance, our race, our relationships, our position in society, our education and belief systems and mostly powerfully, our fears. In fact all experience real and imagined. This is the downside of possessing such a phenomenal mind.

So how does this influence our behaviour? Well, for most humans and human societies, unconscious thought is acknowledged as a form of identity, it defines who we are and is the filter through which we see and judge everything before us. It is this simple misgiving that is at the heart of our human cultural dilemma. By mistaking our unconscious thinking for reality and by engaging with it, we continue to do harmful acts wantonly or otherwise, individually or collectively to our environment and other living things. Also, our illnesses, hatred, greed, enforced exclusion, intolerant belief systems and extremism are caused and nurtured, without exception, by attachment and identification with unconscious thought.

As humans, we cannot stop our capacity for negative unconscious thinking as it is a natural experience of our mental function. But we can and must learn not to engage with it and to see it for what it is – just thoughts that have no place in our present moment reality.

Becoming 'aware of' and 'detached from' unconscious thought and addressing only that which is in the present moment, causes a fundamental shift in our human behaviour. It re-engages our social awareness and increases our love for ourselves, our fellow humans and every living thing with which we encounter. Our fear of change diminishes and our emotional attachments especially to material things become less important to our wellbeing. This awareness is not new and it does not need to be taught, it is an innate faculty which we have possessed since birth. It is not a belief, it is a natural order just as evolution or relativity.

Any teaching of this awareness is purely focussed on assisting people and society as a whole to experience what they have always possessed; the ability to accept and respond creatively to whatever the moment presents, uncorrupted by prejudicial thinking and past attachments.

The difficult part is that change to our understanding of ourselves cannot happen collectively like a philosophy or political movement. It can only come about through individual experience, which is why it’s up to us as individuals. It may take decades before society and corresponding governments follow, but be reassured in the meantime, that a real sense of joy and gratitude for life in all its guises awaits us all, if we chose.

19th November - Guided De-Stress Meditation at State Street Bank

Great feedback from our recent guided meditation at State Street Bank in Edinburgh.

"Under the Wellbeing topic, Bernd gladly accepted our invitation to come and talk about Mindfulness Meditation and the relationship between the body and the mind. He is a natural talented speaker and the audience really got the message, as they never thought about mind body awareness before this talk.

The talk was so well received that we invited him for a Quiet Time Session of guided meditations. These sessions have been the most successful and well attended, so far."

Michelle Burgos Almada, Client Operation Services, State Street Bank

If you think that weekly guided De-stress Meditation Sessions would be good to try at your company, please get in touch at info@conscientium.com

20th October - Interview by U.Lab MIT with Bernd Neckel

U.Lab is a free MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and made available globally.  It blends e-learning (watching videos online and streamed live sessions) with face to face discussions in small groups.  It helps people to delivers results more aligned with our sense of our emerging future.  A few colleaguesparticipated in the trial run of U.Lab earlier this year (along with 28,000 other participants around the world!) and found it to be one of the most effective learning experiences we’ve ever had.   U.Lab strongly supports our approach to Public Services in Scotland:

• It builds skills we need in working collaboratively and co-producing outcomes with others including those who use public services;

• It is a highly participative approach – anyone can take part free of charge;

• It builds on people’s and communities’ assets and strengths; and

• It champions the use of improvement science.

U.Lab builds the quality of our awareness of ourselves and of the context we are working within.  Given the priority which the First Minister has given in the Programme for Government to increasing participation it is well aligned with our operating context right now.    Scottish-specific content will be available to participants with an interest in Scotland.

The story so far

Following a discussion within Scottish Government in May 2015, 180 people from all over Scotland joined an open event in Edinburgh on 1 June; and a further 280 participated in an open event on 3 July.  We expect over 300 people at a final preparatory event on 1 September.  There is growing enthusiasm and energy for the programme, which will be organised and facilitated by the Scottish Government, helping to create the conditions for people in communities and networks to take action on issues that matter to them.   

To get involved with U Lab please contact Angie at angie.meffan-main@scotland.gsi.gov.uk