Jenny O'Byrne Psychotherapy

15/12/2019

15/11/2019

Love this guy!

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2454666781297582&id=100291436735140

ON TELLING THE TRUTH

There is something so healing about simply telling the truth.

To ourselves. To a trusted, non-judgemental friend. To a journal. To the gods, to the mountains, to the wild animals of the forest.
Not the ‘nice’ truth, the stale, regurgitated truth designed to please. Not the conceptual truth of the mind. But the raw, messy, present-moment truth of our wild hearts. Destroying the self-image, the persona (mask) designed to win love, or impress people, or just keep ourselves ‘safe’ and ‘out of trouble’.
Well, sometimes what was once ‘safe’ has become a self-imposed prison. You long to lose control and speak the wild truth. Or whisper it. Or shout it to the heavens.
Not the convenient, socially-acceptable, “nice guy” truth. Not the “spiritual” truth crafted to impress teachers and gurus and friends and gain a million followers.
But the truth you are a little scared to speak. The truth that makes your heart pound. The truth that makes you go a little dizzy when you speak it.
The vulnerable truth. The shaky, sweaty, what-the-f**k-am-I-doing, dry-mouthed truth.
The truth of your immense loneliness. Your raging doubt. Your piercing shame. The truth of your ‘sinful’ longings and desires, cravings, jealousies. The ‘out of control’ joy that you just can’t squash down anymore. The anger that has been suppressed for too long and is making you physically sick. The frustration, the boredom, the hope or the hopelessness, the ‘madness’ you just cannot push down anymore.

What you hold down ends up holding you down. And what you depress ends up depressing you.

It can be so relieving, so liberating, to just tell the truth. To have a breakdown, a healing crisis, and just tell the truth, birth it, mother it into existence. To sing it, to dance it, to put it into a poem. To write it on a piece of paper and burn it. To silently – or very loudly – proclaim it to all the gods and goddesses. You will find your own way. You will find your own unique expression of truth. Or it will find you.

To tell the truth of this moment, and let love in. The truth that shatters old safety but gives new safety. The truth that may upset a few people, shock those who thought they knew you, anger those who wanted to control you, disappoint those who’d hoped you were different. But that’s how real our self-images are. That’s how stable our ‘personality’ really is. It can shatter, break, rebuild itself a billion times.

It’s so exhausting to keep pretending. It gets more exhausting as the lies deepen.
Truth can hurt, and shock, but it can also heal. It can open up old wounds, break up relationships, unravel the status quo, leave you with nothing, except your self-worth and new dignity. It can feel terrifying to speak it, yes, but a life of lies ultimately murders the soul and that is far more terrifying in the long run. The fears we face are far less terrifying than they seem before we face them. The medicine is in the pain, sometimes. The healing is in the telling.

Find a trusted friend. A therapist. A teacher. A partner. An animal, a mountain, a loving family member, alive or dead, who can hold your shame and guilt and fear as you speak. Someone who will believe you. Someone who wants the real you, flaws and f**k-ups, failures and fears and all.

Someone who will stay present as you break.
Who will not try to fix you, or vomit out easy platitudes and stale spiritual teachings.
Who will hold you in your crisis by holding themselves.

Find a fire.
A lake.
A vast night sky.
A stage. A canvas. A dance-floor.
A fu***ng rock with a face painted on it, if that’s what it takes.

And just tell the damn truth.

- Jeff Foster

14/11/2019

https://www.facebook.com/350447368976065/videos/637405090116913/

23/06/2019

https://www.facebook.com/100291436735140/posts/2176106595820270/

JUST SHOW ME YOUR F***ING HEART

“Manifest everything you desire!”
“Look years younger!”
“Live your best life!”

We have all been trained, from a very early age, to conceal and manipulate aspects of our humanity in order to please others and win love and approval and protect ourselves from failure and ridicule and psychological death.

We are all, to a lesser or greater degree, well-trained actors.

Until we wake up. This is no judgement. This is the human condition.

See, the heroes and heroines of our age! Those flawlessly made-up and air-brushed visages. Those perfectly toned and sculpted bodies, not a trace of fat, cellulite, anything that would remind us of mortality, illness, confusion, loneliness, physical decay. The perfect display of health, excellent control of the faculties, bright smiles and a positive outlook. The contoured hairs of the head and face, grey and white obliterated, everything bleached, dyed, shaved, cropped and chopped, effortlessly on trend, sexy without ever trying to be sexy, all broadcast real-time, image as “reality”.

You must understand: External beauty is no beauty at all – it is ugliness and fear - when it is used to mask our authentic pain, smother our authentic internal devastation, airbrush away our wildness. Only in our devastation can our true beauty and identity be found, only in our darkness and our striving for the light can our deepest humanity be known. A broken heart, displayed without shame - hell, even displayed with shame, what do I care - is the most exquisitely beautiful thing of all. Our flaws and deformities, our rage and our despair, our rolls of flab, our spots and dry mouths, our trembling hands and fluttering bellies, our nausea and our burning guilt, our moles and birthmarks and our yearning for connection - no airbrush, no “sexy” pose, no new suit or dress or fragrance or hairstyle can improve upon this fu***ng divinity, heal our unhealed trauma, or make us whole again.

I sit not in judgement of the image and the external world - it is all God’s play, after all, it is all her artwork and her joy. Even the image is holy, and don’t get me wrong, I love to play with appearances too, I love pretending to shift around the forms of this world and make things that are pleasing to the eye and ear. But, I tell you, friend, even if you craft the most beautiful external form, and even if you are loved and admired for your perfect presentation of “self”, and you build your success and happiness upon your presentation, and you win a million followers and lovers and sponsors and awards for your presentation, you will continue to feel abandoned inside, and lost, and godless, and fraudulent.

If your self-worth gets tied up with your carefully-crafted self-image, and if you forget who you truly are, and if you lose yourself in your own presentation and in the approval of the “others”, your success will not feel like success at all, and your work will exhaust you eventually, and your beauty will turn to ugliness, and you will want to die before long, you will want to blow up all you have built, set fire to the beauty, you will want to numb it all away with substances, and more work, and forgetting, which would be such a shame, because you are capable of such integrity, you are destined for something so noble and dignified, and you are so beautiful inside, really you are.

The shiniest, plumpest lips, the tightest muscles, the most flexibly oiled limbs in all the yogic and ta***ic positions. Effortless-looking poses effortfully designed to make us look effortlessly attractive. The latest diet and fashion trends. Perfectly worded inspirational quotes about happiness, health and higher levels of consciousness. Teachings of positivity and enlightenment and eternal joy and bliss and love. All ugly and empty and repulsive to the soul, when they are not shot through with authentic human pain, infused with the rage and the billion unwept tears of the orphaned child, forged in the sweat and the stink and the suffering of years and years of a feverish internal campaigning for truth, fed by a fierce, near-erotic nostalgia for God.

Take off your costume, now, friend.
Rub off your make-up. Burn the script.

Gain weight. Wear rags. Forget your own philosophy.
Doubt everything you know.
I don’t care about your image.
Just show me your fu***ng heart.

- Jeff Foster

Art: Richard Mcall (Pixabay)

16/01/2019

https://www.facebook.com/1459881796/posts/10213158068453876/

08/10/2018

https://www.facebook.com/100291436735140/posts/1793216340775966/

THE KIND OF LOVE YOU DESERVE

More than anything, we long to be seen.
To be held in a safe, nonjudgemental, all-accepting presence, and be seen through loving eyes.

And being seen is what we fear the most.
More than death, we fear intimacy's piercing gaze.
And yearn for it all the same.

It takes such courage to show yourself!
To take off your mask, when you look and feel your worst to take off your mask (the one that was suffocating you anyway) and to say, "Look. Look. Here I am, world".

To let yourself be seen
before you're ready.

When you feel the most rotten, the most dirty, the most wretched and unloveable, the most unevolved, the most boring, the most confused and lonely and broken and sad and angry and hurt, to let yourself be seen there.
There, in that sore, shameful place.
Let light in.
Come out of hiding and invite someone into your 'private' world.
Let them witness the real, authentic you.
Before that pitiful defence called 'personality'.

Say, "Look. Look, friend. Here I am".

Take the risk of being loved!

The risk of being rejected, yes.
The risk of being shamed again, laughed at again, ridiculed again, maybe.
The risk of being seen as a failure. As sick, or broken, or ugly, or weak.
But the risk of being loved?

Yes. Take the risk today because life is short, and it's exhausting trying to repress your authentic self. Let yourself be witnessed in the raw. The vulnerable you. The you without protection, without answers, without expertise. The imperfect you.

Because the deepest shame is only healed in love's light.
And your flaws were always longing to be touched with an awareness so tender that it would birth entire universes to find itself.

And you can fall now into the arms of a loving friend.
Who will hold you.
Naked. Unprotected. Imperfect.

Loveable.
Just as you are.

This is the kind of love you deserve.
True human love which is also God's love.
The kind of love that bathes you in gentleness when you feel the most ashamed, the most frightened, the most lost.
When you feel the smallest.
A huge love that holds you.

Never settle for less.

- Jeff Foster

01/10/2018

https://www.facebook.com/100291436735140/posts/1784660891631511/

WHEN YOU STOP RUNNING AWAY

If you sit

just long enough

with sadness, fear or longing

or some strange energy or urge you can’t even name

if you sit in a place of no hope and no expectation

if you open your heart wide in meditation

the sadness eventually softens

the fear becomes intimate

its imagined edges and boundaries dissolving into the vastness

and it reveals its deep intelligence and benevolent nature

for at the core of everything we run away from

is everything we long for

but we’ll never know

if we keep

running.

- Jeff Foster

03/09/2018

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/sep/24/why-lack-of-sleep-health-worst-enemy-matthew-walker-why-we-sleep?CMP=fb_gu

Leading neuroscientist Matthew Walker on why sleep deprivation is increasing our risk of cancer, heart attack and Alzheimer’s – and what you can do about it

30/08/2018

https://www.cosgrovecoaching.com/so/dMK0YowX #/main

Life can be challenging at times and we often find ourselves on a conveyer belt of 'doing' the same thing over and over again, sometimes unsure as to whether we are getting anywhere or aligning with our true purpose. We can feel tired and diminished with the sheer multitude of tasks, living in a 'ti...

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https://www.facebook.com/SOULSHAPING/posts/10155424366955982

24/03/2017

http://uk.businessinsider.com/smartphone-impact-brain-body-sleep-2015-2?r=US&IR=T

VIDEO: Stop telling your brain to stay awake.