Leading a more autonomous life with Max St. John

 For much of my life I’ve been a worrier. I’ve worried about whether I was making the right decision or whether people thought I was doing the right thing. My mind fills with thoughts and judgements that can turn into a cacophony. This stops me from being able to listen to my body and therefore be able to follow my intuition. As Max St. John, founder of Being Wild Things, tells me in this episode the body will whisper to us what we should do, and then nudge us and then at some point shout. Recently I’ve been crippled by back pain which I guess is my body shouting. I guess I haven’t been listening well enough. I haven’t been creating enough space to be still. I hope you enjoy this podcast as I hear about how we can lead more autonomous lives by listening more to our bodies.

Extracts from this episode:

• When you’re really listening to the body you’re just responding to intuition and instinctive self.
• One of the myths of meditation is that you should be able to clear your mind.
• But the mind will just do what it’s going to do.
• Don’t push the thoughts down with judgment.
• Young children live in the moment and aren’t conscious of what they should or shouldn’t do.
• The conscious conditioned self is the self that worries about the future, past and present.
• The subconscious is the awareness of being alive in the body. It’s always there but drowned out by the conscious self.
• Worry, stress and anxiety is the tension between what your conscious self is telling you and what your subconscious self knows what you need.
• The conscious self needs conceptuallise and put stuff in boxes.
• The fears of the future and the shackles of the past are stopping us from working well in the present.
• The moment we try too hard to listen to the body so that it can tell us what to do next is the moment that we lose the point.
• We need to let go of the expectation that listening will get us some where - “Abandon all hope of progress” Charles Davies
• By feeling into our bodies we can stop ourselves from jumping onto the train of bad thoughts and remain on the platform of presence.
• The judging, planning, plotting and scheming mind are just a reflection of tension in the body. If we focus on them we just reinforce the tension.
• If you experience tension, don’t focus on it, just focus on the possibility of letting go.
• The things you give attention to will grow.
• Rather than chase each urge to respond to everything that comes your way just, let go and then trust that you can deal with whatever comes up in the way you need to.
• You can’t control how other people behave, the only thing that you can control is how you respond.
• We should strive to live a autonomous life and stop listening to the chatter and doing what people say you should do.
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Get in touch with Max via email on max@beingwildthings.com.

Max will be talking at Summercamp and he’ll be leading a morning neigong session to help get us more in our bodies.

Find out more about Summercamp at http://happystartupsummer.camp.