Category: Daily Life

Some notes and exercises from counseling session.

• Disengagement from the present
• Self as concept, labels
• Thought fusion
• Struggle/control of emotions –  “clean” emotions
• Actions
• Consequences

Exercises

1. Separating thoughts from self. Example thought: “I am boring” -> I am thinking I am boring -> I notice I am thinking I am boring -> (funny cartoon voice) I notice I am thinking I am boring. (I chose Marvin the Martian – cracked me up).

2. Awareness exercise. Close eyes or focus on fixed point, no distractions. Think about awareness of feelings, sensations, sounds. Simply observe, no pressure, no control. Focus on breathing (10 breaths). Acknowledge awareness of wandering of thoughts, refocus on breathing.

This post from Very Happy Phil pretty much covers the session.

Since attaching an external USB keyboard my laptop keyboard had been useless – press certain keys and the wrong characters came out. Wasn’t a huge problem until recently when I wanted to take the laptop somewhere without lugging along the external keyboard. We needed to access data from a password protected Sandisk and ended up locking the thing because of the keyboard issue.

On a day off so searched the net to find someone on Yahoo with the same problem. And the solution was to turn off the NUMLOCK key on the USB keyboard. Problem solved!

Looked a nice sort of day when I hung out our new guest room sheets. An hour or so later was sitting at my desk updating the dog rescue site and noticed the smell and taste of dust in the air. Looked outside and everywhere is a pale orange smoke – thought fire at first but no smoky smell. Realised it was a giant dust cloud. Phoned mum, was over their side as well, came up from Broken Hill. On the net – images of bright orange sunrise in Sydney, meteorological estimates of the dust cloud reaching Brisbane by 10am. Dead on.

Dust everywhere, horrible stuff. Had planned a day of intensive house cleaning, not much point. Will have to wash the sheets again I think. Go away dust!

Can’t believe I’m 40, how on earth can that be? just shows how time marches on while your state of mind flitters and dwells at different points. Age is irrelevant, really. Apart from giving your body a shelf-life.

Went through a whole day yesterday without realising it was my wedding anniversary. H reminded me when I got home in the evening, he’d got us a yummy cake from the Cheesecake Shop to help celebrate.

Ebby has the wonky tail, don’t know what she’s done to herself but her tail is crooked. It looks very odd when she wags it.

A few months ago a small snake got onto our front veranda. H tried to drive it off with a broom, unfortunately it managed to shimmy up a veranda post and got under the roof.

We hadn’t seen it since and I’d hoped it had gone away. Unfortunately it seems to have liked our roof space and over the last few cold months has been hibernating there. First day of spring, and it has sprung into life keeping both of us awake as it has slithered about in our ceiling.

Hoping we don’t have enough vermin in our roof to keep the snake fed, and that it decides to find another place to live.