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A Long Weekend in Swanage and Dorset 2026

Sunday, April 19th, 2026

Date: 1st – 4th May 2026
Base Location: Swanage, Dorset
Price: £60

Overview: A weekend of walking and community in May, based in the Victorian seaside town of Swanage, the county of Dorset and the Jurassic Coast. Picture above; approaching Lulworth Cove.

This trip features a steam train ride to Corfe Castle to start one of the walks, across stunning panoramic view scenery to reach Lulworth Cove for our ‘middle day’ walk.

The first day’s linear walk is from Worth Matravers, along the coastal path back to Swanage, via Anvil Point Lighthouse, Durlston Head and Peveril Point.

And Monday’s circular walk is from our base in Swanage to Old Harry Rocks, where seals and dolphins are often spotted, then refreshments in Studland before returning to Swanage via an inland cross country path which retains the views over the coast.

There’s also no reason why more modest walkers shouldn’t skip the middle days’ walk and do tourism instead. With three walks in three days, some participants may be wise to have a rest day in the middle of the three days. …or take the shorter, 5 mile option (see below).

Please Note: As Dorset’s most spectacular walks are its coastal paths, two of the three days’ walks are linear routes, rather than circular routes, for which we will need to get taxis either there or back. We will arrange taxi sharing in groups of four, if not seven, to share the cost. Taxi prices in the area are pretty reasonable.

You’ll need to arrange your own accommodation for the Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights.

Friday 1st May

It doesn’t really matter what time you arrive in Swanage on the Friday night, but if you’re arriving early enough you can rendezvous to dine and socialize with those from the group who have already arrived, should you wish to.

I’ll be around from 6:00 pm until at least 9:00 pm.

Saturday 2nd May: Worth Matravers to Swanage Coastal Walk

Start Time: 10:30 am
Meet Point: Swanage Railway, Swanage BH19 1HB. (Meeting one lady at Worth Matravers, Swanage BH19 3LE)
Distance: 6.5 miles

Parking: We’ll be getting shared taxis from the centre of Swanage to Worth Matravers.

Our first walk is a linear coastal path from the village of Worth Matravers back into Swanage.

Worth Matravers.

Priest’s Way.

Anvil Point Lighthouse.

Durlston Head.

Peveril Point.

Sunday 3rd May: Steam Train to Corfe Castle, then Walk to Lulworth Cove (5 mile or 10 mile walk option), then Shared Taxi Back

Start Time: 9:45 am
Meet Point: Swanage Railway, Swanage BH19 1HB
Distance: 5 miles or 10 miles

Parking: As we’ll be meeting in Swanage you’ll already be parked. 🙂

Please note that this is a linear walk. We will need to get taxis back from Lulworth Cove to Swanage, so we will arrange taxi sharing in groups of four, if not seven, to share the cost.

For this walk we’ll meet at Swanage Railway Station, a heritage railway with diesel and steam locomotives, and travel together to the start point for the walk at Corfe Castle. The train journey is £14. If you would rather drive to Corfe Castle you can, and park at Castle View Visitor Centre, meeting the group at 10:25 am. (If you do this, after the walk instead of getting a taxi back to Swanage from Lulworth Cove, you’ll get a taxi back from Lulworth Cove to Corfe Castle to collect your car).

You Choose: I’m giving you the option of doing this walk as a five mile walk, and getting transportation to the end point at Lulworth Cove, because the full walk to Lulworth Cove is ten miles and has a steep 41% incline hill at the end. Some stronger walkers won’t be bothered by this, but for those who would rather stop after five miles you can stop at Whiteway Car Park, also known as Lulworth Range Car Park, where we’ll have a taxi arranged to take you to Lulworth Cove (you might have to wait a short while).

For those who do choose the 5 mile option, while you’re in Lulworth Cove waiting for the remainder of the group to finish the walk, you could walk to Durdle Door and back. It’s just over a mile each way, and the coastal path is clearly marked and very obvious, with tourists walking in both directions marking it out.

As we start our walk we can turn and look back on Corfe Castle.

Lulworth Cove.

West Lulworth Village.

Monday 4th May: Swanage to Old Harry Rocks and Studland Circular Walk

Start Time: 10:30am
Meet Point: Swanage Railway, Swanage BH19 1HB
Distance: 6 miles

Parking: As this walk starts in Swanage you’ll already be parked! 🙂

For this walk we’ll also start by meeting outside the Swanage Railway Station, as we did on day two, and this walk then takes us along the beach front, up the coast and on to Old Harry Rocks.

Then we’ll continue to Studland and refreshments at The Bankes Arms, which has great views from it’s beer garden across Studland Bay.

Finally, we’ll take our last leg of the last walk back across country to Swanage, on a route which, whilst inland, still allows us to see the coast view.

Old Harry Rocks.

The Bankes Arms pub at Studland has tremendous views across the bay.

Videos

This video shows Lulworth Cove, the ‘finishing line’ of our middle day walk.

This video shows the resort charm of Swanage, where we’ll be based.

Refunds

Refunds cannot be given except on a first come basis if the full capacity of the event is reached AND someone from the Waitlist pays for the event.

Group Ethos

This is an inclusive, boundaries respecting group. Participants must act in accordance with this at all times. Failure to do so will result in instant removal from the event and group without refund.

What to do next?

Don’t book any accommodation before you’ve confirmed your place with me.

Speak to me or message me to let me know you’d like to go.
I’ll let you have bank details to make a payment.
Then you can set about arranging accommodation.

You can call me on 07758 351 527.

I look forward to seeing you there,

James

A Long Weekend in Swanage and Dorset 2026

Monday, February 16th, 2026

Date: 1st – 4th May 2026
Base Location: Swanage, Dorset
Price: £60

Overview: A weekend of walking and community in May, based in the Victorian seaside town of Swanage, the county of Dorset and the Jurassic Coast. Picture above; approaching Lulworth Cove.

This trip features a steam train ride to Corfe Castle to start one of the walks, across stunning panoramic view scenery to reach Lulworth Cove for our ‘middle day’ walk.

The first day’s linear walk is from Worth Matravers, along the coastal path back to Swanage, via Anvil Point Lighthouse, Durlston Head and Peveril Point.

You’ll need to arrange your own accommodation for the Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights.

Friday 1st May

I’ll be around from 6:00 pm until at least 9:00 pm.

Saturday 2nd May: Worth Matravers to Swanage Coastal Walk

Start Time: 10:30 am
Meet Point: Worth Matravers Car Park, Worth Matravers, Swanage BH19 3LE
Distance: 6.5 miles

Parking: We’ll be getting shared taxis from the centre of Swanage to Worth Matravers.

Our first walk is a linear coastal path from the village of Worth Matravers back into Swanage.

Worth Matravers.

Priest’s Way.

Anvil Point Lighthouse.

Durlston Head.

Peveril Point.

Sunday 3rd May: Steam Train to Corfe Castle, then Walk to Lulworth Cove (5 mile or 10 mile walk option), then Shared Taxi Back

Start Time: 9:50 am
Meet Point: Swanage Railway, Swanage BH19 1HB
Distance: 5 miles or 10 miles

Parking: As we’ll be meeting in Swanage you’ll already be parked. 🙂

Please note that this is a linear walk. We will need to get taxis back from Lulworth Cove to Swanage, so we will arrange taxi sharing in groups of four, if not seven, to share the cost.

As we start our walk we can turn and look back on Corfe Castle.

Lulworth Cove.

West Lulworth Village.

Monday 4th May: Swanage to Old Harry Rocks and Studland Circular Walk

Start Time: 10:30am
Meet Point: Swanage Railway, Swanage BH19 1HB
Distance: 6 miles

Parking: As this walk starts in Swanage you’ll already be parked! 🙂

For this walk we’ll also start by meeting outside the Swanage Railway Station, as we did on day two, and this walk then takes us along the beach front, up the coast and on to Old Harry Rocks.

Then we’ll continue to Studland and refreshments at The Bankes Arms, which has great views from it’s beer garden across Studland Bay.

Finally, we’ll take our last leg of the last walk back across country to Swanage, on a route which, whilst inland, still allows us to see the coast view.

Old Harry Rocks.

The Bankes Arms pub at Studland has tremendous views across the bay.

Videos

This video shows Lulworth Cove, the ‘finishing line’ of our middle day walk.

This video shows the resort charm of Swanage, where we’ll be based.

Refunds

Refunds cannot be given except on a first come basis if the full capacity of the event is reached AND someone from the Waitlist pays for the event.

Group Ethos

This is an inclusive, boundaries respecting group. Participants must act in accordance with this at all times. Failure to do so will result in instant removal from the event and group without refund.

What to do next?

Don’t book any accommodation before you’ve confirmed your place with me.

Speak to me or message me to let me know you’d like to go.
I’ll let you have bank details to make a payment.
Then you can set about arranging accommodation.

You can call me on 07758 351 527.

I look forward to seeing you there,

James

A Long Weekend in The Peak District 2026

Wednesday, December 10th, 2025

Date: 26th – 29th March 2026
Base Location: Bakewell, Derbyshire
Price: £60

Overview: A weekend of walking and community in March, based in the famous Derbyshire ‘Peaks’ village of Bakewell. Picture above; Mam Tor.

This walking itinerary is designed to showpiece the various different styles of scenery in the Peak District, from the ridge walk across to Mam Tor which is like being on top of the world (see photo above), …

…to the Tolkein-esque gnarled tree and silver stream ancient woodland of Padley Gorge (see photo below),…

…to the classical village walk from Bakewell to Edensor village (pronounced En-zuh) at the foot of the majestic Chatsworth House, nestled in gentle rolling Derbyshire hills.

You’ll need to arrange your own accommodation for the Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.

Thursday 26th March

It doesn’t really matter what time you arrive in Bakewell on the Thursday night, but if you’re arriving early enough you can rendezvous to dine and socialize with those from the group who have already arrived, should you wish to.

I’ll be around from 6:00 pm until at least 9:00 pm. We’ll use the Lobby Lounge of one of the Bakewell hotels and I’ll advise which one nearer the time.

Friday 27th March: Mam Tor

Start Time: 10:30am
Meet Point: Castleton Visitor Centre, Buxton Rd, Castleton S33 8WN
Distance: 6.5 miles

Parking: Castleton Car Park – HPBC at the Castleton Visitor Centre, Buxton Rd, Castleton S33 8WN. There are public toilets at the Visitor Centre. Parking between 4 and 10 hours is £6.80, see various charges per duration. Car park ticket machines accept 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p, £1 and £2 coins and do not give change. Card payments accepted via the pay and display machines. You can also pay for parking in all council owned car parks via the PayByPhone application.

On the Friday we’ll start with the biggy, Mam Tor, the roof of the Peak District, and we’ll have an optional visit afterwards to Speedwell Cavern, and being Friday we’ll avoid the weekend queues.

We start from the village of Castleton.

Lose Hill looking toward Mam Tor.

Mam Tor’s ridge pathway allows you to enjoy the ‘view from the top’ as you go along, rather than just as single stop-at-the-top and 5 minute look around, as you get with other hills.

Speedwell Cavern

Parking: There is Speedwell Cavern Car Park opposite Speedwell Cavern. The address is Speedwell Cavern, Winnats Pass, Castleton, Hope Valley S33 8WA.

Anyone who doesn’t wish to go down Speedwell Cavern after the walk can rest up in the town of Castleton, where we’ll be parked, at the foot of Mam Tor, or visit Buxton for the later part of the afternoon – 12 miles to the South, or return to Bakewell to explore the town more.

Speedwell Cavern is on the recognisable Winnats Pass, the winding road snaking down the gorge you see below.

It is an underground boat journey, arrived at by going down some steps, in one of the four show caves in the region. The cave system consists of a horizontal lead miners’ adit (passage) 200 metres below ground leading to the cavern itself, a limestone cave. The experience takes between 30 and 60 minutes.

The last tour is at 3:00pm and Speedwell Cavern closes at 4:00pm so we will need to be mindful of time.

Saturday 28th March: Padley Gorge

Start Time: 10:30am
Meet Point: The Fox House country pub, Longshaw House, Hathersage Rd, Longshaw, Sheffield S11 7TY
Distance: 6 miles

Parking: Park at The Fox House country pub with their kind permission, Longshaw House, Hathersage Rd, Longshaw, Sheffield S11 7TY, where we’ll have lunch after the walk optionally, unless you wish to take a packed lunch or do something else for lunch. Please Note: It is possible that by the time we travel, The Fox House will have formalised their car park as a public ticketed car park.

Alternative Parking: Alternatively, there’s a municipal car park 200 metres south of the Fox House pub at National Trust Car Park – Longshaw Estate – Woodcroft, Grindleford, Sheffield S11 7TZ.

Padley Gorge is an enchanting ancient woodland and brook in a valley, unlike anything else. Its twisted trees, wooden bridges and flowing waters give it a fantasy movie feel.

This walk also includes paths to the tucked away Grindleford Station, across the plains past Owler Tor and great views down from the small village of Hathersage Booths.

The Fox House at Longshaw.

Sunday 29th March: Bakewell to Chatsworth House

Start Time: 10:30am
Meet Point: Bath Gardens, on the roundabout (Rutland Square) in the centre of Bakewell, opposite The Rutland Arms Hotel. Address is Rutland Square (Stand B), Bakewell DE45 1BT
Distance: 6 miles

Parking: As this walk starts in Bakewell you’ll already be parked! 🙂

On the Sunday we’re going to pop to the neighbour’s place. …In this case the Duke of Devonshire, Peregrine Cavendish, and the 17th century grand mansion of Chatsworth House.

A 3 mile or so ‘outward’ walk gets us there, and after we’ve explore the house and estate – and had lunch – it will be another 3 miles about in the different return leg; about 6 to 7 miles in total, plus a bit more depending on how much you want to walk around the Estate and grounds or just sit with a coffee instead.

In addition to the option of your own packed lunch, there are several options for eating at Chatsworth, including The Carriage House Café…

…the luxurious Cavendish Restaurant (with prices to match)…

…and various ‘Food to Go’ options at the Chatsworth Park Shop, the Tea Shop, and various food trucks serving everything from stone baked pizza to fresh scones….

Video

This video shows the beauty of Bakewell, where we’ll be based.

“Base Camp Bakewell”

For snacks, self-catering and packed lunch filling there are two supermarkets in the town;

A Co-op close to the centre, on Market St, Bakewell DE45 1DS, about 300 metres from the central roundabout and The Rutland Arms Hotel.
and an Aldi just out of town; Ashford Rd, Bakewell DE45 1GL

Refunds

Refunds cannot be given except on a first come basis if the full capacity of the event is reached AND someone from the Waitlist pays for the event.

Group Ethos

This is an inclusive, boundaries respecting group. Participants must act in accordance with this at all times. Failure to do so will result in instant removal from the event and group without refund.

What to do next?

Don’t book any accommodation before you’ve confirmed your place with me.

Speak to me or message me to let me know you’d like to go.
I’ll let you have bank details to make a payment.
Then you can set about arranging accommodation.

You can call me on 07758 351 527.

I look forward to seeing you there,

James

A Weekend in Lavenham and Suffolk, 2026

Thursday, December 4th, 2025

Date: 12th – 14th June 2026
Base Location: Lavenham, Suffolk
Price: £40

Overview: A weekend of walking and community in June, based in the famous Suffolk village of Lavenham, pictured above.

With over 300 listed buildings, Lavenham is the best-preserved Medieval town in England.

Lavenham and the surrounding villages of Long Melford, Clare and Cavendish are picture postcard locations made famous by the 80s TV show, ‘Lovejoy’, aided by the nearby towns of Sudbury and Bury St. Edmunds.

Lavenham itself, with its timber-framed buildings and painted homes was the real life inspiration for J.K. Rowling’s fictional village, Godric’s Hollow, in the Harry Potter book and film series.

Scenes from the Deathly Hallows Part One were filmed in Lavenham.

You’ll need to arrange your own accommodation for the Friday and Saturday nights.

Friday 12th June

It doesn’t really matter what time you arrive in Lavenham on the Friday night, but if you’re arriving early enough you can rendezvous to dine and socialize with those from the group who have already arrived, should you wish to.

I’ll be around from 6:00 pm until at least 9:00 pm. We’ll use the Lobby Lounge of one of the Lavenham hotels and I’ll advise which one nearer the time.

Saturday 13th June – Morning Walk

Start Time: 10:30am
Meet Point: Nowton Park Car Park
Distance: 5 miles

Parking: Nowton Park car park is £3 for over 2 hours, which we’ll need. Address: Nowton Park, IP29 5LU. Here’s the West Suffolk Council web page for the car park.

Our morning walk starts from – and proceeds through and around – Nowton Park; a 200 acre estate and manor house built in 1837 on the outskirts of Bury St. Edmunds, 10 miles North of Lavenham.

It’s a delightful environment in which to reconnect with nature for three miles, before venturing further afield toward Hencote Lane and High Green.

Of course, as we’ll be here in June, sadly the daffodils will be gone.

Afternoon Activities

After the walk, our touristy activities take us into Bury St. Edmunds, where we will meet up for lunch (optionally – of course all elements of the weekend are optional) and then the afternoon is yours to explore the town as you wish.

Bury St Edmunds has a history stretching back over 1,000 years, originating as the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Beodricsworth around the 7th century. The town was one of the royal boroughs of the Saxons.

Sigebert, king of the East Angles, founded Beodricesworth monastery here about 633, which in 924 became the burial place of King Edmund the Martyr, who was slain by the Danes in 869, and ‘Bury’ owed most of its early celebrity to the reputed miracles performed at the shrine of the martyr king. The town grew around Bury St Edmunds Abbey, a site of pilgrimage.

One option is to visit Moyse’s Hall Museum, as shown in the two photos below…

Saturday 13th June – Optional Evening Walk

Start Time: 7:00pm
Meet Point: By the War Memorial, Market Place, on Market Lane; Lavenham, CO10 9QZ. This is in the market ‘square’ area in front of the distinctive National Trust – Lavenham Guildhall building.
Distance: 5.5 miles

Parking: As this walk starts in Lavenham you’ll already be parked! 🙂

In the Summer, evening walks is what we do, so as this weekend is intentionally designed for the height of Summer, we’ll schedule an optional evening walk on the Saturday, too.

As we approach the weekend we’ll modify the itinerary to avoid walking in heat, and evening walks are a perfect way to allow us to do that.

This walk takes us from Lavenham, to the nearby small village of Brent Eleigh, and back round in a circular loop.

The War Memorial, Market Place, on Market Lane; Lavenham, CO10 9QZ.

The National Trust – Lavenham Guildhall building, in the same square as the war memorial.

Brent Eleigh and village sign.

We’ll end the walk going past the famous pub, The Swan at Lavenham.

Sunday 14th June

Start Time: 10:30am
Meet Point: By the War Memorial, Market Place, on Market Lane; Lavenham, CO10 9QZ (pictured below). This is in the market ‘square’ area in front of the distinctive National Trust – Lavenham Guildhall building.
Distance: 6 miles

Parking: As this walk starts in Lavenham you’ll already be parked! 🙂

The Lavenham Walk is an established route, using an old railway line which starts just a couple of hundred yards away at the top of the High Street.

The War Memorial, Market Place, on Market Lane; Lavenham, CO10 9QZ.

The National Trust – Lavenham Guildhall building. The war memorial we’ll meet at is in front of this majestic edifice.

Video

This video shows the colourful beauty of Lavenham, where we’ll be based.

“Base Camp Lavenham”

For snacks, self-catering and packed lunch filling there’s;

East of England Co-op Village Shop opposite The Swan on the High Street
A regular Co-op at the other (Northern) end of the High Street
And an olde worlde style Londis (A.R. Heeks) on Market Place (see below)

Refunds

Refunds cannot be given except on a first come basis if the full capacity of the event is reached AND someone from the Waitlist pays for the event.

Group Ethos

This is an inclusive, boundaries respecting group. Participants must act in accordance with this at all times. Failure to do so will result in instant removal from the event and group without refund.

What to do next?

Don’t book any accommodation before you’ve confirmed your place with me.

Speak to me or message me to let me know you’d like to go.
I’ll let you have bank details to make a payment.
Then you can set about arranging accommodation.

You can call me on 07758 351 527.

I look forward to seeing you there,

James

A Weekend in the Cotswolds, 2026

Sunday, September 14th, 2025

Date: 2nd – 4th January 2026
Base Location: Bourton-on-the-Water, Gloucestershire
Price: £40

Overview: A weekend of walking and community in January, based in the Cotswolds town of Bourton-on-the Water, pictured above.

Bourton is known as the ‘Venice of the Cotswolds’ for its five bridges which cross the River Windrush which runs through its centre.

The weekend takes in all three of the most beautiful and famous villages in the Cotswolds, with a Saturday walk and visit from the large village of Broadway and a Sunday walk and visit from the village of Bibury.

You’ll need to arrange your own accommodation for the Friday and Saturday nights.

Friday 2nd January

It doesn’t really matter what time you arrive in Bourton on the Friday night, but if you’re arriving early enough you can rendezvous to dine and socialize with those from the group who have already arrived, should you wish to.

I’ll be around from 6:00 pm until at least 8:30 pm. We’ll use the Lobby Lounge of The Old Manse Hotel, just behind the war memorial, for our Friday evening meetup, where you can also dine by the fireplace, as we did last year.

Saturday 3rd January

Start Time: 10:30am
Meet Point: By the War Memorial, The Green, High Street, Broadway WR12 7AA
Distance: 7.5 miles

Parking: There are two public car parks, both about 700 metres, 7 minutes walk, from our meeting point at the War Memorial:

Milestone Ground Car Park, Childswickham Road, Broadway, WR12 7HA
Shear House Car Park, Leamington Road Broadway, WR12 7ET

For both of these, 10 hours = £4, and both are open Mon-Sun 8:00 am to 6:00 pm. I recommend parking at the Shear House Car Park on Leamington Road, as the walk from there takes you down the beautiful High Street, so that can be considered the start of your walk to take in the sights.

The Saturday walk will be from the village of Broadway, 12 miles (26 minute drive) to the North of Bourton-on-the-Water.

Broadway is famous for its attractive main street, the High Street, with its many beautiful buildings constructed in the mellow local stone. The village sits beneath the main ridge of the Cotswold Hills, providing this stunning backdrop.

This walk takes us along the Cotswold Way National Trail as a basis for visiting three villages of Stanton, Laverton and Buckland to the South.

There are a lot of great views on this route and some woodland to enjoy, too.

Stanton:

Laverton:

Buckland:

Afternoon Activities

After the walk, our official tourist activity will be to visit Broadway Tower, a seven minute (4 mile) drive, but this is optional – spend the rest of the day however you wish to.

Broadway Tower is the highest point in the Cotswolds. It has a museum within its three floors and access to a lookout platform at the top. There’s also a nuclear bunker.

It’s also dog-friendly.

If anyone of an unusually high energy would like to, you can walk to Broadway Tower by walking East up the High Street and taking this right-turn footpath (pictured below) to the tower, but you will have to self-navigate. It’s a 1.5 mile walk there from the War Memorial, and the same distance back, of course (though you may be able to arrange a lift back with a friend).

Last admission for Broadway Tower is 4:15pm, and it closes at 4:30pm, so anyone walking there will need to bear time in mind. Adult tickets are £14 excluding the Nuclear Bunker, or £20 including it.

Website: Broadway Tower (opens in a new window)

Sunday 4th January

Start Time: 10:30am
Meet Point: Opposite The Swan Hotel, Bibury, GL7 5NW
Distance: 7 miles

Parking: Parking is relatively easy in Bibury off season. There are two places to park:

Free parking on ‘The Street’, the main road through the village, which has parking along one side.
There’s a small free car park opposite Bibury Trout Farm, up Ablington Lane, with an overflow car park further up the lane.

Both of these parking options are very near our meeting point, opposite The Swan Hotel.

Bibury is 12 miles (25 minute drive) to the South of Bourton-on-the-Water.

The Swan Hotel is on the famous bend on the main road, (B4425), the most recognised central focal part of the village, as pictured in the first photograph below.

Bibury is perhaps the most famous of all the Cotswolds villages, and the 14th century row of cottages at Arlington Row are certainly the most photographed.

The Sunday morning walk is a 7 mile route from Bibury to Coln St Aldwyns, where The New Inn provides amenities half way round.

We’ll go via the courtyard of St Mary’s Church and the River Coln, and of course go via Arlington Row (below).

The New Inn and other sights in Coln St Aldwyns.

Afternoon Activities

After the walk, our provisional official tourist activity will be to visit Broughton Castle (pictured below) near Banbury on the drive home, £11 per adult ticket, however, if some wish to you can go for the more expensive Blenheim Palace – tickets from £38 – also on the drive home, North of Oxford.

Oxford does make a natural place to gather prior to the final leg of the drive home.

Of course, these are again all optional and the rest of the day is yours to spend as you wish. Here are some other possibilities in Bourton…

Other Attractions in Bourton-on-the-Water

Birdland in Bourton on the Water: £13.95 for adults or £12.95 when booked online. Closes 5:00pm, Last Entry at 4:00pm. Birdland in Bourton has over 500 birds including penguins and flamingos. (Website)

The Model Village: £4.50 for adults. Closes 3:30pm. The Model Village in Bourton on the Water can be found behind the Old New Inn and is a one ninth scale model of Bourton-on-the-Water (Website)

Cotswold Motoring Museum: £8.50 for adults. Open 10:00am to 6:00pm every day. (Website)

Christmas Lights and Atmosphere

As we’ll be visiting in the first weekend of January, the Christmas lights will still be in place in Bourton and the post-Christmas atmosphere will still be there to enjoy. Bourton Parish Council have confirmed the lights won’t be taken down until on or after the 6th January.

Video

This video shows two of our destinations; Bourton-on-the-Water (at 3 mins 42) and Bibury (at 12 mins 15).

“Base Camp Bourton”

For snacks, self-catering and packed lunch filling there’s a Londis/Budgeons in Bourton-on-the-Water, on the High Street, GL54 2AQ, in the main area by the river, 100 yards South of the War Memorial. Click this link to see the exact location in Google Street View.

For catering shopping in Broadway (on the Saturday) there’s a walkway opposite the War Memorial in the High Street that takes you through to a good sized Co-op store, just 100 yards away. It’s open 7am to 9pm on a Saturday. Address: Russell Square, Back Ln, Broadway WR12 7AP.

There are two public toilets in Bourton, both of which charge 40p:

Church Rooms, GL54 2AX – on the corner of the High Street and Rectory Lane.
and Rissington Road, GL54 2DR – next to the Rissington Road Long Stay Car Park.

Refunds

Refunds cannot be given except on a first come basis if the full capacity of the event is reached AND someone from the Waitlist pays for the event.

Group Ethos

This is an inclusive, boundaries respecting group. Participants must act in accordance with this at all times. Failure to do so will result in instant removal from the event and group without refund.

What to do next?

Don’t book any accommodation before you’ve confirmed your place with me.

Speak to me or message me to let me know you’d like to go.
I’ll let you have bank details to make a payment.
Then you can set about arranging accommodation.

You can call me on 07758 351 527.

I look forward to seeing you there,

James

A Weekend in the Cotswolds

Sunday, October 20th, 2024

Date: 3rd – 5th January 2025
Base Location: Bourton-on-the-Water, Gloucestershire
Price: £40

Overview: A weekend of walking and community in January, based in the Cotswolds town of Bourton-on-the Water, pictured above.

Bourton is known as the ‘Venice of the Cotswolds’ for its five bridges which cross the River Windrush which runs through its centre.

You’ll need to arrange your own accommodation for the Friday and Saturday nights.

Friday 3rd January

I’ll be around from 6:00 pm until at least 8:30 pm. We’ll use the Lobby Lounge of The Old Manse Hotel, just behind the war memorial, for our Friday evening meetup.

Saturday 4th January

Start Time: 10:30am
Meet Point: By the War Memorial, The Green, High Street, Broadway WR12 7AA
Distance: 7.5 miles

Parking: There are two public car parks, both about 700 metres, 7 minutes walk, from our meeting point at the War Memorial:

Milestone Ground Car Park, Childswickham Road, Broadway, WR12 7HA
Shear House Car Park, Leamington Road Broadway, WR12 7ET

The Saturday walk will be from the village of Broadway, 12 miles (26 minute drive) to the North of Bourton-on-the-Water.

This walk takes us along the Cotswold Way National Trail as a basis for visiting three villages of Stanton, Laverton and Buckland to the South.

There are a lot of great views on this route and some woodland to enjoy, too.

Stanton:

Laverton:

Buckland:

Afternoon Activities

After the walk, our official tourist activity will be to visit Broadway Tower, a seven minute (4 mile) drive, but this is optional – spend the rest of the day however you wish to.

Broadway Tower is the highest point in the Cotswolds. It has a museum within its three floors and access to a lookout platform at the top. There’s also a nuclear bunker.

It’s also dog-friendly.

Website: Broadway Tower (opens in a new window)

Sunday 5th January

Start Time: 10:00am
Meet Point: Outside The Kingsbridge Inn, Riverside (off the High Street), Bourton-on-the-Water, GL54 2BS
Distance: 5.6 miles

Parking: If your accommodation isn’t within walking distance of the centre of Bourton, there are two car parks:

The Rissington Road Long Stay Car Park, on Rissington Road, at GL54 2BN. There’s also a public toilet next to this car park which charges 40p.
The Station Road Car Park at GL54 2EN.

Both of these car parks are about 400 metres from our meeting point for the walk at the centre of Bourton village.

The Sunday morning walk is a 5.6 mile stroll from the centre of our base town, Bourton-on-the-Water.

This is an easier walk as, for most people, this will be the travelling back day.

Our route takes us through the two nearby villages of Upper Slaughter and Lower Slaughter; two of the jewels of the Cotswolds.

The descent down towards Upper Slaughter gives a great view over the village, which also has a delightful ford.

The walk through Lower Slaughter includes going right past this delightful mill.

Lower Slaughter also has some stunning riverside scenery.

Afternoon Activities

Oxford does make a natural place to gather prior to the final leg of the drive home.

Of course, these are again all optional and the rest of the day is yours to spend as you wish. Here are some other possibilities in Bourton…

Other Attractions in Bourton-on-the-Water

The Model Village: £4.50 for adults. Closes 3:30pm. The Model Village in Bourton on the Water can be found behind the Old New Inn and is a one ninth scale model of Bourton-on-the-Water (Website)

Cotswold Motoring Museum: £8.50 for adults. Open 10:00am to 6:00pm every day. (Website)

Christmas Lights and Atmosphere

Video

This video shows two of our destinations; Bourton-on-the-Water (at 3 mins 42) and Lower Slaughter (at 7 mins 10).

“Base Camp Bourton”

There are two public toilets in Bourton, both of which charge 40p:

Church Rooms, GL54 2AX – on the corner of the High Street and Rectory Lane.
and Rissington Road, GL54 2DR – next to the Rissington Road Long Stay Car Park.

Refunds

Refunds cannot be given except on a first come basis if the full capacity of the event is reached AND someone from the Waitlist pays for the event.

Group Ethos

This is an inclusive, boundaries respecting group. Participants must act in accordance with this at all times. Failure to do so will result in instant removal from the event and group without refund.

What to do next?

Don’t book any accommodation before you’ve confirmed your place with me.

Speak to me or message me to let me know you’d like to go.
I’ll let you have bank details to make a payment.
Then you can set about arranging accommodation.

You can call me on 07758 351 527.

I look forward to seeing you there,

James

Chat with Peter Ragnar on Health and Longevity – with James Blacker

Thursday, October 19th, 2023

Peter Ragnar talks health, longevity and mindset. Peter is a world-renowned pioneer, author and speaker in the fields of life, health and spirituality, now enjoying – after many decades – what he describes as a lifestyle of quiet contemplation, solitude and silence.

It was once said of Peter; “I’ve often wondered how it would look if someone like Jack LaLanne or Anthony Robbins—whom I’ve always admired for their indomitable spirit, incredible self-discipline, and joie de vivre—became enlightened. When I discovered Peter Ragnar, I think I found out.”

This is a conversation that Peter and I had several years ago, around 2015, and I recently asked Peter if he was happy for me to share it with you, and so here we are.

In this conversation, Peter talks about the relationship between the mind, the body and health, outlines two different notions of personas and attitudes to health – each of which contain half of the full picture of an optimum approach to health, and even dips into philosophies around death, and how our relationship to the notion affects our health.

First, some housekeeping. Peter’s ‘Longevity Sage’ website is at; https://longevitysage.com/. This includes a link to his latest Kindle book, Finding Heart: How to Live with Courage in a Confusing World.

YouTube Video Timestamps

00:00 Greeting

00:22 Finding spring water in a cave

02:22 Strength for Life with David Heard

03:19 The Gift of Health

03:45 How long we can stay in a healthy state?

04:00 The 1-2-3 of Health and listening to the body

05:07 Integral Life Practice

06:05 Dr Myron Wentz and Sanoviv Medical Institute

06:35 Lifestyle, health and disease

06:55 Powerful subconscious effect over body’s energy

08:08 Unbridled mental activity eats up energy

08:38 How to harmonize mind and body?

09:04 Chi, Prana, Energy or Life Force

09:55 How can I stop ageing?

10:40 Bio electric body and biomagnetic force field

12:33 The liver and anger; a stormy personality

13:37 Forced behaviour and habits

14:25 Health for the 21st Century

14:53 ‘Martini Man’ Example

15:27 Why dietary discipline might not give health

16:23 Guilt and the ‘Food Police’

16:51 Combining mindset and healthy choices

18:25 Genetically Modified Organisms Foods

19:21 What foods Peter eats

20:00 Where does the fear come from?

20:48 Judgement, approval and health

21:50 Life expectancy around the world

23:17 A reason for being alive

23:51 Nothing to prove

24:53 Thymus Gland and stress

25:09 Fear of death and effects on health

26:54 Thoughts on reincarnation

28:00 You’re not in control

29:02 Little answers to big questions

Transcript: Chat with Peter Ragnar on Health and Longevity

James Blacker: Hello!

Peter Ragnar: Hey there, James, it’s Peter! How you doing?

James: I’m great, thanks. Yeah, I’ve got a great visual on you as well; I’ve not got one of those myself.

Peter: Your voice is very clear right now.

James: Excellent!

Peter: Yes. Good reception.

James: So how are you doing?

Peter: I’m doing good, doing good, just er… we were cleaning out a spring in another cave that I found and a fellow that works works for us, he he’s leaving for a few weeks here and so we had to take the opportunity to do it today if we were going to do it.

James: Right.

Peter: …try to get the water tested out of that spring. But it’s an interesting cave, we just crawled down into it, actually the three dogs ran into it and disappeared back in the tunnel.

But it looks like a really good place to get some excellent water, and that’s one of the really important parts of health, is making certain that the water that you drink is of the highest quality.

So, you know, it’s always good to find new springs, new sources of it.

James: Is that what you mean by when you say you’re testing the water then?

Peter: Well, we’re going to have it tested to make sure to see what’s in the water and make sure that there’s not… there are no glutens at all in there.

I don’t know how there could be, but it’s good to test it. And then the other thing you want to test the water for is the dissolved solids.

So, you know, what is the rate of dissolved solids that you have in the water.

Some of the waters, even the waters that you buy, some of the spring waters, have a lot of stuff in them.

They may be pure but they have a lot of minerals and so we want to check on that, and, you know, that’s also to see how alkaline or acidic it may be, even though some of the best springs in the world, or the most renowned healing springs, have high acidity, which is interesting, too.

James: Right.

Peter: So, anyway, we’ll see what we come up with here. So I listened to the little program that you did with your friend on… the little clip about physical immortality, that was interesting.

James: Oh, on the wisdom audios with David Heard, the Strength for Life one?

Peter: Yeah.

James: Yeah, that was fabulous. Yeah, I worked with him. He founded the National Rehabilitation Centre for the Paralysed after a visit to Moscow in 93; there was a guy called Valentin Dikul who was a high wire artist in the Moscow State Circus who fell and broke his back.

Peter: Oh.

James: Spinal cord injury. So David then went to Moscow with some students to find out what they did to use exercise therapy for paralysis rehabilitation so they founded the NRCP after that.

I worked with David then and I kind of had an idea that I wanted to do an audio series called ‘The Gift of Health’ back then, which would be; Exercise, Nutrition and then also Sleep came into it, and David said he really wanted to do the one on Strength for Life because… he’s similar to you, I guess, well, the same philosophy of attitude and no limits and… well, no artificial limits, and see how far it takes you.

Peter: Yeah. That’s what we’re doing, is pushing the envelope to see how long you can stay in a healthy condition and, you know, function optimally.

James: Yeah. So it was The 1-2-3 of Health which I came… David taught me to listen to my body, and after I did that for about four years, well I guess after about 6 months I started seeing that the mind would get in the way.

So listening to the body was all well and good, but sometimes I would not do what the body asked for because the mind’s got its own agenda and, you know, addictions with certain foods and such like.

So that kind of brought to together The 1-2-3 [of Health] which I discussed with him and said, you know, this listening to the body needs to be added to by differentiating between the needs of the mind and the needs of the body; that’s Stage Two.

And then Stage Three is that it’s all very well differentiating them if you [don’t] still allow your decisions and behavior to be those of the mind for the body, you know, where the mind hijacks the needs of the body; if you eat something because the mind’s hungry rather than the body’s hungry it’s not really what [the body] wants.

So the Third Stage kind of expanded into a whole area of personal practice.

And I come from the Ken Wilber area of Integral Life Practice; Mind, Body, Spirit and Shadow exercises.

But whatever it is really, it just seems to be whatever a person can do to get themselves in the state of being where the mind is calm and tamed and so the insights that you’re getting on what the body wants are actually being followed up, rather than ignored.

So I kind of… that really became my simple understanding of what brought health.

And I used to qualify it by saying approximately 95% of health, because I don’t know too much but it seems clear to me that there’s a chance that there are some diseases that are caused at birth and such like and couldn’t be necessarily totally perfectly defended from, simply by following The 123 of Health.

But by and large they could. I was working on the notion that…

There’s a guy called Dr Myron Wentz who founded Sanoviv [Medical Institute] on the Baja Coast, which is a medical facility that cures cancer and such like.

Peter: Sorry, what was that name, James?

James: Dr Myron Wentz.

Peter: Oh okay.

James: And I met him and watched one of his videos when he explained that a hundred years ago people were dying of Infectious Diseases; Tuberculosis, etc., and the doctors, at least in the Western World, the doctors have cured those and now people are dying of Degenerative Diseases.

And we’re kind of not meeting the doctors half way, because it seems to me there’s no cure for abdication of responsibility and not properly dealing with stress and overeating and, you know, a lack of emotional well-being that leads to all these things.

Peter: You know, that really has more power over the body than most people can appreciate, because even a lot of our motivation is subconscious; it’s not consciously accessed, and the part that is consciously accessed oftentimes is filled with a lot of stress, a lot of tension and even, you know, when people have time just to be able to sit.

But and let’s say they had nothing on the schedule; they feel rushed, they feel pressured that; “I gotta be doing something!”, and that sense that I have to be doing something burns up so much energy internally that could be used for your glands and your cellular structure and it’s learning to release all of those little… the little things that eat up the energy that we don’t even know that eat up the energy, whereas a lot of people’s subconscious is filled with these things that eat up energy.

And, of course, just mental activity of its own, which is essential in our world, if it’s unbridled, if it’s not controlled, it eats up a tremendous amount of energy that could be used by the physical body to keep it in an optimal state of health.

So there’s The Big Challenge.

James: Yeah.

Peter: How do I first access these areas that are not conscious to me?

How do I get them under control? How do I get my conscious mind under control?

And then how do I harmonize out with my body?

What do I do for my body that gives it the most amount of energy, the least amount of stressors, so it really basically is burning less energy?

And then have the mental reserve, having more energy than what you need.

So you put those two together and you’ve got plenty of Life Force, and basically, you know, depends on what methodology or philosophy you follow, this could be anything from, you know, you could call it Chi, you could call it Life Force, you can call it Prana.

I don’t care what you call it, it’s basically still energy and there’s ways of working with that energy.

And those are the things that I’ve found in my own research; how to work with energy; how to work with it mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually – and how to harmonize all those areas so they all balance each other and, you know, that comes down to lifestyle.

So people ask, you know, okay well, you know, how can I stop aging?

How can I get that level of health? How can I achieve the… those physical goals that I have?

And I say it’s all about lifestyle.

Most people don’t get enough sleep, they don’t get enough water, they have too much stress and they can’t control their thoughts.

James: Yeah.

Peter: And when we address those, James, and put them in the proper sequence and, you know; 1-2-3.

James: Yeah.

Peter: Work with them, then we have a program that people can use in their life and see how they can get to fit into it.

James: Yeah.

What I found was particularly fascinating, because I mean, the fourth thing you mentioned there was “can’t control their thoughts”, and your post on Facebook was talking about… the body is bio electric, the force field around the body is biomagnetic, and then…

but when the mind isn’t at peace that disturbs the clarity and as you said there, I think it’s static in the body.

Peter: Yep.

James: So if we think of… if we think of… I use the phrase ‘Life Force’, I also it’s just my terminology is to use ‘wisdom’ to mean the kind of peace of mind that comes when you don’t identify with objects.

So what excited me was that it was almost getting to the point where we could define… we could scientifically define ‘wisdom’, or even recognize it in a physical or electro-physical expression, because of it’s difference between two [theoretical] bodies; one of which has got a mind of wisdom and one that’s got a [mind of] turbulence.

So the static would be having some kind of electrical effect, rather, not just a…

Peter: Oh yep, it is bioelectric and that’s… and of course, whenever you have static electricity in the body and it shows up in the energy body around the physical, around the skin and, you know, that can be photographed.

And if then when the photographs are taken it shows basically clouds, like storm clouds, like, you know, you get lightning and thunder in your aura.

And whenever you have a repeat – a repeated episode of that, the areas that that static electricity shows up at creates illness.

As a good example, if you see some dark clouds over the area of the liver, you usually see a lot of red and dark colours, and what that indicates is that, you know, you got a stormy personality, there’s a lot of anger there, because the liver stores a lot of anger.

And I, you know, that anger just basically eats up the Chi or Prana or Life Force.

And that’s just, you know, that’s just one of the areas from traditional Chinese medicine – a lot of focus is put on the kidneys, which take in the gonads, the genital organs and all of the difficulties that men and women have with that.

There’s the seed of life that’s being diminished and, you know, the health issues that people have with that is tremendous.

But again it goes back to thinking, too.

James: Yeah. Yeah, and the other thing that I noticed, or I’ve concluded is that the importance of thinking is that people… they think – ironically – they think that they can improve their health without changing their thinking – just by trying to.

They will force themselves down the gym, they’ll starve themselves to get slim and they’ll think that works, and then 6 weeks or 6 days later the whole thing ‘elastic bands’ back.

Peter: Yep.

James: And they come back to where they are. But they do the same thing again and again and again.

Society doesn’t yet have a major, shared understanding that that doesn’t actually work; that the key to health, therefore, is at a deeper level than that of forcing behavior.

Peter: Absolutely.

James: So that seemed to me, when the notion came up of ‘Health for the 21st Century’, that really seemed to me as the crux of the message that I wanted to get across to people, was that very fact that society as a general has to look above the level of forcing behavior as a very clear principle.

Peter: Yeah, it’s as much a behavioural problem as it is a habitual problem and, you know, the classic example that you see many times – here you got a guy, he’s 105 years old and he smokes a cigar every day and has his Martini at 3:00 in the afternoon.

Now you have someone that’s on a raw food diet, they fast, they’re fasting, they’re taking supplements, they’re doing yoga or whatever it may be and they look like death warmed over.

And you say, well, how can that be?

How can one person seemingly do everything from a dietary perspective in error, and the other one doing everything supposedly correct: What causes that?

Well a very small part of that is genetics. But that’s a very small part of it.

A major part of it is the mindset.

The one person who has the bad habits is enjoying his bad habits so much he’s not worried about it, he doesn’t care what you think about him.

He says; “Hell, I’ve lived to be 105 years old, why should I care about what you think?”, “…judge me about what I eat”.

And that sense of freedom to be who he is contributes greatly to his longevity.

Where the other person is wrestling with guilt; “If I ate the wrong thing”, or “Maybe the food police are going to come and check on me and find that I’m not eating all the right things or…”

You know, or they’re so worried about their food being poisoned that it becomes poisoned. Even the best food becomes a poison when you’re worried about it being poison.

James: Yeah.

Peter: And so, you know, these are the two sides of the issue.

Now you take an individual who has the mindset, who is… really has come to know who they are.

They don’t care what you think. But they realize also that there is a way to eat that is healthy.

James: Yeah.

Peter: And they embrace that because, not because they have to, just because they want to.

And they do these things out of something that just brings them pleasure.

James: Yeah.

Peter: That person doesn’t age.

That person now maintains their vitality because it’s that balance point between these extremes, and they found it.

And then they’re content, they’re happy.

Now if you can teach that… if you can teach people how to come over to that balance point and get rid of their guilt, get rid of their compulsive obsessive disorders and basically screw their head on in a better way, you know, then you got something.

James: Yeah. So you’re saying that the Martini Guy has got half of the answers but you wouldn’t necessarily want to end there, you’d still want to balance that with the awareness of the value of certain foods and such like.

Peter: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean you look at… you certainly don’t want to eat the foods that are genetically modified organisms. I mean, you know, there’s too much information about that.

There’s things you don’t want, you just don’t want to put in your body. But it’s not because you’re afraid of the foods, it’s just that you have found a better way to live.

James: Yeah.

Peter: And a great example, I mean, that I can eat, I eat out of my garden because the food tastes better; it’s more delicious; it’s tastier; I mean it satisfies you in a way that non-organic food can’t.

James: Right.

Peter: And so you make the choice because you want to make that choice.

And you know I was doing a seminar at one time and people were asking me about foods and I said; “I’ll anything – if I want to” and they looked at me strangely as though, “But you’re a… you’re a vegan, you’re raw, you’re… you eat raw food: What do you mean you eat anything?”

And I’d say if I thought it would improve my health I’d eat it.

James: Yeah.

Peter: Whatever it is.

James: Yeah.

Peter: That it’s not a religion. It’s a results [thing]…

James: Because the thing that always comes first is that whatever you do you don’t do it from a position of fear.

Peter: Say that again, James?

James: Whatever decisions you do make, you don’t make them from a position of fear!

Peter: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, and so where does the fear come from?

The fear isn’t physical, though it shows up physically.

The fear first starts in the head. It starts with your attitude and what you expect other people may say.

In other words, will they like me? Will other people like me because I’m this way?

And this is why we join clubs, why we get into movements – we want friends, we want to be liked.

And if we don’t do what everybody else is doing maybe we won’t be liked! Ut-oh! You know, now you got the tension.

And if you can get out of that, break out of that, because everybody really loves someone who’s their own person.

James: Yeah.

Peter: That’s the crazy part about it – just be who you are and, you know, you’re free of judgement then.

But that’s the… that, by the way, is probably the worst thing you can do for your health, is to get into judgement – or be afraid of being judged.

James: Yeah. Yeah.

I know, I always found it with the… when people would talk about the guys who are 100 years old and smoked and drank and all that kind of thing, it always used to upset me – I mean that’s an exaggeration, but… because they would then hold that up as an example, saying; “Don’t worry about, you know, this food isn’t important and that food isn’t important”, but I could always see that it was an absolutistic view, that it was, it was only taking on some of the information rather than seeing the whole picture.

And, of course, what they were ignoring was that for every guy who gets to 100 smoking and drinking, there are another 99 in the morgue.

Peter: Yeah.

James: Or something like that.

Peter: So when you look in and you see that, you know, in the United States here, in America, you know, 77 years of age is the average age of mortality rate for men, and, you know, that’s ridiculous.

James: Yeah.

Peter: Of course, 100 years ago back in the turn of the century, was 47, which was ridiculous.

James: Wow, 47!

Peter: In certain countries like India, I think India is 54 or 56.

Some of the African countries, the average age is like in the 30’s – it was in Cambodia, I think, was like 37, 38, if I remember correctly.

But you know, also consider the stress that war and famine and, you know, tribal hatred has.

So it comes back to how your head is put on there; what you’re thinking, what are your fears, what are your hopes?

And that’s very important, too, you know, if you have a hopeful attitude, if you got things to do that excite you, and you have the freedom to do it you’re going to live a long time anyway, no matter where you are.

James: Yeah. Yeah, just because there’s a reason for being alive.

Peter: Exactly.

James: So the universe created you and merged with the universe you’ve got a purpose for it.

Peter: Right. And, you know, you don’t have to be obsessive about it. You can relax with it, you can say, “Hey, I’m my own person, I’m going to do what I want to do. I’m going to live the life that I want to live, that suits me.”

I mean you don’t have to do something great. You don’t have to push yourself, though sometimes it’s fun to do that.

You know, when you have nothing to prove you, you prove a whole lot.

Peter: Yeah, and doesn’t also, when you stop worrying about how you come across and all that kind of thing, also, I believe the shoulders relax, so the nervous system must be able to function optimally, rather than when everything’s held tight and together and constricted…

I’ve read that the the immune system is just a circulating nervous system.

Peter: Yes.

James: So if people, again, that’s yet another way that whether the thoughts are calm or not is going to be affecting that as well.

Peter: Yeah, whenever you’re stressed the Thymus Gland shrinks.

James: Right.

Peter: It could shrink half its size under high stress. And that controls your immune system.

So you basically dial down your immune system. Pretty simple.

James: Yeah, and we were talking about how essentially the key is just not fear, and so a subset of that, I guess, must be living – ironically – living without fear of death?

Peter: Yes!

James: Right.

Peter: Yeah. Absolutely. And that is the biggest thing… you see that’s… when you start talking about… when people talk about physical immortality, or, let’s put it this way, a more acceptable term is ‘Radical Life Extension’, you’re talking about radical life extension.

You will live long when you’re not constantly worried about dying.

James: Yeah.

Peter: And because to worry about death, or even have to prove something…

See here’s my objection to a lot of folks who accept this concept of physical immortality, that they’re trying to prove it.

That’s not something you prove, you just live long.

James: Yeah.

Peter: Just continue living.

James: That defeats the object, doesn’t it, because the whole… if the whole purpose of it is to enjoy the life, so if you’re proving it then you’re postponing the action of enjoying life.

Peter: Yes. And you’ll see, even on our Facebook site, that, you know some people are so touchy about it, because it’s become a new religion. It’s become their religion. That’s not my religion.

James: Yeah.

Peter: You know, if I meet death tomorrow then I can say, “Well, it’s been a good party, great, bye!” You know, I’m done. It’s not, it’s no big thing.

Because, you know, conscious awareness, the conscious awareness that you had when you came into this life – even though you didn’t know half the stuff or a fraction of the stuff that you know now – you still were consciously observing what was going on.

You get to the point where you go out of this body.

And here you could go back – possibly – into another body and you’re being born again and you’re looking …and you still have the same Consciousness.

The Consciousness… and that’s different from your mental state. You’re still conscious.

James: Right.

Peter: And now you start adding new experiences as a filter and then, you know, we go through the whole thing again maybe.

James: I’m fascinated by your use of the word ‘maybe’, because I was going to ask you, getting rid of the fear of death either happens one of two ways: Either you believe in reincarnation – or reincarnation as everybody, or you just don’t worry about it because you realize there’s no value to be gained from worrying about it and controlling what you can’t control?

Peter: Yep.

James: It’s the latter, right.

Peter: Yeah, you know, you’re not in control of it anyway, so don’t worry about it, to heck with it.

James: Yeah, so there’s only negatives to be gained from fearing death.

Peter: I mean, you know, you don’t need another life raft to try to hold on to.

And, you know, people will go from being raptured and taken up into the clouds to go to heaven, to, “Okay, well I have another body and now I’m reincarnated”, …

…and then other people worry; “Well, will I come back as a bug or will I come back as a bird?”, and hey, you’re here now.

James: Yeah.

Peter: You know, why create another religion, that’s only going to cause the same degree of anguish and discomfort as the more fundamental one did for you… you don’t need crutches.

James: Yeah. No distractions from pure being and pure consciousness.

Peter: Yeah. Being conscious… is your answer.

James: Yeah.

Peter: Your conscious awareness puts you in a place that you don’t need little answers to big questions.

And you’re okay, because the questions then dissolve and you’re no longer burdened by the questions.

James: Yeah.

Peter: You’re really free.

James: Yeah.

Peter: And because it’s not an issue, and because you’re not afraid, because you don’t have to fight for it, you can have it.

I stay, I personally I stay young because I don’t care whether I stay young. Yeah.

James: I think I do the same.

Peter: Yeah. I don’t have to prove anything to anybody.

Okay, well, we got a lot to think about and I’ll let you get to bed and I’m going go look for some supper here that my wife, Katrina, is fixing.

James: Excellent. Fabulous.

I know, because you go to bed at 8pm, don’t you, so me being up at what’s now quarter to 10 is rather curious.

I’m working on the changing the sleep hours and such like, but it’s kind of, I’m I’m kind of with the Martini Guy at the moment on that bit, I’ve got to not judge myself for it – as with a couple of things I eat, but it’s getting there.

Peter: Good, good.

James: Great stuff. Thank you for joining me tonight, it’s fabulous to talk to you, and please pass on my love.

Peter: I sure will. James, have a beautiful evening and it’s great talking with you.

5 Steps to Greater and Spiritual Self-Confidence

Wednesday, February 15th, 2023

The confidence you have is vital to the four big areas of your life: Mind, body, relationships and prosperity.

In this article I’m going to explain what confidence is, why it’s your birthright and therefore why it’s possible for everyone to claim it in full. I’ll then identify the one very simple, key action you can take to claim your confidence in any moment.

Having worked through this process for myself, and for other people, I’ve seen how certain cultural obstacles can prevent people from reclaiming their lost confidence. So I’m also going to share two key insights which help make the foundations upon which you can build your confidence.

So in this article we’ll sort of ‘reverse engineer’ back from what confidence is, to discover what the foundational bases for confidence are, and therefore what the blocks are, and how we might remove those blocks from our path.

It is for this reason that I’m going to present these five steps in the order 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. (If unusual counting is good enough for George Lucas and the Star Wars franchise, it’s good enough for me).

So, Step 3…

Step 3: Know The Target – and Hit it!

The first thing is to understand exactly what confidence is. And it’s very simple; confidence is the act of confiding in ourselves. It’s a simple moment of self-honesty.

If we really want to get clinical about the anatomy of confidence and lack of confidence, we can consider the conscious mind and the subconscious mind.

The subconscious mind holds all the information from all experience we’ve ever had – save that which may have been permanently destroyed by alcohol, etc. Yet the conscious mind doesn’t want all that information at one time, and can’t handle it anyway, and so the subconscious feeds the conscious mind what is required for the current moment.

Except there’s an exception.

The ‘unconscious’ – called ‘The Shadow’ by psychologist, Carl Jung – is that total of your own inner information which has been a threat to you.

This ‘Shadow’, the unconscious, is the gap down the back of the sofa! It is where some of your own truth and personality is lost, and thus it is pretty much the same thing as your lack of confidence.

But why would your own information and truth be a threat to you? Simply because someone at one time who had some power over you (physical, social, cultural, emotional, economic, religious, domestic) disapproved of it. It threatened their sense of self, or their sense of okayness, and so you had to disown it so as to not incur their displeasure, or worse, their rage.

If people hadn’t repressed you, or controlled, judged and conditioned you, why would you lack confidence?! Answer: You wouldn’t!

But if those people are no longer around, or no longer a threat, an obvious question occurs: Is it safe to reclaim that lost confidence?

We bury those parts of us that are dangerous for us to acknowledge about ourselves. This unconscious Shadow equates to your lack of confidence because it represents those aspects and truths about yourself that it hasn’t been safe for you to be honest with yourself about.

An example may be a gay young man growing up in a homophobic household in a partly homophobic society. It may literally be dangerous for him to be honest with himself about that.

So there, you see, we know our target (self-confiding) but we have a problem in hitting our target because someone has put a board in front of it.

This is actually the original meaning of ‘sin’, whose Pagan meaning is “to pick up your bow and miss your target” (page 95 of the Kissing Consciousness book).

That simple act of gaining confidence I promised above is to be honest with yourself. In fact, if we’re talking about you wanting to gain more confidence than you currently have then you are required to be more honest with yourself than you previously have been.

An increase in self-honesty is an increase in self-confidence.

But an increase in self-honesty is dependent upon an increase in self-acceptance, i.e. self-love.

Building confidence requires us to get any self-judgement there is out of the way first.

Confidence vs Competence

This may mean being honest with yourself about something you cannot do, either temporarily or permanently. Confidence is not competence. Therefore, confidence is not about telling yourself you can do something regardless of whether you can, as if that is some kind of self-deluding ‘positive thinking’. Confidence is about being honest with yourself if you can and honest with yourself if you can’t.

Here’s my 60 second guide to confidence;

Step 2: Emotional Freedom

So it’s simple, right, we just face everything?

Well simple does not mean easy, and many people – perhaps most people – aren’t always comfortable facing up to emotions and feelings.

In fact, as a life coach I know that lack of emotional capacity is the most common denominator for many of my clients. If I ask people to assess how comfortable they are with their emotions on a scale of one to ten, the answer is typically less than five, and often around two.

This is why I created the Kissing Consciousness concept of ‘Emotional Infinity’, to help people see how to create infinite emotional freedom.

Whether we consider emotions to be in the body and feelings to be in the mind, or the other way round, doesn’t matter. Forget the labels, ‘feelings’ and ’emotions’, we don’t need them. We can deal directly with the reality.

“The map is not the territory.” – Alfred Korzybski

There are only two places where feelings and emotions can arise – in the mind and in the body. So we need only concern ourselves with ‘events of the mind’ and ‘events of the body’.

If we allow whatever arises in these two vessels to arise, we have infinite emotional freedom.

But as we grow up we ‘learn’ how to be unable to cope with such things. We’re told we shouldn’t cry – one of the stupidest instructions in the world. People who are themselves uncomfortable with their own feelings tell us; “Don’t cry!”

Don’t cry, don’t shout, don’t scream, don’t vomit, don’t go for a run. What else have you been told you aren’t allowed to do as a natural way for your body to process the feelings and emotions which arise in it?

Your awareness is the sky and the feelings and emotions that arise in your body are like the weather. The sky doesn’t resist when it is filled with sunshine, or rain clouds, or thunder, and it is not natural for us to resist. It is learned conditioning. So the first thing to do is to liberate your body from all the ways it isn’t allowed to cope.

Then we come to the mind. Our responses to both ‘events of the body’ and ‘events of the mind’ are informed by the beliefs, attitudes and values we hold in our minds.

If a thought or feeling or emotion arises in the mind do we allow it to be there? Or do we judge it for arising, immediately creating a problem for ourselves?

Step 1: Wisdom

Just holding an intention of allowing ourselves and our bodily reactions isn’t always enough; we may need to get deeper.

We can only face what arises if it is acceptable enough to us that we’re not too scared to face it, and that is often based on the culture that defines us. Where we have judgements about how things and how people “should be” then we have the potential to resist and fear our own thoughts if they are – or might be – in direct conflict with how we think we should be.

We have all kinds of different cultural programs and conditioning running in our modern world. You may get someone’s approval by serving the collective. You may get someone else’s approval by demonstrating your ability to excel beyond the collective, sacrificing it as you go (“look after number one”). You may get someone’s approval by agreeing with their values of equality – only to anger them by solving an equality issue without forming a committee first.

So who are you to be? Who are you allowed to be? Whoever it is, society wants to define it very tightly. No room for your true nature here; social constructs insist on shoe-horning you into small boxes – and boxes that contradict each other at that.

“Be a sensitive man!” “Be a ‘real man’ and forget all that sensitivity crap!” “Be a modern career woman – but spend 100% of your time at home as a housewife!”

Wisdom dissolves this prison by accepting, valuing and honouring your true nature.

To understand wisdom we can use the logical principle of ‘Subject vs Object’. In logic, a subject is defined as “that which is aware of an object”. Look at (or pick up) any of the objects around you. They are the objects and you are the ‘subject’ that is aware of them.

Wisdom answers the age-old question, “Who am I?”

Ask anyone who they are and they will start with such things as “My name is… I’m [insert age], I’m a [insert trade], this is my body, these are my thoughts and beliefs, I’m this person’s husband/wife, brother/sister…”

…but these are all objects. They’re miraculous, wondrous objects but they’re objects nonetheless. Who is the ‘real you’; the subject that is aware of all these objects?

Do you see? People define their subjective self by objects. And as Integral Philosopher, Ken Wilber, points out, that is a colossal case of mistaken identity on the part of almost the entire human race.

It’s also why he suggests we kind of have two selves; an empirical (or finite) self based on the mind and body, and a transcendental (or infinite) self which is not bound by these objects.

This can be further understood by the spiritual mantra; “I have a body but I am not my body. I have a mind but I am not my mind.”

It’s a big and deep topic that I can only touch on here, although if you’d like to delve deeper then see my free wisdom resource below. But the main takeaway I want this to leave you with is that this insight creates a little separation between your deeper self and all these objects.

That should loosen your identity such that you may have less – and at some point hopefully no – resistance to the contents of thoughts that arise in your mind.

Wisdom, therefore, allows you to shun the conflicting cultural concepts and deal with the reality of you instead.

In short, there is almost certainly an amazing you waiting to be reclaimed.

Facing the Unfaceable

If you’re going to clear out the crud from the deep recesses of your mind then it’s possible you’re going to come ‘face to face’ with some pretty disturbing thoughts.

This wisdom will allow you to remain sturdy and composed while you observe and consider them.

“What is wrong with me that such a thought is in my head?” Well, you can be reassured by that reaction, because it proves that such a thought doesn’t reflect the truth of your character. If it did you wouldn’t be disgusted by it (see pages 263 and 306 of my book, ‘Kissing Consciousness’ and the section on ‘The Self-Disgust Principle’).

Spiritual wisdom allows rare individuals the freedom to process anything that arises in the mind without fear.

Other people may judge me, but in the privacy of my own mind anything is allowed. In other words, I have made my own mind a ‘Safe Space’.

And what makes that possible is the wisdom to see that I am what I am, and whatever I am is fine, and I don’t need to buy into any social constructs that may constrict that.

That’s confidence!

Step 2 Revisited

So with this new-found spiritual wisdom you have the basis to allow yourself to be open to all thoughts, feelings and emotions, and with that to ‘face everything, avoid nothing’.

That doesn’t mean you won’t feel pain, or unhappiness, or whatever. It just means you can develop the capacity to not feel the need to resist or avoid facing such things – and can therefore always live with confidence.

And this also lessens the suffering. As they say, Suffering = Pain + Avoidance.

Step 3 Revisited

This isn’t just greater confidence, this is what’s known as ‘Spiritual Self-Confidence’; an infinite capacity to confide in yourself.

And note the association between ‘spiritual’ wisdom (enlightenment) and ‘Emotional Infinity’. The quality of the infinite runs through both. The purpose of virtually all wisdom traditions has been to help people move from an understanding of their small self to an understanding of their big Self (capital ‘S’), their Universal Self.

Understanding your individual nature as an expression of the infinite loosens the shackles of your identity which may otherwise limit you.

As Tony Robbins observed thirty years ago, people feel the need to remain consistent with their identity, their sense of self. Well if that identity is infinite, isn’t, too, that person’s relationship with their own personality and potential? …and thus with their confidence?

Step 4: Hold Presence to Your ‘No’ Permissions

We now have a basis for confiding in ourselves around any topic or feeling. But that doesn’t mean our unconscious Shadow baggage has magically just healed itself and disappeared.

All it means is we are in a really good place (mindset) to do that work.

The Simplicity of Kissing Consciousness

If you aren’t familiar with Kissing Consciousness, we make things very simple by seeing each moment of life as experienced through a state of either self-acceptance or self-constriction.

We call these states ‘Love Consciousness’ and ‘Fear Consciousness’ respectively, and then notice how all other pairs of qualities such as confidence, fulfillment, living in the flow, choice, and their opposites – lack of confidence, frustration, stuckness, the illusion of choice, fill in under one or the other columns, thus;

Another way in which we bring this to life is with a concept I created called ‘Human File Permissions’. We were all born with only self-acceptance (‘Yes’ Permissions), yet the unconscious, the Shadow I mentioned above, essentially became the sum total of our ‘No’ Permissions.

Whenever we are about to do something, if we have a ‘No’ Permission around it, our subconscious remembers this, and – to keep us safe – finds a way for us to fail to do so. We experience this as self-sabotage, or something like that; lack of confidence.

The purpose of Kissing Consciousness is to help you turn your ‘No’ Permissions into ‘Yes’ Permissions… turn Fear Consciousness into Love Consciousness… so you can live your fullest and truest life.

You can read more about ‘Human File Permissions’ starting from page 60 of the Kissing Consciousness Handbook (and see the index for more page references).

There are two ways to illuminate and heal our Shadow and turn lack of confidence into confidence;

‘Hold Presence’ to it as it arises day to day
Go after it proactively – hunt it down, so to speak

So how do we ‘hold presence’? I’ll embarrass myself; I’ll give you an example of my own.

There I am in the past, fully confident; relaxed, natural, in total control of what I am doing, and then an attractive woman enters the room and all that goes to hell in a handcart.

I was brought up with a ‘No’ Permission around being allowed to connect with women. So for me that was a trigger that changed my state from Love Consciousness to Fear Consciousness.

For other people, their ‘No’ Permission triggers may be different; maybe around money, so they get triggered when the bills come in, or around their body, so they get triggered if someone mentions the beach.

So anyway, in that moment I could either be a victim of my conditioning (if I didn’t understand what was happening), or I could choose to have a conscious response – ‘hold presence’ to the state of Fear Consciousness that arose in me.

And so, in the latter, what we’re talking about here is noticing that the mind has doubts, the body has a reaction, the heart rate quickens, maybe the palms get sweaty, etc. And instead of identifying with this reaction, we observe it as an object. We see it for what it is; a False Self conditioning, nothing to do with who we truly are.

And so maybe as our breathing becomes shallower we notice it and allow ourselves to breathe more deeply again – but without forcing anything, instead inviting the body’s nervous system to process and recover.

In our mind, we realise that we don’t have to identify with the nervous thoughts, we can just observe them as objects, and choose not to react unconsciously to them anymore.

That’ll do for now, I could write a million words here – come to one of my seminars if you want to go into this further.

Step 5: Proactively Challenge Your ‘No’ Permissions

You don’t have to wait for day to day experiences to trigger your ‘No’ Permissions.

People across the world have proactively engaged in Shadow work to help them reclaim their lost personality aspects and capacities. This is what I do with my clients and at workshops I run.

I even set up Kissing Consciousness so you can do this without me.

By using the following two-part question tool, whenever an energy of self-constriction arises in you, even if you can’t name it or define it, you may ask yourself;

1. Would you like to let it go?

And if so,

2. Ask your body if it would like to let it go?

You don’t even have to be in a ‘real’ situation. The brain – and the bodily nervous system that responds to it – can react all the same to imagination. (Imagine pouring vinegar on your tongue and see if you have a physical reaction). So I could have imagined asking a woman out, felt the nervous system reaction of my ‘No’ Permission, and processed it so I had tamed it, before asking out an actual woman.

You can make yourself and your awareness bigger than the ‘No’ Permission.

We can do this with anything. Right now, you can ask yourself to let go of any conditioning that wouldn’t allow you to earn x amounts of money.

What’s the trigger point for you? A thousand a month? A thousand a week? Ten thousand a month?

I’d better stop there or I’ll be writing for the next month, as I could go off on so many tangents, continue or expand this piece in so many directions.

I hope that helped you.

If you’d like to get more from Kissing Consciousness you can get the first two chapters of the Kissing Consciousness book for free here;

https://www.kissingconsciousness.com/chapters

You can buy the book here in both paperback and Kindle formats;

Paperback | Kindle

And if you’d like my one to one support with anything at all you can schedule a free coaching discovery call with me via this link;

https://www.kissingconsciousness.com/coaching

Thanks for reading.

Kindest,

James

James Blacker, Founder of Kissing Consciousness

What Is Success And How To Achieve It

Thursday, April 21st, 2022

Success seems to be the most important thing in our lives, or certainly the media would have us see it that way; that seems to be the way our culture thinks. So what is success?Is it actually worth it? How do we harness it? And why would we even bother? Let’s discuss!

Hi there, I’m James Blacker, I’m an Integral Philosopher, Life Coach and the Founder and Author of Kissing Consciousness, and today I’m going to be talking about what success is and how we achieve it. And before we get into that, I would like to give you something that’s going to really help with that anyway, which is a gift of the first two chapters of the Kissing Consciousness handbook. Today we’re going to be talking about stuff that is really covered in chapter three. And chapters one and two are really the prequel to how we arrive at some of the conclusions that we do about what success is. And that’s going to help you get into Kissing Consciousness as a way of seeing, primarily, success, but also every other aspect of your life. It’s a very simple approach. Chapters one and two will get you there. Chapter one is about living in the flow versus living in stuckness, so that’s very much related to that. And chapter two is about The Power of Love, which is the big prequel to why we think about success the way we do, in this philosophy, at least.

And so that’ll get you a good background to it and give you a complement, so when you add this video to it as the third (element) then you get the whole picture, all the way through chapter two. We’ll fill in some of some of the detail for you there.

So we start after the prequel with the definition of success. The basis of Kissing Consciousness is that we take from The Power of Love, a concept. We divide love into three different types. First of all we identify three different types and then we take ‘Love as Acceptance and Allowance’ as the basis of The Power of Love that we’re then going to use to define what success actually is, because before we get into the world of achieving goals and working towards success, we first of all need to work out what success is and whether we’re on the right track with that.

So what Kissing Consciousness does is to divide every moment of our lives into one of two different states. The first is Love Consciousness and the second is Fear Consciousness. So if we just get those up there as a table – this is what we call a Kissing Consciousness Binary Table. So on the left we’ve got Love Consciousness – and then Fear Consciousness on the right. So the left hand column is all about self-acceptance and the right-hand column is about self-judgement and/or self-constriction. So bearing in mind that we’re using words to try and create a concept, or to represent a concept, these are about the best two words that I can find to define what this Fear Consciousness is.

And it won’t always seem like self-judgement in the head, but it might also be self-constriction and physiology – you know you get that sense sometimes where – your gut feelings – you don’t feel you can succeed in something or achieve something. That is also part of that. So using the Fear Consciousness concept to get a sense of that. So if we get that up there’s a table as well, so you can see on the Love Consciousness we’ve got self-acceptance, and on the Fear Consciousness side we’ve got self-constriction and self-judgement.

So then if we think about those two as our lives being, in any moment, expressed through one of those two states, then we start to think about success… you’ve got two different possibilities for what success is. The first is that success is based on self-acceptance and the second is that success is based on self-judgement and self-constriction, and what this really amounts to is gaining other people’s approval.

So success based on self-judgement, self-constriction is really not going to fulfill us. This is a phenomenon that you might have experienced – I’m sure you have – where people are aware of (that)the concept of success doesn’t necessarily bring them fulfillment. So what society thinks of us as success might be completely different to how you define it; what’s important for you. If you’re being true to yourself, what are the goals that you want to achieve? And, in addition to the goals, how do you want to even *BE*, moment to moment, because life isn’t just about achieving the goals? It’s about the moment as well. So you’re experiencing and enjoying the journey.

For example if you’ve got a business, hopefully you enjoy the the process of it as well. Otherwise you could wait 30 years for what you might call success and then think; “Well, actually I could have enjoyed that along the way!”

And so then we can bring in another concept here, called Permissions. ‘Human File Permissions’ is a Kissing Consciousness concept, and this is exactly the same thing. Love Consciousness is essentially a ‘Yes’ Permission: You’re allowed to be you!. And a ‘No’ Permission is what happens under Fear Consciousness: You’re not allowed to be you! And that sounds like a really strange thing.

When we’re born, we have total ‘Yes’ Permissions around everything. It’s kind of almost as if the concept of ‘No’ Permissions doesn’t exist. But as we grow in childhood and in teenage years and all those kind of stages in between, what we find is that the way we *are*, and the things we want to do, aren’t always acceptable to the people around us.

And depending on those people, they might seek to control us, to deny us what it is that we want to achieve… possibly even to repress us, because… let’s say that makes them uncomfortable, i.e.the fact that we might achieve something or be good at something, or even be charming, it could be a simple thing… If we’re lucky, they’re a conscious, aware, responsible person and they can recognize that that triggers them and go away and deal with that feeling responsibly in their own time. Now if you lived on this planet for any length of time you’ll probably be aware that that doesn’t always happen. Most people don’t think that way. More of the time what you’re dealing with is people who get triggered, react unconsciously, and typically this is what a lot of our childhood experiences can be. They’re essentially a way of learning ‘No’ Permissions.

So the things that are great and beautiful and true about us become dangerous to express. So we have to deny them, to push them down into the unconscious – what Carl Jung would call the shadow – and they get denied. So then our very nature is being constricted. So therefore our very definition of success is being constricted.

And so at this point I’m going to work on the basis that you’re with me on the fact that we want to pursue success based on self-acceptance, rather than based on self-constriction and self-judgment. Essentially, what Fear Consciousness does when we are repressed by others, is they’re saying… what they’re saying to us is, “Here’s my truth, make it yours!”, and of course in such circumstances, often they have physical power over us or economic or domestic or social power over us, and possibly also psychological as well . All these kind of things come into play.

The upside of that, though, the good thing, is that once we move away from that – perhaps we become adults, we live in our own place, or maybe it was a school bully or a crap teacher at school – we go beyond that then we no longer have that fear that if we don’t do what they want we’re gonna get problems – negative consequences.

If we then recognize that’s what’s happened we can start to reclaim those parts of us that have been denied and reclaim, essentially, what is our success. So we start to define success or think of it in two different ways:

The first is as goals or achievements… A few years ago I was part of a group and somebody got into trouble… they were giving a speech and they got confused around the concept of there being no such thing as failure. And they were talking about a boxing match, actually, and the guy had lost a boxing match and the speaker was trying to explain that there’s no such thing as failure. And his audience quite rightly pointed out that the guy *had* failed to win that boxing match.

We don’t need to be afraid of the word failure, but if we’re going to use quotes like “There’s no such thing as failure”, what we need to understand is what we’re talking about in terms of being true to ourselves moment to moment. We can, of course there’s such things as failure in terms of whether we… any goal we set to achieve, if we either don’t achieve it in time, or we don’t achieve it fully then there’s a certain degree of failure there, and we don’t need to be afraid to say that.

So you’re talking about goal setting between this moment now, something in the future that you’re going to achieve or you set it like a finish line for your race; either you’re going to achieve that or you’re not. So that’s goal setting and achievement. But prior to that, what we have is, as I say, you’ve got success based on the actual moment; whether in this current moment you’re in state of self-acceptance, i.e. Love Consciousness, or whether you’re in a state of Fear Consciousness, self-constriction.

And so really that quality of Love Consciousness and success as a state in the moment is the primary form of love, the primary power of love. And also it should inform the goal setting.

So it doesn’t work the other way around. It’s not like we pursue our goals and try and achieve our goals, but in the meantime we don’t worry if we’re not being true to ourselves, or if we’re in the state of Fear Consciousness or self-constriction. That’s not really going to work. We’re going to be aligning our achievement of our goals by primarily, and in the first instance, getting this moment right where we’re in self-acceptance, which is the state of success.

The opposite of that is the state of frustration. So we can get those up on the screen again in a Binary Table. So we have success on the left, under Love Consciousness and frustration (rather than failure) in the moment under the Fear Consciousness column, because that’s what’s actually happening there… in that moment where we’re not in self-acceptance, we’re trying, we’re struggling to become something and we’re simply having frustration because we’ve got that ‘No’ Permission from our conditioned past that we need to release.

And so this brings us onto The Kissing Consciousness Tool.

It’s very simple tool, based in pragmatic reality. Whenever we find that we’ve got a self-constriction or we suspect that we have, we simply asked ourselves two questions.

The first is; “Would you like to let that go?” And this is an instruction, or an invitation to your conscious mind and your free will, recognizing that you’ve been operating under the effect of some self-sabotage, or self-judgement or self-constriction. You think to yourself, “Yeah, absolutely I would like to let that go! Thank you.”

And then the second question is, “If so, would you like to ask your body if it would like to let that go?” And normally when I talk about such things I get a physiological reaction from my body, because it’s kind of … I equate the … Kissing Consciousness equates the body and the subconscious mind is essentially being the same thing. And when I start to talk to my body then I get a reaction and it says it’s gratefully … it’s thankful to be appreciated and acknowledged.

And the point is, let’s say you want to achieve a million pounds, a million dollars, whatever currency you’re working with. Getting a millionaire mindset isn’t enough to achieve that. You need a millionaire physiology. There are plenty of people who can intellectualize the concept that, in theory, they should be able to allow themselves to earn a million pounds, a million dollars if that’s what it is they want to achieve. But to actually be comfortable in that skin, physiologically, and go out and achieve it is a different thing entirely.

So success, in in terms of Love Consciousness, we can recognize that Love Consciousness exists in both our conscious mind and in our subconscious, and in our body and our physiology and our flesh.

And so when these ‘No’ Permissions are created they’re actually created in the body as well as in the mind, so that your mind … let’s see how this would happen, so you’re a child of eight years old maybe, and you’re excited and enthusiastic, and somebody reprimands you and says; “What a stupid thing you’re doing there!” Maybe it’s not stupid, but maybe they can’t handle what it is that you’re doing. So you sort of constrict.

So mentally, that gets shut down; “Well, I won’t do that again!” There are problems, but physiologically also the nervous system shuts down. And you see that, if you see people who have had really terrible childhoods where they’re repressed a lot, the nervous system is just down here, completely shriveled up.

So actually when you’re using The Kissing Consciousness Tool, as well as freeing up the mind, the consciousness, to become aware of your possibility to achieve what it is that you’re capable of achieving, there’s also the sort of physiological release. The constriction in the body unclenches, releases, diffuses, all of that kind of thing. It might be physiology that’s been trapped in your body for 30 years – you can just invite it to release and … start to gain some freedom from it.

So that’s that’s the tool and then what we have then is our primary version of success, which is just based on self-acceptance in the moment. And that’s also the same thing as being at one with ourselves, rather than being at odds with ourselves, and you could also call that congruence, so you’re congruent with yourself, rather than incongruent, so we can see those also displayed in the Binary Table, if we can show those…

And so what I recommend is that you make this the starting point of everything that you’re doing. Whatever moment you’re in now, that’s your point of power for how you can influence your life. You can’t change the future in the future. If you’re going to influence the future it has to be done in the present moment.

So therefore first thing to always do if you want to achieve success, and if you want to achieve your goals, is to become aware if you’re operating from a state of Fear Consciousness and self-constriction, self-judgement.

If you’re not, there’s no problem, just flow naturally with what you’re doing. There’s nothing that is required to do because everything happens spontaneously.

But if you are, and you can notice that you are in the Fear Consciousness state, then you can ask yourself to release that. First of all, the very fact that you notice it changes things, because you go from having negative thoughts, let’s say, in your head and in your body, rather than … if you’re thinking those you’re going to be identifying with them, but if you become aware of them, actually what you do is you create some perspective on your own thoughts. So you become the *observer* of the negative thoughts, rather than *being* the negative thoughts. I hope that makes some sense.

And actually that gets a degree of control back, and then you can recognize; “Oh, hang on, I was operating under conditioned, negative effects there!” And you can change your approach when you realize that that’s the case.

So that’s why you would then bring in the Tool – ask ourselves to let go of that kind of rubbish.

And then also, by definition, if you’re asking to let go of self-judgement and a self-constriction from maybe 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago, by definition what you’re also doing is you’re asking yourself – your deeper self – to step into the new you! …The new you who you would have been had that self-constriction event never happened in the first place!

So that’s going to be more confident, even if it’s only by a small degree, that’s gonna be more confident, more relaxed body, more aware, more intuitive. So you’re actually reclaiming that.

And again, once we have that Love Consciousness state then success actually flows naturally from that. If you’re capable of something – and an opportunity for it to be achieved arises – and it’s something that you wish to choose – it’s your truth that it’s your choice – then as long as you have a ‘Yes’ Permission around that, i.e. you’re in the state of Love Consciousness around that particular topic or concept, you will automatically and spontaneously go and achieve it.

So what we what we’re really doing is not necessarily finding things that we have to gain in terms of psychology and consciousness and physiology. What we’re doing is we’re removing the negatives.

And then that frees us up. Of course, yes, we might have to study academically to achieve something, or we might have to train physically – all these kind of things. Or we might have to find out how we might launch a business or how we might market a business, and such like.

We do have to do these things, but if we’ve got ‘Yes’ Permissions around them then they’re going to happen spontaneously as a result.

They don’t happen without us doing anything, but they do happen essentially automatically and spontaneously and they flow from that state.

So primarily what Kissing Consciousness is all about is recognizing that all of what I’ve been talking about leads to the simple practice in the moment: If you’re in the Love Consciousness, self-acceptance state; no worries – there’s nothing you need to do because everything’s flowing. Or, if you’re not, you can notice that and just let it go and invite a release so you can get back to being who you are, being true to yourself and let everything flow from there.

So essentially that’s like undamming a dam. If there’s a block of a river you’re removing the block and letting things flow again.

So let’s go to some questions…

What does success look like?

This is very important because in our culture we have a conventional concept of success which probably involves a red Ferrari, a beautiful wife or husband or whatever it is, family, lots of money, all that kind of thing.

Now that could be someone’s definition of success and actually some of those things are quite nice. I quite like the idea of most of that. But for every individual it’s going to be whatever is real for them. So it doesn’t have to be that at all. It doesn’t have to be any of that. It’s nothing whatever to do with what other people decide is success. It’s entirely what makes you happy, what you want to do, what’s your choice.

And this is where 90% of the failure and confusion around success comes from, because people… and this is quite remarkable to the degree… I find this remarkable how much people do this; they get unconsciously dragged into running their lives and operating their lives robotically assuming that what society decide defines is success is A) the only version of success there is, B) wise and sensible and C) to be followed by everybody as if we’re all homogeneous, and that this is what one person’s success is, so therefore it should be and has to be for everything for everyone else.

This is the biggest problem that human beings have with success, is trying to live up to something which is a concept of a collection of ideas of what success represents, whilst at the same time, deep down there’s a sense that that doesn’t necessarily reflect who we are.

And certainly if we adhere too strictly to that, then that’s really going to constrict what we allow ourselves to do and how we allow ourselves to pursue success with fulfillment. And the obvious quotes that come to mind are; “Success without fulfillment is failure” or “Success without fulfillment is nothing”. And quite right! So we want to remove that.

And so what success looks like almost has no rules to how, what what a successful life might look like. You might see somebody and think; “Wow, that really looks like the opposite of success!” But to them it might be success. So there are almost no clues.

Almost the only thing you can look for, in terms of what success looks like, is whether a person looks congruent – whether they look at one with themselves. Are they comfortable with their own choices? And you can kind of get a vibe or a sense of that.

People who have that tend to be magnetically attractive to other people because A) there’s a recognition that someone isn’t needily looking for outside, external approval for what they’re doing, and B) is that they’re they’re aligning with nature. They’re aligning with reality. So there’s something attractive to that quality as well.

So yeah, great question, you have to be mindful not to worry too much about what success looks like, and, of course, tragically we’ve seen a lot of people who, on the outside have what we would consider to be the trappings of success; money, awards, fame and all that kind of thing, and there are any number of stories of famous people we know of where, sadly, we’ve found out that that hasn’t been the case.

Can success be measured?

This is a great question, I love this question.

One of the things that Kissing Consciousness does is uses Integral Theory’s Four Quadrants … if I ever talk about the Four Quadrants, automatically I’ll do something like that … to get a rough sense of what can be achieved in life, in terms of success.

So we’re talking about … and I like to apply our very own kind of flavor of what the best or the most fulfilling of those Four Quadrants might look like. And again this is down to your own interpretation.

So the first quadrant is the upper left quadrant, so maybe I’ll get a … let’s get a diagram up on the screen there so we can see how that is working. So the first quadrant, the upper left quadrant, is the individual interior.

So the way the quadrants work is that the left hand side is the interior, the intangible, non-physical. And the right hand quadrants are the physical, external quadrants. So they’re things you can touch physically.

And to complete that, the top two quadrants are the individual quadrants and the bottom two quadrants are the collective quadrants.

So essentially what you have is the individual, non-physical mind, so that’s your mental health, emotions, thoughts, feelings.

Second quadrant would be your physical body – there we go – plus the brain, because that’s a physical thing as well. You could, in theory, touch it physically. That’s the second quadrant.

And then third is interior again, so you talk about relationships, and the fourth is social systems, and the way I like to interpret that for success and life coaching kind of concepts, is prosperity. And we could call it money, but actually it’s something a bit broader than that, it’s sort of all of the prosperity that we have socially and the quality of life around fulfilling our potential.

So we have the first quadrant, ideally would be deep, unselfconscious joy and happiness. Second quadrant would be an ecstatic, liberated body. Third quadrant would be blissful, harmonious relationships. And the fourth one would be fulfilled creative potential, so that whatever economically, financially is going on for you that’s a reflection of the fact that you’re allowing yourself to engage with all your creative potential. So again, what we’re talking about there is ‘Yes’ Permissions, rather than ‘No’ Permissions.

So anyway, we’ve got our four quadrants and I said I would explain how we measure that. What’s interesting about this, something that I pointed out to a colleague in Integral Theory a few years ago, about 15 years ago … we were talking about this, because I noticed a temptation in life coaches that they like to have their clients focus on things that they themselves can measure, because then they can make claims about how good they are as a life coach.

So let’s say I help my client double their income from 100,000 to 200,000. Or I helped my client lose 30 lbs of unwanted weight from their body.

Well this is the key. On the physical side, the the external quadrants, the right hand quadrants, what we’re talking about there are physical things, so they can be more easily measured. So you can measure someone’s finances by looking at their bank account. You can measure someone’s body lots of ways. You can put them on the scale and weigh them. Also there’s actually other things you can do, you can measure qualities of lung capacity, arterial elasticity, there’s all kind of things that can empirically be measured physically with those two quadrants, the body and especially money.

So that’s how you measure success there.

Now that doesn’t apply to the other two quadrants, because they’re intangible, they’re interior. So what we need to understand there is that doesn’t make it impossible to measure success there, but what it does mean is that we have to be a little more creative in how we measure success, because there’s nothing physical – we can’t bean count – two, four, six, eight, ten…

So the way we do that is we might give ourselves assessments. So I say to you, “Well, out of 10, how happy would you say you are?”

Let’s say you say “Seven!” Okay, great. So if I then say, “How happy were you ten years ago?” So “Five!” Okay, so you’re doing well. Or you might say “Nine!” Okay, so what’s happened?

You’ve now got some measurements for what’s happening A) now and B) where you were, and perhaps also where you’d like to be, so you can start to see some direction to the measurements.

So if you were 9/10 happy a few years ago and then you’re 7/10 happy now, then we might want to ask the question; “Well what’s happened and can we address that?”

And if you were 2/10 and you’ve gone to 5/10, rather than saying, “Well, 5/10 isn’t great”, you might think; “Well hang on, you’ve gone from two to five! That’s a real achievement. That’s fantastic.

In fact, you could go from minus five to two! You could have a happiness rating, self-rating of 2/10, and that would be fantastic (in that context). So that’s how you measure that.

And the same applies to the lower left quadrant as well, which is relationships. So you say, “How happy … how would you assess the quality of your relationship – give it a score out of 10!” And you say “Nine!” Great! Or you might say, “Three!” Oh okay, there’s a problem, you’ve got a relationship that you’re measuring 3/10, so that’s how you measure success in the right hand quadrants and in left-hand quadrants.

How does success come? How can success be achieved and how does success happen?

So they’re essentially, again, they’re all the same questions … similar questions. And again the point there is that it comes spontaneously if you are already in a state of Love Consciousness and self-acceptance around whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve. And if you’re not then you release the blocks first of all and then … so you’re removing not just psychology but also the physiology, so you’re removing the blocks to those, and then what we call the ‘mechanics’ of success, like the things you actually going and do to achieve success, kind of tend to flow from there.

And as part of that is the kind of feedback loop process, so you might, if you started, let’s say you start a business to run a restaurant, it’s not failure if it’s struggling the first few months or you’re learning the ropes. That’s natural, that’s part of the process, that’s part of the journey of success to learn the ropes, refine what you’re doing, change things, tweak things, iterate, improve as you go, learn from people who’ve done it before maybe.

And so that’s part of the natural process. So that doesn’t necessarily mean… you’re still gonna be in the state of self-acceptance while that’s going on. That doesn’t mean anything in terms of Fear Consciousness.

Where success is a burden?

Yeah, absolutely, and one of the things I was thinking about earlier is that, because we have this binary of self-acceptance and self-constriction, we can then integrate our achievement of our goals by making sure that we’re always in this state of self-acceptance.

So let’s say you have a financial career goal that you want to achieve success in. And that’s probably an ongoing thing year after year, decade after decade. Well almost certainly that’s not going to be the only goal that you want to achieve in life. You probably have goals around relationships, and I would hope goals around your health, and so what the checking in with your state in the moment will help you to integrate is to integrate one goal with another, because you could be damaging a relationship if you’re focusing everything too much into the career. And people will damage their health as well, and some people will damage both.

So actually, if you’re tuning into your awareness you can go the extra mile at work, but then you might tune into the awareness and your physiological response is giving you that instinct, that gut instinct, intuition, saying; “Okay, I’ve gone the extra mile but I’m not going to go the (second) extra mile. i’m going to do something different and invest some time in the relationship or look after the body or something like that. And I hate the word ‘balance’ but I love the word ‘integration’ – you integrate the goals naturally by always being in your instinct and in your wisdom to make sure that’s going well.

Where success comes before work?

Yes, success should always come before work, because: What is the work for?!

Unless you’re enjoying the work for its own sake and you’d do it regardless of whether it was paid, things like work, money, essentially they are means to an end. They’re not the end. So the end is happiness, fulfillment, quality of life, so always we want to be thinking about whether any work that we do… does it align with where we want to be going and what we want to experience and the outcomes we want. So if it doesn’t why do the work?

Can success and happiness coexist?

This is really a question that brings up compassion in me because it kind of implies that the person asking the question is struggling with the idea that they can coexist.

And absolutely, there’s a certain alignment that we’d hope to be naturally there; rather than success being something that you have to sacrifice your happiness for in order to get, really what we’re looking for is something that aligns with what’s true for us, and therefore will naturally, effortlessly align with our happiness.

There’s a caveat I want to put to that, though, which is that there are essentially two ways to define happiness.

The first is that you can think of it as an extreme emotional state, something like that. So that isn’t going to be the case all the time, but if you think of a second form of happiness, in terms of Love Consciousness, so you’re in self-acceptance then you’ve got, essentially, happiness as contentment.

So you might not be happy with the way everything’s going, but you might be content in the sense that you can be an acceptance with yourself, whatever is arising, so there’s a certain internal composure there, and we might even start referring to the Kipling poem to get a sense of what that’s about.

So if you’re aligning with your success in terms of Love Consciousness, you’re also going to be aligning with your happiness as contentment. Or essentially what we’re talking about there is happiness as a reflection of the fact that we’re in self-acceptance.

And then happiness, whether we’re on an emotional scale, we don’t want to worry quite so much about that, because we don’t want things to… we don’t want to get attached to the idea that we’re always going to be in that elated happy state, because we’re not. And there might be times when we’re unhappy, sad, or even grieving, but you can be grieving from a state of Love Consciousness and self-acceptance.

So the point is to recognize that emotions are just emotions. It’s kind of like the sky – beautiful clear day today, the clouds are passing through the sky – it’s a clear day. There’s blue skies and clouds, so there’s no rain. The sky doesn’t have any resistance to whether it’s filled with sun or clouds or snow or what have you.

And it’s the same for human emotions, so we can be in that state of self-acceptance and just let the emotions come and go. And the more we do that, the more the ones that we don’t want are just going to arise, be experienced; we get what we need from them and then we can let them go.

Why success is a journey, not a destination?

Well first of all, success isn’t just a journey, it is also a destination. Success as… in terms of Love Consciousness is a journey in the sense that we’re always measuring it in the present moment, the current moment.

But also you have success in terms of the goals and the achievements. These are sort of landmarks along the way in life. So you want to be combining a contentment in the moment with a modest and reasonable achievement of the goals that are realistic for you to achieve as you go, just to keep that going forward, make sure you’re not stagnating. So we do actually want a bit of both there.

The reason why we consider success a journey, in part, is, as I say, so that we don’t have that aspect where we’re worrying too much about the future. If we’re always worrying about the future then the future never arrives and we’ll never enjoy the moment. So we really want to appreciate that the miracle of life is is always right here now.

Can success be attributed to profitability only?

Well for the last forty years we’ve had a global economic system running the world called Neoliberal economics, which states that “Only money matters”, so from that point of view all that system cares about its profitability, but absolutely not in terms of the wider context of your life, as I’ve explained a few times now, you really want to be thinking first and foremost about your quality of life and what it is you want to achieve, and then have money serve that.

So if you’re… if you’re only prioritizing money and that causes you to think or treat people dishonestly or not worry about any influence on the environment or anything else like that, it might be very difficult for you to then go home and have a happy family life and be comfortable in your body, because you might know that deep down you’re not aligning with all of your deeper values and possibly even values that you’ve never even considered, but just as a wider context and appreciation for what your life can be.

And primarily we talk about… people talk about their Inner Guide; they don’t talk about the conscience quite so much, but they’re actually the same thing. So if you can live an alignment with your own conscience then that’s a great way to achieve success, as a journey as a success, because your conscience is essentially – a true conscience, not your conditioned conscience, about what you’ve been told is right and wrong – but your own internal sense of conscience, is actually the… the compass, the guide for what’s true for you. So that is essentially the same thing as your true success.

Can success be bad or harmful? Can success make you happy? Can success lead to failure?

Yes, again, depending on how we’re considering them, but there’s nothing inherent in success that should lead to failure. In terms of whether it can be bad or harmful, then that depends also what we’re putting on it. So in itself there’s nothing inherently wrong with the success but of course we do want to make sure what’s motivating it… is it aligning with our our internal values and what what we think is the difference between right and wrong? And whether we are keeping the kind of lid on it, not getting too big headed in our ego.

There’s another question I had. If I can find it a moment ago.. Here it is, yeah, so what happens when success goes to your head?

So what happens when success goes to our heads, and we’ve all been there, is that we gain achievement in a certain area and we actually overplay it. And the reason we do that is because we subconsciously or deep down we have fears that we won’t achieve in other areas.

We know that there are other aspects that we’re trying to achieve and we’re trying to fulfill our basic, genuine, healthy desire to have our needs met and if we have some ‘No’ Permission, some Fear Consciousness around that – people have blocked us in the past so we’ve got constrictions – there can be this tendency when we get success in a different area, to overplay the hand, and to try and compensate.

So again this is an unconscious reaction, it’s not particularly healthy. Well it’s not healthy at all. It’s just sort of covering over insecurity. So actually, when we do that we might realize that we’re avoiding something that we could perhaps face up to.

Okay, so I hope that’s been really helpful for you. There are linking concepts there, I’ll do a video at some point on The Power of Love, and also do one on positive thinking and go into a bit of detail there.

If you haven’t already, as I say you can click the link at the top of the description and get chapters one and two from the Kissing Consciousness handbook. Chapter one is going to talk to you about being in the flow and chapter two will really give you the prequel to what I’ve talked about today in The Power of Love and will allow you to really get into how Kissing Consciousness works, get familiar with The Binary; the two states of Love Consciousness and Fear Consciousness; how that links up to success, how that links up to The Power of Love that we identify, and then all the various other aspects that it can lead on to, and there’s, goodness, I mean there’s 430 pages there, so there’s quite a lot of stuff in terms of … well let’s have a look, shall we? … how that plays out with regard to timing, positive thinking, creativity, genius, trusting our knowing – all these things are reflections of either self-acceptance or self-constriction, so once we get that basic framework there then you can really start to take that further and open up all kinds of areas like your creativity, your genius, your positive thinking, and really get your life working.

So good luck with that, thanks for listening and I’ll see you again.

Real Life: Your Awareness Trumps Your Beliefs and Your Conclusions

Saturday, July 31st, 2021

In my June column I explained that ‘conscious living’ is our ability to be true to ourselves; the only sensible measure of true success that there is. I’ll now explain why awareness, rather than beliefs, is key to that.

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You may have heard the Chinese saying that: “He who chases two rabbits catches neither.” Oh, that’s sounds really wise! Yes, I’m going to commit that to myself as a belief system! Well done me! After all, I don’t want to dilute my focus! Here’s another proverb: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket!” Oh yes, that’s really wise, too! After all, if one ‘egg’ has a problem I’ve still got the others to fall back on!

Hang on a second! I’ve just realised that those two proverbs contradict each other. They are complete opposites! And pretty soon I’ll realise that virtually all pieces of advice have opposite versions. I now realise that I can’t just rely on my belief systems to run my life and make my decisions for me, I have to use my own skill and judgement to assess what’s really true for me in each given moment. And it’s this insight which led Rikka Zimmerman to this profound piece of wisdom:

“What if you can trust YOU but you can’t trust belief systems?”

Yeaaaah!!!!! What a fantastic insight! If you rely on belief systems, they can always let you down because they are only concepts that represent reality, not reality itself (‘the map is not the territory’). But if you commit to always trusting your own knowing – that ‘knowing’ that you have when you stop justifying your beliefs and conclusions, and instead communicate openly with yourself – then you have the ultimate protection from tripping yourself up! What is justifying? It’s when you know something to be true, but aren’t ready to admit it to yourself, and so you tell yourself an overly intellectualised story that justifies going against your own true ‘knowing’, your own inner wisdom. In Kissing Consciousness, justifying is an expression of Fear Consciousness.

So, we need a new relationship to beliefs in which we hold them lightly, rather than lock them in as conclusions, which are an inhibitor to living from awareness. At first, this may be unfamiliar and uncomfortable, but with practice we can nurture and develop our natural ability to make decisions for ourselves and strengthen that capacity. There is no crutch this way, nothing to rely on, but for those who choose this way of life the rewards are a ‘real’ life. This is the choice of conscious living!