Life is very individualist now, but conversely, more and more of what we do is in teams, work groups, clubs, associations, co-operatives, etc. You can learn a lot from these as you go deeper inside any particular group (usually learning what NOT to do !!), and hopefully we can all find ways to imporove the group experience as we learn from this. 

There is a wide range of potential variations between groups

“Normal’ and “simple” groups are at one end of the spectrum:-

We are born here, and we all face challenges - some challenges are personal, and some are collective

There are 3 main ways of looking at these

1. Social and Psychological.

a) New Birth. when we are born, we don’t know the language and customs, (we are alien migrants !) so we don’t know anything at all, but also, we have no previous mistakes either - it’s a fresh start.

I thought I would gather “the Great Truths” - you need to know these :-

The 4 Noble Truths of the Buddha

1. The nature of existence is Suffering
2. The cause of Suffering is Ignorance - for most of us, these are the most important two
3. (to be released from suffering, you can follow the Noble 8-fold Path described by the Buddha)
4. (at the end of this path is a state of release / enlightenment / freedom from suffering / wholeness) 

(The first two of these, though simpler, take many lifetimes to fully grasp. Once they are grasped, the remaining two truths are relatively quick and easy to implement)

There are two main starting points for spiritual development

• one is doing yoga to straighten out your body, get comfortable, and let yourself relax (which is the first step before meditation)
• the next step is to be aligned, and then attune to your inner self

Alignment.

This is a process of getting in contact with our “inner self”

People use lots of different names for this - a higher level, the higher self, the finer side of oneself, soul, spiritual self, guidance and so on. You can also align more externally to the Christ or Buddha, or the Will of God. It's best to align yourself to the highest you can imagine, and then be quiet and listen !

There are several types of change that you can make in your life :-

1. Going in a new direction
2. Stopping doing things that you don’t like
3. Changing the way you relate to people and situation

Usually people want to do this because of :-

A - either their own or other people’s pain and distress
B- because they have found a person they want to copy or an ideal that they want to incorporate in their own life

Any combinatation of these reeasons is absolutely fine, though it works better if you look for positive models and ideas (or try to switch tracks to the positive as you go along )

This is the central page for 3 others

• Reframing
• Mapmaking
• Sub-personalities

But I want to start with an idea to bring those 3 pages together - I was talking to a friend a few days ago

As time goes by, I seem to be better organised !! (maybe my memory is a bit worse and I have less eneergy to spare !?)

I thought I’d pass on some ideas which have been really valuable to me, at different times and in different ways:-

Types of Journals

Conflict can be very damaging, leading to results

There are 3 main types of conflict:-

Lots of problems are insoluble  - they are part of the fabric of the universe (karma). But a lot of problems CAN be solved .......

Also, things develop in their own way - multiple causes lead to a huge number of effects, and these can build up a “knot” that blocks further progress, or, even worse, they can lead to crystallisation and the inability to change at all, when people say “things have always been like this and this is how they are supposed to be”

We hope that our actions will produce the desired consequences, but sometimes thay also lead to unintended consequences (and new situations with unknown causes can also spring up and affect us)

We need to administer this process to get more of what we want and less of what we don’t want

A local spiritual organsiation has some problems that give some examples to start us thinking:-

Sub-personalities are part of psycho-synthesis - Link to the Psychosynthesis Trust . Psychosynthesis has many wonderful ideas and techniques, and I recommend a full training.

However, the idea of sub-personalities has been especially useful to me. It seems to me that I have a number of clear sub-personalities – these usually help me handle the world more easily