The Moiderer

The Gallery–an embarrassing outfit

This might be me.

This photo does not make it easy to see does it.

Is this outfit embarrassing? I think so!

This was all put together for this weeks gallery over at sticky fingers where the subject is "An Embarrassing outfit"

Quantum leap and me

I used to love Quantum Leap the TV series. This is the Wiki write up

Quantum Leap is an American television series that was broadcast on NBC from March 26, 1989 to May 5, 1993, for a total of five seasons. The series was created by Donald Bellisario, and starred Scott Bakula as Dr. Sam Beckett, a physicist from six years in the future (during the series' original run) who becomes lost in time following a time travel experiment, temporarily taking the places of other people to "put right what once went wrong". Dean Stockwell co-starred as Al Calavicci, Sam's womanizing, cigar-smoking sidekick and best friend, who appeared as a hologram that only Sam, animals, and young children could see and hear.The series featured a mix of comedy, drama and melodrama, social commentary, nostalgia and science fiction, which won it a broad range of fans. One of its trademarks is that at the end of each episode, Sam "leaps" into the setting for the next episode, usually uttering a dismayed "Oh, boy!"

It occurred to me, as I have struggled since meeting with my brother, that it is awfully like a Quantum Leap scenario.

In the programme, Sam, the main character gets dragged back through time and finds himself in a scenario in someone else’s body. It takes him a while to work out who he is. He then has to become that person whilst using his own innate skills to solve their problem so he can leap back out of their body again.

I thought I had reached a point in my personal journey where I was pretty much sorted.

I feel happy, confident and in control. I look at each day and each week with optimism. I enjoy my life and sharing it with the people around me. On Saturday, as I sat giggling at Trevor as he taught the course I realised that I was looking at him almost as a stranger. He was the bloke teaching the course and not so much the bloke that helped me change my life. It was actually quite bizarre!

Then on Saturday night I met with my brother. I paid for a taxi to bring him to my hotel and to take him back home again.

I stayed up until 1:30am talking to him. I was trying to work out if I could help and I realised I couldn’t. Maybe someone else can but not me. He told me about all his troubles.He told me how he’d tried to kill himself and put his affairs in order, written a will etc. Apparently I was named in it but what he has that I’d want I have no idea! He told me how he didn’t plan on living much beyond the next 2-3 years. He told me that he was chilled and contented right now and then without realising it shared with me that it clearly wasn’t true.

I talked to him about Cognitive Hypnotherapy. He said he understood how it worked but it wouldn’t work on him. But I could tell he would like it to. I used the pendulum on him and he realised how powerful it was but he couldn’t think of anything he’d like to ask it to change.

I told him I was happy. He didn’t even acknowledge what I said. He didn’t care.

He said he was worried by how cold it was because he hadn’t got any money off the dole since he came out of prison 4 weeks before. I gave him all the cash I had in my wallet but the cashpoint in the hotel didn’t work so I couldn’t give him any more. He said it was ok, that I could transfer some money to his account.

At 1:30 am he left with a bottle of cider from the bar and £60 in his wallet.

He left me with an empty wallet and a feeling of being totally out of control again. He left me with that familiar misery that I have lived with for so long.

For the 3.5 hours he was with me I was like Sam out of Quantum leap. I was back as the Dawn before I started seeing Trevor. In fact I was the 18 year old Dawn. It felt like almost everything I had didn’t exist anymore. The only reminder was the fact that I was sat in a bar in a hotel, having just given him a load of cash.
He left and I was shaken.

The next day I got up at 5am having had a fitful sleep from 2am.

I made my way into college with my eyes to the ground and a maelstrom in my head. When I saw Trevor, the unfamiliarity was gone and there was the guy that had helped me find myself stood in front of me again. I wanted him to tell me it was ok, that I could cope. But I didn’t want to tell him that I’d screwed up, met my brother and was now in this deep dark hole. After all, this was day 2 of the course – this was not about me.

So I stewed.

Every break I took myself off to a quiet space as soon as I could and I tried to work out what was going on in my head. I found myself distracted as we went through the day, wanting only to find a nice dark corner to sit in.

When the course finished I sent the others off on their own (I usually travel back to the airport with a couple of friends off the course). I slowly walked through Regents Park to Baker street tube. I chatted to the squirrels, observed the birds, watched my feet as they walked along.

I eventually settled in at the airport and started working on my exam pack for the course to try and get my head somewhere else. I gave in an emailed Trevor. He reassured me that I’d just stirred stuff up and it would settle.

It did start to settle. But it hasn’t yet gone away.

I am still in the time warp.

I have realised a number of things

• I was stupid to think it was a good idea to meet with my brother
• I am not well enough established as the “new me” to cope with anything from my old life
• I can’t help my brother.
• I have a lot more work to do on myself.

I guess, like Sam from Quantum Leap I need to take action on these feelings then I can leap back to the me now. And get back to enjoying everything about my life. I think, it’s going to take a while longer for me to get back to enjoying being myself again.

London Marathon–8 weeks training done

I have done 8 weeks of training for the London Marathon. No really. I have. Me. Amazing if you consider I don’t like running.

But let’s pause a moment on that thought shall we.

I actually do like running now.

Because before I started training for the marathon I always felt I had to run either further or faster each time I went out. I had no goal and so was competing with myself. As a result, every run was harder than the last.

The thing I hate about running is getting breathless. For some reason I can’t cope with that and it’s always been the same. But the marathon is about balance. Generally here’s how it goes:

1. You do 1 long run a week. The distance or time of this increases each week as you get closer to the big day. The maximum distance you ever run in preparation is 20 miles. This run is done at a pace where you can easily have a conversation. I enjoy these most. I feel on these I can keep going forever. I have found, with these runs that I can actually enjoy running. Because of weather I have done these on the treadmill so far but the last 2 times I went out. The challenge is that it is all in the hills round here so when I did 1 hour 44 minutes instead of 2 hours I didn’t mind too much because it was all up in the hills. I will expand my route and make these longer and longer because I usually walk briskly up the steeper hills to keep my pace ‘easy conversational’. I take water and energy gels with me to keep me going and, when I run on a Sunday am usually fully recovered by the Monday. These runs are getting easier as my training kicks in. This is soul destroying on the treadmill but give where I live it’s better than not doing it.

2. You do 1 recovery run a week. This is at a faster pace than the long run but by no means a sprint. This week I did 4.23 miles in the 45 minutes I had scheduled. This was a reasonable pace. This is easy to do on the treadmill.

3. You do 1 interval run. Out of all of them this is the best for building your endurance for the marathon – and the one I find the hardest. You effectively sprint until you nearly collapse for a few minutes, do a cooldown jog for a couple of minutes and repeat for 5+ cycles. I have started doing these in the road across the front of my house. I sprint down and jog back. If this ever gets too easy (hard to imagine!) I can sprint 2 legs and jog one. This week it was too icy/snowy but the hill outside of my house was clear on one side of the road. So I ran up and down that 6 times which was the same effect. This is not something you can do on the treadmill easily!

4. You then do 2 or 3 days of cross training of some sort. I do an Xbox Kinect session. I use YourShape Cardio Endurance workout and a fun kick boxing session on after.

This week I had to juggle stuff around because I was in London on my course and because of the snow and ice. In the end, I only missed out 1 cross training day which is good enough. I did my long run on Friday afternoon before flying to London. I have more aches after that run than usual but I think this is because I did hills instead of intervals and hills on my long run. The muscles at the top of my thighs seemed to activate!

So in summary for this, week 8 of my marathon training, with only 68 days of training left :

If you want to guess my time you can below and it would also be really nice if you made a small donation at the same time by visiting my BT MyDonate page (I have chosen this method of fundraising because they don’t take any sort of admin fee which I like). I won’t be constantly plugging for a donation because I know money is tight. I only want you to give to this cause if you can afford it. There will be a link with every marathon post I do – as well as a link to guess my time.

If you want to guess my time and donate then either leave a comment with your guess (and I will fill in the survey), or click on the link and it will collect all the guesses in a survey tool. I will try and think of a nice prize for the winning guess too!

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Weekend 5 - Day 2

 Well where do I start?

After the course yesterday a few us went to the pub for dinner. And as I mentioned in yesterdays post, I decided, in a moment of temporary instanity, to try and meet up with my brother. The logistics of this required me to book and pay for a cab for him to come over to my hotel, and the same in return. 

He lives in New Cross and there was no way I was going there!

So here he is. No spiky punk hair because it was too cold. 

It was after 10pm by the time he arrived and it was about 1:30am when I waved goodbye to him. I got him to record a video for the little one which he did in his own inimitable way and scared the heck out of her when she watched it! At least it gives her time to get used to him before she meets him in person when I bring her down with me to watch me run the marathon. 

I wanted to suss out what I could do for him using Cognitive Hypnotherapy. My conclusion was 'not a lot'. Firstly he was very much 'I see how it can work for some but it won't for me'. It took all my skills to explain it to him and I eventually had to break out the pendulum to prove it. He also has epilepsy and hears voices as a result of the way he's abused his body with drugs and alcohol over the years. Neither of these are particularly good around hypnotherapy. I think if anyone can help him, it will have to be one of my fellow trainees at Quest. He would be great practice for them though! 

It appears he spent 6 weeks over xmas in prison. How he has got to 41, having been a junkie since he was 16, without a previous record is a mystery - but he has. It apparently was a huge fear for him and he took some pretty drastic steps to avoid going in there. But it seems that once there he coped well and his biggest problem was a horrible purple tracksuit they made him wear. At least he still had his tatoos!

He headed home in a taxi at 1:30am - with all the money I had in my wallet to keep him going and a bottle of magners in his pocket!

Needless to say I didn't sleep well and it was well past 2am before I settled. I was up again at 5am. I don't cope well with contact with certain members of my family and I feel like I have taken a number of steps back after meeting him. I have spent the day either wanting to cry or run headlong into the nearest wall multiple times. I don't entirely understand why I feel this way but I'm sure it will pass because of that. If it was more solid I could use a technique. The fact that it isn't must mean it will pass (I hope!)

At least it wasn't too cold this morning. I even managed a chat with this little chappy on the way home

So on the course: this weekend is, I think, one of the most powerful weekends for the personal development of the people on the course. We look initially at what our values are in life, usually around either our relationships or our careers. The way these exercises work is that you first list all your values, then you rank them in priority (usually surprising yourself by the ones that come top) and then you get to the "what's that all about" of each of the values to get to the real underlying drivers. 

You know how we often say "there's part of me that wants to X" or something like that? Well we look at the limiting belief we have around these values. Then we do one of the coolest techniques in the Cognitive Hypnotherapy toolkit called Visual Squash 

 In this technique you visualise the two different parts of yourself on each hand. You do some work to show that actually both the part you want to resolve and the other, often more positive part, have the same intention in your subconscious. Then with your eyes closed your hands come together and in that the two parts become integrated. 

It was very powerful for many people on the course, including my partner who said it was the biggest and most significant change in her since we started the course. It was nice to have been in a position to make that possible.

So now I am once more waiting in London City Airport. My friend that was up for the weekend has gone home. She had a fab day with the little one yesterday, taking her all over the place. This morning the little one wasn't well and actually had a nap which is unheard of. But apparently she perked up after, so fingers crossed. 

I am sure this feeling I am carrying will pass soon, and I'm sure having only 3 hours sleep has something to do with it! Luckily I am off work Friday - Tuesday next week so might get a chance to catch up with myself!

Course weekend 5 - day 1

Not much to share today with you guys.
It started very very cold. My mouth was getting cold inside as I breathed! The picture is Regents Park.

The course focussed a bit more on structure of therapy today as well as beginning to look at what our values are.

The weird thing on the course today came from me. I realised as I watched Trevor talk that he was like a stranger to me. It was like I only knew him as a course instructor and not as the therapist who changed my life!

Maybe this is a reaction to where I am in my head now. More settled in myself and in control of my own head. Or something else.

Anyway I thought I was gonna be on my own for dinner as the person I was meeting was sick but a few of us went to the pub , had some drinks and a chat and then some food. Hoorah

Then I decided to arrange to meet my brother. So that's what I'm doing now. Erk

The London Marathon–my charity

As you all should know by now that I am running the London Marathon thanks to Nestle Pure Life.

We are running for a charity too. After all, that is what the London Marathon is all about! I am running for:

Samantha Dickson Brain Tumour Trust

Samantha Dickson Brain Tumour Trust (SDBTT) is the largest brain tumour charity in the UK. We have been working to improve understanding, diagnosis and treatment of both childhood and adult brain tumours since we were established in 1996.

Our work has three key strands:
1) Research: We spend around £1 million per year funding top quality scientific and clinical research into childhood and adult brain tumours, making us the leading dedicated brain tumour research funder in the UK.
2) Support: We run a dedicated helpline and series of patient information days to provide compassionate, confidential and accurate support and information for anyone living with, or affected by, a brain tumour including patients, family members, carers or friends.
3) Campaigning and Awareness Raising: Our latest campaign, HeadSmart, aims to raise awareness of childhood brain tumour symptoms among parents, GPs and other health professionals to make earlier diagnosis of brain tumours a reality for many more of the children and young people who experience them.

So I am going to make this a bit of fun.

I would like you to guess how long it will take for me to complete the marathon.

And if you want to guess, it would also be really nice if you made a small donation at the same time by visiting my BT MyDonate page (I have chosen this method of fundraising because they don’t take any sort of admin fee which I like)

If you want to guess my time and donate then either leave a comment with your guess, or click on the link and it will collect all the guesses in a survey tool. I will try and think of a nice prize for the winning guess too!

Click here to guess my time using survey monkey

**I am trying to find a survey tool that I can embed on this page so watch this space! but here are the guesses so far..

Feel the fear and do it anyway

It’s now been 4 weeks since my last session with Trevor.

These days I am way better at being tuned into the differences in myself after these sessions but to be honest it would be impossible not to notice this time.

My school report when I was about 16 read “does well in familiar surroundings”. The ‘best’ category was worded as “does well in familiar and unfamiliar surroundings”

I was always put out by not getting the best score but the reality is that it was a very accurate assessment.

You see I have always been scared of everything. So much so that I have always had to ignore what my head is saying (Run away and hide!) in order to function effectively. If going somewhere new I would always do a check to make sure I had worked out where the front door was! (if possible)

Take a deep breath, close your eyes and jump.

That has been my mantra for life. Don’t let your doubts dictate your behaviours. For me, that was the only way I could ever do anything.

But it didn’t change the fact that every situation with an element of something new was terrifying to me and required me to draw on my inner resources to do it.

Last week I took a trip to Enniskillen with work. For a trip like this I would check I had all the travel arrangements sorted. I had to hire a car and drive after flying, so I would have printed the map. I would have the contact details of the hotel. I would be incredibly nervous until I reached my hotel.

But it was different.

I wasn’t nervous. I was actually excited.

I felt like a kid seeing a whole new world.

“I’m different” I thought.

“I don’t recognise this person”

You see, it seems I am no longer scared of everything.

I don’t get drowned in a feeling of dread.

I no longer have to “feel the fear and do it anyway”

I hadn’t realised how much that fear dictated so many dimensions of my daily life. I only realised when it was gone.

So there you go, the latest change from my sessions with Trevor is that I am no longer scared of everything.

Pretty cool.

The Gallery–my brother

The theme for this weeks Gallery is A family story

Interesting.

This is my brother.

The last picture is my brother with my real father (as opposed to Stepfather)

So let me tell you a family story. This is obviously very sketchy in some of the details.

My mother was born with a form of Spina Bifida that meant she had a hole in her spine. The problems she suffered as a child were put down to growing pains but when she gave birth to me and my brother, who is nearly 2 years older than me, they realised there was something serious going on.

When I was about 3 my mother ended up in hospital because of this.

At some point during her time in hospital my father (pictured above) got together with my stepmother. She moved in and my mother was kicked out.

My brother and I lived with my father and stepmother until I was about 9. She didn’t like us. We were neglected and hit often. It wasn’t fun. We saw my mother very little. In fact, the first time I saw her after the split I didn’t know who she was.

As we got older my mother met a new man who would later become my stepfather. We went to stay with them occasionally.

Then one year, when I was about 9, we went to stay with them and we never went back. From that point onwards we lived with my mother and my stepfather.

My brother and I could have been united by the experiences of our early years but we were not. He disliked me and used to threaten to punch me many 1000’s of times (typical kid stuff) if I did something he didn’t like or spoke when he didn’t want me to. We didn’t share toys. If we went anywhere together I had to walk some way behind him. To him I was never anything more than an annoying sister that he didn’t want around.

When we moved in with our mother we lived as separate lives as is possible at that age. My father disowned us and didn’t have anything further to do with us. In later years, my brother would visit him and they would chat. If I tried to visit him I was sent packing sharpish.

Life was no better living with my stepfather and mother. My mother was ill and limited, and my stepfather was a bastard.

Still, my brother and I never really pulled together to support each other.

We moved back to Wales when I was 10 or so and life carried on as it had always done. Then, shortly before his 16th birthday my brother ran away from home, down to London. My parents went to get him and brought him back.

But now he had learnt what he needed to do. He waited until after his 16th Birthday and ran away again. This time they didn’t bring him back.

I never forgave him for running away and leaving me. Given our relationship there was no way he would have taken me with him, but I always wished he had.

He stayed in touch with my mother occasionally and every now and then he would visit. He had a tough time. He always wanted to be a punk and has been ever since he left home. He has been on drugs since then and has had a few close shaves for sure. But he is one of life’s survivors and no matter what happens he always seems to come through ok.

A good number of years ago he got in touch with me. He said family was the most important thing and he tried to reconnect. I have tried for many years to accept that connection, but family isn’t important to me, and he abandoned me leaving me to deal with everything on my own.

A few years back I went to his wedding. It was unique and I made a unique cake to go with it

I have a wonderful family and an amazing life now.

I have also found acceptance of myself and learnt to be happy in my life.

One day, I might try and help him do the same thing.

This was all put together for this weeks gallery over at sticky fingers where the subject is "A family story"

Positive of the day

It seems that it is human nature to focus on those things in our day that do not go as we would like, rather than accept and enjoy the successes we have.

When we are trying to drive some kind of change in our lives, the success of that change can be very dependent on our ability to acknowledge progress and forgive failure.

Let’s face it, there are very few fundamental life changes that happen overnight (certainly not the good sort anyway!)

So how do we rise out of the darkness and choose to make our lives positive? How do we take control ourselves of the way things go and choose to interpret things in the most positive way possible?

…and more importantly, what the heck am I doing writing this post?!

Those of you who have been following this blog for a while will know that when I first started my Cognitive Hypnotherapy, one of the things I was asked to do after my first session was to review the positive(s) in my day at the end of each day.

This is not something that has ever come naturally to me.

I have chosen the stance of a pessimist in life. Expect the worst then you can’t be disappointed. Expect the worst and things will almost always turn out better than you expect.

But it’s not a great approach for recognising change. Especially when you are trying to reprogramme the way you have thought for 20 years. Or when you are trying to lose weight and you just want it to be gone and for everything to be different.

So I set about blogging my positive of the day. It’s fair to say I didn’t get it quite right because I was picking big things each day. Then again, big things were happening to me.

But it did help me to learn to focus on what was changing instead of what was not. It tuned me in to a certain way of thinking that I have continued since then.

Now, I am very clued up to things that are different in me, and this is still often a daily insight (even though I don’t blog it daily any more). It also helps me with my Thinking Slimmer journey as despite not feeling like I’m losing weight, I am able to focus on the signs that I am different now.

I still haven’t learnt to forgive myself for my ‘failures’. I am hoping that one day I will become as good at that as I am now at recognising my achievements.

What do you think? Worth a bash.

At the end of each day, take a moment and write it down (if you love notepads buy a shiny one for this), or blog it, or even put it in your mobile phone each day in your calendar. Imagine how much fun it will be to look back after a few months and review your Positive of the Day.

While you're at it, you might want to check out this book “Bubbles of Happiness” by Ozge Karabiyik. She is a lady that I didn’t know but her story has touched me. She was clearly an amazing person. She was a Cognitive Hypnotherapist trained by Trevor. She fainted one day and banged her head so badly that she died a short while later having never regained consciousness. From reading about her, her life touched and continues to touch so many people in a positive way, she was clearly a remarkable women. Her partner published this book that she was writing. All proceeds go to Macmillan.

Marathon training–7 weeks done

7 weeks done and 11 weeks to go.

The big news is that I have managed to stick to my schedule for yet another week.

This week was my new schedule and I swapped my rest day from Friday to Thursday because I was away with work on Thursday. That worked pretty well.

This week is a down week with ‘only’ a 60 minute long run. Next week will be 2 hours! *gulp*

I pushed it a little and did the long run at my short run pace. It was a risk but I would have slowed down if it was too much. It wasn’t. It is supposed to be run at an easy conversational pace and I managed 5.31 miles in 60 minutes at that pace.

The other news is that I managed to find an approach to intervals that works for me. It basically involves sprinting down the road across by the house and jogging back. I did this 8 times in the 30 minutes I set myself (same timing as on the schedule). The thing that’s good is I managed about 0.5 miles further for the same time than on previous interval runs – showing I was getting faster. If this gets to easy I can just do 2 legs of the road at the sprint.

You can see it definitely gets harder so it may be a while before I can do the 2 legs of the road!

So overall another good week

Unfortunately I couldn’t make it to the meet the experts event in London this week (Becca and Darin went along). With Nestle Pure Life there explaining about the water points along the way and Adidas doing a cool gait thing with some excellent discounts on trainers (2 pairs for price of 1) , I really missed out again despite these companies making it possible for me to run the marathon as part of their team

They also run training days but I can’t make any of the dates for them. I guess that’s the price I pay for living in deepest, darkest Dundee.

Next weekend is weekend 5 of my course in London. I am hoping to do my mammoth 2 hour run on Friday afternoon before I fly, a Kinect session tomorrow and then treat Saturday and Sunday as rest days because it’s not really practical to do much.