Over the years I have done quite a lot of presenting and teaching and decided that this will be the year I get back out there!  I am rather chuffed and honoured to have been selected to present to my peers at the UKHC in November this year.  Nick Ebdon, the extraordinary organiser of this event has put together this video to promote the event.

After a couple of good downpours, the earth was quite nice and soft, so I decided to get out and start digging the ground elder from our front garden.  I’m not really what you would call a gardener, more someone who does gardening.  The result of this is a seriously weedy front bed! 

If you have a garden with ground elder, you’ll know the challenge I’m facing – never has a plant devised so many ways to ensure it not only survives, but thrives and rules.  After several hours of digging I got to thinking how negative thoughts are like ground elder.  If you take the time to dig it out and destroy it as soon as it rears its pretty little green leaves, the problem is gone.  Let it grow, and it turns into a massive problem, which takes hard work and determination to overcome. 

In the case of the weed, there are thick roots which peel apart to allow new growth, little white shooting roots, clusters of pale cream, worm like roots and I don’t even want to think about their pepper pot like seed heads. They are determined to survive and their roots weave in between the other beautiful plants in the bed, making it almost impossible to extricate.  It is fast growing and spreads as well, and pulling off or strimming the leaves makes it grow even more densely.  Pulling out the obvious shoots and planting something else there as a distraction simply won’t work as the weed simply shoots back up, overwhelming the new plants, weakening or strangling them.  And it appears that even when the bed is clear, some of those blessed little roots lurk, hidden in the soil, and they start to shoot more little leaves out, which I will dig out and destroy.

Our negative and faulty thoughts work in just the same way.  Making a habit of challenging them when they first arise, digging them out and ditching them, keeps their growth under control.  But when they grow and get out of control they can overwhelm, spoiling any joy or positivity and causing us pain, grief and fear.  At least we can do the work on our minds sitting comfortably in hypnosis, which makes it far more attractive than the hard graft of weeding, and if there are any lingering roots, we can ditch them using self-hypnosis. 

And yes, thank goodness the physical pain from gardening can be helped with self-hypnosis too!