Punishments for Gluttons

I was physiologically responding to what was going on in my brain - I felt nauseous, the blood flushed from my face and my knees became unstable. I felt as though I lost control of my conscious mind. The doubt that consumed me was clearly the result of insecurity buried deep in my Subconscious - a black box of despair had been opened. I became lost in the negative, self-limiting thought process associated with Personalising and Catastrophising. I don't want people thinking you're a dick while you're alive. Consoling myself with the thought that Van Gogh's wife probably thought his sunflowers were shit, I'm about to introduce you to a broad coalition of concepts around spirituality, consciousness, reality, mindfulness, and what a previous version of me might have labelled `new age hokum'. So let's start gently and a little left field, with Britain's favourite snack. All crisps are just crisps - plain and simple sliced and fried spuds. Then they stick them in a vat of flavour and the sliced potatoes take on the identity of smoky bacon, roast chicken, pickled onion, squirrel, or whatever. Same with you. You started out as just plain and simple you. Then we stuck you in a big vat called `life' and flavours stuck to you. You might be `generally upbeat but with a bad case of the Mondays' or `a proper grumbler' or `kind and loving', `self-centred', `confident and go-getting', `a little bit poisonous' or, indeed, `squirrel'. Jacki Huba says it better with `we're born naked and the rest is all drag'. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London. Before the late 1800s, cesarean sections were death rituals, not lifesaving procedures. If a doctor suggested a C-section, you knew you were on the way to the morgue. To save time, sometimes priests operated so they could take out the fetus and baptize it immediately. Try picturing a C-section of the Middle Ages: Women were wide awake, tethered to the table and cut without anesthesia. Sometimes they were not sewn back together because doctors thought an open wound hastened healing.

According to midwives, cesarean sections were necessary when the patient does not respond to penetrating odors, is ice-cold, without pulse, looks collapsed and pale as death, and if her breath leaves no traces on a mirror. In other words, they were ready for surgery when they looked dead. The first recorded successful C-section was in 1508. Jacob Nufer, a Swiss pig gelder, operated on his wife. After dinner Jill asked everyone into the living room. I gave a little speech to the new couple, inviting my ex's intended baby mama to reach out to me if she had any questions or concerns while the girls were in her care, and told her that if I do anything to upset her, to please tell me right away and I would straighten it out. Looking back, Jill considers the evening a success. She and the WBR even began a friendship that lasts to this day. Jill's Aha: Though she initially resisted the idea of a new woman spending so much time with her girls, once she accepted that this woman wasn't going anywhere, Jill was able to relate to her as an important person in her kids' lives rather than a threatening or unwelcome presence. Jamie's divorce left her strapped for cash and prone to devising creative barter arrangements to provide her sons with some of the nice extras in life. When a good friend gave her a secondhand SUV, Jamie decided to sell her beat-up Toyota Corolla to a mom acquaintance from her kids' elementary school in exchange for a little cash and a year's worth of guitar lessons for her boys. The next month, her younger, Lucas, said in passing, The guitar teacher tucked me in last weekend at Daddy's. It turned out the music teacher tucked in Jamie's sons on a rare Daddy night and then tucked in Daddy. The next time Jamie drove by her old house, she noticed the guitar teacher's car (Jamie's old Corolla) parked in the driveway. It was astounding just how rapidly this negativity took control and how my conscious thoughts became consumed by it. For me, it certainly was a lesson: a lesson that we are all on a journey and will all encounter experiences that take us by surprise. Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans. No one is perfect. Even if you feel you've mastered the art of positivity and happiness, I guarantee that you'll encounter obstacles and problems that you'll need to address. We can never anticipate fully what life has in store for us - all we can hope for is that when life hits us hard we have the mental resources available to help us grow from the experience and recognise the lesson.

The easiest and most effective strategy to get you back on track if you find yourself, like I did, blocked by Subconscious obstacles is by practicing being present. So what does that mean? As with anything, the more you commit to being present and implement the following techniques, the easier it becomes and the quicker you'll be able to overcome challenges in the future. Again, it's a choice. The point being that it's not long into your 4000-week journey that you develop an ego; I'm coming back to this later but for now remember `ego'; Newborn babies don't have an ego. They have what's called the `original face'. A baby isn't trying to be anything or anyone, it's a human being rather than a human doing. When you paddle yourself through that birth canal into the bright lights, you have no idea whether you're white, brown, black, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Jedi, or whether you're destined to support Derby County, Arsenal, Partick Thistle, or none of them. You've no idea whether you're going to be someone who lives an abundant life, or someone who plays it so cautiously that they miss out. You haven't decided whether you're a confident or non-confident person, whether you'll take illegal drugs or eat too much cake on a regular basis. You're not born with prejudice or religious intolerance. All of the above are learned behaviours, choices that we make according to the upbringing we have. Supposedly, after 13 midwives tried to get the baby out to no avail, he grabbed one of his knives and got his baby. His wife survived and gave birth five more times. Many scholars have a hunch that the pig gelder tale is about as believable as Caesar's mother's C-section. They do not believe that Nufer's wife could have survived the amateur operation and then survive five more vaginal deliveries (including a set of twins) without rupturing her uterus. They also wonder why no one said anything about Nufer's operation until 82 years after the event. You would think the farmer would have been so proud of his surgery he would have spread the word.

In what is perhaps the most clever marketing pitch ever, the name was changed sometime in the sixteenth century from cesarean operation to cesarean section. That took the edge off, as section sounds so much simpler than operation. Even more mind-boggling than letting your farmer-husband slice you (if you believe the story) are the few reports of women who did their own C-sections. Most of the time the baby died. Jamie's ex never mentioned that he was getting private lessons, too. This was the second woman she knew about whose kids went to school with their kids. Even worse, Jamie would learn about every yummy mommy her ex was dating not from him but from their children. To say that Jamie didn't like her ex dating women she bumped into every day when she waited to pick up her kids would be an understatement. She actually would have preferred not to know what he was doing, and yet she was face-to-face with his parade of WBRs on a daily basis. Her therapist explained that it's not uncommon for separated or divorced men, accustomed to married life for so many years, to want to find a new wife ASAP. So they dust off their weapons of charm and head out to hunt for a replacement to settle down with so they can return to their new normal as quickly as they can. Many want fast results and choose women they bump into during their daily life. Jamie understood why Doug was dating other moms, but that didn't make her feel any less embarrassed. When she decided to bring up the subject with him, he was surprisingly amenable to stopping because he saw that his dating patterns could impact the boys. Once you become aware that your body has Take a deep breath, inhaling through your nose and exhaling through your mouth. Deep breathing increases the supply of oxygen to your brain and stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system to promote a state of inner calm. It's the most effective natural stress-buster. Don't inhibit what you're feeling. Similarly, don't ignore it or try to conquer it.

Just al ow it to `be' and breathe through the experience. What do I feel? Acknowledge that you've just received some `data' from your body. It's trying to communicate something to you. Let me paraphrase a newspaper story that gives a heart-warming example of how we all start out . In recent times there's been a security crackdown. So airports have become more onerous, often requiring you to step into a glass chamber, legs splayed, arms aloft, as they take some sort of naked picture of you. We don't question it. We do as they ask, hanging onto the glimmer of positivity that the naked picture shows your back passage is clear of heroin and as degrading as the system is, it's more humane than the alternative rubber glove treatment. This heightened security has spread to concerts and public gatherings. There's a wonderful story about Kai, a four-year-old boy who was new to all this. A keen WWF wrestling fan, his dad took him to a big venue where fans were routinely frisked on entry. All of them, even the four-year-olds! The boy wandered through the metal detector, the red light picking out the L2 spending money buried in his pocket. In 1822, a 14-year-old Long Island maid pregnant with twins buried herself in a pile of snow and cut open her belly and pulled out one baby. Her boss, a doctor, found her and delivered the other baby and sewed her back together. The teen mom survived, but there is no record of the babies. In 1879, a Turkish woman who had been in labor for 36 hours used a razor to get her baby out. Her neighbor stitched her. Mom and baby survived.