In the past I was powerless, powerless against the might of pollen. I suffered puffy eyes, runny nose and mental cloudiness through spring and summer, through exams and dates. I just accepted it. I was allergic to pollen, my immune system reacted to these harmless bits of atmospheric flotsam with the force usually reserved for a dangerous virus. There was nothing I could do.
Then, last year, I read an article about curing allergies with NLP. It sounds ludicrous to begin with, but the more I read the more it made it sense. I started to ask people who had got allergies when they first had them. It turned out that most of them got them after a particularly traumatic time in their life. Others had lost the allergy unexpectedly. There was definitely something psychosomatic going on.
So, I tried relaxing when my symptoms came on. I didn’t tense up and worry about the barrage of sneezes I was about to endure. And, well, it was more or less a complete failure. Although my hayfever wasn’t quite as severe as previously, it was still pretty intense.
This year I have moved away from NLP a little and embraced mindfulness meditation. This is meditation with the emphasis on being present in all aspects of your life, not just when you’re doing meditation. When you are doing something, focus all of your mental faculties on it, don’t get distracted by future anxiety or past trauma. Be here now. This doesn’t mean that you don’t think about past or future, rather that if you do then you focus on them completely rather than using them as a distraction from your current activities.
Mindful deliberate action can be illustrated in the way you eat your food. Instead of watching telly or reading whilst eating, you appreciate each mouthful, chewing it slowly and relishing the flavours.
The result of mindfulness is that I am generally much more relaxed, confident and coherent. Without the gnawing sensation of unnecessary worrying, I am hopeful that I can avoid hayfever in that I will have outgrown it. So far, it appears to be working.
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