http://www.happygreenblueeyes.co.uk/

Health and Happiness Coaching, Saltburn (2026)

28/04/2023

If you would like a safe space to explore your comfort zone with your own movement?

A soft reminder of tomorrow's opportunity.

30/05/2022

Rise

30/05/2022

Shine

30/05/2022

Walk

19/02/2021

Health, Happiness and Arriving

Thought experiment. What if you were conscious of being in the air. You could not be seen but you were conscious that you existed. You also knew that one day you would become somet hing that took form. And one day, one beautiful day you would be born and coalesce as a particle, a raindrop, a snowflake, a crystal of ice. That form would look similar to others but it would not be the same. All that time that you had no form you could imagined what it might be like to be a shape, to feel physical and to be in life, falling from the sky or held up and floating in space. What joy you could imagine you would bring to that falling when finally it came. What excitement you would bring to what you would do when you landed, to join the earth in creating life. Perhaps the pleasure of being a puddle or a stream, or a powerful river, perhaps even the great dream that all the droplets had of one day joining the great ocean.

Now imagine you were you and non-physical and that you had been non-physical for many years. let’s call it a hundred years and you had that time to picture what shape you would take when you arrived here. Imagine you could chose to be any kind of life and after considering the options you chose to be human. Imagine you had a hundred years to imagine what it would feel like to have a body, a face, the feeling of a jaw and teeth, a tongue and eyes and what if felt like as a human to see. So different it would be to perceive the colours of life than through eyes of the fish, the insect or the animals, who see the same objects but very differently.
Imagine your eyes themselves were made up of magical colours, swirling and mixing as if a brilliant universe all of its own. Imagine in that time before your human life you had time to feel in to what it would be like to breath with human lungs or to walk or run or jump or dance on human legs. Imagine you tried to imagine the taste of strawberry ice cream or a mixed salad with fresh herbs or the taste of clean water deeply appreciated in your mouth. Imagine the idea of smelling a pine tree or a field on a summers morning or a Eucalyptus branch freshly broken. Imagine you could imagine music, soft and soothing and then rousing, mixing together different vibrations cascading and moving. Imagine you could actually make meaning of your feelings and even communicate them with sounds from your mouth to other beings.
Imagine that you imagined what your ge****ls would feel like and what it might fell like when the body was excited, warmed up and pleasurably pulsating. Imagine every inch of your body had subtle senses on it that could pick up the softest stroke of a feather or the warm weight of another human pressing on your back, the pain and pleasure of that skin to skin feeling.
Imagine what you might plan to do with your life and where you might travel. Imagine how you would plan to respect your body and keep it healthy and feed it only what would support it to flourish and feel good. Imagine the connections you would wish to make sitting peacefully with nature or with animals but particularly with other human beings. The plans you would make to open your sexuality, to open your heart, create friendships of purity and the feelings you wished to feel with a family. Imagine what you might plan to do for others, to collaborate and help create something big together. What plan would you have made to positively add something great to this life and to leave it a better place than you found it?

Now sit with yourself a while right here and close your eyes and feel what it’s like to arrive. Imagine what you planned to do and how you planned to be with others, when you dreamed yourself alive.

Kendal Aitken : Happy Balance Training. Individuals and groups. Contact: [email protected] or 07944883961

17/07/2020

Health and Happiness
If thoughts were a virus
Imagine if thoughts themselves were a virus. They could get into your system, infect every part of your body, eating you from the inside. You could pass it to others if your voice is heard on the street or through online followers or you're a national newspaper or a TV news company that beams round the world. The virus could be spread globally, instantly, spat out aggressively by a very small group of people.
Like a lie can be, the information left out can be just as harmful as the thoughts put in. And as when you lie to yourself or you try to convince yourself of something that you don’t wholeheartedly believe, well the virus can see through the act and can tell your true thoughts and feelings and reacts appropriately.
It feeds off your discomfort, your stress, your anger, hatred and most of all fear. Like this it's a poison. It can feed off your bitter racism and criticism of others. It can feed off your homophobia and non-acceptance of anyone who is different from you. It thrives off your irritation of injustice. It is strengthened by a sense of guilt or shame about your body or about something you feel bad about in your past. Most of all it harms you when you fall into self-hatred or even feeling sorry for yourself, when your self esteem drops and you don’t feel worthy or balanced inside.
It is manifested in material things through your beliefs about food and what ends up going into your body. It doesn't care if you do no research into the harm that fizzy drinks and alcohol or anything else you consume does to you. It has no maliciousness of it's own but it reflects directly in your body. In your flesh it t reflects your beliefs about drugs, illegal, legal or prescription, the virus doesn’t distinguish. It reflects your beliefs about how much exercise is healthy for you and what you actually do. It reflects how you choose to structure and prioritise your life. It reflects how much time you take to know yourself and to cope with stress. It reflects your beliefs about the importance of regular sleep. It reflects your thinking patterns and if they create discomfort inside you or if they create good feelings.
Thought is a potentially a virus. One that infects your system with poison like an acid that burns your insides and that kills you much younger than you need to die.
Yet thoughts can be a healthy virus too.
You have the power in your thoughts to create wellness in your system, to think in positive patterns, with appreciation for yourself and for others. You can effect the physical cells of your body through the way you construct how your think and how you prioritize your well-being.
It is up to you how much support you reach out for and how much research and interest you take to find out what is healthy for your mind and for your flesh.
Through your thoughts you can train your emotions to feel good. You can train yourself to think well of others and to be resolved with the past and optimistic about the future. And then you take those thoughts and those words and that feeling behind them and you spread them. You spread them talking to others, you spread them online and you spread them physically loving other beings. You spread them with good intentions and when your disposition is genuinely happy you infect yourself with something healthy and it’s contagious.
You are carrying a virus, it’s in your thoughts, it transfers to your feelings and your actions. It is up to you what virus you choose to create and what you choose to spread.

22/06/2020

Health, Happiness and choices

We humans are interesting. We have this perhaps unique ability to be be conscious of our existence and with that we have an ability to recall our past and crucially to make plans for our future. That ability to plan for our future, can be both for today, the next hour or ten years time.

Yet within this ability to plan for our future perhaps we are the only creature that finds themselves in this strange position, not quite a paradox but not far off, a many worlds scenario perhaps? Whereby we can plan what it is that we want to do and yet our ...what shall we call it, our instincts, our learnt behaviour, our rebel will, can take us in a whole other direction.

What many of us do with our ability to plan ahead, especially the morning after a heavy night of downing alcohol, is to truly believe we will never drink again, or at very least truly believe that from now we will start a new path of health and feeling better, more self-respecting, more conscious of our choices, more appreciative of our body, more aware of our one fortuitous life.

The intention is set, the aim is clear, health all the way from here. Drink water, cut out sugar, start running. Yet within hours we already feel better and there in the cupboard in the alluring package is the sweet shape of a seemingly harmless biscuit. Memory of intention flickers across the mind, yet so too the taste buds of the mouth remembering that pathway of pleasure and before long our rational mind, as if in a chess game against the biscuit itself, has made solid convincing arguments to oneself and the biscuit is gone.

Two nights later the head is back in equilibrium and a cocky bravado has taken hold once again. A new rationale, one life, I am wild and reckless and free, I am rebel even to myself. I am the wayward filmstar who smokes and drinks and finds comfort in his self image, the person who is different, not like all the rest, not mainstream, not controllable. The freebird.

Before you know it this memory, this self-perception, whatever the self-perception is, it comes into sharper focus, as if we see ourselves suddenly in sharp clothes, a suit, something suave, something we feel good in, something we truly feel represents the picture of who we see ourselves as.

And there in that moment we have subsumed the commitment, the awareness, the path that two days before we had sworn ourselves to take.

In the final analysis, perhaps we are all more creatures of habit than we are wanting to admit.

If we see ourselves as un- tamable and independent then that message that pattern is perhaps the strongest pattern, the pattern of thought, the thoughts returned to most often. That is who we are.

Rarely do we stick to our new perceptions of who we want to be. For most of us are actually mentally weak, pattern addicted, immediate pleasure led. By which I mean the desire to change, to live more healthily and be more happy and feel better about ourselves is often short lived. For the power of the biscuit is often more practised than the new thought. The power of our daily patterns, what our bodies have learnt to consume, are perhaps the most powerfully strong and hardest to change.

And all along the body is watching the battle between the new idea of who we want to be and the old habits that have created who we have become. The body is simply quietly keeping score, taking the battering, being worn down over years of self induced micro aggressions, our unhealthy foods, our unhealthy habits driving us faster towards death than our conscious imagining hopeful minds every wanted us to travel.

25/04/2020

Health Happiness and our body
Every time I have a little annoyance it has an effect on me, raising blood pressure just slightly, retriggering that neural pathway, strengthening that pattern, that bridge. It is so imperceptibly, so normal , so every day, every hour, so subtle that the changes they create are nigh on impossible to recognise.
We are pattern making machines. If the blood pressure is constantly bumped up slightly every ten minutes or every hour then sooner or later it normalises at that higher rate. We can't sense that but our body is adapting. If we are out throwing a ball for our dog every day then it is likely that slowly over time that arm will become stronger along those tendons and in those muscles, in the same way our stress levels are also tightening or loosening.
Our moods are a cumulative experience, an adding up. If I am generally feeling down on a daily basis this will become my baseline, my average. If I have one incredible hour of joy or pleasure or freedom then it will probably not on its own over the longer time change my overall mood much. It is likely that I will return back soon to the average of all my daily emotions.
If I eat sugar filled biscuits regularly, daily, well the pernicious harm of them is not seen in a single one on it’s own. Individually one is so innocuous and looks so unable to harm me. In this country it’s normal to have tea and biscuits together, it is not normal in other places in the world. And there is something powerfully seducing us when something is normalised into a culture. Everybody is doing it but each body is keeping the score of the health impact individually.
It doesn't matter if we are not looking at what is in a biscuit, that doesn't stop the ingredients effecting us. In England we have normalised so many unhealthy things. look at cereals. We are brought up thinking cereals for kids are normal. Look at the walls full of them in supermarkets. Yet they are soaked in sugar and no knowing parent would treat their child so unhealthily if they knew what they were doing to them by proving them with such a regular start to their day and the harm it is doing to their growing bodies.
In Redcar or Skelton I see people actually queuing up for Mc Donalds but how many of them have ever looked at the ingredients? There is so much harm it is doing them nutrition wise, even if there is an important benefit gained of meeting friends and feeling part of a group. There is a video online that is just a big Mac and chips sitting there day after day. The last time I looked over a year had passed and it was still just sitting there, it looked identical to the day it was brought. What does this tell you about the nutritional value and the degree of preservatives in it?
People don't suddenly become large overnight, we are on average one of the most obese nations in Europe. Why? Because we normalise drinking coke and other fizzy drinks starting as children. And we do not have a habit of looking at what is in the food we eat. Many financially poorer people here think Asda is a better supermarket because it is cheaper. Yet many of these same people do not realise that food is not the same because it looks the same or because it is packaged the same. There are vast differences in the nutritional value of the food and thus in the harm it does to your body. Look how large the average person coming out of Asda is, that tells you something about what happens to you if you buy from there regularly. And have a look at what they buy, fizzy drinks are so common. Compare the size of people who drink fizzy drinks regularly to those who don't at all.
This is where intelligence comes in, not a school intelligence, but a self-awareness, a self-caring. Because your body is keeping score even if you are looking the other way.
One day you might get ill, your body can't take the abuse any more and you spend the rest of your life slowly trying to understand where your illness came from and dealing with the increasing pain and discomfort it causes you.
It is said that in terms of illness your body will often warn you as if gently stroking a feather across your cheek to tickle you into awareness, then it will caress you as if with fingertips, then it will press harder, then lightly slap you, then harder and harder and if you still don't get the message then eventually it will punch you straight on in the face and knock you down.
Smoking isn't generally a major problem if you do it once in your life or even once in a while , nor is drinking alcohol or taking other drugs. The harm is in the regularity. Your body adapts to what it experiences regularly.
Our bodies are generally self healing and phenomenally adaptable to so much, different weather extremes, different foods and air quality and noise and levels of depression or stress. It is an organic adapting miracle that changes to survive in whatever environment it finds itself in. Yet like a car that runs on petrol you can't start mixing in diesel and expect it to keep on working. Unlike a car that really can't adapt our bodies are amazing at what they can take on board and still keep on moving, at least in the short term. Artificial sweeteners, preservatives, E numbers, alcohol, smoking and the sugar and chemicals from those "harmless" little biscuits next to our tea are all like diesel going into a petrol car. The car will give signs that it is not ok to be fed like that, it will splutter and so will your body. Unless we are wise, unless we course correct pretty sharpish it will continue to struggle, grind down and eventually pretty much come to a stop.
We build momentum in our lives, through the food we eat and the way we allow ourselves to get stressed or angry or critical or indeed how light we take life, how much we smile and laugh and how conscious we become of putting quality food and water into our system.
You can't stick a smile on your face however and expect yourself to feel good if you are not genuinely feeling good on the inside. You can't tell people you are fine and tell them you don't think about politics or care who does what, when actually you are worried deep down and feel anxious on a daily basis. Your body can't be lied to , even if you can lie to other people, even if you think you can convince yourself that things don't really bother you when they actually do. Your body is never fooled, it is keeping score.
Daily practice is to me the key to healthy pattern creating. It is the key that goes with self awareness and self care which in turn relates to how we feel about ourselves.
You might think you have good self esteem but how often do you give your body and your thoughts an honest scan and check in with yourself? You may feel like you have no worries but how often do you sit quietly and notice your thoughts and your anxieties. And how honest can you be with yourself about what is painful too you and humming away daily in your background, harming you? Your body is not impressed with your acts of emotional toughness, it is keeping score, it is neutral to your ego pretence.
Do you wake up and stretch your body daily and recognise where there is lingering tension being held in your muscles?
Do you regularly meditate and appreciate this incredible gift of a body that you have? Do you ever register and appreciate the incredible unlikeliness of you ever having been born? Do you regularly consciously stop and look at all you have been given? Do you read the ingredients of food you buy? And are you conscious every time you are about to put something in your mouth about whether it is supportive to you or if is it harmful and slowly blocking up your system?
Do you notice your thoughts and see how frustrated or angry you let yourself become? Do you question what that is doing to your blood pressure or your neural synapses or how it might be potentially adding daily to you getting debilitating diseases? Do you spend time exploring where your stress and anger come from and making changes to support your life? Do you consciously support yourself to be more appreciative and happier? And do you realise what a massive difference it makes if you do that daily? Because your body is essentially comprised of what you do it daily.
Your daily practices literally can keep you alive for years or decades longer than a person who doesn’t look at the quality of the food they are eating. Or a person who allows themselves to be frustrated and critical on a daily basis.
And do you realise that it doesn't matter if you realise any of this, your body is keeping score and will let you know sooner or later.
Kendal Aitken Mental Health and Happiness T

19/10/2019

More life in life

I wake early, hours before my family do and I tiptoe downstairs. The light is changing, it’s a golden time. I heat water and cut a lemon to bring warmth to my mouth and down the centre of my body. I’ve created different length of music depending on how much each day I feel I want. Waves that start slow, a spiritual sway that grows to full Brazilian carnival or a nightclub at the fulcrum of the rave. It’s a rise into joy, into full movement, the body in rhythm and flow and a smile on my face. Once peaked the wave begins to calm and mellows slowly back down to a solitary violin and then like a final drop of water squeezed out it comes to a stop.
The body is awake.
The process is one of appreciation, to feel more life in my life. I’m trying my best to be wake up, to wake up more and more to this experience of life that I’m in, to feel it as deeply as I can.
Nothing changes us quite like something we do regularly. Doing something once or occasionally simply doesn’t have the same power to effect a pattern. For this reason I’m a massive advocate of daily practice.
I shudder to think how unfit in my body or mentally unbalanced or depressed I might now be if I had never started some twenty years ago to keep myself afloat, to grow and not just float but swim.

Meditation is for me about setting a time when I can regularly let my body enter conscious pure relaxation. it’s a major support to my emotional balance.
Firstly I move slowly through my senses, notice the light behind my eyes, the clean smell through my nostrils, the subtle sounds, the soft lemon taste in my mouth and the touch of air on my skin.
It is to me a bringing of awareness to my consciousness, to my senses and to my inner feelings. I so strongly want to grow my appreciation and recognise fully this experience that I’m living.
Everything will be new today, everything will be experienced afresh if I bring awareness to how true that is, alive in the present always unique, never the same repeated.

Both the dance and the meditation on my senses are times to connect to my body in different manifestations. Then my meditation is to leave the thoughts behind and the aim becomes to enter into no-mind. For the thinking about who I am is limited, a false map often, constrained by language and thought and scientific understanding of what I think I am. My aim is to simply enter a deep state of peace.
Most mornings I add Tai chi (poorly remembered from classes a decade ago but it’s still serving to help find my peace and flow). I do exercises too to increase my strength and over many years this daily practice has done wonders for keeping my body free of pain and flexible. I run, I run now with a joy that my body works well enough at fifty to still run. I praise that my lungs still work well and have recovered from many years of smoking. My body still has power and stamina and the feeling of fluidity is a magnificent feeling.
And then often I end the run with a cold shower, a wake up call like no other that leaves the body zinging and more awake and connected to living.
It’s so easy to charge on into life, to be focussed on just getting things done. A constant focus on the practical can end up an avoidance of ourselves. I’ve learnt it’s very possible to take time out to heighten our appreciate of who we are and what we have and how incredible this opportunity to be alive in this world is. It’s all too easy to bypass the magic in a blur, miss the subtle and the sweetness that is in the present where we all live. Death and the awareness that it’s coming is a wonderful gift. For me it brings more focus and appreciation to who I am and where I am and the kind of life I am living.

12/10/2019

I'm fifty years old this year and that's old

Well not if you're ninety . Because everything after all is relative.
My body still feels good and my mind is relatively sharp, though I forget things, don't we all, is it more than before?
I'm aware of lots of places and relationships that have flowed through my life like leaves in a river drifting past in front of my memory. The faces of people I have known and loved and a million more forgotten and a thousand different shores landed on and explored.
If you are twenty or even thirty being fifty seems old, or it did to me. At this point there is no more thinking you are still young , dressing young, using street slang, definitely too old to be flirting. Or so I thought back then.
Now I am almost there, the view is very different to how I ever imagined it to be. Flirtation still feels like a healthy energy, a life spark. S*x is still important but in more proportion, it is no longer leading me like a dog taking me for a walk. You could say I've moved in my journey as a young adult from my hips to my head and I hope I've met myself somewhere around my heart.
Chapters passed, friends come and leave, fashions, politics and creative attractions all ebb and flow. I can see life really is a state of flux and we are all part of a oneness of a very real kind. Trees and fields and seas are going to outlive us all yet we are all nature, not separate.
The thing about being fifty is just how short it has been, most trees know this from their perspective yet most teenagers' don't . How could they? In fact it is wonderful how most teenagers go head long into life without any fear of death or failure, or many of them do, certainly looking back I did.
What I think is so important for all of us is to live life without that fear and with a sense that we can do anything and go anywhere on the planet and essentially live any life we want to.
It is very very rare that people die on adventures, yet for those who chose to be led by their passion and their love of something, there is a lifetime full of reward waiting for them.
What I have learnt is that perhaps the most important aspect in our life is our mindset. It leads us to do things we think we can, or it holds us back from those things we convince ourselves we can't. Thinking ourselves down or having low self esteem can convince us that we are not worth much and so we don't need to treat ourselves well. We manifest that lack of self love with unhealthy food and drink and substances that hurts our body and by getting into jobs or relationships that are essentially not healthy or supportive to us.
What I see from life at this age is that no one really has a clue what we are doing here, I mean as a human being here on this planet. We can each define our own meaning and how we think directly correlates to what we do with this short period of time. The only thing we can be clear about is that we want to enjoy the journey in whatever way we individually find we do.
Being fifty is like being twenty but with more consciousness. I know more about what is important and what isn't, how to treat myself well and how to think in a way that supports me. I still have very little idea why I am here but I'm damn well going to feel as good as I can while I'm here and support as many other people as I can who want the same.

25/06/2019

I'm fifty years old this year and that's old
Well not if you're ninety . Because everything after all is relative.
My body still feels good and my mind is relatively sharp, though I forget things, don't we all, is it more than before?
I'm aware of lots of places and relationships that have flowed through my life like leaves in a river drifting past in front of my memory. The faces of people I have known and loved and a million more forgotten and a thousand different shores landed on and explored.
If you are twenty or even thirty being fifty seems old, or it did to me. At this point there is no more thinking you are still young , dressing young, using street slang, definitely too old to be flirting. Or so I thought back then.
Now I am almost there, the view is very different to how I ever imagined it to be. Flirtation still feels like a healthy energy, a life spark. S*x is still important but in more proportion, it is no longer leading me like a dog taking me for a walk. You could say I've moved in my journey as a young adult from my hips to my head and I hope I've met myself somewhere around my heart.
Chapters passed, friends come and leave, fashions, politics and creative attractions all ebb and flow. I can see life really is a state of flux and a we are all part of a oneness of a very real kind. Trees and fields and seas are going to outlive us all yet we are all nature, not separate.
The thing about being fifty is just how short it has been, most trees know this from their perspective yet most teenagers' don't . How could they? In fact it is wonderful how most teenagers go head long into life without any fear of death or failure, or many of them do, certainly looking back I did.
What I think is so important for all of us is to live life without that fear and with a sense that we can do anything and go anywhere on the planet and essentially live any life we want to.
It is very very rare that people die on adventures, yet for those who chose to be led by their passion and their love of something, there is a lifetime full of reward waiting for them.
What I have learnt is that perhaps the most important aspect in our life is our mindset. It leads us to do things we think we can, or it holds us back from those things we convince ourselves we can't. Thinking ourselves down or having low self esteem can convince us that we are not worth much and so we don't need to treat ourselves well. We manifest that lack of self love with unhealthy food and drink and substances that hurts our body and by getting into jobs or relationships that are essentially not healthy or supportive to us.
What I see from life at this age is that no one really has a clue what we are doing here, I mean as a human being here on this planet. We can each define our own meaning and how we think directly correlates to what we do with this short period of time. The only thing we can be clear about is that we want to enjoy the journey in whatever way we individually find we do.
Being fifty is like being twenty but with more consciousness. I know more about what is important and what isn't, how to treat myself well and how to think in a way that supports me. I still have very little idea why I am here but I'm gonna damn well going to feel as good as I can while I'm here and support as many other people as I can who want the same.
Kendal Aitken Mental Health and Happiness Training. Individuals and groups. Contact: [email protected] or 07944883961

Health and Happiness Coaching

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