Living in Harmony with the Real World Vol 1: Fundamentals, Family & Friends

By Gary Edward Gedall

Life is often experienced as a series of conflicts and aggressions, both from the outside and within ourselves.

The Living in Harmony with the Real World series, will lead you towards a more harmonious way of dealing with the many, complex and competing elements of your daily life.

These conflicts leave us exhausted, depressed, angry, and feeling generally unhappy and unfulfilled.

Being more in harmony with yourself will bring more happiness, more energy and open up the route to self-fulfilment.

Volume 1 covers; an introduction to the basic concepts, our relationship with ourselves, our family, (partner, children, parents, brothers, sisters and in-laws), friends and enemies.

This book is written in a particularly friendly and accessible style.

This book is a glorious mixture of elements of family and systemic psychotherapeutic knowledge shared by an expert in the field, personal and clinical vignettes, and humorous and entertaining stories.

It brings home the practical and easily understandable messages this book is created to share.

It succeeds to draw in the reader, helps them to understand, often quite complex concepts, never talking down to them, yet with infinite care, compassion, and yes humour opens their minds and their hearts to new ways to see their lives and the real possibilities to change for the better.

The Author Gary Edward Gedall BSc, License, (BSc +), MSc, DAS, state registered Psychologist, Psychotherapist, specialist in Family, Transcultural Therapy and Hypnosis.
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In well over 20 years of successfully working with Individuals, Couples and Families, Gary Gedall has confronted a vast array of relationship problems and difficulties.

With a wide range of both personal and clinical experience and a light and accessible writing style he is most capable to help and instruct his public.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gary Edward Gedall
• Release date: Jan 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9780463862735

Book preview

Introduction

Dear Reader,

This book was first published under the title of; The Zen Approach to Modern Living, only many people thought that I was writing about the spiritual practice or philosophy of Zen.

But this book was never meant to be about a Zen practice.

Which is why we decided to change the title.

So, what is this book about?

This book is about you.

About how you are living your life; about your relationship with yourself, with your family, with your friends and even with your enemies.

Of course there are no magic formulas to life, but there some basic ideas that I have found to work quite well.

Ideas that I have not only begun to integrate into my private life, but something that I am sharing more and more with my patients, and I am noticing how much they make sense in many, many situations.

However, I am neither Moses, nor Mohammad, nor a ‘pure channel’, nor even a latter-day Eileen Caddy. I do not have all the answers to all of life’s problems and difficulties.

This is not meant to be a new form of Bible, where you will always find the perfect response to every situation.

I have taken one simple idea, ‘living in harmony in the real world, and have looked how this concept can be applied to many situations in daily life.

Private, professional, family, social, or any and every situation that we may find ourselves in, we can call upon this vision of ourselves and the universe.

As I have said, it is not a miracle pill, there are no miracle cures.

However, the main concept that I am about to share with you; a concept that has existed for many thousands of years yet has rarely been simply and clearly explained.

I do firmly believe that this simple concept has great value, and that by keeping conscious of it, we can enormously improve our daily lives.

I have also chosen to add a number of allegoric tales to enrich the chapters and to facilitate the entering of the energy behind the words into the deeper parts of your consciousness’s.

I feel that it is also of value to read these tales, they are not just added to ‘pump up the book’, they are meant as an integral part of a global, outer and inner learning process.

I hope and trust that this book and the ideas behind them improve and enrich your life.

Clearly I can only deal with a very limited number and type of relationships and people. And you might find yourself frustrated, even irritated with the examples that I give.

For this, I apologise in advance, I’ve done my best.

Please feel free to write to me if you have any comments or feedback, and of course, any reviews or sharing about this book would be greatly appreciated.

With my kindest regards,

Gary Edward Gedall,

Lausanne, Switzerland 03 06 2015, updated on the 23 05 2020

[e-mail]

1. Living in harmony

1.1 Basics

All too often we find ourselves in conflict both with others and, or, with ourselves.

It is this lack of inner harmony; creating conflicts, both within ourselves and with those around us, that produces friction and resistance.

Friction; when trying to slide an object, causes heat and slows down movement.

Resistance; in an electric wire creates heat and dissipates the energy.

Likewise, friction and resistance in relationships either externally or internally, cause ‘heat’, (increasing the conflict), slow us down and waste our energy.

Hence; by being in harmony with ourselves, and those around us, we can succeed to benefit from this hither to, wasted energy. And therefore, be more active, creative and positive in our lives.

For those that follow these teachings, the whole concept of cleansing and lining up the chakras, follows the exact same logic.

It is finding the ways to resolve those primary conflicts and connect to a deep inner harmony that this approach is based.

Unfortunately, really being in harmony with ourselves and with others is very much the exception, not the rule.

The greatest challenge to living in harmony, happens to be… living with Sin.

While this might seem more than obvious, not living in sin is not at all obvious.

Permit me to explain …

Nb. The repetition of some of the words in this and the following chapters is not at all accidental.

1.2 Living with Sin

The original and basic meaning of the term, ‘sin’, going back to the Hebraic root and according to the bible study tools net site is Chata חָטָא which translates as - ‘to miss’.

As in, missing the mark or the target.

Now, what can that possibly have to do with our common understanding of the term, and what does this have to do with living in harmony?

Short answer - everything.

We all have, within ourselves, a set of value judgements, how we should act, talk, deal with life, be dealt with etc.

One could term this as our ideal of ourselves, and our fundamental vision of who we are in, and how we are treated by, the world.

The ideal can be thought of as the centre of the target.

It is most important, and we will come back to this often in the course of these reflections.

However, before we move away from our reflections on our ideal expectations and turn to how things actually are, there are some details that need to be clarified.

What is particularly interesting is that these ‘ideals’, although often linked to outside value have much more to do with our inner value systems, and to what we are experiencing on the inside, rather than any outside rules, norms, teachings or commandments.

Which is to say that, robbing, cheating, even killing can be acceptable to certain people in certain situations.

While blindly following the usual, legal, religious and socially acceptable conventions might, for us, be wrong.

Bear with me here.

Would you, if someone was threatening the lives of your family and if the only way to protect them was to kill that person, kill them?

I would do so, and still sleep soundly at night.

The legend of Robin Hood speaks of a noble, moral hero, who also happens to be a thief and an outlaw.

Would you, if you had the means, arrest good Robin of Sherwood?

Or would you wish him ‘God’s speed’, and let him continue his unusual manner of doing charity work?

On the other hand, many ‘legitimate’ business executives, while still technically working within both civil and religious ‘laws’, manage to cheat and steal in ‘biblical proportions’.

Would you support an ‘asset stripper’, who seeks out financially precarious companies, makes an aggressive take-over bid, buys the company and then liquidates all the assets, leaving all the employees destitute?

Or politicians that manage to offer lucrative contracts to their families and friends?

Or religious leaders that rigidly control many, many aspects of the daily lives of all those that happen to live under their extreme rules?

Our visions of what are correct, our ideals, are personal to each and every one of us.

We now will turn the real world; how do things work out in reality?

These Real experiences, one can visualise as the arrow that is shot towards the target.

Often things work out okay, the Real and the Ideal, tend to find themselves close together. The arrow finds itself within an acceptable distance from the bull’s eye.

However, what happens when things don’t work out so well?

When we fail to be; when we fall short, when the person that we are, the way we accept to be treated, is far from the ‘target’ of who we would wish to be or wish to be dealt with.

Here, the real and the ideal find themselves uncomfortably far apart.

Then we feel bad, we feel shame, we feel angry, we feel guilty, we suffer.

Basically, these are the feelings that we associate with having sinned or having been sinned against.

The further we stray from our own values, the worse we feel, the more we sin.

The harmony concept is simply based on bringing our outer realities together with our own inner truths.

So is that all there is to it? Behave in the way that we are trained to, and everything will be fine?

‘Fraid not, nothing is ever that easy.

Clearly, if it was that easy to live our lives according to the truths and values that we have integrated, then wouldn’t we all be doing that, all the time?

So, why are we not doing so?

For the obvious reason, that it is just not possible.

Okay, so, why is it not possible?

For two reasons.

Firstly; many of these values are below the level of consciousness, so we don’t know what they are.

All that we know is that we feel bad, that we or someone else, has done something ‘wrong’.

And secondly; many of the values are unclear, possible only in certain contexts, unreasonable, contradictory, illogical, and, or based on a poor emotional education.

Here is not the place