When you’re trying to do a very hard Su doku puzzle or even an easy one it’s very tempting to make a big effort to try a very hard to do it.

But in fact this is the wrong approach. Yes you have to read all the information and you have to know what you meant to do to solve the problem but tensing your muscles and trying hard will not help you to do it

The mind is much bigger than we think and once we’ve got the general information the mind itself will be pondering over the problem and will come up with answers

So why don’t we do this normally? I suppose we don’t like to rely on something or someone else we want to feel we’ve done it all by ourselves but we’re never really by ourselves because we’ve always got to the deeper parts of the mind the part that produces dreams and the remembers things and learns things that you didn’t know that you were learning

I think the French used to call this part of the mind

L’autre moi.

The other me.

But this is not talked about at school or even at university. It could be that fear of being dependent on another person when your parents were harsh or punitive may  make you want you to rely only on yourself.

It is true that you have to cultivate your garden in other words you’ve got to know something about the problem and I’ve done the necessary reading and preperation or even talk to someone about it

But after that you’ve got to rely on your un conscious mind.

Some people may have a closer relationship where their unconscious than others do

I have read this approach helps in sport for example playing tennis is described in the book

A life of one’s own’ by Marion Milner’ so

If you’re interested in art you might like that book also or just generally well worth reading

Relaxation is the most important skill or should we call it a skill when it should come naturally to us?

Western society values efforts and hard work and of course there’s always a certain amount of that in any situation like running a home for example but even that can be done in a more relaxed manner then we think.

My grandad was a coal miner for 50 years starting at the age of 14 and I don’t know what he would have said about relaxing at work but he  was very proud of himself. He brought up six children alone as well and he used to work nights. But it did have some bad consequences like my mother always had problem sleeping. Especially when she was left in the same situation after 11 years of marriage.

The other factor is that tension is one way that we control our feelings and if we let go of the tension we may hear some interesting idea coming from unconscious mind but we might also feel some feelings that we don’t want to feel because we’re frightened of them sometimes with good cause.

When I was at school I was trying to solve a mathematical problem with no luck until I went to bed. When I closed my eyes I saw the numbers I had been trying to deal with rearranging themselves into a new pattern and suddenly I saw the solution. It was a mystical experience.

It doesn’t mean that if you are relaxed you will never suffer pain again you may not suffer the same kind of pain that you did when you were trying to do your homework when you were 15 years old but there is always pain and suffering in different degrees from not being able to have the clothes that you want when you’re a teenager to suddenly realizing a person you thought was a friend is actually someone who doesn’t like you but you’ll never been able to see it before.

Then there’s marriage and it’s problems: life is never easy for most of us. We can’t envy the royal family either.