Professional footballers in the UK are publicly talking about their psychological suffering.

This beautiful openness by elite sportspeople paves the way for sustainable change in a field riddled with suffering.

Yet what of the solution?

For 20 years in the field of elite sport, I witnessed athletes battle with their mental life. In some cases, it is more obvious to see with resulting behaviours easy to identify but others whose experience is suffering behind the closed doors of their human perspective, this can be difficult to detect. Here are a few of the more apparent cries for help from athletes:

  • Demands constant individual attention even during times when coaches are delivering to the team as a whole
  • Disruptive behaviours in and out of training which are difficult to ignore and which require management intervention
  • Disagrees with team tactics and selections in a way, which lowers the spirit of the entire squad.
  • Disturbs the elite training environment unable to work at the required levels of quality and intensity.
  • Distracts teammates, does everything to cajole and convince others the training programme or coaching staff need changing.

Are coaches currently equipped to help; support and guide athletes back towards well-being and high performance? Until now, when athletes show signs of mental illness, they are referred to a doctor, but by this time, the athlete may have suffered silently for many years and completely sabotaged their career and results.

Furthermore, there are thousands of medical diagnoses found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) published by the American Psychiatric Association to define symptoms of each mental illness, but none of them speaks to a human beings natural mental health and resilience. Is it time to look in a revolutionary new and different direction for healing and transformation?

The human being is a genius design equipped with the capacity to experience life. The human body has many automatic functions; it processes food and drink, the heart beats, the lungs expand and contract, and with an immune system, it heals, all by itself. Psychologically, our mental activity is forever changing; I cannot put a thought in your head, and you cannot put a thought in mine, in fact, I don’t even put thoughts in my head either, if I could I would certainly select the ones with the best feelings? Something amazing is going on here, and we are missing it! It IS the solution to all humanities problems, and I don’t mind to say this loudly and boldly.

Every sports coach can now gain an understanding of how the human mind works to create the experience, and when this happens, athletes and coaches will no longer suffer the way they do right now. Coaches will cease to be baffled as to how players show up and behave; they will know what is going on, a state of mind issue, not a performance or behavioural problem. They will be able to guide players back to balance, towards peace of mind and well-being. The medical profession is changing,  as it looks beyond the conceptual diagnosis of psychotic behaviours to the real cause of human experience. Let me explain:

It might seem like people experience the world out there, see a situation and feel it, but what if life works more like a projector than a camera?

What if the human Consciousness is projecting experience into the world, and every ounce of experience is coming from within us?

What if people can feel absolutely anything at any given time, irrespective of circumstance?

It looks like there are feeling bullets out there in the environment or around particular people, firing into us, (annoyed, pressured, frustrated, as well as excited, happy and satisfied), but can you see them, if so which ones do you get most frequently? We know this is not how it works; there are no feeling bullets out there heading in our direction, ever, so how do we get our experience, where does it come from really?

It appears that certain situations or places are stressful, i.e., that they have stress particles that you can catch like you get the flu, but this again is not true – where are these particulate matters and why have the scientists not found them – because they don’t exist?

The human experience is an inside job, and when you profoundly see how the mind works to create an experience, the mechanism and Principles at play for everyone, 100% of the time, no exceptions, you are not scared of your inner world, no matter how frightening it might feel at that moment. You reconnect with your natural mental health, resilience and well-being. You learn that all you are ever feeling is your thinking in the moment and nothing else, not the circumstance or situation and that whether positive or negative, it is changeable, arbitrary and fluid. It doesn’t make sense for you to run from your scary day-mare, (your illusory film) you know it is not permanent and therefore not who and what you indeed are at your core, which is the constant Divine Universal Intelligence of all things.

Please forward to anyone you feel may not be leading their best life, you never know it may well be the catalyst for change they just need to hear right now!

With Love
Denise

Article updated May 2019