A colleague of ours has taken the understanding that we use in our coaching into many jails and prisons, and there have been profound change in many of the inmates.

Many of the inmates, she found, began to identify themselves the way our society has labeled them: as bad, harmful people. And, while the behaviour that landed them in jail was harmful, it doesn't describe the truth of who they essentially are. And that's the story of the Blue Dot.

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The metaphor she used to explain the understanding we coach from, is that of a blue dot. She would draw an outline of a person and put a blue dot in the center, explaining that everyone is born with a blue dot. The blue dot refers to the innate love, joy and goodness that everyone is born with. What we've referred to in past blogs as our true nature or innate wisdom.

And how this blue dot, our essential goodness, is not touched by anything, not by what we've done or what's been done to us. It's our true nature, untouched and unchangeable by anything that occurs in our lives. But we can lose connection with this when our thinking gets negative and disturbed.

She and her team shared how we all lose our connection at times when we're upset, showing how, when we act from that state of mind, we can do things we wouldn't do if we were coming from this inner wisdom.

Many of the inmates began to see how this was true in their lives and how it had led to the actions that landed them in prison. When they recognized the fact that they were always feeling their thinking, they realized that their circumstances weren't what caused them to lose access with their wisdom, but their thinking was the cause.

As a result, many, some of whom were serving life sentences, shared how they had never felt so much freedom in their lives. How understanding that their thinking was always creating their experience, they no longer saw their lives as limited by their circumstances.

For those who saw this, despite the fact that they would never get out of the physical prison they were in, they had gotten out of the prison they had created with their thinking, and life was new and free again.

Although Connie and I have not dealt with inmates in jail, we can see how our clients who come to us with problems in their marriage or job or family, are living as though they are in a prison, a prison of their own making. They have a very limited and restricted experience of their situation.

It isn't uncommon to hear a client say, "I feel trapped in this relationship," or "I feel stuck in this job." They have created their own prison by the way they're thinking ABOUT their situation.

So, when they begin to see that it's their thinking and not the situation that's causing the difficulty, they stop looking for the other person or situation to change in order to find their peace and happiness again. They begin to look to their thinking ABOUT the situation and see that the thinking is, indeed, the source of the restriction they feel in their lives.

This is how clients, who come to us considering that they no longer want to be married, in a matter of weeks are asking themselves, "What were we thinking?" When our thinking settles down, we begin to connect with our true nature again, our Blue Dot, and our inner experience changes. With that, our behaviour naturally changes. We begin living from our inner wisdom and goodness that always tends to harmonize relationships rather than disrupt them.

Does this make sense to you? Can you see how your thinking creates the feelings you have about your situations? And that you have a blue dot, an inner wisdom and goodness inside that can always guide you to find the peace and harmony you're looking for in any situation.

If you would like to explore this more deeply, leave us a comment below and we'll set up a time to chat.

The recipe this week is a Dehydrated Veggie Wrap. In keeping with our new direction of eating more raw since Connie returned from the Hippocrates Institute, we're making wraps of whole foods and dehydrating them instead of baking them so they retain the nutrition in the raw form of food.

They are delicious and packed with goodness. The wraps we're doing are from Mellisa Maris' book "Hand Salads", and contain anywhere from one-half to two pounds of whole foods in each wrap. Now, that's a lot of nutrition for a wrap!

To your Amazing Health,

Connie and Bill

Dehydrated Veggie Wrap (makes 2 – 14” x 14” wraps using an Excalibur dehydrator)

Adapted from Mellissa Maris’ book “Hand Salads”

• 4 cups of chopped kale (100g/3.5oz)
• 2 cups fresh basil leaves (50g/1.75oz)
• 2 jalapeños, seeds removed (28g/2oz)
• 1 cup chopped zucchini (170g/6oz)
• 2 ribs of celery (80g/2.8oz)
• 3 pitted medjool dates (75g/2.6oz)
• 2 tbsp hemp seeds
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• 2 tbsp nutritional yeast
• 2 cups of water
• 2 tbsp freshly ground chia seeds (20g/0.7oz)
• 2 tbsp psyllium husk powder (25g/0.88oz)

For best results, weigh the ingredients.

Add all ingredients but the chia and psyllium to a blender and blend on high.

Add the ground chia and psyllium and run on high for just 3 seconds to thoroughly combine it.

Pour half of the liquid into each of two 14” x 14’ silicone trays with a ¼” lip and level out with an offset spatula. Here’s a link to a short YouTube video of Lissa making one.

Put in your dehydrator and dehydrate for around 12 hours, until they firm up. If you can push your finger in the middle and it still dents a little, it needs more time.

NOTE: We make our ground chia and psyllium husk powder by adding the 2 tablespoons of each to a coffee grinder and grinding for around 15 seconds, until it is a fine powder.