Memoirs of an Accidental Undertaker I: Tis The Season To Be Wary

Chinese New Year 2013!

In Singapore, people here celebrate the Lunar New Year and it has been tradition for extended families to gather and celebrate it together. It’s really just a reason for every one to catch up with one another and for some ego sizing. The Lunar New Year is an auspicious time of the year for the chinese and hence it is customary to greet each other with blessings of good fortune and luck.

I am faced with a challenge. Imagine me visiting a relative and after the initial greetings, they pose the following question: So what are you doing these days?

Memoirs of an Accidental Undertaker

Over the new year, a twist of fate occurred and thus I have plunged into a new career. Dear friends and readers, fret not! For I am still helping people, well in a different kinda way. I still do counselling for clients and conduct talks, I just happened to have added a new profession to my repertoire.

I am an undertaker.

You’re the Gardener of Your Life

A weekend spent going through “The Art of Hypnosis” workshop with Dr Roy Hunter was really good for a practicing hypnotherapist like me. People ask me why do I still attend the workshop even though it simply goes through the basics? Well if I get a chance to learn to do things the way a guru does, why not? So I see a lady volunteer to go up for a demonstration and rudely resisted the demonstration that Roy Hunter wanted to give. Then at break time I heard her telling other students that he gave Roy a chance to prove his worth because if he was a Guru, he should be able to hypnotize anyone… What balderdash! I look at her and see all the misexpectations and myths that have taken root in her mind about hypnosis; which makes me reflect on my own clients. This image then crept into my mind:

Our mind is like a Patch of fertile soil when we were young. You can plant anything you want. What you think is what you plant. So if you plant lots of self-defeating thoughts, your patch of soil will let these thoughts grow and grow. Then again most people think a combination of nice and not nice thoughts; your patch of soil would look overall nice or not nice depending on which thoughts prevail! One thing is for sure, for any client to get better, they need to be planting flowers for of they keep planting corpses, they’re most likely going to get a cemetery instead.

Every client that comes to me gets a chance to regrow their land, the only issue would be what would they want to grow on it

The Japanese Cashier… A Story for All of us

The following is a translation of a short story originally taken from a 2008 book by Haruhiro Kinoshita and posted on a blog called One Minute Impressions. The story struck a chord with tens of thousands of people across Japan as it spread through social networks. I do not own this article but it is extremely shareworthy. Please get the book if you are interested in it!

There Was This Cashier

She moved from the countryside to go to a university in Tokyo. She joined many extra-curricular activities but always got turned off quickly . One after another, she jumped from club to club looking for something better.

How Did I Go From A Biology Major to an Actress? Lisa Kudrow from Friends

Thanks Kaye for sharing this really inspiring speech from Lisa Kudrow. This speech was taken from the Vassar College Website. I think this deserves sharing, happy reading!:

Thank you, President Hill, for inviting me to speak, and thank you to the Class of 2010 for not protesting…seriously.

John Grisham The Plumber

Do you know John Grisham? He’s the author who stole many hours of our lives as we immersed ourselves into the worlds he created with his pen. We know of his writings, but do we know how they came about? I chanced upon this article while I was preparing for a program. If your life has taken many interesting ups and downs, you may find this article soothing. Every wrong turn may turn out to be the right one.

Originally published in the New York Times on the 5th of September 2010, written by John Grisham:

Goldman Sacks

This is easily the best article I have read on banking in quite a while. The original article is on the NYTimes page. This is a repost. It was written by Greg Smith.

TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.