Persistent sadness, depression and anxiety can be huge obstacles in the way of you living a full life –they can stop you in your tacks and are hard to get over. Mental health can indeed be a tough mountain to climb and from my own personal perspective I have availed of cognitive behavioural therapies and other techniques of neuroplasticity including mindfulness to help me conquer the obstacles in my way.

I have in recent years gone back to train in CBT, positive psychology and mindfulness facilitation to help equip others with skills to climb their mountain. I do believe that the best way to assent is through the wisdom of words and how you can retrain your brain and thinking processes out of negative thoughts and that chain reaction to self-defeating behaviours. This is not simply positive affirmations, this is more than a vision statement, and the words inspire the spirit but also sink into the mind and help alter its perception and recognition functions.

We are the stories we tell ourselves, that’s how we are wired – our brain believes all the negative input, every doubt and resignation increases its hold. We can break that hold by imputing more positive and changing the narrative. If depression and anxiety is a movie we play over and over then let’s make a different movie: the one where we climb the mountain – succeed. Plant the flag of our unobstructed future at the summit. Goodbye to a stunted life. Good bye to holding ourselves back. Hello blue sky.

Here are some quotes that I hung around the house when I was battling my own demons. They gave the inspiration to persevere. You can pick one as a personal mantra to keep you motivated or use them all to flood the brain with the belief that any mountain can be conquered.

“To rule the mountains is to rule the river”

– French proverb

“When there’s love, mountains seem like plains”

– Sicilian proverb

“Even the loftiest of mountains begins on the ground”

– Moroccan proverb

The blue mountains are of themselves blue mountains, the white clouds are of themselves white clouds.”

– Zen saying .

“There are many paths to the top of the mountain, but the view is always the same”

– Chinese proverb

“The mountain is good mustard”

– Irish proverb

If you would like to know about mindfulness and methods of rewiring your brain then my new book – By time is everything revealed is available here http://bit.ly/time-revealed and in all good bookstores #EverythingRevealed.