No one on the sun could ever have an understanding of something called darkness, because the sun is the source of all light. That’s all there is; light. So how could there be any opposite? When you are with the source, there are no opposites. The source of all of us is love. When you’re with the source there are no opposites.
That’s what Divine Love is. It never changes, it never varies, that’s all there is! That’s all you have – to give away – is love. When your eye becomes single, your whole body becomes filled with light. Such a concept! To begin to rid yourself of all this idea of conflict. In „A Course In Miracles“, it says: „A mind at war with itself remembers not eternal gentleness.“
Your original nature is love. When you stay in a state of God realisation, you never see an opposite. You never see conflict. In fact, praying to a source that is only oneness to solve your conflicts – if that source was able to even hear that and process it – could never understand it because it is only oneness. It only sees love.
That’s why Saint Francis’s prayer says: „Make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me bring love. Where there is doubt, faith. Where there is despair, hope. Where there is darkness, light “ Let me be that, instead of saying: „Please help me to solve my conflicts, I have so much darkness around me!“
It’s a different concept a different way of being….
Wayne Dyer
Breathe, breathe in the air
Don’t be afraid to care
Leave, but don’t leave me
Look around, choose your own ground…
Pink Floyd, Breathe (1973)
When you watch an aikido black-belt martial artist you’ll noticed Sage in action. In aikido, rather than blocking or opposing the forward momentum and energy of your opponent, you align with it and use it to your advantage. You use your opponent’s powerful forward momentum to throw him in the direction you want, by aligning with your opponent’s energy rather than opposing it. The stronger the aggressive energy of your opponent, the easier your job will be in throwing him down, once you align yourself with that energy…
Shirzad Chamine, PQ Focus of the Day
My latest coaching project has brought me back into the practice of yoga. This is already proving to be a real bonus. I had been an active yoga practitioner for several years leading up to an accident in 2021, in which I broke two vertebrae. It took me a long time to get back on my feet – I was within a hair’s breadth of completely losing my mobility – and, though I had, in the meanwhile, already returned to jogging, swimming, and cycling, yoga was still on my „to do“ list, that is until this project began last month.
When I coach business owners as to how the business can be better structured, communications improved, and dormant potential identified and unfurled, I like to get in on the „shop floor“, to get a good feel for that which we are aiming to optimise.
My new clients are the owners and operators of several yoga studios. This prompted me to begin attending lessons at each studio – after a hiatus of more than five years.
The good news is that I took to it like a duck to water. A bit like riding a bike, once it has been mastered, we can return to it even after long pauses, without having to again learn to master the skill from scratch. Aside from the odd day’s muscle ache, it has been a very rewarding experience.
The topic of one of last week’s lessons is one that has been attracting my attention since my very first yoga semester in 2012. It is the topic of balance.
As a young boy I had several challenges all of which had to do with balance, though I had no awareness of this at the time. I had a horror of soft underground, be it the morass in the bog, the bouncy area of deep moss in a lawn, or the deep loose sand in the dunes in which we used to play on summer holidays, the sky larks chirping overhead.
Unfortunately, as often happens with signs of anxiety or vulnerability, my older sibling seized on my predicament to tease me and lure me into those exact places of which I was most terrified. As children we can all be cruel to those more vulnerable than us. I am no exception here, as my younger brothers would surely attest.
The next memory is my terror of walking along walls of any height above five feet. Our neighbourhood was criss-crossed by such walls, and higher, dividing the various properties – homes, gardens, orchards, lanes, and fields. While other boys would easily walk or even run along such walls, some of which had shards of glass embedded in the concrete parapet – to deter would-be burglars – I would freeze up, breaking out in a sweat, my heart racing at top speed.
This may have had something to do with my very poor eyesight, something that remained unnoticed by my parents, and finally addressed in my early twenties while in the process of applying for a drivers license in Germany where I had moved as a student. Such oversights were not uncommon in those times, especially in families with so many children – we were ten in all.
My competence as a transformation coach is built on a foundation of the experience gained throughout my lifetime in many modalities of so-called „body work“. Body awareness exercises play a central role in the Positive Intelligence (PQ) Mental Fitness Programme which is one of the key elements of my coaching practice, in both the business and personal development realms.
The key role of relaxed breathing is a familiar component of many of the activities in which I engage. When I first began to work out in a gym, in my late twenties, the trainer was astonished to witness me, when under pressure while lifting weights, holding in my breath rather than breathing out freely, which is what we need to do to support us in moments of stress. This concept, which was alien to me at the time, is now part and parcel of my body work activities.
Reflecting on my childhood, I surmise that my habit of holding in my breath was an attempt to mask the fact that I was struggling. The experiences described above would explain why.
So, it was really telling when, in a recent yoga lesson, we went though balance exercises which included the Vrikshasana (The Tree Pose, where standing on one foot we bring the other to the inside of our upper thigh), that the terror of childhood – as a felt state – returned. My heart began to race; I began to sweat and couldn’t maintain my balance for longer that twenty seconds.
Of even more interest was the fact that my breathing froze. Despite all the insights and, indeed, practice in so many other modalities and situations, here we had the default patterns re-asserting themselves immediately, and with a vengeance.
The good news is that I am now capable of recognising – in real time – what is going on and can initiate counter measures on the spot. This I did. Relaxing into the discomfort and exploring where exactly I felt it and how.
The second part of the „PQ Focus of the Day“ exercise quoted above proved useful in this context. It tells us that we can practice aligning with the energies of our Saboteurs (the old fear-based coping strategies). The Sage Perspective is that everything can be converted into a gift and opportunity; that includes our Saboteurs. So, we can begin to appreciate our Saboteurs as our black-belt Sage Trainers.
They’ll come at me to try to throw me to the ground and hijack me. We can use that energy to our advantage. Every time we notice our Saboteurs coming over the horizon to hijack us, we can use that incoming energy as a wake-up call to energise our Sage.
The best way to do that is to suddenly become fully aware of my body. To notice my body. To occupy my body. To feel my body on my seat, or on my feet, and, from that place of body awareness, to do some PQ Reps (some simple body-based exercises such as conscious breathing, wriggling my toes, or intensely studying the topography of the palms of my hand) to enable me to stand firm in the face of the attacking Saboteurs.
Every time I do this, I become a little stronger in Mind Command and Sage. The approach of the Saboteur is converted into my black-belt Sage Trainer. Notice the aikido strategy here: I don’t get upset at the Saboteur (mine or another person’s), but use its incoming energy to wake up my Sage, energise my body, do some PQ Reps, and switch to one, or a combination, of the five Sage Powers: Compassion, Explore, Innovate, Navigate, and Activate.
These are the fruits of the elevated levels of Mental Fitness: On-the-spot awareness of what is going on, real-time response to ground the body in the here-and-now, and the ability to shift from the fear-based patterns of the Saboteurs to the love-inspired alternatives of the Sage Powers.
„Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom,“ stated Viktor Frankl – the Viennese psychiatrist who survived the horrors of the Concentration Camps and went on to found the school of „Purpose Therapy“, or Logotherapy – emphasising the importance of the choices we make in response to life’s challenges.
The awareness, cultivation and utilisation of that space is the essence of Mental Fitness. It is equally the core of what we now call Emotional Sobriety, the advanced stage of recovery from all forms of addiction.
In living responsibly – rather than reactively – we are liberated from the bondage experienced by every addict: the concept that „we don’t have a choice“. We also return to the fold of humanity, becoming once again „a part of“ as we relinquish the stance of „apart from“.
We are thus returned to a state of ease and balance, the place from which we can once again manifest what we were forced to sacrifice in childhood, namely the beauty and authenticity of our True Selves.
