To Ship Oars
This effortless effort is by no means a permission slip for inertia, a laissez-faire attitude or, indeed, indifference, but rather a manner of living life to the full, trusting in the guidance of the Universe, unattached to specific outcomes, and confident that every situation, without exception, contains gifts and opportunities for the benefit of self and Creation as a whole. By relinquishing our attempts to control outcomes and by trusting that we will be given whatever we need to handle what life throws our way, we seldom revert to the formerly ingrained fear-based patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving…
On Setbacks
My translation of the statement; to supply me with prestige, security, and the like… into the trauma-informed language of the 21st century would draw attention to every child’s needs for ample acknowledgement, attention, affection, and an ongoing felt sense of safety. For those of us who came up short in any of these areas, our Inner Child may, even decades later, continue to attempt to draw our attention to the necessity of healing the woundedness, the childhood trauma. Until these cries for help are heeded and acted upon, we will remain in bondage to impulsive, somatically driven reactions, the coping patterns of the helpless child. This is a form of mental gridlock.
Living On Purpose
Imagine reaching the end of your life and realizing that the person you became was not the person you could have been. Not because you lacked talent, intelligence, or opportunities. Not because life was unfair, but rather because you had spent decades being driven by forces you could not see, chasing goals that were never truly yours in the first place, diligently sitting in the orchestra, following the baton of the conductor, playing a symphony you have never truly comprehended, playing a tune that is not your own. Many great teachers have pointed out the necessity of carving out our own unique path in life, not following a path that has already been trodden…
Parents
My paternal grandfather died long before I was born, when my father was a boy of 14. The fact that my dad died when I was a boy of 16 would appear to be the flip side of that coin of synchronicity. He was in his 52nd year and struck me, then, as being a very old man. The luxury of the blessing of enjoying an adult-to-adult relationship with both my daughter and son is something I consciously cherish. Again, through stories and hearsay, I conclude that my paternal grandfather was not emotionally available to his eleven children, of which my father was the second youngest…
Awe
Because many of us rarely experience awe or do so only sporadically, we remain unaware of its beneficial effects on our state of heart and mind. When most of us have the experience of feeling down, for example, we usually look for distraction through busyness or light relief through comedy or entertainment. These are not only less effective than awe; they may, in fact, be counterproductive in that our stress levels are ultimately increased by the end of the day. Cultivating awe, on the other hand, can still the mind and trigger a great mental shift, propelling our neural activity beyond what had become its predictable comfort zone…
Summer Solstice
We arrived on the first day of the retreat in awe of the wild, beautiful natural surroundings of Ballycroy, Co. Mayo in the stunning, pristine, natural landscape of the Erris Blanket Bog. Here in the wild West of Ireland, it would be no surprise to encounter selkies at dusk where the sand dunes meet the ocean on the further shore of the estuary, the confluence of the two black-brown rivers as they dissolve into the broad, salty ocean. This encounter with the „wildness without“ is conducive to our opening up to the „wildness within“, a wildness that often gets buried beneath layers of societal expectations, childhood coping strategies, urban living, busy schedules, family obligations, and the superficialities of life in our driven consumer society…
Indivisible Reality
When we say a person has her feet on the ground, we mean rooted in reality, perception unclouded by denial, delusion, illusion, grandiosity, or anxiety, all states that skew our sense of reality. If we can’t even recognise where we are, we will have enormous difficulty in getting where we want to go. It’s a bit like asking Google Maps to take me to „Cologne Cathedral“ and when the prompt comes to submit my current location, I enter „unknown“. Even Artificial Intelligence algorithms are going to have great difficulty in providing accurate directions under such circumstances…
Source
When we operate in hyper-rational mode, those with whom we interact tend to become intimidated, especially if the are less analytically inclined. We appear to them as emotionally cold, even harsh. In doing so, we proliferate a pattern we experienced as children, whereby our feelings and perceptions are discounted and belittled. The tragedy in adult life is that we are now doing this to ourselves, in our own inner dialogue, as well as to others. In the work of our circles, we men begin to transcend this old, ingrained pattern, get in touch with our feelings and – further underneath – our intuition…
Boundaries
It is incredulous that we survived such experiences as children. The abuse was bad enough, but the icing on the cake was the fact that no one was there to turn to for solace, for protection, for understanding, for solidarity, for a comforting hug. I dared not bring it up with my parents for fear that a second round of punishment would ensue. This stance emanated from my observation of how my parents treated older siblings in similar circumstances. I was smarter than that, I surmised. Into that trap I would not fall. It is this „no one being there for us in our time of need“ which is described by Gabor Maté as the „über wound“…
Impassioned
This points us again to the importance of compassion once awareness has begun to germinate. The Saboteurs are both sly and powerful when it comes to maintaining their control over our lives. If we begin to beat ourselves up for the Saboteur pattern we have just discovered, we are right back in Saboteur mode again. Here we need to learn to be like a discerning anthropologist. We look clearly at what is before us, to see it as it is, without judgement or evaluation. We simply ask: “What is going on here?”
