Eine Oase ist ein guter Ort, um innezuhalten, sich zu sammeln, zu reflektieren und die Batterien aufzuladen. Jede Woche gibt mir reichlich Inspiration in Bezug auf Themen; mögliche Quellen sind Coaching-Sitzungen, Gespräche mit Familienmitgliedern und Freunden, meine eigene Lektüre oder einer der vielen Beiträge und Podcasts, die ich unterwegs genieße. Ein Thema wird mich Anfang der Woche ansprechen und ich habe dann große Freude an dem iterativen Prozess des Entwerfens, Überarbeitens, Polierens und Fertigstellens jedes Aufsatzes. Dann folgt die Auswahl eines passenden, meist aktuellen Fotos aus meiner Sammlung, um das aktuelle Thema visuell zu akzentuieren. Wenn Sie die Artikel in Deutsch lesen möchten, klicken Sie bitte auf den entsprechenden orangenen Button „Translate >>“.
Ich lade Sie ein, sich eine kleine Auszeit zu nehmen, Ihre eigene sechsminütige Oase zu schaffen, einen bequemen Stuhl zu finden, sich niederzulassen und zu lesen. Mögen Sie ein Gefühl der Identifikation erleben und hoffentlich etwas Inspiration in diesen wöchentlichen Reflexionen finden. Wenn so, fühlen Sie sich frei, die `Weekly Reflections´ zu abonnieren:
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Loud voices, cramped spaces, the physical danger of contact sports, tension in the air at home that could be cut through with a bread knife, – these poised challenges to me which were not easily overcome. Fear began to creep into the picture more and more. As Cornnelia Funke has one of her characters state, `fear kills your mind, your heart, and your imagination´. I would add that it also leads us to shut down our vulnerability….
Ten years later in Germany, during my first foray into psychoanalysis, my therapist ventured that it was time for me to return to my body. What a novel idea! I was clueless, however, as to how this could be achieved. He suggested going to the gym. Hanging out at the gym was not my cup of tea but it eventually brought me into contact with members of a cycling club, which I eagerly joined. In my first full year, I racked up 5,000km on my newly acquired racing bike! The re-entry had begun…
I am reminded of the image of a group of famished people sitting around a huge cauldron of soup with only spoons of ridiculous length at their disposal. Far longer than a human arm, they make it impossible to feed oneself. Then one person gets the bright idea that they should each feed the person opposite. In this manner an individual problem is solved by means of a collective solution. All are ultimately satiated…
Our large holiday home was the most downstream of three fishing lodges located on the Owenduff River, two miles from Blacksod Bay. A day would begin before dawn (that’s early in July) with a hushed breakfast in the cavernous kitchen downstairs while the rest of the family slept above. Sufficient food for a twelve-hour expedition was then packed in our fishing bags. As the day began to dawn, we would depart quietly in his old car to drive several miles upstream towards the mountains, to the junction where the two main rivers met. From here onwards we would spend the rest of the day on foot…
Like the woodpecker in the quote above, coaching participants who tap twenty times on a thousand trees may get nowhere but stay busy. Those of us who tap twenty-thousand times on one tree, get dinner. The PQ Programme supports us in staying the course until the benefits of our efforts can be truly experienced. We then find ourselves on the path of cultivating Mental Fitness for life and reap the benefits of improved personal and professional outcomes…
Carl Gustav Jung, one of the founding figures of depth psychology and psychotherapy, referred to the integration of supressed aspects of our personalities as `Shadow Work´, the idea being that, as we emerge from childhood, we consign those aspects of our history, thinking, and behaviour which we find unpalatable, to the shadows, in the hope that they would somehow be rendered harmless or even disappear…
This prompted ideas about the various forms of energy, and the smooth conversion from one to the other, we humans require to operate well at full potential. Physical, emotional, and spiritual are three that come to mind. In everyday life, if at all, emphasis is placed on the physical, in terms of physical health, and that generally only after something has gone wrong. The approach taken by the culture now shaped by the medical-industrial complex is similar to how we approach the mechanics of a car. We break down, find the broken element, replace it, and hope for the best.
The beginning of the new calendar year is a good time to take stock. While deciding on the topic for this week’s reflections, I compiled a list of the ninety-two essays – all still accessible in the `Weekly Reflections´ section –which have appeared on this website since the very first, on February 2nd, 2021. That essay was aptly named `Imbolc´, which is the Irish name of the feast day of St Brigid, which falls on February 1st, and marks the beginning of the Celtic year.
The fire was already burning brightly in the hearth, and, in the heavily curtained bay window, the large, decorated Christmas tree with its baubles, figurines, lights, and shining tinsel provided a further source of warm light for the happy scene. Towards the end of the melee, we found ourselves wading ankle-deep through a kaleidoscopic sea of reams of torn wrapping paper, each child creating their island with the gifts they had gratefully received from various relations, near and far.
The conscious witnessing of this phenomenon of internal gossip is relatively new to me, something I have learned in the PQ Coaching Programme. The simplicity and user-friendliness of this mental fitness programme, as devised by Shirzad Chamine and his PQ Team, has been helping me greatly in this process…
Even those obvious losses were impervious to my efforts to grieve. My heart felt numb. Nothing stirred, but for an inkling of rage deep down inside. Like many in such a predicament, I chose the solution of self-medication using the drugs, – legal and illegal – which were freely available to us as teenagers in the 1970’s, and the process addictions of the False Self such as workaholism, co-dependency, and ego inflation which are so lauded in the culture of today’s global, post-modern, consumer society. I became convinced that I couldn’t grieve because I didn’t know how to “do” it. Only much later, after years of living in addiction recovery, did I come to the realisation that grieving is not something we “do”, but rather something we “be”…
The central argument Frankl makes is that life has meaning whatever the circumstances, even when profound suffering is encountered. The title itself is the core message: we can and must say „yes to life“ not because of circumstances, but in spite of them. It is easy to say „yes to life“ when everything is going well. If that „yes“ is contingent on circumstances, however, it can never be sustained because, as we all know, circumstances change as much as the weather in my native Ireland. Everything, even our existence in this incarnation, is transient…
Even the most articulate and hard-working of us may find we cannot erase the imprint of a parent who was too busy or depressed to notice us or who seemed to consider us a burden. We then interpret this as our caregiver wishing we’d never been born. When we internalise such stances, our shame, if it could speak, would repeatedly tell us that “the world would be a better place if we were dead”. Our lives change only when we reconstruct the missing inner maps that should have been formed in safety and attunement…
© 2022 SoberOasis | Patrick Little
