A message from your body…..

I crave your attention.

  • Every muscle wishes to thrill with your attention. To tense and release, and release!
  • My blood calls to continue the nurturance, the diversity of foods, the sweetness of water, the soft clean air.
  • My skin yearns toward sweat and salty water, crisp dry towels, nourishing potions and oils.

I am tired of processing all this junk. Everything that goes in your mouth is my medicine.

In return, I promise to boost you in living the fullest life imaginable.

  • In being prepared to experience the full bounty of nature.
  • To support you to stand in your full presence.
  • To provide the energy for listening, enquiry, dialogue and leadership.

I will allow you “hold on,” and keep your integrity, long after the day seems done.

I am ready to be the temple for your mind and grow the wings beneath your soul.

Just give me your attention.

6 June 2017

Intimacy

I just finished reading The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson (2012). It is set in North Korea and it explores the ways people are able to hold onto their humanity even having experienced the most brutal and severe conditions over years. It is a society where people regularly denounce each other for a range of things including having unpatriotic thoughts.  Our protagonist comes to learn the meaning of intimacy as “when two people share everything, when there are no secrets between them.” The concept astonishes him and he is drawn to have his own experience of it. Near the end of the book, just before he is to have his memory wiped, he explains to his torturer: “It turned out to be easy. You tell someone everything, the good, the bad, what makes you look strong and what’s shameful as well. If you killed your wife’s husband, you must tell her. If someone tried to man-attack you , you must tell that, too. I told you everything, as best as I was able. I may not know who I am. But the actress is free. I’m not sure I understand freedom, but I’ve felt it and she now has it too.”  Perhaps intimacy does bring the freedom of having been beheld, of having been seen for who and all you really are. An experience worth pursuing.

Resilience

In December the New York Times Magazine published an essay called “The Profound Emptiness of ‘Resilience.’ “ It pointed out that the word is now used everywhere, often in ways that drain it of meaning and link it to vague concepts like “character.” But resilience doesn’t have to be an empty or vague concept. In fact, decades of research have revealed a lot about how it works. This research shows that resilience is, ultimately, a set of skills that can be taught. In recent years, we’ve taken to using the term sloppily—but our sloppy usage doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been usefully and precisely defined. It’s time we invest the time and energy to understand what “resilience” really means.

Read this well-researched article by Maria Konnikova to follow some of the thinking about resilience over the last decades.

The Only Poem by Leonard Cohen RIP

The Only Poem

 

This is the only poem

I can read

I am the only one

can write it

I didn’t kill myself

when things went wrong

I didn’t turn

to drugs or teaching

I tried to sleep

but when I couldn’t sleep

I learned to write

I learned to write

what might be read

on nights like this

by one like me

Stand ready for the hard moment

It’s not so much that life is hard. It’s more that when the time comes to do something hard, we don’t shy away from it. We stand up and do the hard thing. We can pretty much count on something hard to do every single day.

Knowing this, we need to stand ready for that hard moment, otherwise we might miss the chance. Sometimes we need our heart to open. Sometimes we need to step forward with our sword. Sometimes we must simply hold steady. Sometimes, it’s put head down and work. Sometimes it requires us to truly listen and intuit because we can be guided by a fire somewhere bright and energising. And sometimes it is simply to stay aligned to our purpose.

Today at least, I’m ready for the hard moments.

The Dance of Intimacy

“Most of us have a need to exercise some control over how close we allow others to get to us at any given time. Often this is not even done consciously. We don’t plan to have a fight with our lover today because last night the intimacy was so intense and passionate that it got a little scary. If this does happen, we are usually unaware of the connection between the two events — just another one of life’s little mysteries.

‘We were so close last night. How could we be so far apart today?’

I try to tune my clients into the rhythm of their moves: close, distant, close again. It is the ‘intimacy dance.’ In some version we all do the dance in our relationships. It is the poetry of movement that choreographs intimacy; the rhythms come from inside us and resonate to the inner rhythms of the other. We move in unison with a partner or in opposition to that person.” BETTY BERZON

Related to this topic is Esther Perel’s “Mating in Captivity” a book on the relationship between intimacy and desire.

 

Be a fool!

To undertake a big journey, we must risk looking like a fool. We must risk being a fool. Who else has the hope, the trust and the innocence but a fool? I love this card from the Tarot of the fool joyfully setting out on a journey, oblivious to the fact he is about to step off a precipice. 220px-rws_tarot_00_fool

If we knew what was involved, we would never begin. And begin we must. How else will we realise our potential? How else will we fulfil our heart’s deepest desires?

So-This-is-a-River

“So-This-is-a-River!”

“The River,” corrected the Rat.

“And you really live by the River? What a jolly life.”

“By it and with it and on it and in it,” said the Rat. “It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink and (naturally) washing. It’s my world and I don’t want any other. What it hasn’t got isn’t worth having, and what it doesn’t know isn’t worth knowing.”

KENNETH GRAHAME, THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS

Coaching and our highest place

The process of coaching helps people think from their highest place. Inside us all is a high place, a transcendent place, where we know the fullness of ourselves and our grace and we are able to offer this with ease. Coaching is to access this place, to come to know it, and to live it out.

Running for the train

This morning 8 people jostled at the boom by the rail way line. We could hear the train coming. As soon as it was through and the boom was opened, 7 people ran across the lines and onto the platform to catch that train. Only one of the 7, a young man, plodded slowly toward the platform. Did he feel the tension in not running? Had he already resigned himself to waiting 20 minutes for the next train? Did he dither over the expensive vs cheaper carriages? Those other 7 were on the train when the whistle blew, but he was left behind, his shoulders a little more hunched.

No one wants to live under constant stress but without a little pressure we lose momentum. We are left waiting and wondering about those who are there already. Who felt that surge of will, that triumph over circumstances, and the power of their own agency.